MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENS

In the never-ending quest to en-

gage audiences, several artists,

entertainers, filmmakers and pro-

ducers are willing to try anything.

In recent months, viewers have been

captivated by the motion-capture

technology that James Cameron used

in “Avatar,” and the decidedly low-

technology approach of Marina Abra-

movic’s “The Artist Is Present” show

at the Museum of Modern Art in New

York, where she sat and looked into

the eyes of thousands of visitors.

Paramount Pictures is trying a

different approach to attract new

viewers to “Grease,” the 1978 musi-

cal starring John Travolta and Olivia

Newton-John, The Times reported.

By adding lyric subtitles, the compa-

ny hopes to inspire audiences across

the United States — clad in

period 1950s costumes, pref-

erably — to visit movie the-

aters and sing along about

teenage summer romance.

“The goal is to create a

true event,” Adam Good-

man, president of the Para-

mount Film Group, told The

Times. “How do you get

groups of young people going to the

movies and having a great time?”

With the film business struggling,

marketers are trying to create excite-

ment that was once generated by the

films themselves. But because audi-

ences are more sophisticated than

ever, the idea could backfire, said

Matt Britton, the managing partner

of Mr Youth, a New York so-

cial marketing agency.

“You don’t want to force

a cultural habit on people,

especially young people who

are very savvy about being

manipulated by marketers,”

he told The Times. “But it’s

definitely savvy to try and

make the moviegoing expe-

rience less linear and more interac-

tive.” Sometimes the audiences will

make the connections for you, and

are happy to travel great distances

to do so. This habit has been a boon to

the tourist industry in Switzerland,

which Bollywood directors and pro-

ducers have favored as the pristine

backdrop for their movies.

For their honeymoon, Vishal and

Jagruti Purohit traveled to Switzer-

land from Mumbai to find the small

village church that provided the

backdrop for a scene in their favorite

movie, a 1995 Bollywood blockbuster

called “The Brave Heart Will Take

the Bride.” “The moment you cross

the border it is something else,“ Mr.

Purohit told The Times, “where the

scenario changes.”

In New York, a new generation of

Broadway Babies is being drawn in

by an old formula that is suddenly hip

again: musical theater. With the hit

television show “Glee” leading the

way, producers have capitalized on

young audiences who were weaned

on television shows like “High School

Musical,” where it is perfectly normal

for the characters to burst into song

and dance. Fred Hechinger, a fourth

grader at the Manhattan School for

Children, has seen, among others,

“Gypsy,” “South Pacific” and “Hair”

three times. “When I was 5, 6, 7, there

weren’t as many kids seeing shows,

but now most of them do,” he told

The Times. “There are maybe, like,

three kids in my school who don’t like

theater.”

On the opposite end of the spec-

trum, at a recent Los Angeles screen-

ing of “Grease,” Inthia Seabrooks

wore a silver smock and fashioned a

headdress out of an empty bucket of

takeout chicken. “If you’re going to

get all dolled up and go out to the mov-

ies, they had better offer you some-

thing special,” Ms. Seabrooks, 28, told

The Times. “This is special.”

TOM BRADY

When the Audience Plays Along

V VIIIMONEY & BUSINESS

Turkey bypasses

debt-weary Europe.

ARTS & STYLES

A scientific view of

Matisse’s creativity.

E D I T O R S ’ N O T E

This is the last issue of the International

Weekly for the summer. Publication will

resume on September 6.

By BENEDICT CAREY and JOHN MARKOFF

LOS ANGELES

IN A HANDFUL of laboratories

around the world, computer

scientists are developing highly

programmed robots that can engage

people and teach them simple skills.

Several countries have been test-

ing teaching machines in classrooms.

South Korea, known for its enthusi-

asm for technology, is “hiring” hun-

dreds of robots as teacher aides and

classroom playmates and is experi-

menting with robots that would teach

English.

So far, the teaching

has been very basic,

and the robots are still

works in progress.

Yet the most advanced models are

fully autonomous, guided by artifi-

cial intelligence software like motion

tracking and speech recognition,

which can make them

just engaging enough

to rival humans at

some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the

pace of innovation is such that these

machines should begin to learn as

they teach, becoming the sort of

infinitely patient, highly informed

instructors that would be effective

in subjects like foreign language or

in repetitive therapies used to treat

developmental problems like autism.

Already, these advances have

stirred dystopian visions, along with

the sort of ethical debate usually

confined to science fiction.

“I worry that if kids grow up

being taught by robots and view-

ing technology as the instructor,”

said Mitchel Resnick, head of the

Lifelong Kindergarten group at the

Con tin ued on Page IV

Reading, Writing and Robots

Machines can conduct lessons,and even learn from students.

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

UPLOADING THEMSELVES

Scientists dream of melding with computers. PAGE VI

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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

II MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010

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Francesco Malgaroli

A Long Wait For a Trade Policy

Recently, book publishers got some

good news. Researchers gave 852

disadvantaged students 12 books (of

their own choosing) to take home at

the end of the school year. They did

this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Rich-

ard Allington of the University of

Tennessee, looked at those students’

test scores. They found that the stu-

dents who brought the books home

had significantly higher reading

scores than other students. These

students were less affected by the

“summer slide” — the decline that

especially afflicts lower-income stu-

dents during the vacation months.

In fact, just having those 12 books

seemed to have as much positive ef-

fect as attending summer school.

This study, along with many oth-

ers, illustrates the tremendous

power of books. We already knew,

from research in 27 countries, that

kids who grow up in a home with 500

books stay in school longer and do

better. This new study suggests that

introducing books into homes that

may not have them also produces

significant educational gains.

Recently, Internet mavens got

some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and

Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School

of Public Policy examined computer

use among a half-million 5th through

8th graders in North Carolina. They

found that the spread of home com-

puters and high-speed Internet ac-

cess was associated with significant

declines in math and reading scores.

This study, following up on others,

finds that broadband access is not

necessarily good for kids and may

be harmful to their academic per-

formance. And this study used data

from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and

Facebook took off.

There was one interesting obser-

vation made by a philanthropist who

gives books to disadvantaged kids.

It’s not the physical presence of the

books that produces the biggest im-

pact, she suggested. It’s the change

in the way the students see them-

selves as they build a home library.

They see themselves as readers, as

members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books de-

bate is conducted on the supposition

that the medium is the message.

But sometimes the medium is just

the medium. What matters is the

way people think about themselves

while engaged in the two activities. A

person who becomes a citizen of the

literary world enters a hierarchical

universe. There are classic works of

literature at the top and beach read-

ing at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a nov-

ice, and slowly studies the works of

great writers and scholars. Readers

immerse themselves in deep, alter-

native worlds and hope to gain last-

ing wisdom. Respect is paid to the

writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very

different experience. The Internet

smashes hierarchy and is not marked

by deference. Maybe it would be dif-

ferent if it had been invented in Victo-

rian England, but Internet culture is

set in contemporary America. Inter-

net culture is egalitarian. The young

are more accomplished than the old.

The new media is supposedly savvier

than the old media. The dominant ac-

tivity is free-wheeling, disrespectful,

antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster dif-

ferent types of learning. The great

essayist Joseph Epstein once dis-

tinguished between being well in-

formed, being hip and being cultivat-

ed. The Internet helps you become

well informed — knowledgeable

about current events, the latest con-

troversies and important trends. The

Internet also helps you become hip —

to learn about what’s going on, as Ep-

stein writes, “in those lively waters

outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still bet-

ter at helping you become cultivated,

mastering significant things of last-

ing import. To learn these sorts of

things, you have to defer to greater

minds than your own. You have to

take the time to immerse yourself in

a great writer’s world. You have to re-

spect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is

better at encouraging this kind of

identity. The Internet culture may

produce better conversationalists,

but the literary culture still produces

better students.

It’s better at distinguishing the im-

portant from the unimportant, and

making the important more presti-

gious.

Perhaps that will change. Already,

more “old-fashioned” outposts are

opening up across the Web. It could

be that the real debate will not be

books versus the Internet but how to

build an Internet counterculture that

will better attract people to serious

learning.

The White House has announced that

it wants to move ahead with a long-ig-

nored trade pact with South Korea. The

deal was reached by former President

George W. Bush, but with President

Obama planning to visit South Korea

for a summit of the Group of 20 major

economies in November, he has now

committed to resolving the outstand-

ing issues and submitting the treaty for

ratification after the fall elections.

This is good news, to be sure. But it is

hardly enough at a time when protec-

tionism is rising around the world.

Until now, the Obama administra-

tion’s trade strategy has been limited

to hoping that a world economic re-

bound and a rising Chinese currency

would double American exports in five

years. Beyond this new enthusiasm,

Mr. Obama’s approach to trade still ap-

pears to be hamstrung by strong oppo-

sition from his party’s union base.

The United States must become a

leading voice for open international

trade. It must press harder for the com-

pletion of the stalled round of global

trade talks started nine years ago in

Doha, Qatar, and to undo the myriad

protectionist measures that govern-

ments around the globe — including

our own — have adopted since the fi-

nancial crash.

The United States and China both put

buy-at-home provisions in their stimu-

lus programs. Russia introduced incen-

tives to develop products to substitute

for imports. According to the Global

Trade Alert from the Center for Eco-

nomic Policy Research, a European

economic research forum, countries

around the world have imposed at least

443 discriminatory measures against

imports since November 2008.

Things are about to get worse. At a re-

cent meeting in Toronto, the Group of 20

biggest economies agreed to cut their

budget deficits in half by 2013. Without

that crucial support for internal de-

mand, most of these countries will have

to rely on exports to try to achieve eco-

nomic growth. Not everybody can do

that at the same time. Fiercer competi-

tion for international markets is likely

to lead to new domestic barriers, unfair

dumping and tit-for-tat punishments

that could disrupt trade flows and fur-

ther hamper the global recovery.

Politicians aren’t even giving lip ser-

vice to free trade. In Toronto, the G-20

leaders dropped their 2009 pledge to

finalize the Doha round of trade ne-

gotiations this year. A day before, the

meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized

nations agreed that countries should

instead pursue their own bilateral and

regional trade deals.

Those may be better than no trade

deals. But without a strong set of

agreed international rules — the sort

that come with a global accord — there

is a real danger that these side deals

could create more mistrust and unfair

competition. The sudden hurry for a

South Korean deal is being driven in

good part by the fact that the United

States is losing South Korean market

share and both the European Union

and Canada are looking to sign their

own agreements with Seoul.

South Korea is an important ally in

a dangerous neighborhood, and the

White House should push hard to get

this deal finished and through the Sen-

ate. It should push just as hard for rati-

fication of pending agreements with

Colombia and Panama. But it can’t

stop there. It must also push for more

open global trade bound by multilat-

eral rules and obligations. The world’s

economy, and the American economy,

are too fragile to risk a trade war.

The Pope’s Duty

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

When rolling scandal forced the

American Catholic bishops confer-

ence to take action against pedophile

priests, the prelates issued a tough

policy requiring accused child molest-

ers be reported immediately to secu-

lar authorities. This mandate finally

acknowledged that crimes against

children should take priority over bu-

reaucratic church policies that served

to cloak rogue priests and bishops in a

fog of ecclesiastical evasion.

Eight years after the American

church’s overdue order, it is shocking

that Pope Benedict XVI and the Vati-

can have not yet applied it to the world-

wide Roman Catholic Church. The pe-

dophilia scandal has erupted in other

nations, leaving parents concerned

about a repetition of the harrowing ex-

perience in America, where more than

700 priests had to be dismissed across

a three-year period. Yet the Vatican

is reportedly working on new “guide-

lines” — not mandates. They are likely

to fall short of zero-tolerance and other

requirements in the American church

that parishes and communities be

alerted to abusers.

It is becoming clear that, as a Vatican

administrator for two decades, the fu-

ture pope handled the pedophilia scan-

dal with no great distinction.

Church policy under his aegis was

too often a study in confusion and frus-

tration for diocesan authorities looking

for firm guidance from Rome, accord-

ing to an investigative report by Laurie

Goodstein and David Halbfinger in The

Times. Alarmed bishops in English-

speaking nations put unusual pressure

on the Vatican to have a secret meeting

in 2000 to consider stronger counter-

measures.

Unfortunately, a dynamic policy has

yet to emerge. As new reports arise of

pedophile abuses and diocesan cover-

ups in Europe, Chile and Brazil, Bene-

dict has had to face the scandal and its

victims more directly. He has put aside

defensive Vatican complaints about

anti-Catholic persecution and admit-

ted the problem is “born from the sin in

the church.”

In this spirit, Benedict has the obliga-

tion to shepherd not just guidelines but

credible mandates that priest-abusers

and bishops who abetted their crimes

face disclosure and punishment.

DAVID BROOKS

The Medium Matters

A few weeks ago, I walked along

a spring creek in the upper Madi-

son Valley, just south of the town of

Ennis, Montana. As my guide, Jeff

Laszlo, explained, the creek is one of

the tributaries of the Madison River,

fed by innumerable springs along the

valley’s rich bottomland. The creek

meanders for kilometers before it

reaches the Madison, gaining water,

providing spawning grounds for fish

and invaluable wetland habitat for

birds. I looked on in disbelief, because

the section we were hiking — nearly

12 kilometers of cold, clear waters —

did not exist before 2005.

Or rather, it existed until 1951, when

Jeff Laszlo’s grandfather dewatered

this section of land by digging canals

to draw the water along the edge of

one of the alluvial benches that define

the Madison Valley. His purpose was

to move water to other sections of his

ranch and to improve the grazing. In

the narrow agricultural logic of the

time, his ditches made a certain eco-

nomic sense. And if it seems strange

that his grandson would undo all

that work 60-some years later, Lasz-

lo notes that he is simply obeying a

different economic logic — one that

considers increased biodiversity to

be one of the ranch’s most important

assets.

Restoring this stream was not

simply a matter of diverting the wa-

ter back into its old channels. It was

an intensely collaborative process,

involving more than a dozen state,

federal and private partners — in-

cluding the United States Depart-

ment of Agriculture, the federal Fish

and Wildlife Service, the local power

company, PPL Montana, and the

Trust for Public Land.

And it was a major construction

project, requiring the precise en-

gineering of new streambed and

shallow backwaters and the care-

ful laying and planting of new bank

sod and willows. Photographs of the

construction show an almost night-

marish scene — excavators hard at

work in what looks as much like the

digging of those old canals as the re-

storing of a stream.

But wherever I looked, I saw

only nature, even in sections of the

stream that were restored just last

year. The speed with which this habi-

tat — aquatic and terrestrial — has

altered itself has surprised nearly

everyone.

Within weeks, trout began to move

up from downstream, and they are

now abundant. Water temperatures

in the stream have dropped signifi-

cantly, and daily variation in temper-

ature has decreased. The subterra-

nean water table has risen, and bird

populations have greatly increased

and, more importantly, diversified.

Aquatic insects are again proliferat-

ing.

The hope is that this restoration

will serve as a model for landowners

farther downstream — and, indeed,

wherever wetland habitat can be

restored. The critical point — one

that Laszlo emphasized repeatedly

— is that the restoration could never

have been accomplished without the

collaboration of private and public

partners. It has been a test not only

for him and the organizations and

agencies that have worked with him.

It has also tested conventional as-

sumptions about the proper use of

public money — which was, in this

case, used to help restore private land

without providing public access.

The real beauty is that from the

bench above this creek, where a

large band of curlews was feeding,

I couldn’t tell that man had been at

work — not in the past five years and

not in 1951. And neither could the

birds and the fish.

Editorial Observer/VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Resilience of a Mountain Stream

NICOLE BENGIVENO/NEW YORK TIMES

A bison and her calf wade in the Madison River in Montana. A

restored river creek there is thriving.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010 III

Iraqi Smugglers Blunt Trade Sanctions Against Tehran

Bridge PlansStir Fears In Ancient Wine Region

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

ÜRZIG, Germany — Compared

with Robert Eymael, Markus Berres

is a relative beginner. The vineyards

that Mr. Eymael’s family works were

first documented as early as 1177. Mr.

Berres’s forebears are registered as

vineyard owners only since 1510.

But more than history separates

both men. What divides them these

days are plans for a colossal, 3.2-ki-

lometer bridge with ten reinforced

concrete columns that would stride

across this bucolic valley where they

and dozens of other winemakers pro-

duce elegant Riesling wines.

If built, the bridge — which is ex-

pected to cost at least $400 million

— would pass close by tiny Ürzig,

in the heart of the Mosel Valley. The

flint-filled vineyards here climb from

the river up the north side of the steep

valley, facing the sun since Roman

times.

The division in opinion is emblem-

atic of what in recent months has be-

come a fierce, popular, if only recent,

resistance movement to the bridge’s

construction.

“I am an absolute opponent of the

bridge, as such,” said Mr. Berres,

31, who works about 3.6 hectares of

vineyard. Existing roads suffice for

local traffic, he says, arguing that

bridge construction could endanger

the vineyards, which perch on steep

slopes and are fed water by a delicate

system of natural irrigation.

Mr. Eymael, more the fatalist, sees

it differently. “It’s like a jumbo jet

five minutes before takeoff,” he said.

“You cannot stop it.”

The ferment has begun to worry

politicians in Mainz, the capital of

the state where Ürzig lies. “We were

certainly surprised by this recent

opposition,” said Hendrik Hering,

economics minister in Rhineland-

Palatinate. “It’s been in the planning

for more than 30 years.” Mr. Hering,

46, explained that before 1989, when

Germany was still divided, the flow

of traffic north to south was domi-

nant. “But Europe has grown, and

east-west connections are missing,”

he said. “The bridge is part of those

missing traffic connections.”

The idea for a bridge goes back

about 40 years and was part of West

Germany’s regional road building

schemes. The first signs of resis-

tance came only 10 years ago, when

Ürzig’s mayor, Arno Simon, sued to

try and stop construction. The origi-

nal site for the planned bridge was a

few kilometers upstream where the

terrain is flatter, but politicians there

blocked it and the Ürzig site was cho-

sen instead.

Mr. Simon, 58, who has been mayor

for 15 years, said he brought suit on the

grounds that the bridge traffic would

cause intolerable noise and the bridge

itself would mar the beauty of the val-

ley landscape, with its steep vineyards

and quaint towns. For seven years the

suit wound its way through the courts,

and it was finally rejected.

“The quality of the wine won’t suf-

fer, but the landscape, that’s some-

thing again,” Mr. Simon said.

The opposition rejects Mr. Simon’s

view. “This region lives from wine and

tourism,” said Georg Laska, 51, an op-

position leader. “Both are in danger.”

By SAM DAGHER

PENJWIN, Iraq — Even as the

United States imposes new sanctions

on Iran, one of the biggest gaps in the

American strategy is on full display

here in Iraq, where hundreds of mil-

lions of dollars in crude oil and refined

products are smuggled over the scenic

mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan every

year.

Day after day, without formal au-

thorization from Baghdad, more than

a thousand tankers snake through this

town on Iraq’s border with Iran, not

only undercutting recent American

sanctions but also worsening tensions

with the Iraqi government over how to

divide the country’s oil profits.

The scale and organization of the

trade has raised concerns among

American officials here. They fear that

proceeds from the sales could be flow-

ing to corrupt Iraqi politicians and ben-

efiting the Iranian government, even

as the United States has approved new

sanctions against Tehran.

A senior Kurdish government offi-

cial said that the benefits from a busi-

ness he described as “elaborate” and

“huge” went to the region’s two gov-

erning parties and affiliated compa-

nies, and that officials and politicians

in Baghdad were involved as well.

“The people are being scammed, but

by whom, we do not know,” said Hamid

Mohammed, an Iraqi tanker truck

driver waiting to enter Iran recently.

The Kurds have long been allied

with the United States. Smuggling of

oil and other goods and commodities

along Iraq’s porous borders thrived

in the 1990s, when Iraq was under in-

ternational sanctions. But the semiof-

ficial nature of the current trade un-

derscored how business interests had

trumped the messy politics of Iraq and

the region.

The stream of tankers into Iran con-

tinued without interruption during an

Iranian military campaign last month

against Iranian Kurdish separatists

operating at the border. Hundreds

of tankers, each with a capacity of at

least 226 barrels of crude oil and re-

fined products, enter Iran every day

from Penjwin and two other border

posts in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish of-

ficials say.

While much of the refined product is

used in Iran, which sorely lacks refin-

ery capacity, the crude oil is trucked all

the way down to the Persian Gulf ports

of Bandar Bushehr, Bandar Imam

Khomeini and Bandar Abbas, where

it is emptied into reservoirs or loaded

onto ships, according to drivers.

The trade is supported by an esti-

mated 70 mini-refineries, known in

the industry as topping plants, said the

Kurdistan region’s oil minister, Ashti

Hawrami. They are dotted around

the Kurdistan region and Kurdish-

controlled areas in nearby Kirkuk and

Nineveh Province, he said, and many

of them are unlicensed.

Abdul-Karim al-Luaibi, Iraq’s dep-

uty oil minister for production, said

he was unaware of oil exports to Iran

from the Kurdistan region, adding that

all the mini-refineries were illegal.

“They bear responsibility for this,”

said Mr. Luaibi, referring to Kurdish

authorities.

In a rare interview in May, Mr.

Hawrami said only fuel oil and by-

products like naphtha were being sent

to Iran after processing the region’s

own crude at two privately owned re-

fineries to meet the internal market’s

needs and run a local power plant. Mr.

Hawrami said that revenue from the

Iran business has helped cover costs

for foreign oil companies in the Kurd-

istan region that were hurt when they

stopped exporting crude through a

pipeline to Turkey in October because

of a dispute between Kurdistan and

Baghdad. He said any extra revenue

that accrued to the region from this

business was being kept out of the

Kurdistan government’s finances and

deposited in a separate bank account

to be reconciled with Baghdad in the

future, once the two sides resolved

their differences.

But Mr. Hawrami also said that it

was not just refined products from the

Kurdish region that were finding their

way into Iran. Crude oil and refined

products from Kirkuk and the Baiji

refinery to the south were also being

smuggled into the region, and some

were crossing the Iranian border. He

said his ministry had no control over

this.

“A truck is a truck — so easy to man-

ufacture a license and say, ‘This is

fuel oil and not crude oil’ and they find

their way,” said Mr. Hawrami. “Unfor-

tunately, the problem is much broader

than little Kurdistan.”

Analysts say that the Kurdish re-

gion’s oil trade with Iran provides a

revenue source that it does not have to

share with Baghdad, at least for now,

diminishing its reliance on exports to

Turkey. It also grants them leverage in

resolving oil and internal border dis-

putes with Baghdad.

“They can negotiate from a position

of strength,” says Ruba Husari, an oil

specialist and founder of Iraqoilforum.

com. “They are running their own oil

kingdom.”

But questions about the legitimacy

of the region’s oil activities are in-

creasingly coming from within.

“Kurdistan is like an island with no

rule of law when it comes to oil,” says

Abdulla Malla-Nuri, a member of the

region’s Parliament from the Gorran

opposition movement, which broke

away from one of the governing par-

ties last year and has accused them of

rampant corruption.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

AMMAN, Jordan — Awet Eyob is

the embodiment of Eritrea’s lost gen-

eration. Long before he learned to

dunk on warped wooden backboards,

Mr. Eyob nursed a dream: to play bas-

ketball in America.

He is 2.3 meters tall, built like an

oak tree, and seems to have mastered

a behind-the-back dribble and crisp

passes from the corner of his eye.

But one big problem stood between

him and his dream. Eritrea is refusing

to let its young people leave.

Eritrea is spawning more refugees

per capita than just about anywhere

else in the world, according to United

Nations statistics. Most of them are

young men, and often the country’s

most promising ones at that.

Hundreds of thousands of people

have fled Eritrea in recent years — the

total population is less than five mil-

lion — and nearly every day, 100 new

Eritreans risk their lives to cross into

Sudan.

The nation, which fought its way to

independence nearly 20 years ago, is

ruled by former guerrilla fighters who

have held firm to their revolutionary

Marxist policies and who demand

that all young people work for the gov-

ernment, sometimes until their 40s.

Anyone who tries to buck this national

program, according to human rights

groups, is subject to cruelly inventive

tortures.

So this January, in great secrecy, Mr.

Awet gathered four pairs of underwear,

two pairs of socks, his high school tran-

script, his Nike Air Jordans and some

cash to pay a gang of human traffickers

(or coyotes, as he calls them).

“I remember that first call,” he said.

“The coyote said: ‘Hello, this is Sun-

shine.’ I answered, ‘This is Thunder.’ ”

Mr. Awet, 20, who is now living in

Amman, Jordan, is lucky.

Mr. Awet sneaked through Sudan

and then on to Kenya and Dubai. He

is now camped out in the basement

of an American family’s home here,

doing push-ups, working on his jump

shot, playing on a Wii set with the fam-

ily’s children and trying to get into an

American college or prep school.

Eritrea is known for being a trou-

blemaker in a very volatile neighbor-

hood. The nation has been accused of

invading Djibouti in 2008 and fueling

chaos in Somalia by arming insurgent

groups, prompting sanctions from the

United Nations Security Council.

But Eritrea has a proud history,

fighting a 30-year guerrilla war to

break away from Ethiopia.

On the surface, life for young Eri-

treans does not look so bad. Asmara

is littered with chrome-lined Art Deco

cafes where young people sip cappuc-

cinos and munch on pizza. But many

young people complain (quietly) of be-

ing chained to dead-end government

jobs. By law, mandatory national ser-

vice is supposed to last 18 months. In

reality, it is often indefinite, and few

can get permits to exit the country

until they are done serving. The gov-

ernment justifies this because of a

highly militarized, unresolved border

dispute with its neighbor, Ethiopia,

nearly 20 times its size.

Mr. Awet says he probably will not

see his parents for years because now

that he has escaped, it will be danger-

ous to go back home.

At night, when he cannot sleep, he

takes out a tiny prayer book his moth-

er gave him and thinks of her. But still,

he nurtures his dream.

“I used to dream about the money

and the cars and the girls,” he sings.

“But now I see, because I’m sitting on

top of the world.”

AYMAN OGHANNA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hundreds of tankers from Iraqi Kurdistan line up at the border to transport fuel into Iran, thwarting

restrictions. Nearby, a Kurdish shepherd minds his flock.

Eritrean Young Dream of Escape

The Kurds’ oil dealings with Iran worries both the U.S. and Baghdad.

GIOVANNI DEL BRENNA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Markus Berres tends to his family’s vineyard in Ürzig, where a

contested 3.2-kilometer bridge is planned.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010

Recognizing that the child is

smiling, RUBI can respond with

verbal and physical gestures

of encouragement, or simply

continue with an activity.

3

54

Learning to Read People

The Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego,

developed a robot that learned from its preschool-class environment. It’s called

RUBI – Robot Using Bayesian Inference – defined as observations or incoming

data that are the basis for determining statistical probability and action. So, for

example, the robot is programmed to recognize whether or not a child is

interested in or enjoying an activity. Then the robot can respond accordingly. Here

is how it recognizes faces and analyzes facial expressions.

Source: Machine Perception Laboratory, University of California, San Diego

FRANK O’CONNELL AND KARL RUSSELL/THE NEW YORK TIMES

RUBI’s nose is a video camera

that recognizes and follows faces

with the aid of its software.

2 Each frame of

incoming video is

analyzed in real time.

One of RUBI’s primary objectives

is to recognize whether a child is

smiling (“action unit” 12). Its system

to do this was also trained using a

database of 70,000 faces.

RUBI’s software is then able to recognize basic emotions.

The lab expounded on and automated the “facial action coding system”

developed by sociologist Paul Ekman beginning in the 1970s. It identifies virtually

every muscle movement in the face and interprets combinations of them as

expressions and emotions. Some of the major “action units”:

12. Lip cornerpull

1. Innerbrow raise

2. Outerbrow raise

4. Browlower

5. Eye widen

15. Lip cornerdepress

17. Chin raise

20. Lip stretch

24. Lip press

1

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Carefully

trained by a government-run lab, she

is the latest and perhaps most innova-

tive recruit in South Korea’s obsessive

drive to teach its children the global

language of English.

Over the years, this country has im-

ported thousands of Americans, Ca-

nadians, South Africans and others to

supplement local teachers of English.

But the program has strained the gov-

ernment’s budget.

Enter Engkey, a teacher with high

standards and a silken voice. She is a

little penguin-shaped robot, but sym-

bolically and practically, she stands

for progress, achievement and na-

tional pride.

What she does not tolerate, however,

is bad pronunciation.

“Not good this time!” Engkey ad-

monished a school boy as he stooped

awkwardly over her. “You need to

focus more on your accent. Let’s try

again.”

Engkey, a contraction of English

jockey (as in disc jockey), is the great

hope of Choi Mun-taek, a team leader

at the Korea Institute of Science and

Technology’s Center for Intelligent

Robotics. “In three to five years, Eng-

key will mature enough to replace na-

tive speakers,” he said.

Engkey has a long way to go to ful-

fill her creators’ dream. The robot can

help students practice only scripted

conversations and is at a loss if a stu-

dent veers off script.

Dr. Choi’s team recently demon-

strated Engkey’s interactions with

four young students from Seoul who

had not met the robot.

“I love you,” Yang Ui ryeol said to ap-

pease Engkey after he was chastised

for a bad pronunciation. Engkey would

have none of it; it was not in her pro-

grammed script. “You need to work on

your accent,” the robot repeated.

When the boy said, “I don’t like ap-

ples” instead of “I love apples,” as he

was supposed to, Engkey froze. The

boy patted her and said, “Hello, are

you alive or dead?”

The trials and errors at the Korea

Institute, a wooded top-security com-

pound for the country’s best scientific

minds, represent South Korea’s ambi-

tious robotic dreams.

Last month, it announced a trial ser-

vice for 11 types of intelligent robots

this year.

They include “robo soldiers” that

will man part of the 250-kilometer-

border with North Korea with a never-

sleeping camera eye, night vision and

lethal fire power.

But the most notable step was this

country’s plans to use robots as teach-

ing aids. In February, the Education

Ministry began deploying hundreds

of them as part of a plan to equip all

the nation’s 8,400 kindergartens with

robots by 2013. Dr. Choi knows the

challenge. After tests in more schools

this winter, he hopes to commercial-

ize Engkey and to reduce the price,

currently $24,000 to $32,000, to below

$8,000.

Even though they are little more

than fancy toys, experts say, these

robots prepare children for a fast-ap-

proaching robotic future.

Early this year, when the institute

did an experimental run of Engkey,

there was a mad rush among children

to be selected for the program.

But an independent evaluator of the

trial noticed that Engkey required the

constant presence of a technical op-

erator.

Ban Jae-chun, an education profes-

sor at Chungnam National University,

said, “Engkey has a long way to go if it

wants to avoid becoming an expensive

yet ignored heap of scrap metal at the

corner of the classroom.”

The Teacher Is Cute but a Little Rigid

CHOE SANG-HUN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

South Korea plans to equip all the nation’s 8,400 kindergartens

with robots by 2013. Engkey, a robot that recognizes human speech,

worked with a student in Seoul on his English.

A robot embodies South Korean progress and pride.

Media Laboratory at the Massachu-

setts Institute of Technology, “they

will see it as the master.”

Most computer scientists say that

they have neither the intention, nor

the ability, to replace human teachers.

The great hope for robots, said Patri-

cia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute

for Learning and Brain Sciences at

the University of Washington, “is that

with the right kind of technology at

a critical period in a child’s develop-

ment, they could supplement learning

in the classroom.”

Lessons From RUBI

“Kenka,” says a childlike voice.

“Ken-ka.”

At the University of California, San

Diego, in California, a robot named

RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-

old boy.

RUBI’s screen-torso is mounted on a

pair of shoes, with a bandanna around

its neck and a fixed happy-face smile.

It picks up a white sneaker and says

kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, be-

fore returning it to the floor. “Feel it;

I’m a kenka.”

In a video of this exchange, the boy

picks up the sneaker, says, “Kenka,

kenka” — and holds up the shoe.

The researchers are finding that

RUBI enables preschool children to

score significantly better on tests,

compared with less interactive learn-

ing .

Preliminary results suggest that

these students “do about as well as

learning from a human teacher,” said

Javier Movellan, director of the Ma-

chine Perception Laboratory at the

university. “Social interaction is ap-

parently a very important component

of learning at this age.”

Like any new kid in class, RUBI took

some time to find a niche. Children

swarmed the robot when it first joined

the classroom. But by the end of the

day, a couple of boys had yanked off its

arms. Engineers re-programmed RU-

BI to cry when its arms were pulled.

Its young playmates quickly backed

off at the sound.

After RUBI’s re-arming, research-

ers from the University of California,

San Diego, the Massachusetts Insti-

tute of Technology and the University

of Joensuu in Finland reported in a

paper last year that the robot signifi-

cantly improved the vocabulary of

nine toddlers.

After testing the youngsters’ knowl-

edge of 20 words and introducing

them to the robot, the researchers left

RUBI to operate on its own. The robot

showed images on its screen and in-

structed children to associate them

with words.

After 12 weeks, the children’s knowl-

edge of the 10 words taught by RUBI

increased significantly, while their

knowledge of 10 control words did not.

“The effect was relatively large, a re-

duction in errors of more than 25 per-

cent,” the authors concluded.

Social robotics is a branch of com-

puter science devoted to enhancing

communication between humans and

machines. At Honda Labs in Mountain

View, California, researchers found a

similar result with their robot, Asimo.

In one 20-minute session the machine

taught grade-school students how to

set a table — improving their accuracy

by about 25 percent.

Making the Connection

“Before they have language, infants

pay attention to what I call informa-

tional hotspots,” where their mother

or father is looking, said Andrew N.

Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-

director of the University of Washing-

ton’s Institute for Learning and Brain

Sciences. This, he said, is how learning

begins.

This basic finding, to be published

later this year, is one of dozens from a

field called affective computing that

is helping scientists discover exactly

which features of a robot make it most

convincingly “real.”

“It turns out that making a ro-

bot more closely resemble a human

doesn’t get you better social interac-

tions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a

neuroscientist at the University of Cal-

ifornia, San Diego. The more human-

like machines look, the more creepy

they can seem.

The machine’s behavior is what

matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very

subtle elements can make a big differ-

ence.

The timing of a robot’s responses is

critical. In recent experiments at a day

care center in Japan, researchers have

shown that having a robot simply bob

or shake at the same rhythm a child

is rocking or moving can quickly en-

gage even very fearful children with

autism.

“The child begins to notice some-

thing in that synchronous behavior

and open up,” said Marek Micha-

lowski of Carnegie Mellon University

in Pennsylvania, who collaborated on

the studies.

Once that happens, he said, “you

can piggyback social behaviors onto

the interaction, like eye contact, turn

taking, things these kids have trouble

with.”

In a continuing study financed by

the National Institutes of Health in

Bethesda, Maryland, scientists at the

University of Connecticut are conduct-

ing therapy sessions for children with

autism using a French robot called

Nao, a 61-centimeter humanoid. The

robot, remotely controlled by a thera-

pist, demonstrates martial arts kicks

and chops and urges the child to fol-

low suit; then it encourages the child

to lead.

“I just love robots, and I know this is

therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s

just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old with

Asperger’s syndrome.

This simple mimicry seems to build

a kind of trust, and increase sociabil-

ity, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant pro-

fessor in the department of education

who is directing the experiment.

“Social interactions are so depen-

dent on whether someone is in sync

with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk

fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they

go slowly — and soon you are interact-

ing, and maybe you are learning.”

Personality matters, too, on both

sides. Researchers have found that

when the robot teacher Asimo is “coop-

erative” (“I am going to put the water

glass here; do you think you can help

me?”), children 4 to 6 did much better

than when Asimo lectured them.

If robots are to be truly effective

guides, in short, they will have to do

what any good teacher does: learn

from students when a lesson is taking

hold and when it is falling flat.

Learning From Humans

“Do you have any questions, Si-

mon?”

On a recent Monday afternoon,

Crystal Chao, a graduate student in

robotics at the Georgia Institute of

Technology, in Atlanta, was teach-

ing a 1.5-meter-tall robot named Si-

mon to put away toys. She had given

some instructions, but the robot was

stumped.

Dr. Chao repeated her query, per-

haps the most fundamental in all of ed-

ucation: Do you have any questions?

“Let me see,” said Simon, in a child-

like machine voice, reaching to pick

up a toy. “Can you tell me where this

goes?”

“In the green bin,” came the an-

swer.

Simon nodded, dropping it in that

bin.

“Makes sense,” the robot said.

Just as humans can learn from

machines, machines can learn from

humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an as-

sistant professor of interactive com-

puting at Georgia Tech who directs

the project.

The ability to monitor and learn

from experience is the next great fron-

tier for social robotics — and it proba-

bly depends on unraveling the secrets

of how the human brain accumulates

information during infancy. In San Di-

ego, researchers are trying to develop

a human-looking robot with sensors

that approximate the complexity of a

year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see

and hear.

Researchers are aiming for nothing

less than capturing the foundation of

human learning — or, at least, its arti-

ficial intelligence equivalent. If robots

can learn to learn, they can in princi-

ple make the kind of teachers that are

responsive to the needs of a class, even

an individual child.

Parents and educators would cer-

tainly have questions about robots’

effectiveness as teachers, as well as

ethical concerns about potential harm

they might do.

But if social robots take off in the

way other computing technologies

have, parents may have more pointed

ones: Does this robot really “get” my

child? Is its teaching style right for my

son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

That is, the very questions they

would ask about any teacher.

Choe Sang-Hun contributed reportingfrom Seoul.

From Page I

Social Machines: Reading,Writing and Robotics

Repubblica NewYork

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

MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010 V

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHENZHEN, China — Last month,

researchers in Silicon Valley cracked

open an Apple iPhone 4’s shell and

started analyzing its components, try-

ing to unmask the identity of Apple’s

main suppliers. These “teardown re-

ports” provide a glimpse into a com-

pany’s manufacturing.

What the latest analysis shows is

that the smallest part of Apple’s costs

are here in Shenzhen, where assembly-

line workers snap together things like

microchips from Germany and Korea,

American-made chips that pull in Wi-

Fi or cellphone signals, and more than

100 other components.

More than a dozen integrated circuit

chips account for about two-thirds of

the cost of producing a single iPhone4,

according to iSuppli, the market re-

search firm in El Segundo, California,

that issued the teardown report.

Apple pays Samsung about $27 for

flash memory and $10.75 to make its

(Apple-designed) applications pro-

cessor; and a German chip maker

called Infineon gets $14.05 a phone

for chips that send and receive phone

calls and data. Most of the electron-

ics cost much less.

The gyroscope,

new to the iPhone

4, was made by

STMicroelectron-

ics, based in Geneva, and added $2.60

to the cost.

The total bill of materials on a $600

iPhone — the supplies that go into fi-

nal assembly — is $187.51, according

to iSuppli.

The least expensive part of the pro-

cess is manufacturing and assembly.

And that often takes place here in

southern China, where workers are

paid less than a dollar an hour to sol-

der, assemble and package products

for the world’s best-known brands.

But manufacturing in China is about

to get far more expensive. Soaring la-

bor costs caused by worker shortages

and unrest, a strengthening Chinese

currency that makes exports more

expensive, and inflation and rising

housing costs are threatening to in-

crease the cost of devices like note-

book computers, digital cameras and

smartphones.

Desperate factory owners are al-

ready shifting production away from

this country’s dominant electronics

manufacturing center in Shenzhen

toward lower-cost regions far west of

here .

At the end of June, a manager at

Foxconn Technology — one of Apple’s

major contract manufacturers — said

the company planned to reduce costs

by moving hundreds of thousands

of workers to other parts of China,

including the impoverished Henan

Province.

While the labor involved in the final

assembly of an iPhone accounts for a

small part of the overall cost — about 7

percent by some estimates — analysts

say most companies in Apple’s supply

chain — the chip makers and battery

suppliers and those making plastic

moldings and printed circuit boards

— depend on Chinese factories to hold

down prices. And those factories now

seem likely to pass along their cost in-

creases.

“Electronics companies are trying

to figure out how to deal with the high-

er costs,” said Jenny Lai, a technology

analyst at CLSA, an investment bank

based in Hong Kong.

“They’re already squeezed, so

squeezing more costs out of the sys-

tem won’t be easy.”

Apple can cope better than most

companies because it has fat profit

margins to absorb some of those

costs.

And when a company is operating

on the slimmest of profit margins as

contract manufacturers are, soaring

labor costs pose a serious problem.

“China doesn’t want to be the work-

shop of the world anymore,” says Pi-

etra Rivoli, a professor of international

business at Georgetown University in

Washington. “The value goes to where

the knowledge is.”

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

ISTANBUL — For decades, Turkey

has been told it was not ready to join

the European Union — that it was too

backward economically to qualify for

membership .

That argument may no longer hold.

Today, Turkey is a fast-rising eco-

nomic power, with a core of inter-

nationally competitive companies

turning the youthful nation into an

entrepreneurial hub, tapping cash-

rich export markets in Russia and the

Middle East while attracting billions

of investment dollars in return.

For many in debt-weary Europe,

which will be lucky to eke out a little

more than 1 percent growth this year,

Turkey’s economic renaissance — at

the end of June it reported a stunning

11.4 percent expansion for the first

quarter, second only to China — poses

a new question: who needs the other

one more — Europe or Turkey?

“The old powers are losing power,

both economically and intellectually,”

said Vural Ak, 42, the founder and

chief executive of Intercity, the largest

car leasing company in Turkey. “And

Turkey is now strong enough to stand

by itself.”

It is an astonishing transformation

for an economy that just 10 years ago

had a budget deficit of 16 percent of

gross domestic product and inflation

of 72 percent. It is one that lies at the

root of the rise to power of Prime Min-

ister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has

combined social conservatism with

fiscally cautious economic policies to

make his Justice and Development

Party, or A.K.P., the most dominant

political movement in Turkey since the

early days of the republic.

“This is a dream world,” said Husnu

M. Ozyegin, who became the richest

man in Turkey when he sold his bank,

Finansbank, to the National Bank of

Greece in 2006. Sitting on the rooftop of

his five-star Swiss Hotel, he was look-

ing at his BlackBerry, scrolling down

the most recent credit-default spreads

for euro zone countries. He still could

not quite believe what he was seeing.

“Greece, 980. Italy, 194 and here is

Turkey at 192,” he said with a grunt

of satisfaction. “If you had told me 10

years ago that Turkey’s financial risk

would equal that of Italy I would have

said you were crazy.”

Mr. Ozyegin represents the old

guard of Turkey’s business elite that

has embraced the Erdogan govern-

ment for its economic successes. Less

well known but just as important to

Turkey’s future has been the rise of so-

cially conservative business leaders.

Mr. Ak, the car leasing executive,

exemplifies this new business elite.

He drives a Ferrari, but he is also a

practicing Muslim who does not drink

and has no qualms in talking about

his faith. He is not bound to the 20th-

century secular consensus among the

business, military and judicial elite

that long fought to keep Islam removed

from public life.

On the wall behind his desk is a

framed passage in Arabic from the

Koran, and he recently financed an

Islamic studies program just outside

Washington at George Mason Univer-

sity in Fairfax, Virginia.

Whether he is embracing Islam as

a set of principles to govern his life or

Israeli irrigation technology for his

sideline almond and walnut grow-

ing business, Mr. Ak represents the

flexible dynamism — both social and

economic — that has allowed Turkey

to expand the commercial ties with

Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and

Syria that now underpin its ambition

to become the dominant political actor

in the region.

In June, Turkish exports grew by 13

percent compared with the previous

year, with much of the demand coming

from countries on Turkey’s border or

close to it. With their immature manu-

facturing bases, they are eager buyers

of Turkish cookies, automobiles and

flat-screen TVs.

In Iran, Turkish companies are

building fertilizer plants and making

diapers and female sanitary products.

In Iraq, the Acarsan Group just won a

bid to build five hospitals.

No one here disputes that these

trends give Mr. Erdogan the legiti-

macy — both at home and abroad — to

lash out at Israel and to cut deals with

Iran over its nuclear energy, moves

that have strained ties with its chief al-

ly and longtime supporter, the United

States. (Turkey has exported $1.6 bil-

lion worth of goods to Iran and Syria

this year, $200 million more than to the

United States.)

But some worry that the show of

power may have gone too far, and that

the aggressive tone with Israel may

jeopardize the defining tenet of Tur-

key’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atat-

urk: peace at home, peace in the world.

“The foreign policy of Turkey is good if

it brings self-pride,” said Ferda Yildiz,

the chairman of Basari Holding, a con-

glomerate that itself is in negotiations

with the Syrian government to set up a

factory in Syria that would make elec-

tricity meters.

Even so, he warns that it would be a

mistake to become too caught up in an

eastward expansion if it comes at the

expense of the country’s longstanding

inclination to look to the West for inno-

vation and inspiration. “It takes cen-

turies to make relations and minutes

to destroy them,” he said.

By HEATHER TIMMONS

HALOL, India — India’s drug in-

dustry was once notorious for mak-

ing cheap knockoffs of Western

medicines and selling them in devel-

oping countries. But India, seasoned

in the basics of medicine making, is

now starting to take on a more main-

stream role in the global drug indus-

try, as a result of recent strengthen-

ing of patent law here and cost pres-

sures on name-brand drug makers in

the West.

And while the Indian industry —

on track to grow about 13 percent this

year, to just over $24 billion — has had

quality-control problems, it still ben-

efits from growing wariness about

the reliability of ingredients from

that other low-cost drug provider —

China. The United States is India’s

top export customer for drugs.

India is becoming a “base for man-

ufacturing for the global market,”

said Ajay G. Piramal, the chairman

of Piramal Healthcare, a drug maker

based in Mumbai.

It is not only Indian executives who

are confident about the pharmaceu-

ticals industry here. Analysts, re-

search groups and consultants have

been making similar predictions, and

big pharmaceutical companies have

come calling, too. This year, Mr. Pira-

mal sold his generic drug business to

Abbott Laboratories for $3.7 billion,

the latest in a string of takeovers and

joint ventures here.

Daiichi Sankyo of Japan helped

kick off the foreign drug push into

India in 2008 by buying a stake in

Ranbaxy Laboratories, this coun-

try’s biggest drug maker. Last year,

among other deals, GlaxoSmith-

Kline formed a partnership with Dr.

Reddy’s Laboratories; Pfizer tied

up with Claris Lifesciences; Sanofi-

Aventis took control of Shantha Bio-

technics, and Bristol-Myers Squibb

opened a research center in India

with Biocon.

“There is a lot of good talent at a

much lower price in India,” said Jim

Worrell, the chief executive of Phar-

ma Services Network, a North Car-

olina-based consulting firm that is

organizing tours of Indian factories

for Western pharmaceuticals.

The next opportunities for India

could come at the more sophisticated

end of the drug making spectrum,

including research and development

for the world’s drug giants and even

development of proprietary medi-

cines. “We can crack the problem of

patented drug discovery in India at

a much lower cost’’ than in the West,

predicted Mr. Piramal, who kept his

research and development operation,

Piramal Lifesciences Limited, when

he sold the rest of his firm.

Mainly because of lower wages, if it

costs big pharmaceutical companies

“$1 billion to $1.5 billion to discover a

new drug, we can do it in a tenth of the

cost,’’ Mr. Piramal predicts.

India exported about 384 billion

rupees ($8.3 billion) in drugs and

services for the pharmaceutical in-

dustry in the 2008-9 fiscal year, ac-

cording to government figures, up 25

percent from the year before. Recent

growth, though, has been shadowed

by quality problems. The United

States Food and Drug Administra-

tion cited Ranbaxy for manufactur-

ing violations several times in recent

years, and in February ordered a re-

view of the company’s global manu-

facturing operations.

In May, Sanofi-Aventis recalled

vaccines made by Shantha Biotech-

nics that were distributed to the

World Health Organization after us-

ers complained about white sediment

in the vials. In June, after floating

matter was found in some IV bags,

Pfizer recalled injectible drugs made

by Claris Lifesciences and sold in the

United States.

Intellectual property is also a

problem. India has toughened its

patent laws, but dozens of intellectual

property suits are still being fought

between Indian and foreign firms

in courts around the world. And big

pharmaceutical companies still find

securing protection of their intellec-

tual property in India difficult.

Indian companies have “a lot to of-

fer and the cost advantage is huge,”

said Swetha Shantikumar, a re-

search analyst in Chennai with Frost

& Sullivan. Chinese firms “don’t have

the technical capacity to produce so-

phisticated drugs,” said Ms. Shanti-

kumar. “If you want to make simpler

drugs like aspirin,” she said, “you

manufacture them in China.”

Turkey Turns East,And Finds Prosperity

BOBBY YIP/REUTERS

KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

Drug companies such are thriving in India. Customers in Mumbai buy medications.

Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.

Developing new drugs in a country betterknown for call centers.

Future Is Bright for India in Drug Industry

A ChallengeIn ChinaFor the iPhone

A Foxxconn

factory in

Guangdong

Province. The

company, a

major Apple

supplier, is

looking to cut

costs.

Repubblica NewYork

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

VI MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010

By ASHLEE VANCE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California —

One spring evening, Sergey Brin, the

co-founder of Google, became part

man and part machine. About 40 peo-

ple gathered at the NASA campus of

Singularity University saw it happen.

While Mr. Brin sat kilometers

away at a computer, the gizmo rolling

around here consisted of a printer-size

base with wheels attached to a boxy,

head-height screen glowing with an

image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot

obeyed its human commander and

sputtered around from group to group,

talking to attendees.

The BrinBot was hardly something

out of “Star Trek,” but it smacked of a

future that the Singularity University

founders hold dear: the arrival of the

Singularity — a time, possibly just a

couple decades from now, when a su-

perior intelligence will dominate and

life will take on an altered form, merg-

ing with machines. Old age and even

death itself will be things of the past.

Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest

and wealthiest people believe in the

Singularity.

Singularity University, set up here

in 2008, represents the more concrete

side of the movement, introducing

entrepreneurs to promising technolo-

gies.

On a more millennialist and provoc-

ative note, the Singularity also offers

a modern-day, quasi-religious answer

to the Fountain of Youth.

“We will transcend all of the limita-

tions of our biology,” says Raymond

Kurzweil, the inventor who is the Sin-

gularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman

and boasts that he intends to live for

hundreds of years and resurrect the

dead, including his own father. “That

is what it means to be human — to ex-

tend who we are.”

Some of the Singularity’s adherents

portray a future where humans break

off into two species: the Haves, who

have superior intelligence and can live

for hundreds of years, and the Have-

Nots, who are hampered by their anti-

quated, corporeal forms and beliefs.

Critics find such scenarios unnerv-

ing because the keys to the next phase

of evolution may be beyond the grasp

of most people.

“The Singularity is not the great

vision for society that Lenin had or

Milton Friedman might have,” says

Andrew Orlowski, a British journal-

ist who has written extensively on

techno-utopianism. “It is rich people

building a lifeboat.”

In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will

begin a cross-country multimedia

road show to promote “Transcendent

Man,” a documentary about himself.

He is also the author of best-selling

books and has come up with a series of

blockbuster inventions, including the

first print-scanning systems that con-

verted text to speech and allowed the

blind to read standard texts, as well as

sophisticated electronic keyboards

and voice-recognition software.

He began his march toward the Sin-

gularity around 1980, when he realized

that some elements of information

technology improved at predictable

— and exponential — rates.

“With 30 linear steps, you get to

30,” he often says in speeches. “With

30 steps exponentially, you get to one

billion. The price-performance of com-

puters has improved one billion times

since I was a student. In 25 years,

a computer as powerful as today’s

smartphones will be the size of a blood

cell.”

He then built an elaborate philoso-

phy that provided an analytical back-

bone for the Singularity, an idea that

had been floating around science-fic-

tion circles.

Mr. Kurzweil posits that techno-

logical progress in this century will

be 1,000 times greater than that of

the last century. He writes about hu-

mans trumping biology by filling their

bodies with nanoscale creatures that

can repair cells and by allowing their

minds to tap into super-intelligent

computers.

The computer and the Internet, Mr.

Kurzweil says, have changed society

much faster than electricity, phones

or television. The next great leap will

occur when industries like medicine

and energy start moving at the same

exponential pace as I.T.

It is a vision that some find less

than persuasive. Jonathan Huebner,

a physicist at the Naval Air Warfare

Center, is unimpressed with the state

of progress. Measuring the number of

innovations divided by the size of the

worldwide population, Dr. Huebner

contends that the rate of innovation

peaked in 1873.

“The amount of advance in this cen-

tury will not compare well at all to the

last century,” Dr. Huebner says, before

criticizing tenets of the Singularity. “I

don’t believe that something like arti-

ficial intelligence as they describe it

will ever appear.”

Mr. Orlowksi, the journalist, sees

the Singularity as a grand, tech-nerd

dream in which innovators of every

stripe create the greatest of all reset

buttons. He says the techies “seem to

want a deus ex machina to make ev-

erything right again.”

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

JOHN MITANI/UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Male chimps battle their rivals to gain access to more food so their females can reproduce faster.

Enemy chimps willbe killed. Females are usually let go.

Failure to show anger could drive yourfriends away.

Chimpanzees on Patrol, Prepared for War

The Virtues of LosingYour Composure

ILLUSTRATION BY BRUNO MALLART

ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ

BENEDICT

CAREY

ESSAY

By NICHOLAS WADE

Most days the male chimps at Ngo-

go, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park,

behave a lot like school boys, making a

lot of noise or beating one another up.

But once every 10 to 14 days, they do

something more adult and coopera-

tive: they wage war.

A band of males, up to 20 or so, will

move in single file to the edge of their

territory. They fall into unusual silence

as they tensely scan the treetops and

startle at every noise. “It’s quite clear

that they are looking for individuals of

the other community,” says Dr. John

Mitani.

When the enemy is encountered,

the patrol’s reaction depends on its as-

sessment of the opposing force. If they

seem to be outnumbered, members of

the patrol will bolt back to home ter-

ritory. But if a single chimp has wan-

dered into their path, they will attack.

Enemy males will be bitten and bat-

tered to death. Females are usually let

go, but their babies will be eaten.

These killings have a purpose, but

one that did not emerge until after Ngo-

go chimps’ patrols had been tracked

and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo

group has about 150 chimps and is par-

ticularly large, about three times the

usual size. And its size makes it unusu-

ally aggressive. Its males directed most

of their patrols against a chimp group

that lived in a region to the northeast of

their territory.

Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped

patrolling the region and annexed it

outright, increasing their home terri-

tory by 22 percent, Dr. Mitani said in

a new report in Current Biology with

his colleagues David P. Watts of Yale

University and Sylvia J. Amsler of

the University of Arkansas at Little

Rock. Dr. Mitani is at the University of

Michigan.

The objective of the 10-year cam-

paign was clearly to capture territory,

the researchers concluded. The Ngogo

males could control more fruit trees,

their females would have more to eat

and so would reproduce faster, and the

group would grow larger and stronger

and be more likely to survive. The

chimps’ waging of war is thus “adap-

tive,” Dr. Mitani and his colleagues

concluded, meaning that natural se-

lection has wired the behavior into the

chimps’ neural circuitry because it

promotes their survival.

The benefits of chimp warfare are

clear enough. Primatologists have

documented the links in a long causal

chain, proving for instance that fe-

males with access to more fruit trees

will bear children faster.

But can the chimps themselves fore-

see the outcome of their behavior? Do

they calculate that if they pick off their

neighbors one by one, they will eventu-

ally be able to annex their territory?

“I find that a difficult argument

to sustain because the logical chain

seems too deep,’’ says Richard Wrang-

ham, a chimp expert at Harvard Uni-

versity.

A simpler explanation is that the

chimps are just innately aggressive

toward their neighbors, and that natu-

ral selection has shaped them this way

because of the survival advantage that

will accrue to the winner.

Dr. Wrangham argues that chimps

and humans have both inherited a

propensity for aggressive territorial-

ity from a chimplike ancestor. Others

argue the chimps’ peaceful cousin, the

bonobo, is just as plausible a model for

the joint ancestor.

Dr. Mitani is reluctant to attribute

any genetic link between human and

chimp warfare, despite the similarity

of purpose, cost and tactics.

More interesting than warfare, in

his view, is the cooperative behavior

that makes war possible.

Chimp watching is an arduous task

since researchers must first get the

chimpanzees used to their presence.

Chimpanzees are immensely power-

ful, and could easily kill any research-

er who incurred their animosity.

“What’s curious is that after we do

gain their trust,” Dr. Mitani said, “we

sort of blend into the background and

they pretty much ignore us.’’

Millions of people live or work

with others who are exasperatingly

calm. Sang-froid has its place, es-

pecially during a crisis; but so does

Sigmund Freud, who described the

potential downside

of suppressed pas-

sions. Lose it. Just

once. See what hap-

pens.

“One reason we’re

so attuned to others’

emotions is that,

when it’s a real emotion, it tells us

something important about what

matters to that person,” said James

J. Gross, a psychologist at Stanford

University. When it’s suppressed

or toned down, he added, “people

think, you’re not like us, you don’t

care about the things we do.”

Rigorous study of what psy-

chologists call emotion regulation is

fairly new, and for obvious reasons

has focused far more on untamed

passions than on the domesticated

variety. Runaway emotion defines

many mental disorders, after all.

Yet social functioning is different.

Research has found that people de-

velop a variety of psychological tools

to manage what they express in so-

cial situations, and those techniques

often become subconscious, affect-

ing interactions in unintended ways.

The better that people understand

their own patterns, the more likely

they are to see why some emotion-

ally charged interactions go awry.

“As we grow, the prefrontal areas

of the brain develop, and we become

more able to control our impulses

as well,” said Stefan G. Hofmann, a

professor of psychology at Boston

University.

Psychologists divide regulation

strategies into two categories: pre-

emptive, occurring before an emo-

tion is fully felt; and responsive,

coming afterward. The best known

of the latter category, and one of the

first learned, is simple suppression.

Suppression has social costs that

are all too familiar to those who

know its cold touch.

In a 2003 Stanford study, re-

searchers found that people in-

structed to wear an emotionless

face while discussing a documen-

tary about the bombings of Hiroshi-

ma and Nagasaki made especially

stressful conversation partners.

In a study published last year,

psychologists followed 278 people

entering college. Those who scored

highest on measures of emotion

suppression had the hardest time

making friends.

Pre-emptive techniques can be

more subtle. One is simple diver-

sion, reflexively focusing on the

good and ignoring the bad.

A 2009 study led by Derek Isaa-

cowitz of Brandeis University in

Boston, found that people over 55

were much more likely than those

age 25 and under to focus on posi-

tive images when in a bad mood

“We have found in general that

older people tend to regulate their

emotions faster , ,” Dr. Isaacowitz

said.

Finally, a series of recent experi-

ments led by Maya Tamir, a psy-

chologist at Hebrew University in

Jerusalem and at Boston College,

has found that people subconscious-

ly prime themselves to feel emotions

they believe will be most useful to

them in an anticipated situation.

In a paper published in June Dr.

Hofmann proposed measuring

three components of regulation:

concealing (i.e., suppression), ad-

justing (quickly calming anger, for

instance) and tolerating (openly ex-

pressing emotion).“These are each

valuable strategies, in different

situations,” Dr. Hofmann said. “The

people who get into trouble socially

are the ones who are inflexible —

who stick to just one.”

Repubblica NewYork

A M E R I C A N A

MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010 VII

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By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — The city’s

civic boosters have decided they want

to add a highly unlikely stop to the

usual tourist itinerary: the Uptown

Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and

determinedly din-

gy domain of the

city’s most down

and out.

“We offer a kind

of grittiness you

can’t find much

anymore,” said

Randy Shaw, a

longtime San Francisco housing ad-

vocate and a driving force behind the

idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what

is grittier than the Tenderloin?”

Indeed, after years of neglect and

bitter battles over its gentrification,

the Tenderloin remains one of the most

stubborn challenges in San Francisco,

a city that prides itself on its looks, its

way of life and its bold solutions to so-

cial ills. So community and city leaders

are readying the Tenderloin for its big

moment, complete with plans for a new

museum, an arts district and walking

tours of “the world’s largest collection

of historic single-room occupancy

hotels.’’ And a trip to the Tenderloin

could include a unique attraction.

“We can bring people into an SRO

and show them where people are liv-

ing now,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to

the single-room occupancy dwellings,

or residential hotels, in the area. “And

that’s a real plus.”

Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing

of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who an-

nounced a city grant in March to help

draw tourism to the area.

The Tenderloin is one of the western

United States’ most densely populated

areas, officials say, with some 30,000

people in 60 square blocks, almost all

of which have at least one residential

hotel. The district’s drug trade is wide-

spread. The police recently asked for

special powers to disperse crowds on

certain streets.

Deranged residents are a constant

presence, and after dark the neigh-

borhood can seem downright sinis-

ter, with drunken people collapsed on

streets and others furtively smoking

pipes in doorways.

Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman

for the San Francisco Convention and

Visitors Bureau, called the recent ef-

forts “a step in the right direction,” but

added that it was a “very, very long

road” to make the neighborhood ap-

pealing.

But Mr. Shaw counters that the area

is brimming with historical nuggets,

like the Hotel Drake, where Frank

Capra lived as a starving young film

director in the early 1920s, or the Ca-

dillac Hotel, in which Mr. Shaw plans

to open a $3 million museum, where

Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry

Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and

he and the Grateful Dead recorded

several albums in the area, as did Jef-

ferson Airplane.

Whether the efforts to revive the

district are enough to conquer poverty

remains to be seen.

Chris Patnode, a self-described wan-

derer who is staying in a local SRO,

seemed willing to welcome tourists.

Just as long, of course, as they know

when to come knocking.

“In daylight, it’d be O.K.,” said Mr.

Patnode, 48. “But people aren’t going

to want to come down here at night.

I don’t even want to be here at night.

And I’m staying here.”

By DAMIEN CAVE

KEY LARGO, Florida — When rigs

first started drilling for oil off Louisi-

ana’s coast in the 1940s, Floridians,

with their resorts and talcum-white

beaches, said, No thanks; we’ll stick

with tourism.

Now the spread-

ing BP oil spill

has reached the

northwest coast,

known as the Pan-

handle, and if it

rides currents to

the renowned reefs and fishing holes

on both Florida coasts, the Sunshine

State could resemble a museum: Look,

but don’t touch.

All because other states decided to

rely on oil and gas, angry Floridians

say; all because, in the water, there

are no borders — only currents that

can carry catastrophes hundreds of

kilometers.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said

Mike McLaughlin, 42, while stretching

tanned shark skin on a dock here in the

Keys. “We’re just sitting here, waiting

for it all to disappear.”

Many Floridians, of course, say

they are heartbroken for Louisiana,

and they still reserve their most caus-

tic criticism for BP and government

regulators.

But with oil gushing from a well off

Louisiana, Florida has grown angrier

at its oil-friendly neighbors. Governor

Charlie Crist said in a June interview

that “there’s a certain level of frustra-

tion” with the fact that Florida gets

little if any financial benefit from off-

shore drilling, even though it shares

the environmental risks.

The divide between the two states is

economic as well as cultural: oil and

gas contribute about $65 billion a year

to the Louisiana economy, according

to the state’s oil and gas association,

while in Florida, tourism accounts for

about $60 billion. The difference, Flo-

ridians note, is that a crowded bar in

Miami has no impact on New Orleans,

Louisiana. Oil spills are a different

story.

Sean Snaith, an economist at the

University of Central Florida, com-

pleted a study showing that Florida’s

Gulf Coast could lose 195,000 jobs

and $11 billion this year if the spill

cuts tourism in half. With oil drilling

— as with Wall Street — “there will

be significant rethinking about who

benefits and who bears the cost,” Mr.

Snaith said.

Florida has a lot to lose, even beyond

tourism and fishing. Housing has

become increasingly concentrated

along the state’s 13,576 kilometers of

shoreline.

With property values already down

by a third in many areas and unem-

ployment around 12 percent, the state

could see its economy darkened for a

decade by the spill.

Also vulnerable is the world’s third-

largest reef system, which sits in the

likely path of the loop current that,

according to oceanographers, has

already sent small blots of oil around

Florida’s tip.

Residents worry about losing not

just their livelihood, but also their way

of life.

Boat-dwellers like Paul Peterson,

57, has been fighting Stage 4 lympho-

ma for years. “It’s a hard fight,” he

said. “And this place is so beautiful it

would be a sin.”

Charter boat captains and diving in-

structors are also struggling. In pre-

vious years, they would usually have

had bookings for much of the summer

by now. But Skip Bradeen, 67, said he

hadn’t seen it this bad in 40 years.

What really worries most fisher-

men and environmental scientists

are the long-term consequences if oil

is carried around the coast of Florida,

with plumes underwater and slicks

onshore.

“It’s untold billions of babies of fish

and lobsters and crabs,” said Doug-

las N. Rader, chief ocean scientist for

the Environmental Defense Fund,

an advocacy group. “A wide array of

seafood are transferred through the

superhighway of the loop current and

are depending on the habitats affect-

ed by the oil.”

Gary Sands, a third-generation

fisherman, took a break from work-

ing on lobster traps to explain exactly

what that means. He pointed to a pair

of blond teenagers, sons of a fellow

fisherman. “I’m 68, but these boys,

they’ve got 30 years,” he said. “If it

doesn’t come back for these boys,

what’s going to happen?”

Albert Pflueger, 50, another fisher-

man, whose family once owned the

largest taxidermy company in South

Florida, pondered the question. “The

whole Keys makes its living on the

water,” he said. “If there is no water,

there is no Keys.”

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

LANGDON, North Dakota — Ev-

ery Friday through Monday night,

Amy Freier awaits the faithful at the

historic Roxy Theater.

“You know who comes,” said Ms.

Freier, one of

200 volunteers

in this town of

roughly 2,000

who are keep-

ing the Roxy’s

neon glowing.

“They’re part of

the theater.”

In an age of streaming videos and

DVDs, the small town Main Street

movie theater is thriving in North

Dakota, the result of a movement

to keep storefront movie houses,

with their jewel-like marquees and

facades of careworn utility, at the

center of community life.

In small-town theaters across the

state, tickets are about $5, the but-

tered popcorn is $1.25 and the com-

panionship free.

“If we were in Los Angeles or

Phoenix, the only reason to go to a

movie would be to see it,’’ said Ceci-

le Wehrman, a newspaper editor

who, with members of the nonprofit

Meadowlark Arts Council, resusci-

tated the Dakota in Crosby, its plush

interiors now a chic black, red and

silver. “But in a small town, the the-

ater is like a neighborhood. It’s the

see-and-be-seen, bring everyone

and sit together kind of place.’’

The revival is not confined to

North Dakota; movie houses like the

Alamo in Bucksport, Maine, the Lu-

na in Clayton, New Mexico, and the

Strand in Old Forge, New York, are

flourishing as well. But in the Ameri-

can Great Plains, where stop signs

can be 80 kilometers apart and the

nearest multiplex is 320 kilometers

round trip, the town theater — one

screen, one show a night, weekends

only — is an anchoring force.

It is a tradition that comes with a

delicate social choreography (kids

up front, teenagers in the back —

away from prying parental eyes)

and in spite of nature’s ferocity (win-

ter temperatures can freeze the co-

conut oil for the popcorn machine).

Steve Hart, 40, a farmer in Lang-

don who helped revive the Roxy, tells

of a paralyzing Christmas blizzard

several years ago. The phone start-

ed ringing shortly afterward.

“Do you have a movie?” people

wanted to know.

“An hour later,” he recalled, “there

were 90 people on Main Street, even

though there was only one path

through the drifts and the movie

was ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: The

Squeakquel.’ ”

To Tim Kennedy, a professor of

landscape architecture who has

surveyed the state’s little theaters

for a book, the communal will of ru-

ral towns that keep theaters going

represents “buildings as social capi-

tal,” forged “outside the franchise

cinemas and their ubiquitous pres-

ence at the malls.”

Of the 31 operating historic the-

aters identified by Mr. Kennedy, 19

are community-run, little changed

from the days when itinerant pro-

jectionists packed their automobile s

with reels of film and hit the road.

Many retain the upstairs soundproof

“cry rooms” for fussy babies.

For older residents, theaters are

a link to a rapidly vanishing past.

Movie rentals are the biggest threat,

said Babe Belzer, 74, who led the

drive to restore the Lyric.

“If you can get a whole living room

of kids watching a movie for three

bucks, what a deal,” she said.

“But at the theater,” she continued,

“the phone doesn’t ring, and there

isn’t anyone at your door. It’s kind of

the heart and soul of our town.”

A grim urban neighborhood’ssinister appeal.

Saying No to Oil, but Paying Anyway

At Small-Town Cinemas,The Fellowship Is Free

Drawing Tourists With the Deranged and Drug-Addled

FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Theaters are the center of small-town life. North Dakota’s Roxy.

DuWayne Escobedo contributedreporting from Pensacola, and GaryFineout from Tallahassee.

MAGGIE STEBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

THOR SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

San Francisco’s Tenderloin area,

known for its gritty hotels and

thriving drug trade, becomes a

vacation destination.

Florida

rejected

drilling, but

its beaches

will still suffer

from the BP

oil spill. An

offshore rig in

Louisiana.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010

By CAROL VOGEL

Around 1913 Henri Matisse was, in

his mid-40s, an international star.

Having returned to Paris from

Morocco in the spring of 1913, he

began creating paintings that were

simpler and more layered than the

boldly colorful, sun-filled canvases

that had been his signature. The

years that followed proved to be a

time of enormous change for Mat-

isse. With life in Paris made diffi-

cult by World War I, he started ex-

perimenting with neutral shades, as

well as with geometric shapes and

daringly austere compositions.

Although art historians could al-

ways track the changes of that peri-

od by studying his paintings in pro-

gression, one by one, until recently

they had no clear idea of exactly

how those changes were developed,

how much hands-on experimenting

went into the new work and what

formal processes of study, revision

and rejection were involved.

Now those mysteries have been

largely solved, thanks to an ex-

traordinary array of technologies

deployed in putting together “Mat-

isse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917,” a

new exhibition opening this month

at the Museum of Modern Art. The

show offers a rare opportunity to

look beneath the surface of Mat-

isse’s work to see a creative evolu-

tion that until now only his eyes had

witnessed.

The exhibition’s organizers, John

Elderfield, chief curator emeritus

at the Museum of Modern Art, and

Stephanie d’Alessandro, the curator

of modern art at the Art Institute of

Chicago, where the exhibit was first

shown, focused on 26 paintings,

drawings and sculptures. They ex-

amined the works with new digital

imaging techniques, laser scan-

ning, ultraviolet illumination and

up-to-date computer software.

Ms. d’Alessandro and Mr. Elder-

field got the idea for the show after

they started examining “Bathers

by a River,” which Matisse worked

on from 1909 to 1916.

After Matisse’s return from Mo-

rocco, he started exploring Cubism,

which was in full flower with young-

er artists like Juan Gris, Georges

Braque and, of course, Pablo Pica-

sso .

While he admired Cubism for its

inventiveness, the more instinctive

Matisse was also suspicious of its

intellectual emphasis. At the same

time he also admired the work of

Paul Cézanne as Matisse began to

reconsider his own working meth-

ods and fundamental ideas about

making art.

“Bathers” is a jewel of the Art In-

stitute’s collection. “Matisse said it

was one of the most pivotal works

in his career,” Ms. D’Alessandro

said in an interview. “By studying

the painting in depth,” she said, “we

began to see a new chronology that

hadn’t been seen before, one which

explained what he meant by that

statement.”

By 1917, Matisse had moved to

Nice and re-emerged as another

kind of painter, abandoning the Cub-

ist approach and adopting a style

closer to Impressionism, painting

soft women in cozy interiors as well

as smaller, almost romantic canvas-

es, rendered through a harder, more

modernist and reductive lens.

“He felt he’d done what he set out

to do and thought it was crucial to

keep changing,” said Mr. Elderfield.

“He didn’t want to become a prison-

er of that style.”

In examining “Bathers,” the cu-

rators could see changes in the out-

lines of figures beneath the paint-

ing’s surface, revealing a constant-

ly shifting landscape of figures. “He

kept going back,” Mr. Elderfield

said. “Yet he always stopped before

a work looked finished.”

The conservators also removed

the varnish and previous restora-

tions from “Bathers,” which had

yellowed over the years, obscuring

the artist’s palette. (They ended up

removing the varnish from 20 of the

40 paintings in the show.)

In addition to their work with

the paintings, the curators unrav-

eled the steps that had gone into

the making of a suite of four large-

scale relief sculptures depicting the

back of a woman inspired in part by

“Three Bathers,” a Cézanne paint-

ing owned by Matisse. The sculp-

tures, which he began around the

time he was working on “Bathers”

and developed over 23 years, grew

more and more radical over time.

Laser scanning showed exactly

how he used a cast from the previ-

ous sculpture for each of the works,

changing the surface of each suc-

ceeding figure until the overall

form had a flatter surface and was

quite stark and architectural, strik-

ingly similar to many of his paint-

ings during the same period. “Like

‘Bathers’ it’s one conception being

evolved over all these years,” Mr.

Elderfield said.

Ultimately the curators were

able to chart the course of Matisse’s

thinking as he added or subtracted

details, scraped and rescraped the

surface with a knife, moved objects

from one side of a canvas to another,

sharpened lines — and juggled sev-

eral works at once, borrowing from

one, experimenting with another,

never satisfied.

“It really showed us,” Mr. Elder-

field said, “what it was like to make

these works at this time.”

By GISELA WILLIAMS

Leipzig, Germany, doesn’t call itself

the City of Music for nothing.

But when the city’s tourism office us-

es that title, it is referring to the grand

past, when Leipzig nurtured the likes of

Johann Sebastian Bach, Mendelssohn

and Robert and Clara Schumann,

whose house is now a museum.

This year is the 325th anniversary of

Bach’s birth, and Leipzig is celebrat-

ing with concerts, festivals and the

reopening of the newly designed Bach

Museum.

But if he were living in Leipzig today,

Bach might be composing experimen-

tal electronic dance music.

In the last two years, this city of about

half a million residents — many of them

students at the 600-year-old University

of Leipzig — is where some of the most

innovative house and techno music is

being created.

“The music scene here is as good as

those in other, bigger cities like Cologne

or Berlin, but everyone knows each oth-

er. It’s not commercial,” said Matthias

Puppe, the founder of Pop Up Leipzig,

an annual alternative music trade fair

and festival.

But the city’s affinity for the arts goes

well beyond music. “Leipzig is a town of

students, musicians and artists,” said

Gerd Harry Lybke, the owner of Eigen

+ Art, one of the most influential gal-

leries in Germany, with locations in

Leipzig and Berlin. Mr. Lybke is often

credited with placing Leipzig on the

global art scene about 10 years ago by

promoting the now much-hyped New

Leipzig School.

This year, Neo Rauch, the “father” of

this group of neo-realistic painters and

considered one of Germany’s greatest

living artists, is being feted with paral-

lel exhibitions: one at Pinakothek der

Moderne in Munich and a retrospec-

tive at the Leipzig Museum of Fine

Arts, both through August 15.

Mr. Lybke compared Leipzig to Ber-

lin in the early 1990s.

“In Leipzig, you can wake up one

morning and decide, ‘I’m an artist,’ or

the next day say, ‘I think I want to be a

journalist,’” he said.

This palpable sense that anything is

possible is due partly to the city’s cheap

rents: grand turn-of-the-century,

184-square-meter, one-bedroom flats

go for as little as 300 euros a month.

But only in recent years has Leipzig

become a desirable place to live and vis-

it. A few decades ago, it was a city to be

avoided: a polluted, soot-covered, town

known mostly for its book publishing

industry and the trade fairs that have

been held there since the Middle Ages.

Now the surplus of abandoned fac-

tory buildings, which had produced

mechanical parts for products like

watches and cars, and textiles, is a

boon, attracting creative entrepre-

neurs, artists and musicians who have

reclaimed the old spaces.

“There’s an underground party or

event in an abandoned factory or build-

ing every weekend here,” Mr. Puppe

said.

Even in Leipzig’s beautifully re-

stored small historic center, a few

buildings with boarded-up or broken

windows remain.

Perhaps the city’s most successful

example of an old factory reinvented

by artists is the Spinnerei,a former cot-

ton-spinning mill now home to a cafe,

a quirky new pension called the Meis-

terzimmer, artists’ studios (Mr. Rauch

has one here) and 11 galleries.

By LARRY ROHTER

In feature films about John F. Ken-

nedy, Richard M. Nixon and George W.

Bush, Oliver Stone gave free rein to his

imagination and was often criticized

for doing so. Now, in “South of the Bor-

der,” he has turned to Hugo Chávez,

Venezuela’s controversial populist

president, and his reformist allies in

South America.

“People who are often demonized,

like Nixon and Bush and Chávez and

Castro, fascinate me,” Mr. Stone said

during a tour to promote the film,

which portrays Mr. Chávez as a be-

nevolent, courageous leader who has

been unjustly maligned. Unlike his

movies about American presidents,

the 78-minute “South of the Border” is

meant to be a documentary, and there-

fore to be held to different standards.

But it is plagued by the same issues of

accuracy that critics have raised about

his movies, dating back to “JFK.”

Initial reviews of “South of the Bor-

der,” which was released in Brazil and

Argentina in early June and in the

United States on June 25, have been

tepid. Stephen Holden in The New

York Times called it a “provocative,

if shallow, exaltation of Latin Ameri-

can socialism,” while Entertainment

Weekly described it as “rose-colored

agitprop.”

Mr. Stone’s problems in the film be-

gin with his account of Mr. Chávez’s

rise. Mr. Chávez’s main opponent in

his initial run for president was “a

6-foot-1-inch blond former Miss Uni-

verse” named Irene Sáez, and thus

“the contest becomes known as the

Beauty and the Beast” election, the

film contends.

But Mr. Chávez’s main opponent

was not Ms. Sáez, who finished third.

It was Henrique Salas Romer, a bland

former state governor.

When this and several other discrep-

ancies were pointed out to Mr. Stone,

he said: “I’m sorry about that, and I

apologize.” But he also complained of

“nitpicking” and “splitting hairs.”

Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani his-

torian who helped write the screen-

play, added: “It’s hardly a secret that

we support the other side.”

Some of the misinformation that Mr.

Stone inserts into his film is relatively

benign. But other questionable asser-

tions relate to fundamental issues,

including his contention that human

rights is “a new buzz phrase,” used

mainly to clobber Mr. Chávez.

A similarly tendentious attitude

pervades Mr. Stone’s treatment of the

April 2002 coup that briefly toppled

Mr. Chávez. One of the key events in

that crisis was the “Llaguno Bridge

Massacre,” in which 19 people were

shot to death in circumstances that

remain murky.

Mr. Stone’s film relies heavily on the

account of Gregory Wilpert, who wit-

nessed some of the exchange of gun-

fire and is described as an American

academic. But Mr. Wilpert is also the

husband of Mr. Chávez’s consul-gen-

eral in New York, Carol Delgado .

In a telephone interview, Mr. Wilp-

ert acknowledged that the first shots

seem to have been fired from a build-

ing which housed the offices of Freddy

Bernal, a pro-Chávez mayor.

“I did not know about that, I didn’t

even know it was a Chávista building,”

Mr. Stone said .

Restless Matisse,Layer by Layer

In Bach’s Backyard, Techno Sets Beat for Arts

Oliver Stone’s Latin America, Shy of Facts

Depicting HugoChávez as a hero, unjustly m aligned.

REUTERS

Laser scanning and other technology unveiled the course of

Matisse’s creative ferment in his “Bathers by a River.”

For the creative inLeipzig, a sense thatanything is possible.

OLIVER HARTUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Leipzig has become a magnet for artists and musicians. Students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig.

A painter refusing tobe imprisoned by a school or style.

Repubblica NewYork