MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 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

LENS

In an age of crass reality shows and viral video, almost anyone withthe right combination of moxie,outrageousness, timing and exposure can claim a momentof stardom.

But then, as anyone in showbusiness for the last few cen-turies can attest, determining who has staying power is aneternal mystery. A few recentovernight sensations, however,may shed some light on why some hang onto their mass em-brace longer than others.

Susan Boyle, the frumpy contestant

on the show “Britain’s Got Talent,’’ invited smug tit-ters from the audience when she stepped onto the show’sstage in April. But when she opened her mouth to sing, the crowd was stunned into enraptured silence, and her moving rendition of the song “I Dreamed a Dream’’

became an instant hit on YouTube.But unlike many overnight Web sen-sations, her fame did not disappear the morning after. The Web video of her performance has been watched

more than 310 million times, and last month her first CD became the fastest selling debut in British history while rocketing to Number 1 in the UnitedStates Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.

Why is such an unfashionable and shy spinster, who up until last yeardid most of her singing in church, stillin the public eye? Her undeniable tal-ent is one reason. But as Ben Sisario of The Times added, “Ms. Boyle, who still lives in her family home in tinyBlackburn, Scotland, has what most YouTube sensations lack: a compel-

ling story.’’Like Ms. Boyle, the ongoing appeal

of Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III may also be rooted in his unas-suming personality. After Captain Sullenberger landed his crippled Air-bus on an icy Hudson River last Janu-ary, he was hailed as a true hero by ahyperdriven media. And with other headlines dominated by scandal-ous politicians and Ponzi scheming hedge-fund managers, his quiet com-petence and understated humilitystruck a chord with the public.

Nearly a year later, he told The

Times, his biggest surprise was not the attention, but that it “has lastedso long.’’

A similar sentiment was expressed by another previously obscure public figure when the initial glare of media attention failed to abate. “The factthat my 15 minutes of fame has ex-tended a little longer than 15 minutesis somewhat surprising to me andcompletely baffling to my wife,’’ hesaid. Presumably, President Obama has by now accepted that his fame will not abate anytime soon.

Carmen Herrera, an example ofa talented artist who is finally get-ting her due, would laugh at the term

By SARAH KERHSHAW

WHAT MOVES PEOPLE to kill

themselves and innocent by-

standers?

Until recently, the psychology of terrorism

had been largely theoretical. Finding actual

subjects to study was daunting. But access

to terrorists has increased and a nascent sci-

ence is taking shape.

More former terrorists are speaking pub-

licly about their experiences. Tens of thou-

sands of terrorists are in “de-radicalization”

programs , and they are being interviewed,

counseled and subjected to psychological

testing, offering the chance to collect real

data on the subject.

Terrorist propaganda has flooded the In-

ternet and the thinking of sympathizers is

widely available. But the new research has

its limits. The accounts of the extremists —

generally militant Islamists — are difficult to

verify. And researchers often differ over the

path to radicalization. Some boil it down to

religion, others to politics and power, others

to an array of psychological and social influ-

ences.

But even if the motivations for terror can be

wildly idiosyncratic, a range of patterns have

been identified.

1. The Path to Violence

Despite the lack of a single terrorist pro-

file, researchers have largely agreed on

the risk factors for involvement. They in-

clude what Jerrold M. Post, a professor of

psychiatry, political psychology and in-

ternational affairs at George Washington

University, calls “generational transmis-

sion” of extremist beliefs, which begins

early in life; a strong sense of victimiza-

As the group becomes more

radical, so does the individual.

Their beliefs may be more subject

to change than previously thought.

They inherently believe that violence

against an enemy is not immoral.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATT DORFMAN

Instant Fame, the Kind That Is Earned

Con tin ued on Page IV

VIIIVARTS & STYLES

Designing to an

African beat.

MONEY & BUSINESS

Eyeglasses geared

to help the poor.

Inside

The Mind

Of a Terrorist

INTELLIGENCE: China fast-forwards into the modern age, Page 2.

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

VIIHEALTH & FITNESS

A workout for

the aging brain.

Con tin ued on Page IV

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

II MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010

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Privatized War,And Its Price

BEIJING

There is nothing like it anywhereelse, nothing resembling this relent-less attempt to fast-forward some 20percent of humanity into the modernage, this extraordinary Chinese ex-periment.

After a week in China, as the gid-dying growth statistics mount up,and the giddying images of the past are ripped down to make way forthe future accumulate, there is nomistaking the sense of standing atthe cusp of the 21st-century drama.The United States appears troubled, entangled in wars and the angst that goes with them; Europe seems staid and peripheral.

Here, only the future counts. Thepast has been suppressed by theCommunist Party with a few faint ac-knowledgments of the worst crimes. In its place stand development andmore development, the key to socialstability, with the goal of creating amodern society by 2020. After three decades of near double-digit growth, who is to say this objective is unat-tainable?

I said “experiment” because thecombination here of rollercoastercapitalism and authoritarian direc-tion is without precedent in its scale,and of course the question arises ofwhether money can satisfy a society to the point that the human urge tohave a say in who runs things is sup-pressed.

Up to now, the Chinese leadership

has proved ruthless where necessary— the suppression of the 1989 studentuprising at Tiananmen — and, sincethen, extraordinarily adept in taking the country forward at a pace thatcontains disgruntlement. As Rus-sell Moses, a Beijing-based politicalanalyst, told me, “There is brilliancehere, a kind of brilliance in the waythey handle things.”

So China, with a vast stimuluspackage that helped it overtake the United States as the world’s largestauto market, navigated the Great

Recession of 2008. Prodded by pub-lic outrage at tainted water and toxic discharges, it is now moving fast toaddress environmental concerns,satisfying people’s demand for in-formation about polluters and rac-ing ahead in the solar-heating andelectric-car industries. Worriedby growing income disparities, theChinese leadership is beginning tointroduce some social security in theprovinces.

For a party with some 80 millionmembers engaged in the attempt to push forward a society of 1.3 billionpeople, most of them still eking out a

living on the land, there is a notable nimbleness here. The leadershipknows stability, its most prized word,is about staying one step ahead of the game.

Still, there are rumblings. Anger at rampant corruption is everywhere,and it’s hard for me to see how youtackle that as long as there is no sig-nificant countervailing power in aone-party state.

There’s also anger at the summa-ry expropriations that accompanyall the gargantuan infrastructureprojects that accompany race formodernity: high-speed rail links,highways, subway systems, dams,nuclear power plants and so on.The very concentration of powerthat enables China to push throughthese projects at breakneck speedalso spurs deep resentment at theabsence of legal recourse for loss ofproperty.

Anger is also growing, as educa-tion spreads, at the various attemptsto control the internet by blockingsites like Facebook and suppressing blogs. Freedom of expression is notpart of socialism with Chinese char-acteristics.

Can the brilliance contain the an-ger? If I was betting, I’d say yes, be-cause the authorities seem to knowthey cannot stanch the flow of grum-bling, they can only hope to guide it.

Anyone under 25 should be learn-ing Mandarin. The future, whetherstable or turbulent, is here, and thefate of the 21st century will be deter-mined in significant measure by thisbreathtaking Chinese experiment.

A federal judge in Washington, Ri-cardo Urbina, has provided anothercompelling argument against the out-sourcing of war to gunslingers fromthe private sector. In throwing outcharges against Blackwater agentswho killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’sNisour Square in September 2007,Judge Urbina highlighted the govern-ment’s inability to hold mercenariesaccountable for crimes they commit.

Judge Urbina correctly ruled thatthe government violated the Black-water agents’ protection against self-incrimination. He sketched an ineptprosecution that relied on compelledstatements made by the agents to of-ficials of the State Department, whoemployed the North Carolina firm toprotect convoys and staff in Iraq.

During the presidential campaign,Barack Obama and Hillary Clintoncompeted over who would take thetoughest line against mercenaries.It is clear that the only way for Presi-dent Obama to make good on the rhet-oric is to get rid of the thousands ofprivate gunmen still deployed in Iraq,Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The killings in Nisour Square werehardly the first misdeeds by hiredguns in Iraq, or the last. The army has said contractors from firms like CACIInternational Inc. were involved inmore than a third of the proven in-cidents of abuse in 2003 and 2004 inthe Abu Ghraib prison. Guards fromBlackwater — which has renamed it-self Xe Services — and other securityfirms, like Triple Canopy, have beeninvolved in other wanton shootings.

Still, the government has failed tohold them accountable. When its for-mal occupation of Iraq ended in 2004,the Bush administration demandedthat Baghdad grant legal immunityto private contractors.

Congress has tried to cover suchcrimes with American law. The Mili-tary Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Actextends civilian law to contractorssupporting military operations over-seas, and the Uniform Code of Mili-tary Justice was broadened in 2006 tocover contractors.

But the government has not prose-cuted a single successful case for kill-ings by armed contractors overseas.

Furious that the Nisour Squarecase was dismissed, the Iraqi govern-ment said it might file civil suits in theUnited States and Iraq against Xe.But its chances of success are not con-sidered great. The families of many of the victims of the rampage accepted a settlement from Xe recently, worried that had they pursued their civil suitthey might have gotten nothing.

There are many reasons to opposethe privatization of war. Reliance oncontractors allows the government towork under the radar of public scruti-ny. And freewheeling contractors canbe at cross purposes with the armedforces. Blackwater’s undersuper-vised guards undermined the effortto win Iraqi support.

But most fundamental is that thegovernment cannot — or will not —keep a legal handle on its freelancegunmen. A nation of laws cannot go towar like that.

In From the Cold

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

Ten years after NATO went to warwith Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo,a democratically transformed Ser-bia has applied to join the EuropeanUnion. That process is likely to takefive years or more, but this is an aptmoment to celebrate the turnaroundin Serbian policies and attitudes underPresident Boris Tadic.

Mr. Tadic was first elected in 2004, but it has been only since his 2008 re-election that he became strong enoughto set his country on the path toward European Union membership.

The European Union already pro-vides more than half of Serbia’s im-ports and buys more than half of itsexports. Serbia’s economy, still recov-ering from the sanctions and chaosof the Milosevic years, needs outside

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

The Chinese Experiment

China knows stability means staying a step ahead of the game.

Readers intending to watch themovie “Avatar” should know that ma-jor events in the plot are revealed.

Every age produces its own sortof fables, and our age seems to haveproduced The White Messiah fable.

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrillsand profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that theyare noble and spiritual and pure.And so he emerges as their Messiah,leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember “AMan Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play inthe Fields of the Lord.” More peoplewill have seen “Dances With Wolves”or “The Last Samurai.”

Kids have been given their ownpure versions of the fable, like “Poca-hontas” and “FernGully.”

It’s a pretty serviceable formulathat gives movies a little sociallyconscious allure. Audiences like itbecause it is so environmentallysensitive. Academy Award voterslike it because it is so multicultur-ally aware. Critics like it because theformula inevitably involves the loin-cloth-clad good guys sticking it to themilitary-industrial complex.

Yet of all the directors who haveused versions of the White Messiah formula over the years, no one hasdone so with as much exuberance asJames Cameron in “Avatar.”

“Avatar” is a racial fantasy par ex-cellence. The hero is a white former Marine who is adrift in his civiliza-tion. He ends up working with a giant corporation and flies through space to help plunder the environment of a pristine planet.

The peace-loving natives — com-piled from a mélange of Native Amer-

ican, African, Vietnamese, Iraqi and other cultural fragments — are likethe peace-loving natives you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. They’retall, muscular and admirably slen-der. They walk around nearly naked.They are phenomenal athletes andpretty good singers and dancers.

The white guy goes to live with the natives, and, in short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe.He has sex with their hottest babe.He learns to jump through the jungleand ride horses. It turns out that he’seven got more guts and athletic prow-ess than they do. He flies the big red

bird that no one in generations hasbeen able to master.

Along the way, he has his con-sciousness raised. The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, andeven have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is likeHorse Whispering without the wire-less technology. Because they are notcorrupted by things like literacy, cell-phones and blockbuster movies, theyhave deep and tranquil souls.

The natives help the white guydiscover that he, too, has a deep and tranquil soul.

The natives have hot bodies andperfect ecological sensibilities, butthey are natural creatures, not histo-ry-making ones. When the military-

industrial complex comes in to strip mine their homes, they need a White Messiah to lead and inspire the de-fense.

Our hero leaps in, with the helpof a pack of dinosaurs summonedby Mother Earth. As he and his fel-low freedom fighters kill wave after wave of Marines or former Marines or whatever they are, he achieves theultimate prize: He is accepted by thenatives and can spend the rest of his life in their excellent culture.

Cameron’s handling of the WhiteMessiah fable is not the reason “Av-atar” is such a huge global hit. AsJohn Podhoretz wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Cameron has simplyused these familiar bromides asshorthand to give his special-effectsspectacular some resonance.” Theplotline gives global audiences achance to see American troops getkilled. It offers useful hooks on which McDonald’s and other corporations can hang their tie-in campaigns.

Still, would it be totally annoying topoint out that the whole White Mes-siah fable is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype thatwhite people are rationalist andtechnocratic while colonial victimsare spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites needthe White Messiah to lead their cru-sades. It rests on the assumption thatilliteracy is the path to grace. It alsocreates a sort of two-edged culturalimperialism. Natives can either havetheir history shaped by cruel imperi-alists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admira-tion.

It’s just escapism, obviously, butbenevolent romanticism can be justas condescending as the malevolentkind .

DAVID BROOKS

The Messiah Complex

‘Avatar’: Another tale ofa white man swoopingin and saving the day.

Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

capital to help generate jobs. WithEuropean Union membership on thehorizon, Fiat already has announced plans for substantial investments inSerbian car production.

Joining Europe makes humansense, too. A generation of Serbs grewup isolated from much of Europe. SinceDecember, Serbs have been able totravel to most of the European Union visa-free.

Important conditions must still bemet before Serbia’s membership ap-plication can progress.

The Serbian government must makeevery possible effort to arrest two re-maining indicted war crimes suspects,General Ratko Mladic and GoranHadzic. The Netherlands threatensto hold up the application until theyare turned over to the Hague for trial.President Tadic pledges full coopera-tion. Six months from now, the chiefwar crimes prosecutor in the Hague isscheduled to report on how well he haskept that pledge.

Another issue is Kosovo. Serbia isnow cooperating with a EuropeanUnion-led police mission there and issecuring its side of the border. It stillrefuses to recognize Kosovo’s inde-pendence. With five European Union members also holding out, recognitioncannot be a condition of membership. But the Serbian government mustagree that it will not try to unreason-ably bar Kosovo from eventual Euro-pean Union membership.

To prepare Serbia to compete withinEurope, Mr. Tadic must also continue his economic reforms. The countryhas come far, and the European Union has used the incentive of eventualmembership to encourage construc-tive policies in Belgrade. Serbia nowneeds to complete a transformationwell begun.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010 III

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By NICHOLAS KULISH

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herze-govina — The siege of Sarajevo had just begun the last time Vera Bagur,now 68, took the famous train line fromSarajevo to Belgrade. It was one of thefew physical links that bound Muslims,Serbs and Croats.

That unity was cracking into violenceas she peered, against the conductor’sorders, out the window as tanks rolledpast in the dry, unpicked cornfields.“That was the time I realized it was go-ing to be serious,” she said.

Now, after 18 years, the line is runningagain, one small reason the mood of Ms.Bagur, once again traveling from Sara-jevo to Belgrade, was more hopeful.

“I think we’re going to overcomethis,” Ms. Bagur said.

For the chain-smoking Serbs, Croatsand Bosnians toasting one another inthe cafe car, the revived passenger linewas certainly a sign that their forcedisolation from the rest of Europe and

the world beyond could be on the vergeof ending.

Starting on December 19, citizens ofSerbia, Montenegro and Macedoniacould travel to European Union coun-tries without visas for the first time since the collapse of Yugoslavia. Serbiaapplied for European Union member-ship a few days later. Reacceptanceinto the Western fold looks closer for the region than it has in years. But theregion — like the train line itself — is byno means normal or fully integrated. Inthe fragmented territory of the formerYugoslavia, the train journey now re-quires four different locomotives fromfour separate railway companies, twopassport checks and more than eight hours to journey about 480 kilometers.

That fragmentation plays out politi-cally: the unresolved issue of gaining worldwide recognition of Kosovo’s in-dependence remains both an impedi-ment and a source of agitation, while the rise of nationalism ahead of this

fall’s general election in Bosnia andHerzegovina has meant increasingdivisiveness and even fear of renewedviolence here.

“What is of the most concern for me isthat for the first time in years, this po-litical tension seems to be influencingand affecting the general public,” saidSrecko Latal, an analyst on Bosnia andHerzegovina with the InternationalCrisis Group, a nonprofit organizationthat aims to prevent deadly conflicts. “It’s a good thing that this choo-chootrain is running between Sarajevo andBelgrade again, but I’m not sure verymany passengers will be on it until theissues in the Balkans are resolved.”

But travelers flocked to the trainrecently to visit friends and relatives over the Orthodox Christmas holi-day, and hope was high as the jour-ney began at the Sarajevo train sta-tion, which was repaired after beingbadly damaged during the war. Older passengers recalled the party atmo-

sphere aboard the upscale OlympicExpress during the successful Winter Games in Sarajevo.

The station agent did not accept cred-it cards and wrote out each ticket byhand. A round-trip ticket to Belgrade,the Serbian capital, cost around $45, abargain compared with a plane ticket,which often costs six times as much.

Practically the entire railway net-work in Bosnia was rendered unus-able during the war, which raged from

1992 to 1995.Rajko Zeljaja, 56, a telecommunica-

tions engineer and Orthodox Serb whois married to a Roman Catholic, began his journey with the bus from his home in Mostar.

“I celebrated one Christmas in Mo-star,” Mr. Zeljaja said. “Now I go to mymother in Serbia to celebrate anotherChristmas. They can change locomo-tives all they want, but I guess theycan’t change us.”

CHRISTOPH BANGERT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Balkan Train Route Restitches War Wounds

By DAN BILEFSKY

ISTANBUL — Fethiye Ce-tin recalled the day her iden-tity shattered.

She was a law student when her maternal grandmother,Seher, took her aside and toldher a secret she had hiddenfor 60 years: that Seher wasborn a Christian Armenianwith the name Heranus andhad been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer,who snatched her from hermother’s arms in 1915 andraised her as Turkish andMuslim.

Ms. Cetin’s grandmother,whose parents escaped toNew York, was just one of

many Armenian childrenwho were kidnapped andadopted by Turkish familiesduring the Armenian geno-cide, the mass killing of more than a million Armenians bythe Ottoman Turks between1915 and 1918.

“I was in a state of shockfor a long time — I suddenlysaw the world through dif-ferent eyes,” said Ms. Cetin,now 60.

Now, however, Ms. Cetin,a prominent advocate for the estimated 50,000-member Ar-menian-Turkish communityhere and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers,believes a seminal momenthas arrived in which Turkeyand Armenia can finally con-

front the ghosts of history.She already has confronted

her divided self, which led her from Istanbul to a grocerystore in New York, where her Armenian relatives had re-built their lives after fleeingTurkey.

In October, Turkey andArmenia signed a historic se-ries of protocols to establishdiplomatic relations and toreopen the Turkish-Arme-nian border, which has beenclosed since 1993. The agree-ment, strongly backed by the United States, the EuropeanUnion and Russia, has comeunder vociferous oppositionfrom nationalists in both Tur-

key and Armenia.Armenia’s sizable

diaspora — estimatedat more than sevenmillion — in the UnitedStates, France andelsewhere is alarmedthat the new warmthmay be misused as anexcuse to forgive andforget in Turkey, where even uttering the wordsArmenian genocide canbe grounds for prosecu-tion.

Also threatening thedeal is Armenia’s lin-gering fight with Azer-baijan, its neighborand a close ally of Tur-key, over a breakaway Armenian enclave inAzerbaijan. The agree-ment, which has yet tobe ratified in the Turk-ish or Armenian Par-liaments, could help

end landlocked Armenia’seconomic isolation, whilelifting Turkey’s chances foradmission into the EuropeanUnion, where the genocide is-sue remains an obstacle.

But Ms. Cetin argued thatthe most enduring conse-quence could be helping toovercome mutual recrimina-tions.

“Most people in Turkishsociety have no idea whathappened in 1915, and the Ar-menians they meet are intro-duced as monsters or villainsor enemies in their historybooks,” she said. “Turkeyhas to confront the past, butbefore this confrontation canhappen, people must knowwho they are confronting. Sowe need the borders to come down in order to have dia-logue.”

JOHAN SPANNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Fethiye Cetin grew up as a

Turkish Muslim, not knowing

her Armenian heritage.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

An Identity UprootedBy a 60-Year-Old Secret

Lala Tomljanovic

and Vera Bagur,

both 68, rode

the train from

Sarajevo to

Belgrade for

the first time

in 18 years.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010

tion and alienation; the belief thatmoral violations by the enemy jus-tify violence in pursuit of a “highermoral condition”; the belief that theterrorists’ ethnic, religious or nation-alist group is special and in danger of extinction, and that they lack the po-litical power to effect change without violence.

Research has also shown that someterrorists have a criminal mentality and had previous lives as criminals.

Paradoxically, anxiety about deathplays a significant role in the indoctri-nation of terrorists and suicide bomb-ers — unconscious fear of mortality,of leaving no legacy, according to new research.

Many researchers agree that whilethere is rarely a moment of epiphany, there is typically a trigger of somekind to accelerate radicalization —for example, the politically relatedkilling of a friend or relative.

2. Life in the Group Most researchers agree that justi-

fication for extremist action, whetherthrough religious or secular doctrine,is either developed or greatly intensi-fied by group dynamics. The Internethas come to play a huge role in increas-ing the number of jihadi groups, manyof them offshoots of larger networks orinspired by Al Qaeda. Dr. Post said theInternet has given rise to what he callsa “virtual community of hatred.”

One theory holds that when peopleare in groups they are more likely tomake risky decisions because therisk is perceived as shared and there-

WASHINGTON — Like every Democratic president since John F.Kennedy, President Obama is bat-tling the perception that he’s a wimpon national security.

Here is a president who just rampedup the war in Af-ghanistan, sendingan additional 30,000American troops. Hehas stepped up drone

strikes by unmanned Predators inPakistan and provided intelligenceand firepower for two airstrikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants. He hasresisted the temptation to sign a new nuclear arms agreement with Russiathat might not provide American in-spectors with the level of verification detail that they want. He is movingtoward the wide use of full body scans in American airports.

Some experts say that the weakling label is more about this city than Mr. Obama — that every political cycle brings with it the opportunity forpundits and politicians to try to prove they were right all along.

“I think the problem is much less Obama than the audience,” saidGeorge Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This isabout talk radio and punditry; these are the absolutes that the bloggers deal with: wimp or macho? This is thenew caricature, but it doesn’t with-stand any analysis.”

What, exactly, it is that Mr. Obama has to do by the end of the year to turnaround the impression that Demo-crats are soft on foreign policy?

For the White House, 2009 was a year of emphasizing a departure from the blunter foreign policy style of President Bush, of projecting that America could offer an unclenchedfist (Iran), push the reset button (Russia) and proclaim that it wasmoving to a policy that focused not

JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

President Obama is battling the perception that, as a Democrat, he is weak on national security.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

HELENE

COOPER

ESSAY

The Label Factor: War Leader or Wimp?

UnderstandingThe MindOf a Terrorist

From Page I

In a video,

Humam Khalil

Abu-Mulal

al-Balawi,

right, called for

revenge. His

suicide attack at

a military base

in Afghanistan

killed seven

C.I.A. officers. overnight sensation. At 94 years old, she has been painting fervently since the 1930s, but only sold her first painting in 2004. Since then, the Cuban-American artist has been hot,a rapidly rising star whose work has been added to the permanent collec-tions at the Museum of Modern Art inNew York, the Hirshorn Museum inWashington, D.C. and the Tate Mod-ern in London.

So even in a youth-obsessed culturewhere fame can seem tawdry and temporary, maybe talent, profession-alism and hard work do win out. InMs. Herrera’s case, fame came to her soon after the death of her husband,Jesse Loewenthal, after 61 years of marriage. Some friends assumed that he was orchestrating her success from heaven.

Ms. Herrera balked at the sugges-tion. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud,’’she told The Times. “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.’’

KEVIN DELANEY

only on guns but also offered butter (Pakistan).

But now, 2010 “will be about achiev-ing some results there,” said BrianKatulis, a national security expert atthe Center for American Progress anda Democrat. “They’re going to need todemonstrate a set of tangible success-es that’s not just a set of speeches.”

Those tangible successes include being able to show that the nice-guy act can yield real results.

Take Russia. Mr. Obama needs Russia’s agreement to impose stiffer

United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran this year, to make worthwhile the 12 months hejust spent courting President Dimitri Medvedev.

Mr. Obama removed a thornydispute when he announced last September that he would scrap plans for missile defense system sites inPoland and the Czech Republic, a central irritant to Russia, in favor of smaller ship-based interceptors that might later be positioned on land inEurope. Russia welcomed the move,

with Prime Minister Vladimir Putingoing so far as to call it “correct andbrave.”

Now it’s time for some payback.The United States wants the Secu-rity Council to endorse tough new sanctions against Iran as part of the international effort to rein in Teh-ran’s nuclear ambitions. Russia and China don’t like sanctions. So far, Mr. Obama has gotten Mr. Medvedev — but not China’s president, Hu Jintao — to say publicly that he might bewilling to endorse new sanctions. But

will Russia and China come through when the time arrives?

“The biggest vulnerability that he’sgot is that he said all that stuff about engagement and the outstretchedhand, that he looks naïve if he discov-ers that other people don’t recipro-cate,” said Stephen Sestanovich,Clinton administration ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Unionwho is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Speaking of Iran, nobody thinksthere’s much chance that the Iraniangovernment will suddenly suspend its enrichment of uranium, as Mr.Obama would like. Since the presi-dent can’t depend on the Iranian op-position toppling the government, 2010 is the year he must show he isstanding tough to try to contain Iran. Which means harsher Security Coun-cil sanctions.

Then there’s terrorism. Mr. Obama will also have to demonstrate sometangible action there, the experts say,to dispel the notion put forward bythe Republicans that his plans to shutdown the detention center at Guan-tánamo Bay, Cuba, makes Americans less safe.

The problem though, is that manyof the steps he can take against ter-rorism — like intelligence co-opera-tion, drone strikes and covert actions — are, by their very nature, often invisible. “He needs visible victories there, like hits on Al Qaeda leaders, sono one is able to put together a narra-tive that says he’s weak,” said DavidJ. Rothkopf, a Clinton administration official and author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the Na-tional Security Council and the Archi-tects of American Power.”

For Mr. Obama, that may alsomean talking tough more often, Mr. Rothkopf said. “If you’re going to bepresident of the United States in the early part of the 21st century, you’re going to have to look like you’re toughon terror.”

From Page I

Instant Fame,

The Kind That

Is Earned

fore is less frightening. As the groupbecomes more radical, so does theindividual, who is also likely to feelenormous social pressure to agreewith the group consensus.

3. Moral QuestionsJohn Horgan, director of Interna-

tional Center for the Study of Terror-ism at Pennsylvania State Univer-sity, refers to the “internal limits” of terrorists. For a book published lastyear, Dr. Horgan collected the ac-counts of 29 former terrorists, manyof them defectors from groups like theIrish Republican Army and Al Qaeda.He found that terrorists must inher-ently believe that violence againstthe enemy is not immoral, but thatthey also have internal limits, whichthey often do not learn until they are deeply embedded in a group.

Some terrorists who accepted kill-ing off-duty soldiers abhorred thekilling of animals. Some are com-fortable with only a limited number

of casualties.

4. The Suicide BombersOnce a terrorist, it is often difficult

to turn back. This is particularly truefor prospective suicide bombers.Once assigned to their fatal missions,they become known as “walking mar-tyrs.” Backing down would create too much shame or humiliation.

Arie W. Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Mary-land, College Park, who has studied videotapes of suicide bombers’ final words and interviews with their moth-ers, argues that the overarching moti-vation of suicide bombers is the quest for personal significance, the desper-ate longing for a meaningful life that appears only to come with death.

5. Leaving TerrorismThe reasons terrorists leave the life

provides great insight into how their minds work, and their beliefs may bemore subject to change than previ-

ously thought, Dr. Horgan said.Recruits are often promised an

exciting, glamorous adventure and a chance to change the world. But what they often find, Dr. Horgan said, isthat the groups they join are rife withjealousies and personal competition.Also, the life is boring. Some may, asthey grow older, find that their ownpriorities change — for example,they may want to start a family. Theymay see that the group’s goals ap-pear unattainable and they may find, as the group becomes more extreme,that they have reached their internalmoral limits.

In one case, a former Al Qaeda re-cruit told Dr. Horgan that when he ar-rived to fight in Afghanistan, he was dismayed to find that children andthe elderly were being forced intobattles.

The man’s “image of this all-seeing,all-powerful, all-noble movement wasreceiving its first hard knock,” Dr.Horgan said.

DEREK BLAIR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Singer Susan Boyle’s fans show

their support.

Repubblica NewYork

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

MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010 V

CATHY

HORYN

ESSAY

By ASHLEE VANCE

SUNNYVALE, California — Foryears, the process remained rela-tively static: computer makers likeHewlett-Packard and Apple, withwell-staffed research labs and de-sign departments, would dream uptheir next product and then hire aChinese or Taiwanese fabricator to manufacture the largest number of units at the lowest possible cost.

But lately, this traditional division of labor has been upended. Many of those Asian companies have moved well beyond manufacturing to seizegreater control over the look and feel of tomorrow’s personal computers,smartphones and even Web sites.

The investment arms of large Tai-wanese and Chinese manufacturers have created an investment networkin Silicon Valley that pumps money into a variety of chip, software andservices companies to gain the latesttechnology. As a result, some Asian manufacturers have proved morewilling than entrenched Silicon Val-ley venture capitalists to back some risky endeavors.

“In the past, the manufacturerswould sneak around and get insideinformation on technology by in-vesting in these companies,” saidK. Bobby Chao, the managing part-ner at DFJ DragonFund China, abusiness that invests in technologycompanies in China and the UnitedStates. “Now, they’re more involved,more visible and charging aftermore complex maneuvers.”

Asian investments in Silicon Val-ley present some risks for America’s top technology companies, whichcould lose their connection to top in-novations.

Asian manufacturers like Fox-conn or Quanta, as a result, couldwrestle away the edge in researchand design.

“The manufacturers have gottenmore competitive as it relates to in-novation, and in some instancesthey’re already competing directly with their customers,” said Patrick Moorhead, a vice president at Ad-vanced Micro Devices, a major PCchip maker.

The investments by Asian compa-nies have already started to pay off. At the Consumer Electronics Showthis month in Las Vegas, people saw laptops that start up instantly andTVs that do not require remotes be-cause they can see the gestures ofviewers. These features are a resultof strategic investments in technol-ogy by Asian manufacturers.

One Asian manufacturer turnedinvestor is Quanta, based in Tai-wan, which has long been one of the largest manufacturers of laptopsand personal computers for majorbrands like H.P., Acer and Dell.

To keep those customers comingback, it needs unique product de-signs and technologies that give itan edge over competitors. Last Oc-tober, Quanta invested $10 million

into Tilera, a chip start-up based inSan Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, that has designed aradical computer processor. Tilerais gambling that it can take businessfrom the major chip makers like In-tel and A.M.D.

Quanta also joined a group invest-ing $16 million in Canesta, anotherchip maker based in Silicon Valley.When combined with a digital cam-era, Canesta’s products let comput-ers, televisions and other devicesview objects in three dimensions.That means that a person couldmove photos or documents arounda computer’s desktop or change TVchannels simply by waving a hand.

Elton Yang, a vice president atQuanta, said there was a high like-lihood that the technology couldmake its way into laptops in 2010.Eventually all makers of personalcomputers will have a chance to buy Canesta’s technology, but Quanta’sinvestment gives it a temporary de-sign lead.

“The PC companies are lookingfor a new future, and we want to at-tract them to our machines,” Mr.Yang said.

James Spare, the chief executiveof Canesta, praised the willingness

of companies like Quanta to backrisky start-ups needing many years to turn ideas into products.

“It’s no secret that these compa-nies make most of the devices we usein our daily lives,” Mr. Spare said.“And they’re only becoming moreand more influential when it comes to innovation and guiding technol-ogy choices.”

Foxconn, one of the largest elec-tronics makers, has found technol-ogy investments, too. It has backedInnovation Works, an investmentand incubation company startedlast year by the former president of Google’s Chinese operations, Kai-fuLee.

Ambitious Taiwanese manufac-turers are now talking to influential component makers like Intel and A.M.D. to help shape what tomor-row’s chips and hard drives will do.

“They do have a much bigger voicein what companies are doing on the chip level than before,” said Mr.Moorhead. “We are interfacing morewith them than we ever have.”

For entrepreneurs in Silicon Val-ley, the money flowing from Taiwanand China represents a blessing.

“It’s great,” said Mr. Spare ofCanesta, “to have another pool ofmoney to go after.”

By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER

VEGHEL, the Netherlands — Sup-plying glasses for the poor may beone of the most valuable investmentsin the developing world. Hundredsof millions of people — some put theestimates as high as two billion — donot have the corrective lenses thatwould allow them to lead better, more productive lives.

A study published in a World HealthOrganization journal in June estimat-ed the cost in lost output at $269 billiona year.

Now efforts are under way to finda means of distributing inexpensiveglasses on a wide scale. One promis-ing technology is self-adjustable spec-tacles, which let untrained wearers set

the right focus themselves in less thana minute, greatly reducing the need fortrained optometrists, who are rarelyavailable in Africa and many parts of Asia. Though these adjustable glasses cannot yet help with conditions likeastigmatism, at least 80 percent of re-fractive errors can be fixed.

At least three organizations arenow offering their own versions oflow-cost adjustable spectacles. Twoare relatively new groups based inthe Netherlands. The third, based inEngland and championing a Britishinvention called AdSpecs, has beenattracting widespread media atten-tion for more than a decade.

AdSpecs, which allow the glasses to be adjusted by means of a clear fluid in-

jected into the lenses, were developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professorat Oxford University.

Since introducing the glasses in1996, Professor Silver has set an am-bitious goal of distributing a billion

pairs of low-cost adjustable glasses bythe year 2020.

But only about 30,000 AdSpecs havebeen distributed; they cost about $19 a pair.

One of the Dutch groups, the Focus on Vision Foundation, says it can pro-duce its Focusspec glasses for about$4 a pair. The group’s founders say the price will drop substantially once the glasses are being made in large vol-ume.

The other Dutch offering, called U-Specs (universal spectacles), is beingpromoted by the VU University Medi-cal Center and a charity called theD.O.B. Foundation.

The design of both Dutch modelsuses two lenses that slide across each other to alter their focus. Though the Dutch camps have had sporadic con-tact, they are not working together.

“I view them as good friends,’’ Pro-fessor Silver, the inventor of AdSpecs,said. “We’re not competitors.’’

He said they all agreed that the de-veloping world needed a “low-costdesign that can be produced at veryhigh volume,’’ conceding that “noneof the enterprises around today cando that.’’

Fashion houses, despite their cre-ative clout on the runway, have been surprisingly slow to bring the samelevel of authority and artistic vision to their Web sites.

Selling luxury goodsonline isn’t the prob-lem. Rather, it is that designers and fashion chiefs, the very peoplewho are supposed to predict the future and

tell the rest of us what we need, can’tseem to grasp the most obvious as-pect of the present: the Web.

Go to the sites of the most innova-tive labels — Prada and Balenciaga, to name two — and you find almost no appreciation for the potential of digi-tal technology. No special films that might illuminate the creative process,no animation, no design gestures thatare consistent with the contemporaryspirit of these brands. Instead, what you chiefly get is a video of the last collection, some still images from anadvertising campaign and, in Prada’scase, an update about its art-world projects.

Meanwhile, peskybloggers — to whomfashion houses threw open their doors in the unexamined belief thattheir presence was goodfor marketing — are downloading everyscrap of information asfast as they can.

As more and morefashion events and opin-ion unfold in real time,top houses are in dan-ger of appearing to lag further behind. Lately,though, there have beensigns of forward move-ment. Many houses now use socialnetworks like Twitter and Facebook,and a number of designers, including Alexander McQueen, tweet them-selves or contribute to blogs. Burb-erry, which has 720,000 fans on Face-book, has installed blogging stations at shows. The company has broadly embraced digital — doing fittings via Skype, creating digital look books for the news media — for significant sav-ings of time and money.

“Our thinking has changed com-pletely,” said Sarah Manley, senior vice president for marketing and com-munications at Burberry, adding that digital media now represents 40 per-cent of Burberry’s marketing budget.

Some efforts by luxury houses to engage fans through social media feel awkward, though.

“Twitter is fine, but who’s tweet-ing?” said Nicholas Mir Chaikin, who founded Spill, a digital design and

planning agency in Paris in 1995. “Youwant to have a good writer doing yourtweets.”

One potential medium for designers to exploit on the Web is fashion film. “I don’t see a wave of new fashion pho-tography coming along, but when you look at fashion film, you’re looking at awhole new visual proposal,” said Nick Knight, the photographer behind the influential SHOWstudio, which pro-vides one of the best windows into the design process.

In October, Mr. Knight helped pro-duce Mr. McQueen’s groundbreaking runway show, a live Web stream that with its robotic cameras and video-screen backdrop seemed to take thenotion of seeing fashion through acamera to a new level. Millions haveseen the show on sites like YouTube.

Live broadcasts are likely to be-come standard. And some designers are experimenting with virtual fash-

ion shows that have interactive com-ponents, like allowing the audience topick the runway lineup and then order outfits they want.

Many houses are used to operating with “a fortress mentality,” said Lu-cian James, founder of Agenda Inc.,a Paris-based brand consulting firm, and don’t know how to deal with audi-ence participation.

Sometime next year, LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton plans to re-cast its e-commerce site, eluxury, into nowness.com, a Web magazine.

“Obviously things are moving,”said Pierre-Yves Roussel, president of the fashion division at LVMH. “Are welagging? I don’t know. Luxury groups want to control their image, and I think they have the sense that some-thing gets out of control” on the Web.

But, he added, “When the big guys really start, the whole thing will ac-celerate.”

Asian Computer MakersTake Risk in Silicon Valley

VALERIO MEZZANOTTI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Alexander McQueen’s show was

streamed on the Web; Burberry’s

Art of the Trench site, left.

MICHEL DE GROOT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD

TRIBUNE

Technology capitalis now flowing backacross the Pacific.

Belatedly,

Luxury

Opens Up

On Web

An Effort to Combat Global Poverty, One Pair of Eyeglasses at a TimeFocusspec adjustable

glasses are manufactured in

the Netherlands for export

to the developing world.

Repubblica NewYork

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

VI MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010

Easy RiderA new wheel design, dubbed the Copenhagen Wheel, captures kinetic energy when the rider brakes or goes downhill and stores it until needed. Unlike most existing designs, all components fit inside the wheel hub.

The wheel’s motor and gears are controlled wirelessly by a Bluetooth-enabled phone mounted on the handlebars.

THE NEW YORK TIMESSource: M.I.T. Senseable City Laboratory

Batteries,

sensors and

GPS unit

WHEEL COMPONENTSPHONE INTERFACE

Motor

Phone

Gear hub

and torque

sensor

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

After hibernating for the lastyear, Silicon Valley’s venture capi-talists are beginning to stir.

Technology financiers raisedabout $14 billion to finance newcompanies in 2009, a sharp dropfrom $36 billion in 2007. But as theeconomic freeze begins to thaw,investors are once again writingchecks to entrepreneurs.

Some of the ideas will become thebig public companies of the future,following in the footsteps of one-time start-ups like Google, CiscoSystems and Amazon.com. Manymore will fail because they are tooearly, late or unoriginal.

Yet whether individual compa-nies make it or not, the new ideasthat are intriguing top venture capi-talists offer an early look at whichtechnologies may transform theway we live in coming years.COMPUTERS IN OUR POCKETS Techpundits have long predicted thatone day we would carry tiny com-puters in our pockets, and last yearthat began to happen with applica-tion phones like the iPhone.

Computing will become evenmore mobile this year, especiallyif Apple releases a rumored tab-let computer, said Todd Chaffee,a general partner at InstitutionalVenture Partners in Mill Valley,California.

As the line between our phones andcomputers blurs, the way we use themwill change. In 20 years, a keyboardand mouse will be archaic, like punchcards are today, said Brad Feld, amanaging director of the Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado.

“With gesture-based, multitouch, spatially controlled, voice-activat-ed and wearable computing, thereis an unbelievable amount of inno-vation going on here,” he said.

For all the interest in mobile, ven-ture investors are losing interest instart-ups that build iPhone applica-tions.

“That was a very exciting place tolook at; the growth numbers wereoff the charts, but I think we all un-derstand now that it’s very hard tobuild big businesses here,” said Da-vid Pakman, a partner at Venrockin New York.

This year, investors are mostexcited about Android, Google’smobile operating system. In 2010,people are expected to buy two tothree times as many Android-basedphones as iPhones, “ripping apartthe hegemony of the Apple ecosys-

tem,” said Peter Fenton, a generalpartner at Benchmark Capital inMenlo Park, California.GREEN TECH FIZZLES After years ofbreathless excitement about greentechnology, many venture capital-ists have grown skeptical. “Thatone has been overhyped,” Mr. Chaf-fee said.

Venture capitalists invested just$1.6 billion in clean tech companiesin the first nine months of 2009,compared with $3.1 billion in thesame period in 2008, according tothe National Venture Capital As-sociation.

Many still think that saving theearth could be profitable, but on asmaller scale. Foundation Capital isinterested in applications that usethe smart electric grid to monitor,distribute and conserve energy.Battery Ventures is looking at com-panies that make devices like com-puters more energy efficient.DATA OVERLOAD We are all produc-

ing a lot more data than we were ayear ago. However, “the way we’ve built Web sites for the last 15 yearshasn’t really been designed to dealwith the amount of data we’re nowseeing because of the real-timeWeb,” Mr. Pakman said. New tech-nology companies will figure outhow to tweak the architecture ofthe Web to accommodate the datadeluge, he said.A MORE EFFICIENT OFFICE Start-ups that make software and hard-ware for businesses will take a cue from consumer devices like the iPodand build products that are simplerto use, said Sunil Dhaliwal, a gen-eral partner at Battery Ventures inBoston.

“The guy buying software andhardware for your average compa-ny probably looks a whole lot morelike a guy raised on an iPod and aniPhone than a guy in his 60s raisedon Unix terminals and big old I.B.M.mainframes,” he said. “That’s going to ripple through technology soldto companies in a really dramaticway.”

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

It is not easy to reinvent the wheel,but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are giving ittheir best shot.

The Senseable City Laboratoryat M.I.T. has designed a wheel thatcaptures the kinetic energy releasedwhen a rider brakes and saves it forwhen the rider needs a boost. Whiletechnically sound, the wheel’s truechallenge may be in winning over cy-clists.

But, said Carlo Ratti, the labora-tory’s director, “biking can becomeeven more effective than what it was.”What the lab is working on, he said, is“Biking 2.0.”

The new wheel uses a kinetic en-ergy recovery system, the same tech-nology used by hybrid cars, like theToyota Prius, to harvest otherwisewasted energy when a cyclist brakes or speeds down a hill. With that en-ergy, it charges up a battery inside the wheel’s hub.

The sleek red hub, called the Copen-hagen Wheel, was recently unveiledin Copenhagen. It can be retrofitted to any bike’s rear wheel, and it includessensors that track air quality, a meter that logs kilometers and a GPS unit to track routes. All that data can be sentvia Bluetooth to a rider’s smartphone and shared with others.

The laboratory is trying to eliminate the clunkiness of other electric bikeswith heavy batteries and unwieldywires by placing all the technologyinto the wheel, said Christine Outram,the project’s lead researcher.

“It’s a technology that can get more people on bikes,” she said.

But other experts are skeptical.“Just the basic bike is so hard to beat,”said Steve Hed, a wheel designer and the owner of Hed Cycling Products inShoreview, Minnesota, who has fittedwheels for the likes of Lance Arm-strong.

This is a period of change in thebicycle design world, said Jens Mar-

tin Skibsted, a Danish designer whoowns the biking company Biomegaand the design firm Kibisi. Mr. Skib-sted believes that over the next fewyears several popular new designswill emerge to serve an increasinglyurban population trying to wean itselfoff cars. In such periods of change, he

said, “the winner will seldom be theone that’s most functional, but rather the one that can become an inherentpart of our culture.”

Back at M.I.T., another researchgroup is spurning regenerative brak-ing as an excessive addition.

“Regenerative braking hardware

adds mass, complexity and cost, andthe energy efficiency gains from itturn out to be surprisingly limited,”said William Mitchell, who runs alab at M.I.T. called SmartCities, aresearch group devoted to improv-ing urban energy efficiency throughtechnology.

By ERIC A. TAUB

While the blue-skinned Na’vi areshooting arrows out of the screen to-ward the audience in the 3-D movie“Avatar,” another battle is beingfought in the theater — over the goofy-looking glasses that moviegoers must wear to see the three-dimensional ef-fects.

Four companies are fighting withthree different technologies. Each ofthem is more advanced thanthe paper glasses worn to view“Bwana Devil,” regarded asthe first of the commercial3-D movies in the 1950s, butall work on the same general principle. Each eye sees aslightly different frame of themovie, but the brain puts themtogether and perceives depth.

About four million glasses made byRealD, the market leader, were wornduring “Avatar’s” opening weekendin the United States. RealD’s glasses use polarized lenses and cost about 65cents each. MasterImage 3D, another vendor, uses a similar technology.

Dolby Laboratories, the companybehind theater sound systems, makes glasses that filter out different fre-quencies of red, green and blue. Theycost about $28 each. The glasses of the third company, XpanD, use battery-powered LCD shutters that open and shut so each eye sees the appropri-ate frame of the movie. Those cost asmuch as $50 each.

Each company claims its glassesand projection-system technologyis better. Because glasses using onetechnology are useless in a theater us-ing a different digital projection sys-tem, the companies backing the three technologies are scrambling for theupper hand while the 3-D industry isstill in its infancy.

James Cameron, the director of

“Avatar,” is more often than not themain marketing tool. He has endorsedRealD, says the company, which hasabout 5,000 screens using its system. But he, his wife and his productionpartner were photographed at thepremiere in Japan wearing XpanDglasses, which work on 2,000 screens worldwide. Dolby says its glasseswork with 2,200 screens, but it has no Cameron connection.

The battle over what glasses patronswear is a big deal because exhibitors are convinced that 3-D, while seeming

like a gimmick now, will lure movielovers away from their crisp high-def-inition widescreen TVs at home andback to the theater. Maria Costeira,the chief executive of XpanD, believes that, “Eventually, we’ll see 3-D movieson airplanes as well.”

The fight over the glasses may in-tensify because TV makers are nowpushing 3-D TVs for the home as a way to increase their sales of more expen-sive sets.

Despite the marketing effort, when it comes down to choosing a 3-D sys-tem, many exhibitors are making a de-

cision based on one factor: Do theywant to be in the cleaning as well asthe movie business?

The expensive Dolby and XpanDglasses are going into a dishwasherafter each use, not the trash. Bothcompanies recommend that theaterowners clean them in an industrial-grade machine. XpanD offers its the-ater partners disposable wipes that itcan distribute to customers along withtheir tickets to assure them the glassesare germ-free.

But the most important question re-mains unanswered: does one system create a better looking 3-D picturethan another?

Joe Miraglia, the director of de-sign, construction, and facilities forArcLight Cinemas, a chain of luxurytheaters based in Hollywood, said, “I don’t think the consumer can tell the difference.”

Watching for SignsOf Technology to Come

Four companies are competing to supply glasses for 3-D movies, including one brand with LCD shutters.

Losing interest instart-ups that build iPhone applications.

Next Front in the Movie Wars: 3-D Glasses

Reinventing the WheelCould Give Bicyclists a Boost

Repubblica NewYork

H E A LT H & F I T N E S S

MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010 VII

By GINA KOLATA

Are some athletes more efficient de-pending on what time of day it is?

Tara Martin, a triathlete, said shecould never get her heart rate up in the morning.

Richard Friedman, a swimmer, saidhis heart rate was always lower in the morning. His swim team does thesame workout in the morning as in the evening, and he swims it just as fast.He had assumed that somehow he was just not putting in the same effort earlyin the day.

“Still,” he said, “I’m pretty energeticall the time.”

I asked Dr. William Haskell, an exer-cise researcher and emeritus profes-sor of medicine at Stanford University,if I’d stumbled on a known fact about heart rates after researching my own exercise patterns: high heart rate at

night, low in the morning for the iden-tical workout. But he was baffled.

A small group of researchers hasstudied the question of exercise per-formance and time of day, even doing studies of heart rates. And not only areperformances better in the late after-noon and early evening, but, contraryto what exercise physiologists would

predict, heart rates are also higher for the same effort.

One recent study, by the late Thom-as Reilly and his colleagues at the Re-search Institute for Sport and ExerciseSciences at Liverpool John MooresUniversity in England, found thatpeople’s maximum heart rates andsub-maximal heart rates were lower

in the morning but that their percep-tion of how hard they were workingwas the same in the morning as it was later in the day.

Dr. Reilly and his colleague Jim Wa-terhouse, in a review published thisyear, also noted that athletes’ best per-formances, including world records,were typically set in the late afternoon or early evening.

Greg Atkinson, also at LiverpoolJohn Moores University, said thatsome researchers, noticing that heartrates during exercise were lower inthe morning, reasoned that peoplemust be more efficient in the morn-ing. It would mean that exercise waseasier in the morning. Not really, Dr.Atkinson said. It actually is harder toexercise in the morning.

“Most components (strength, pow-er, speed) of athletic performance are worst in the early hours of the morn-ing,” he wrote in an e-mail message.“Ratings of perceived exertion during exercise have generally been found to be highest in the early morning.”

If you exercise later in the day, yourmuscles are more flexible and stron-ger and your heart and lungs are more

efficient, said Michael H. Smolensky,an expert in chronobiology, the study of the body clock.

“Is a heart rate of 140 in the morning indicative of the same level of workout cost as in the afternoon?” asked Dr.Smolensky, a visiting professor at the University of Texas Health SciencesCenter in Houston.

“I would say no,” he added. “Exer-cise physiologists say you should beable to perform at the same level witha heart rate of 140 in the morning as inthe afternoon or early evening. Butchronobiologists say your capacity togenerate and tolerate a higher heartrate is better later in the day.”

But, he added, all this applies topeople who work out vigorously three or more times a week. People who are not regular exercisers, Dr. Smolensky said, put much more strain on theirhearts in the morning, making theirheart rates higher then.

In fact, Dr. Smolensky added, peopleat risk for a heart attack should plantheir workouts for late afternoon orearly evening.

“My personal approach is to trainwhen your biological efficiency isgreatest, which means late afternoon or early evening for most people,” he said. “Others say if you train whenyour biological efficiency is least you will get a harder workout.”

By BARBARA STRAUCH

I love reading history, and theshelves in my living room are linedwith books. The problem is, as much as I’ve enjoyed my books, I don’t re-ally remember reading any of them.Certainly I know the main points. But didn’t I, after underlining all those in-teresting parts, retain anything else?It’s maddening and not all that un-usual for a brain at middle age: I don’t just forget whole books, but movies I just saw, breakfasts I just ate, and thenames, oh, the names are awful.

Brains in middle age, which, with in-creased life spans, now stretches from the 40s to late 60s, also get more eas-ily distracted. Start boiling water for pasta, go answer the doorbell and —whoosh — all thoughts of boiling waterdisappear.

Given all this, the question arises,can an old brain learn, and then re-member what it learns? As it happens,

yes. While it’s tempting to focus onthe flaws in older brains, that induce-ment overlooks how capable they’vebecome. Over the past several years,scientists have looked deeper intohow brains age and confirmed thatthey continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many long-held views, includingthe one that 40 percent of brain cellsare lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not havevanished but has simply been squir-reled away in the folds of your neu-rons.

One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a pro-fessor of psychology at Pomona Col-lege in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know some-thing but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such inci-dents increase in part because neural

connections, which receive, processand transmit information, can weakenwith disuse or age.

But she also finds that if you areprimed with sounds that are close tothose you’re trying to remember —say someone talks about cherry pitsas you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name— suddenly the lost name will pop intomind. The similarity in sounds canjump-start a limp brain connection.

The brain, as it traverses middleage, gets better at recognizing the cen-tral idea, the big picture. If kept in good

shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recog-nize patterns and, as a consequence,see significance and even solutionsmuch faster than a young person can.

The trick is finding ways to keepbrain connections in good conditionand to grow more of them.

“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger butallowing for greater complexity anddeeper understanding,” says Kath-leen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’sCollege of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively.

Educators say that, for adults, oneway to nudge neurons in the rightdirection is to challenge the very as-sumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With abrain already full of well-connectedpathways, adult learners should “jig-gle their synapses a bit” by confront-ing thoughts that are contrary to their

own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.Teaching new facts should not be the

focus of adult education, she says. “There’s a place for information,”

Dr. Taylor says. “We need to knowstuff. But we need to move beyond thatand challenge our perception of theworld. If you always hang around withthose you agree with and read things that agree with what you alreadyknow, you’re not going to wrestle withyour established brain connections.”

Such stretching is exactly what sci-entists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone. Do any-thing from learning a foreign languageto taking a different route to work.

“We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up,” Dr. Taylor says.“And if you learn something this way,when you think of it again you’ll havean overlay of complexity you didn’thave before — and help your brainkeep developing as well.”

Have you had your five to nine serv-ings of vegetables today? Exercised for an hour? Cut back on saturated fat and gotten eight hours of sleep?

When it comes to achieving healthgoals, many of usfeel we are falling far short.

Now Dr. Susan M.Love, a respected women’s healthspecialist, offers a

new rule: stop worrying about yourhealth.

In the new book, “Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break YourHealth,” Dr. Love makes the case that perfect health is a myth and that most of us are living far more healthful lives than we realize.

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, par-ticularly for women.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said. “I would contend it’s not. It’s re-ally to live as long as you can with thebest quality of life you can.”

The book, written with Alice D.Domar, a Harvard professor andsenior staff psychologist at Beth

Israel Deaconess Medical Center inBoston, explores the research andadvice in six areas of health — sleep,stress, prevention, nutrition, exer-cise and relationships. In all six, theywrite, the biggest risks are on theextremes, and the middle ground isbigger than we think.

Take the issue of sleep. Most peoplebelieve that it’s best to get at least eight hours a day. But the studies on which this belief is based look at how much men and women sleep under ideal conditions — silence, darkness and no responsibilities other thantaking part in a sleep study. These studies don’t tell us anything about how much sleep we really need orwhat will happen if we get less.

A 2002 report in Archives of Gen-eral Psychiatry found that peoplewho slept seven hours a night were the least likely to die during a six-yearstudy period. Sleeping more than sev-en hours or less than five increasedmortality risk. It wasn’t clear from the study whether more or less sleep increased risk or whether an under-lying health problem was affecting sleep habits.

“We need to be more realistic,” Dr. Love said. “If you’re sleepy all the time, you’re not getting enough sleepfor you. If you’re fine on six hours,

don’t worry about it.”And there is nothing magic about

losing weight. People who are obese or underweight have higher mortal-ity rates, but people who are over-weight are just as healthy as thoseof normal weight — and sometimes healthier. “The goal is to be as healthy and have as good of a quality of life asyou can have,” Dr. Love said. “It’s not to be thin.”

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, professor of family medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cautions against interpreting a re-laxed health message as an excuse to overeat or stay sedentary. “I thinkthe problem is the slippery slope,” Dr. Barrett-Connor said. “In the process of translating this message simply to the masses, they may feel they’ve been forgiven. They shouldn’t

feel like they’re sinning, but theyshouldn’t feel like this is a license not to try to do better.”

Dr. Love said many people seemedto have lost sight of what it meant tobe healthy. “The point of this is to useyour common sense, and if you feel good, then you’re fine,” she said. “The goal is not to get to heaven and say,‘I’m perfect.’ It’s to use your body,have some fun and to live a little.”

Building New Connections to Keep the Middle-Aged Brain Active

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FILIP KWIATKOWSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

STUART BRADFORD

TARA

PARKER-POPE

ESSAY

Older brains thrivewhen they are challenged.

PlanningTo Exercise? Check YourWatch

New Health Rule: Don’t

Stress About Health Rules

A workout in the morning raises

the heart rate less than an

equivalent one later in the day.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010

By RUTH LA FERLA

The Na’vi, the blue-skinned clanof the planet Pandora in James Cam-eron’s screen blockbuster “Avatar,”scale treetops and mountains, andeven fly, with a loose-limbed elastic-ity that Tarzan would have envied.At once exotic and familiar to fansof adventure films, the Pandoranswear latticed animal skins andbrightly colored beads, and scoretheir faces with chalky tribal mark-ings.

Jake Sully, the former Marine as-signed to infiltrate the tribe, can’ttake his eyes off Neytiri, a regalmember of the clan. When he firstencounters her clambering along aslender tree branch, he is drawn un-stoppably into her world.

A similar exoticism is casting itsspell over the style world of late, asvanguard retailers like BarneysNew York, mass marketers likeAmerican Apparel and designersas disparate as Oscar de la Renta,Marc Jacobs, Frida Giannini of Gu-cci and Dries Van Noten embracepan-African influences.

Western fascination with Africanart and design has blown in gusts for more than a century, of course, eversince Picasso and Kandinsky filledtheir canvases with tribal motifs.

Now another Afrocentric windis rising. “Its beauty is in havingcrossed all sorts of racial barriers,”said Malcolm Harris, the creativedirector of Unvogue, a popular fash-ion-focused Webzine. “It doesn’tmatter who you are or where you’refrom. People are incorporating bitsand pieces into their wardrobes andtheir lives.”

That may be because in the popu-lar imagination, African jungles,deserts and plains retain a near-

mystical allure, which the realityof the continent’s political turmoiland poverty have never entirely dis-pelled.

“Africa has never become quantifi-able or entirely knowable,” said RickCarter, the production designer who helped to conceive the Edenic uni-verse of “Avatar.” “It still suggestsromance, and a sense of the abun-dance of life. Threatening or benign, it has something to teach us.”

Hints of a global fashion trendfirst appeared more than a year agoin London, where the glossy maga-zine Arise, published in Nigeria,has been highlighting the work ofAfrican designers. A thriving musicscene also lent impetus.

“London is awash with African in-fluences,” said Ed Burstell, the buy-ing director for Liberty of London,which is hard-pressed to keep instock a collection of Masai-inspiredwooden bangles, horn cuffs and

hammered metal collars. People“want items today that don’t seemslick and polished,” he suggested.

African-inspired designs offer anantidote to what Max Osterweis, thefilmmaker turned fashion designerbehind the Suno label, calls “a lux-ury market filled with brands thatlately have become machines formass-produced, logo-covered sta-tus symbols.”

Beyond the runways, that appe-tite for authenticity is showing up inclubs and lounges and on Broadwayas well. Audiences are gyrating tothe rhythms of Fela Kuti, the Nige-rian father of Afrobeat, whose music and activist passions are being cel-ebrated in “Fela!”

Pop enthusiasts are as captivatedby the music and style of Maya Arul-pragasam, a k a M.I.A., a Londonerof Sri Lankan origins, who has madetribal leggings and flamboyant Afri-can prints essential to her persona.

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES — Patti Smith burst onto the cultural landscape in the early1970s with poetry readings in LowerManhattan and musical performancesat a new downtown club called CBGB. Her 1975 debut album, “Horses,” is nowviewed as a rock ’n’ roll classic.

According to the Rock and Roll Hallof Fame and Museum, where she was inducted in 2007, the album arrived“at a time when rock ’n roll needed a jolt from its unadventurous rut andupwardly mobile arena-rock preten-sions.”

“Dream of Life,” a documentaryshown last month on the PBS televisionnetwork and screened at more than 30film festivals around the world, pro-vides glimpses into that creative primeof her life, via archival footage and filmof recent performances captured bythe fashion photographer and film neo-phyte Steven Sebring. He spent more than 11 years making the film.

“I haven’t changed all that much as aperformer,” Ms. Smith, 63, said. “I stillhave the same visions, and I still liketo make a lot of noise and a lot of loud feedback on my guitar.”

But the film also delves much deeper.It begins with her goodbye to the housein Detroit where, in a retreat from fameinto a new role as a mother, she lived for16 years beginning in the early 1980s.From there the film documents her re-turn to New York and to performing adecade ago, after a trio of unexpecteddeaths that affected her deeply — of her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith;

of her brother,Todd; and ofher longtimepianist, RichardSohl.

She was encouraged by a few close friends: Bob Dylan, who drafted Ms. Smith to tour on the East Coast withhim in 1995, and Allen Ginsberg andMichael Stipe, the R.E.M. frontman.

Mr. Sebring said he basically made up his vision for the film as he wentalong. “I’m not a historian, you know,”he said. “I didn’t have any set planwhat it was going to be. As soon as westarted cutting it, I knew it wasn’t go-ing to be a typical documentary.”

He filmed performances and toursin Israel, Japan and Washington. And as he was editing the film, he set up a 16-millimeter camera in her bedroom to capture Ms. Smith telling storiesabout herself and her life. “We werealways in her bedroom,” he said, “be-cause that’s where she thinks, that’swhere she creates, where she couldshow things and talk about them.”

Those scenes provide the film’s faintnarrative, revealing a person who to many people under 40 is little morethan a name or a stock character —“the godmother of punk,” as she is of-ten called.

“My main hope for the film is thatpeople see the work that Steven does, and that Steven is appreciated for the work,” Ms. Smith said. “My own per-sonal hope is just that people get somesense that I have more dimensionsthan is sometimes reported. Some-times all people know about you is, No. 1, your work, but through the mediathey often will be given one aspect of a human being.”

For Designers, Africa Is the ‘In’ ContinentPunk Poet

As Legend

And MuseSTEVEN SEBRING

CHRIS PIZZELLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS; RIGHT, 20TH CENTURY FOX

In music and film, African-inspired looks abound.

The singer M.I.A. and, right, a Na’vi from “Avatar.”

Patti Smith,

seen in

1996, is the

subject of a

documentary.

Repubblica NewYork