Gendered Tech During The Rise Of Radio

Girls in Chicago show off radio sets they’ve built (July 1924 Radio News magazine)

Radio is for boys only. No girls allowed. Or at least that was the message from so many young men at the dawn of the medium.

There was a sense of betrayal by many young men in the early 1920s that radio was no longer their exclusive domain. Girls were rushing in and getting their cooties all over everything. The magazines of the early 1920s that had once catered to the “wireless amateur” as they were known began appealing to a broader base. No longer was the radio magazine implicitly sold as for men and boys by excluding women from its pages as so many did in the late 1910s. By 1922 women and girls were starting to be featured in many radio magazines as competent tech nerds who could hold their own with any man.

The July 1924 issue of Radio News ran the photo above and explained: “The girl pupils of one of Chicago’s public schools would not let the boys outdo them. Hence a contest was held for the making of radio sets, and prizes were offered. The girls have shown superior workmanship and attracted the attention of local experts. The above photo shows some of the prize winning sets and their owners.”

As Richard Butsch notes in his 1998 paper on gender and radio technology in the 1920s, the predominantly male audience of Radio News magazine was scandalized by the perceived feminization of its pages.

A letter to the editor in the November 1922 issue of Radio News:

… in the editorial of the first issue [July, 1919] you stated that the magazine was for and by the AMATEUR, and you signed off H. Gernsback â€" your editor. The issue of August, 1922 is nothing more than the average broadcast magazine, great numbers of which have recently sprung up, and you signed the editorial with a plain H. Gernsback.

The first issue of Radio News teemed over with AMATEUR, AMATEUR, and AMATEUR… Just try and count the amateur articles in last August’s issue.

And then alas came along the broadcast craze. The word AMATEUR, so profusely expounded in the first dozen issues, is absolutely left flat and his place is filled by the young chap who can only hear noises with his ‘steen’ step amplifier, or the kid whose crystal set doesn’t function properly. Of course, I realize it is more profitable to cater to the broadcast fiends from a financial standpoint, but don’t lose sight of the fact that it was the now apparently forgotten AMATEUR who originally put the magazine on its feet.

… if you canned those silly [fiction] stories and the articles on scarf-pin radio sets you would have room to admit some of the amateur stuff you were so glad to start with.

Reference to fiction stories and scarf-pin radio sets was a thinly-veiled swipe at women, and as Butsch notes, “[the editor's] retreat from from a purely technical format was seen as an especially treacherous betrayal of his own followers’ faith in masculine technological mastery and contribution to the world.”

An advertisement for a Unidyne radio set in the July 1924 Radio News magazine [Novak Archive]

While the wireless magazines of the late 1910s (back when radio technology was used as a point-to-point communication rather than broadcast) suffered the wrath of angry young men, other magazines like Radio Broadcast, Radio Age and Radio World (all started in 1922) were more open to women from the start.

Butsch notes that Radio World featured many women in its pages from 1922 until 1924:

It included cartoons, many pictures of radio and cabinets in domestic settings, advice on how to choose a set for the parlor and many pieces on women. The magazine from its inception in 1922 to about mid-1924 gave marked attention to women. Pictures, stories and cartoons presented images of women in control of this new technology. The predominant message was one of women successfully using and enjoying radio. Numerous pictures showed women operating radios, for radio telegraphy as well as broadcast listening. A woman in New York was pictured playing chess via radio telephone with a female friend in Chicago. One cover featured the first woman graduate of a radio school.

But by mid-1924 something had changed. The pages of Radio World no longer showed women at the helm mastering technology but rather as set-pieces. The cover design of Radio World was suddenly featuring “young women in bathing suits, or dancing, legs exposed, while listening to radio.” The push-back from many corners of the male radio community had seemed to work.

Today the tech world grapples with its own gender problems. Women are under-represented not only in the major tech company boardrooms and Silicon Valley start-ups but also in the pages of tech’s leading culture magazines. We’ve undoubtedly made some progress since the 1920s, but we still have quite a ways to go.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate The New York Times, Steal Every Employee's Password

By NICOLE PERLROTH

Published: January 30, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO â€" For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware â€" malicious software â€" that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

Security experts said that beginning in 2008, Chinese hackers began targeting Western journalists as part of an effort to identify and intimidate their sources and contacts, and to anticipate stories that might damage the reputations of Chinese leaders.

In a December intelligence report for clients, Mandiant said that over the course of several investigations it found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contacts and files from more than 30 journalists and executives at Western news organizations, and had maintained a “short list” of journalists whose accounts they repeatedly attack.

While computer security experts say China is most active and persistent, it is not alone in using computer attacks for a variety of national purposes, including corporate espionage. The United States, Israel, Russia and Iran, among others, are suspected of developing and deploying cyberweapons.

The United States and Israel have never publicly acknowledged it, but evidence indicates they released a sophisticated computer worm starting around 2008 that attacked and later caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Iran is believed to have responded with computer attacks on targets in the United States, including American banks and foreign oil companies.

Russia is suspected of having used computer attacks during its war with Georgia in 2008.

The following account of the attack on The Times â€" which is based on interviews with Times executives, reporters and security experts â€" provides a glimpse into one such spy campaign.

After The Times learned of warnings from Chinese government officials that its investigation of the wealth of Mr. Wen’s relatives would “have consequences,” executives on Oct. 24 asked AT&T, which monitors The Times’s computer network, to watch for unusual activity.

On Oct. 25, the day the article was published online, AT&T informed The Times that it had noticed behavior that was consistent with other attacks believed to have been perpetrated by the Chinese military.

The Times notified and voluntarily briefed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the attacks and then â€" not initially recognizing the extent of the infiltration of its computers â€" worked with AT&T to track the attackers even as it tried to eliminate them from its systems.

But on Nov. 7, when it became clear that attackers were still inside its systems despite efforts to expel them, The Times hired Mandiant, which specializes in responding to security breaches. Since learning of the attacks, The Times â€" first with AT&T and then with Mandiant â€" has monitored attackers as they have moved around its systems.

Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m. Beijing time. Usually they continued for a standard work day, but sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason was not clear.

Investigators still do not know how hackers initially broke into The Times’s systems. They suspect the hackers used a so-called spear-phishing attack, in which they send e-mails to employees that contain malicious links or attachments. All it takes is one click on the e-mail by an employee for hackers to install “remote access tools” â€" or RATs. Those tools can siphon off oceans of data â€" passwords, keystrokes, screen images, documents and, in some cases, recordings from computers’ microphones and Web cameras â€" and send the information back to the attackers’ Web servers.

Michael Higgins, chief security officer at The Times, said: “Attackers no longer go after our firewall. They go after individuals. They send a malicious piece of code to your e-mail account and you’re opening it and letting them in.”

Lying in Wait

Once hackers get in, it can be hard to get them out. In the case of a 2011 breach at the United States Chamber of Commerce, for instance, the trade group worked closely with the F.B.I. to seal its systems, according to chamber employees. But months later, the chamber discovered that Internet-connected devices â€" a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments and a printer in its offices â€" were still communicating with computers in China.

In part to prevent that from happening, The Times allowed hackers to spin a digital web for four months to identify every digital back door the hackers used. It then replaced every compromised computer and set up new defenses in hopes of keeping hackers out.

“Attackers target companies for a reason â€" even if you kick them out, they will try to get back in,” said Nick Bennett, the security consultant who has managed Mandiant’s investigation. “We wanted to make sure we had full grasp of the extent of their access so that the next time they try to come in, we can respond quickly.”

Based on a forensic analysis going back months, it appears the hackers broke into The Times computers on Sept. 13, when the reporting for the Wen articles was nearing completion. They set up at least three back doors into users’ machines that they used as a digital base camp. From there they snooped around The Times’s systems for at least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee.

While hashes make hackers’ break-ins more difficult, hashed passwords can easily be cracked using so-called rainbow tables â€" readily available databases of hash values for nearly every alphanumeric character combination, up to a certain length. Some hacker Web sites publish as many as 50 billion hash values.

Investigators found evidence that the attackers cracked the passwords and used them to gain access to a number of computers. They created custom software that allowed them to search for and grab Mr. Barboza’s and Mr. Yardley’s e-mails and documents from a Times e-mail server.

Over the course of three months, attackers installed 45 pieces of custom malware. The Times â€" which uses antivirus products made by Symantec â€" found only one instance in which Symantec identified an attacker’s software as malicious and quarantined it, according to Mandiant.

A Symantec spokesman said that, as a matter of policy, the company does not comment on its customers.

The attackers were particularly active in the period after the Oct. 25 publication of The Times article about Mr. Wen’s relatives, especially on the evening of the Nov. 6 presidential election. That raised concerns among Times senior editors who had been informed of the attacks that the hackers might try to shut down the newspaper’s electronic or print publishing system. But the attackers’ movements suggested that the primary target remained Mr. Barboza’s e-mail correspondence.

“They could have wreaked havoc on our systems,” said Marc Frons, the Times’s chief information officer. “But that was not what they were after.”

What they appeared to be looking for were the names of people who might have provided information to Mr. Barboza.

Mr. Barboza’s research on the stories, as reported previously in The Times, was based on public records, including thousands of corporate documents through China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce. Those documents â€" which are available to lawyers and consulting firms for a nominal fee â€" were used to trace the business interests of relatives of Mr. Wen.

A Tricky Search

Tracking the source of an attack to one group or country can be difficult because hackers usually try to cloak their identities and whereabouts.

To run their Times spying campaign, the attackers used a number of compromised computer systems registered to universities in North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and New Mexico, as well as smaller companies and Internet service providers across the United States, according to Mandiant’s investigators.

The hackers also continually switched from one I.P. address to another; an I.P. address, for Internet protocol, is a unique number identifying each Internet-connected device from the billions around the globe, so that messages and other information sent by one device are correctly routed to the ones meant to get them.

Using university computers as proxies and switching I.P. addresses were simply efforts to hide the source of the attacks, which investigators say is China. The pattern that Mandiant’s experts detected closely matched the pattern of earlier attacks traced to China. After Google was attacked in 2010 and the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were opened, for example, investigators were able to trace the source to two educational institutions in China, including one with ties to the Chinese military.

Security experts say that by routing attacks through servers in other countries and outsourcing attacks to skilled hackers, the Chinese military maintains plausible deniability.

“If you look at each attack in isolation, you can’t say, ‘This is the Chinese military,’ ” said Richard Bejtlich, Mandiant’s chief security officer.

But when the techniques and patterns of the hackers are similar, it is a sign that the hackers are the same or affiliated.

“When you see the same group steal data on Chinese dissidents and Tibetan activists, then attack an aerospace company, it starts to push you in the right direction,” he said.

Mandiant has been tracking about 20 groups that are spying on organizations inside the United States and around the globe. Its investigators said that based on the evidence â€" the malware used, the command and control centers compromised and the hackers’ techniques â€" The Times was attacked by a group of Chinese hackers that Mandiant refers to internally as “A.P.T. Number 12.”

A.P.T. stands for Advanced Persistent Threat, a term that computer security experts and government officials use to describe a targeted attack and that many say has become synonymous with attacks done by China. AT&T and the F.B.I. have been tracking the same group, which they have also traced to China, but they use their own internal designations.

Mandiant said the group had been “very active” and had broken into hundreds of other Western organizations, including several American military contractors.

To get rid of the hackers, The Times blocked the compromised outside computers, removed every back door into its network, changed every employee password and wrapped additional security around its systems.

For now, that appears to have worked, but investigators and Times executives say they anticipate more efforts by hackers.

“This is not the end of the story,” said Mr. Bejtlich of Mandiant. “Once they take a liking to a victim, they tend to come back. It’s not like a digital crime case where the intruders steal stuff and then they’re gone. This requires an internal vigilance model.”

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One Chart That Explains Why Apple Is Now A Broken Stock

It’s not that Apple isn’t making money. It made $13.1 billion last quarter. By some counts, that’s the largest non-oil-company quarterly profit ever.

And it’s not that Apple can’t generate huge revenue growth. As its executives told shareholders in the earnings release, it managed to increase its truly staggering $54.5 billion in sales by 18%.

No, a key reason Apple is a broken stock is because of something Apple didn’t say. In a stark departure, Apple declined to offer an earnings-per-share target for the current quarter. And that is a significant shift in the earnings expectations game Apple had mastered in recent years.

The game has worked like this. Apple lays out a ridiculous low-ball estimate of its diluted earnings per share for the next quarter. Then it delivers an actual result that crushes those expectations. Stock soars. Rinse. Repeat in three months.

But as this chart above shows, the game has changed.

For the period between July 2006 and the quarter that ended in December 2011,  Apple beat its own official earnings-per-share guidance by around 31% each quarter. But in 2012, Apple’s powers to deliver dazzling displays of profitability weakened. For the four quarters of 2012, Apple only beat its own guidance by about 15%, on average.

And now, Apple has suspended its earnings-per-share forecasts. On Apple’s post-earnings conference call with analysts, longtime CFO Peter Oppenheimer even outlined the tweaks to its guidance, with a slightly less-than-bullish tone:

In recent years, our guidance reflected a conservative point estimate of results every quarter that we had reasonable confidence in achieving … Going forward, we plan to provide a range of guidance that reflects our belief of what we are likely to achieve.

Analysts understandably were grappling to understand what the change to guidance meant. Toni M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, tried to pin Oppenheimer down:

Before you, I think, on average eclipsed your guidance on EPS by 35%. Was the guidance before something that you felt reasonably confident in achieving? Or was there an implicit buffer in there? Because I’m trying to reconcile the fact that you said you thought it was reasonable before but your historical precedent was you eclipsed it enormously on an ongoing basis, and this time you’re saying there’s a high likelihood of falling within the range, and I want to understand the distinction.

Oppenheimer hewed close to the prepared language and stayed on message:

I’ll go through it again. In the past, we gave you a single point estimate of guidance that was conservative, that we had as reasonable confidence as you can have that we would achieve. We’re now providing you a range of guidance that we expect to, as best we can, report within.

This is clearly an important signal to the markets that the cat-and-mouse expectations game which accompanied Apple’s remarkable share price rise is, apparently, over. And that requires a deep rethink on reasons for owning the stock, forcing investors to recalibrate expectations for growth, and to learn to focus on other metrics such as growing marginsâ€"which are also currently under pressureâ€"and the likely hood of more of Apple’s $137 billion pile of cash finding its way to shareholders.

In short, it’s time to start thinking about Apple like a value stock.

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Boeing Knew Batteries Were Dangerous Before Fires

By CHRISTOPHER DREW, HIROKO TABUCHI and JAD MOUAWAD

Published: January 29, 2013

Even before two battery failures led to the grounding of all Boeing 787 jets this month, the lithium-ion batteries used on the aircraft had experienced multiple problems that raised questions about their reliability.

Officials at All Nippon Airways, the jets’ biggest operator, said in an interview on Tuesday that it had replaced 10 of the batteries in the months before fire and smoke in two cases caused regulators around the world to ground the jets.

The airline said it had told Boeing of the replacements as they occurred but was not required to report them to safety regulators because they were not considered a safety issue and no flights were canceled or delayed. National Transportation Safety Board officials said Tuesday that the replacements were now part of their inquiry.

The airline also, for the first time, explained the extent of the previous problems, which underscore the volatile nature of the batteries and add to concerns over whether Boeing and other plane manufacturers will be able to use the batteries safely.

In five of the 10 replacements, All Nippon said that the main battery had showed an unexpectedly low charge. An unexpected drop in a 787’s main battery also occurred on the All Nippon flight that had to make an emergency landing in Japan on Jan. 16.

The airline also revealed that in three instances, the main battery failed to operate normally and had to be replaced along with the charger. In other cases, one battery showed an error reading and another, used to start the auxiliary power unit, failed. All the events occurred from May to December of last year. The main battery on the plane that made the emergency landing was returned to its maker, GS Yuasa, and that 10 other batteries involved in mishaps were sent to the airline’s maintenance department.

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said investigators had only recently heard that there had been “numerous issues with the use of these batteries” on 787s. She said the board had asked Boeing, All Nippon and other airlines for information about the problems.

“That will absolutely be part of the investigation,” she said.

Boeing, based in Chicago, has said repeatedly that any problems with the batteries can be contained without threatening the planes and their passengers.

But in response to All Nippon’s disclosures, Boeing officials said the airline’s replacement of the batteries also suggested that safeguards were activated to prevent overheating and keep the drained batteries from being recharged.

Boeing officials also acknowledged that the new batteries were not lasting as long as intended. But All Nippon said that the batteries it replaced had not expired.

A GS Yuasa official, Tsutomu Nishijima, said battery exchanges were part of the normal operations of a plane but would not comment further.

The Federal Aviation Administration decided in 2007 to allow Boeing to use the lithium-ion batteries instead of older, more stable types as long as it took safety measures to prevent or contain a fire. But once Boeing put in those safeguards, it did not revisit its basic design even as more evidence surfaced of the risks involved, regulators said.

In a little-noticed test in 2010, the F.A.A. found that the kind of lithium-ion chemistry that Boeing planned to use â€" lithium cobalt â€" was the most flammable of several possible types. The test found that batteries of that type provided the most power, but could also overheat more quickly.

In 2011, a lithium-ion battery on a Cessna business jet started smoking while it was being charged, prompting Cessna to switch to traditional nickel-cadmium batteries.

The safety board said Tuesday that it had still not determined what caused a fire on Jan. 7 on a Japan Airlines 787 that was parked at Logan Airport in Boston. The fire occurred nine days before an All Nippon jet made its emergency landing after pilots smelled smoke in the cockpit.

Federal regulators said it was also possible that flaws in the manufacturing process could have gone undetected and caused the recent incidents.

The batteries’ maker X-rays each battery before shipping to look for possible defects.

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Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

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Why It's So Rare For A Wife To Be Taller Than Her Husband

By Philip Cohen Tweet Jan 28 2013, 12:11 PM ET Comment

It's not just because women are, on average, shorter than men.

Keith Urban and his wife Nicole Kidman arrive at the 2009 American Music Awards. (Chris Pizzello/AP Images)

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That generalization, although true, doesn't adequately describe how sex affects our modern lives. In the first place, men's and women's size and strength are distributions. Strong women are stronger than weak men, so sex doesn't tell you all you need to know. Otherwise, as retired colonel Martha McSally put it with regard to the ban on women in combat positions, "Pee Wee Herman is OK to be in combat but Serena and Venus Williams are not going to meet the standard."

Second, how we handle that average difference is a matter of social construction: We can ignore it, minimize it, or exaggerate it. In the realm of love and marriage, we so far have chosen exaggeration.

Consider height. The height difference between men and women in the U.S. is about 6 inches on average. But Michael J. Fox, at five feet, five inches, is shorter than almost half of all U.S. women today. On the other hand, at five-foot-ten, Michelle Obama is taller than half of American men. So how do people match up romantically, and why does it matter?

Because everyone knows men are taller on average, straight couples in which the man is shorter raise a problem of gender performance. That is, the man might not be seen as a real man, the woman as a real woman, if they don't (together) display the normal pattern. To prevent this embarrassment, some couples in which the wife is taller might choose to be photographed with the man standing on a step behind the woman, or they might have their wedding celebrated with a commemorative stamp showing her practically on her kneesâ€"as the British royals did with Charles and Diana, who were both the same height: five foot ten.

But the safer bet is just to match up according to the height norm. A new study from Britainâ€"which I learned of from the blogger Neuroskepticâ€"measured the height of the parents of about 19,000 babies born in 2000. They found that the woman was taller in 4.1 percent of cases. Then they compared the couples in the data to the pattern found if you scrambled up those same men and women and matched them together at random. In that random set, the woman was taller in 6.5 percent of cases. That means couples are more often man-taller, woman-shorter than would be expected by chance. Is that a big difference? I can explain.

For illustration, and to compare the pattern with the U.S., I downloaded the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a U.S. survey that includes height reported for 4,600 married couples. These are the height distributions for those spouses, showing a median difference of 6 inches.

Clearly, if these people married (and didn't divorce) at random we would expect the husband to be taller most of the time. And that is what we find. Here is the distribution of height differences from those same couples:

The most common arrangement is the husband five to six inches taller, and a small minority of couplesâ€"3.8 percentâ€"are on the left side of the red line, indicating a taller wife.

But does that mean people are seeking out taller-husband-shorter-wife pairings? To answer that, we compare the actual distribution with a randomized outcome. I made 10 copies of all the men and women in the data, scrambled them up, and paired them at random. This is the result:

Most couples are still husband taller, but now 7.8 percent have a taller wifeâ€"more than twice as many.

Here are the two distributions superimposed, which allows us to see which arrangements are more or less common in the actual pairings than we would expect by chance:

Now we can see that from same-height up to "man 7 to 8 inches taller", there are more couples than we would expect by chance. And below same-heightâ€"where the wife is tallerâ€"we see fewer in the population than we would expect by chance. (There also are relatively few couples at the man-much-taller end of the spectrumâ€"at 9 inches or greaterâ€"where the difference apparently becomes awkward, a pattern also seen in the British study.)

Humans could couple up differently, if they wanted to. If it were desirable to have a taller-woman-shorter-man relationship, it could be much more common. In these data, we could find shorter husbands for 28 percent of the wives. Instead, people exaggerate the difference by seeking out taller-man-shorter-woman pairings for marriage (or maybe the odd taller-woman couples are more likely to divorce, which would produce the same result).

What difference does it make? When peopleâ€"and here I'm thinking especially of childrenâ€"see men and women together, they form impressions about their relative sizes and abilities. Because people's current matching process cuts in half the number of woman-taller pairings, our thinking is skewed that much more toward assuming men are bigger.

More at The Atlantic

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The Scientists Who Fly Into Hurricanes

Infrared satellite image of Hurricane Karl, showing three NASA aircraft heading into it. Credit: Terry Lathem

On August 17, 2010, Terry Lathem flew through a hurricane to pick up some bacteria. He had a huge smile on his face. “It was the longest, most thrilling seven hour flight of my life,” he says. “Each passing hour provided new bursts of adrenaline as the storm intensified, lightning flashed in the distance, and heavy rain streamed across the windows.”

A month later, he was at it again.

On both occasions, he flew aboard an old DC-8 plane, which had been retrofitted into a flying laboratory. With him was a team of NASA scientists, who were taking part in the agency’s ambitious GRIP experimentâ€"a mission to study how hurricanes are born. They hit two hurricanes in six weeksâ€"Earl and Karl.

Aside from taking environmental reading, the flights were also surgical operations. Their mission: to biopsy the storms. As they criss-crossed Earl and Karl, they sucked in the surrounding air into sampling tubes. These filtered out big droplets or ice crystals and retained everything elseâ€"gases, dust, minerals… and bacteria. That was what Lathem was out to find. And he found them in their thousands.

Back on the ground, he analysed the hard-won samples with Natasha DeLeon-Rodriguez, a fellow student from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Together, they have provided a world’s first: an inventory of the invisible life of the upper troposphereâ€"the zone that sits 8 to 15 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. Even here, with little oxygen, freezing temperatures and intense bombardments of solar radiation, there is life. Microbes float through the air above the ocean surface at altitudes that even Everest cannot pierce.

Maybe they’re breaking down the airborne chemicals they find there, literally eating the clouds. Maybe they’re seeding the creation of the clouds in the first place, by acting as chewy biological centres around which crunchy ice crystals can form. The team will need to test these possibilities, but one thing is already clear: These cells are alive. They’re not the carcasses of microbes blown up on the windâ€"they’re living residents of perhaps the most uncharted habitat on the planet. And a few of these consistent cloud-riders are everywhere.

A view of Hurricane Earl from close to its centre. Credit: Terry Lathem

Up, up and away

The word “microbiome” was originally coined to refer to all the microbes on the human body, and the genes within them. But the term can really apply to any environment where microbes abound… which is all of them. There’s a soil microbiome. A panda microbiome. A hospital microbiome.

The sky has a microbiome too, and one that may have a critical role in the creation of weather. When water changes from vapour to liquid, it condenses around microscopic particles in the air. When it freezes into ice, the same thing happens. Without these centres, completely pure water would condense and freeze at much lower temperatures than you’d expect. Dust, soot and sea salt can all act as nuclei for water’s transformations, but so can bacteria. For example, some plant-infecting species have proteins on their surfaces that ice can crystallise upon. Just by floating in the air, species like these could kick-start the births of clouds, raindrops and snow.

Scientists have collected samples of microbes that fall to Earth, as snow, rain and hail, and that float in the skies above human settlements, coasts, the Amazon river, and mountaintops. But many parts of the world are still uncharted. But “nobody had sampled the high atmosphere above the oceans,” says Kostas Konstantinidis, who is DeLeon-Rodriguez’s supervisor. “We found quite a few cells up there, more than predicted.”

The team took samples not just from the two Atlantic hurricanes but from clouds around them, and from clear skies over the Atlantic, the coast of California, and the continental US. On average, the samples contained anywhere from 5,000 to 150,000 microbial cells in every cubic metre.

The same volume of soil or seawater would contain tens or hundreds of millions of microbes, and it’s hardly surprising that the airborne communities are sparser. But up there, the living cells account for around 20 percent of all microscopic particlesâ€"a far greater proportion than they’d make up elsewhere.

These microbes came mostly from oceans, but also rivers and soils. Some of them were fungi but the vast majority were bacteria. And most of themâ€"upwards of 60 percentâ€"were still alive. “Many people might have guessed that they’re dead cells and spores and we found many cells that are viable,” says Konstantinidis.

Burkholderiales, one of the groups that the team found in the clouds. Credit: CDC/Courtesy of Larry Stauffer, Oregon State Public Health Laboratory (PHIL #1926), 2002.

Roll-call

The communities were relatively narrow, and the team identified around 314 bacterial species across all their samples. “Apparently not everybody can make it up there,” says Konstantinidis.

Hurricanes certainly help. They picked up huge volumes of bacteria, including species that aren’t normally found in the skies, and carry them up, up and away. These include Escherichia and Streptococcus, which are typically found in the faeces and guts of animals, and can sometimes cause disease. These storms could be acting as huge conveyors belts that carry microbes around the world. “It just opens more questions about how many bacteria might survive this rough atmospheric treatment and continue the ubiquitous spread of organisms around the planet’s surface,” says Jack Gilbert, who is leading the Earth Microbiome Project,

But there are also more consistent residents of the skies. In the team’s samples, 17 species seemed to be everywhere. They weren’t just temporary drifters, launched skywards by storms. They were found over the Pacific and the Atlantic, and clear, cloudy and stormy skies. This consistent cadre of frequent fliers seem to have the right adaptations for surviving in the skies, and can stay aloft for days or weeks.

What’s so special about this core 17, and how do they survive? “We’ll answer in the next five years,” says Konstantinidis. So far, the team have only studied analysed a single geneâ€"rRNA. It’s great for pulling up a roll-call of species from a morass of genetic material, but it doesn’t tell you what this community can do. To find out, the team will sequence the entire genomes of the microbes they found. Perhaps they’ll find genes that help the bacteria to deal with the DNA-shattering effects of ultraviolet radiation, or genes that help them cope with dessication.

Cirrus clouds in the troposphere, by Fir0002

Making clouds, eating clouds

Maybe these species help to create clouds and precipitation? They certainly belong to groups that are known to be effective centres for condensation and freezing, but the team needs to actually test their ability to create ice and rain. They will place them in artificial cloud chambers, providing them with the right cocktail of compounds and watching what happens.

Such experiments might also tell us if the bacteria survive by breaking down the chemical constituents of clouds, and driving the chemistry of the skies as they do in every other environment on the planet. Certainly, there’s plenty of water around. And two of the bacterial families that appeared in every sample contain members that are meant to break down oxalic acid, one of the most common chemicals found in clouds.

It’s conceivable that, with water and food around, these microbes could be actively growing. The team admits that they need to test this and Anne-Marie Delort, an atmospheric chemist from the CNRS, agrees. In her experiments, atmospheric bacteria do consume the compounds in clouds… but not oxalic acid.

“If you work in a lab, with bacteria from real cloud samples, they do degrade a number of compounds in clouds,” says Delort. “But there’s a big gap.” Clouds are more complex than anything that scientists can reproduce on their lab benches. They look white and fluffy, but they’re really swirling masses of condensation and evaporation, changing temperatures, and other assorted physical turmoil.

To really understand what’s going on inside, and how the microbes are contributing, Delort says that we need models that combine physics, chemistry and biology. That’s difficult, since most scientists who study the atmosphere are more focused on the physics than the role of living things, and those working on the microbes lack expertise in the physical sciences. “I think we’re at the very beginning,” says Delort. “The topic is very new.”

Reference: DeLeon-Rodriguez, Lathem, Rodriguez-Ra, Barazesh, Anderson, Beyersdorf, Ziemba, Bergin, Nenes & Konstantinidis. 2013. Microbiome of the upper troposphere: Species composition and prevalence, effects of tropical storms, and atmospheric implications. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212089110

More bacteria in extreme places:

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Apple Has A Porn Problem, And It's About To Get Worse

On Sunday, a number of news outlets ran stories covering the rise of easily-accessible pornography on the new video sharing app Vine, causing a firestorm of debate online. The New York Times' Nick Bilton tweeted that pornographic material was discoverable thanks to simple hashtags such as #porn.

---

Vine doesn't have a porn problem â€" Apple has a policy problem

But the truth is that Vine doesn't have a problem with porn, at least not one that isn't shared by any other social media app. Apple has a problem: its App Store's puritanical, unevenly-enforced policies for adult content. Vine is just today's example.

The Twitter-owned app and service launched last week to much fanfare, mostly due to its ingenious editing functions, which allow users to stop and start a video recording. Vine is also notable as one of Twitter's first major departures from its core social networking business. The iOS-only app was prominently featured by Apple as an "Editor's Pick" in its App Store the day it launched.

The news that pornography or nudity would find its way into a popular social app, which is focused on image or video sharing, takes a backseat to the larger question of how Apple will handle this flare-up. Recently the company pulled a popular photo sharing application from its App Store called 500px citing the discovery of "pornographic images and material." Apple offered this statement:

The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We've asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app.

A cursory search of #porn and related hashtags within the Twitter iOS app unearths a cornucopia of adult material, yet Apple has taken no action in the case of that app. The existence of pornography on Twitter and in similar apps is also not a recent occurrence â€" Twitter in particular has long been used for such sharing. Yet Apple has made much out of its tight partnership with Twitter, adding native Twitter functionality into iOS as part of a recent update to the software.

The situation draws even more attention to the vague and sometimes confusing rules of Apple's App Store guidelines, and more clearly showcases the sporadic and often unusual criteria the iPhone-maker uses to decide the fates of applications. As marketshare of Apple's iPads and iPhones has grown, the company has come under increasing fire over interpretations of its own rules in regards to offensive or objectionable content.

Twitter responded to inquiries about Vine with the following statement:

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

According to Vine's terms of service, below are the violations the company says it will take more decisive action on, "inappropriate" content is not listed as a catalyst. Rather, it's content which:

• Impersonates another person or entity in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others;
• Violates the rights of a third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, and publicity rights;
• Is a direct and specific threat of violence to others;
• Is furtherance of illegal activities; or
• Is harassing, abusive, or constitutes spam.

We've reached out to Apple for comment, and will update the post with more information as we get it.

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The Revolution That Could Change The Way You Park

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford

There’s plenty to hate about drivingâ€"traffic jams, car accidents, speeding ticketsâ€"not to mention the endless headache of finding a spot to park. So what if you discovered an invention that could wean us from our vehicles, combating suburban sprawl and making city streets less dangerous, congested, and polluted? Well, that device has been around for nearly 80 years: It’s called the parking meter.

Contrary to popular belief, the parking meter was originally designed to keep traffic moving and make more spaces available for shoppers, a measure often lauded by local businesses as much as the public who paid their hourly rates. Beginning with the first parking meter, installed in 1935 on the corner of First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, and spreading clear across the United States, the device was hailed as the great solution to our parking woes. Yet decades of poor meter implementation, inane off-street parking requirements, and technological stasis slowly turned our city streets into a driver’s nightmare.

“People who walk, bike, or take transit are bankrolling those who drive.”

In the early 20th century, the United States rushed to embrace the independence and flexibility offered by motor vehicles, ignoring thousands of years of urban design in favor of the fast, cheap mobility automobiles provided. American towns were built to accommodate cars, rather than integrate them.

“The idea in force in American law at the start of the 20th century, that thoroughfares were for the movement of trafficâ€"with certain specific exceptions such as the loading and unloading of goods and passengersâ€"gave way fairly quickly to the idea that took root in the popular mind that parking of vehicles on the street was a right and not a privilege,” writes Kerry Segrave in “Parking Cars in America, 1910-1945.” In response, ill-conceived regulations helped cement the concept of free parking as a public good across America, fueling our dependence on automobiles.

Top: A forlorn driver in a Los Angeles parking lot, circa 1955. Image via the Los Angeles Public Library. Above: A  classic “Park-O-Meter” made by Magee-Hale in Bellaire, Ohio in 2011. Photo courtesy scottamus’s flickr stream.

Segrave notes that by 1920, city traffic jams were commonplace due to bountiful free parking without legal restrictions to encourage turnover. Street parking spaces were typically occupied by commuting workers, leading to snail-paced traffic and frequent double-parking as daytime drivers fought for the few spaces vacated during business hours. In many urban centers, more street space was filled with parked cars than moving ones. Unfortunately, most city leaders didn’t turn to mass transit as a solution to increased congestion, and actually used gridlock on downtown streets, frequently due to street parking, as an excuse to tear up efficient commuter tracks and inner-city rail systems.

The most visible instance of such degradation was the General Motors streetcar scandal: Beginning in the late 1930s, several automobile-related businesses, including GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil, created front companies to purchase and dismantle rail-based transit systems, especially inner city tramways, and replace them with less efficient bus lines. In 1949, the companies would be convicted of a conspiracy to monopolize transportation, but the damage was already done.

Left: In the 1930s, Parker Brothers’ earliest “Monopoly” sets already included the requisite space for free parking. Right: During the 1920s, an absence of restrictions meant that the majority of American city streets were devoted to free parking, rather than the flow of moving vehicles.

In fact, automobile congestion had been a problem since the late 1910s, so much so that several cities, including Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, passed laws completely outlawing street parking in their central business districts. However, public protest and pressure from local businesses soon overturned such bans in favor of restricted time limits on downtown streets. Yet enforcement was still inadequate, as police departments typically used a poor system of patrolling streets on foot and marking tires with chalk to indicate payment.

An early Magee-Hale meter at work.

Then, in July of 1935, a novel technological effort to improve parking turnover was initiated in Oklahoma City, where entrepreneurs Carl Magee and Gerald Hale designed the world’s first parking meter, ominously dubbed “The Black Maria.” Using a coin-operated timing system, their meters displayed a red flag once payment had expired, making parking laws much easier to enforce. As a trial, the Magee-Hale “Park-O-Meter” Company installed 200 machines along a 14-block stretch of downtown, divided into 20-foot spaces. They agreed to place meters on one side of the streets at no charge to the city with the understanding that their initial capital cost would be repaid by the five-cent hourly rate, after which the city would reap all parking fees.

On their first day of operation, motorists tentatively adopted the new meter technology, but by the end of the first week, shops fronting parking meters reported increased sales, prompting establishments on the opposite side of the street to beg the city for their own magical meters. The following year, a New Republic editorial praised the device’s effectiveness, calling it “the next great American gadget.”

As the New Republic explained, the mechanism had “already spread to Texas, Florida and Michigan and seems likely to sweep the country.” In addition to benefitting city treasuries and increasing parking turnover, the article claimed few motorists opposed the device, and many “warmly approve it.” Though there was some backlash from drivers who accused municipalities of charging a new tax on roads, a publicly owned property, cities successfully defended meter fees in court as a way to fund parking regulation and enforcement.

Residents watch with excitement and trepidation as the first meters are inaugurated in Washington, DC, in 1938. Photo courtesy Roth Hall.

During the late 1930s, to serve the growing demand for parking meters, several new companies followed Magee-Hale’s lead, like M.H. Rhodes’ Mark-Time meters and the Duncan-Miller Company. In 1938, American City magazine reported that 85 municipal areas had installed new meters, and Segrave says, “those cities were practically unanimous in praising the machines and what they had done in solving their cities’ parking problems.”

“Cities were practically unanimous in praising the machines and how they’d solved their parking problems.”

Meanwhile, local governments began establishing off-street parking requirements for new buildings in a further attempt to eradicate traffic jams and force developers to accommodate private motor vehicles. A 1946 survey of 76 cities found that only 17 percent had parking requirements in their zoning ordinances, but only five years later, 71 percent had off-street requirements or were in the process of adopting them. Thus began the great American sprawl: Since most new construction was required by law to include a minimum number of parking spaces, gigantic parking lots and hulking city garages grew like tumors from city streets.

In his definitive book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Donald Shoup explains that minimum parking requirements “led planners and developers to think that parking is a problem only when there isn’t enough of it. But too much parking is also a problemâ€"it wastes money, degrades urban design, increases impervious surface area, and encourages overuse of cars.” Besides the fact that legally required lots are often more than half-empty, they result in a variety of negative impacts, from environmental runoff issues to inhospitable pedestrian zones. Instead of using the tools available to limit automobile use and encourage free-flowing street traffic, Shoup explains that planners traditionally did the opposite, requiring “enough off-street spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking.”

The orderly results of parking meter usage in Omaha, Nebraska, circa 1938. Photo by John Vachon.

Additionally, such ordinances falsely reduced the explicit cost of city driving, transferring the true expense of so-called “free” parking to every citizen in the vicinity, diffused into taxes, real estate, product, and service fees. In effect, this legislation created an environment where “nobody can opt out of paying for parking,” says Jeff Speck, renowned urban planner and author of the book, “Walkable Cities.”

According to Speck, “people who walk, bike, or take transit are bankrolling those who drive. In so doing, they are making driving cheaper and thus more prevalent, which in turn undermines the quality of walking, biking, and taking transit.” Furthermore, our plethora of free parking resulted in a range of negative consequences still unaccounted for: “The social costs of not charging for curb parkingâ€"traffic congestion, air pollution, accidents, wasted time, and wasted fuelâ€"are enormous,” writes Shoup.

By 1950, as a concession to the automobile’s omnipresence, parking meters had spread to most urban centers in the United States. An article in The Rotarian claimed that “most motorists like the parking-meter idea, for they find curb parking spaces more easily in metered districts. Merchants say that this easier parking improves their business.” The story also highlighted the great return cities had seen from parking revenue, which was used to pay regulatory policemen or trendy new meter-maids and also to expand off-street parking. For the next fifty years, the U.S. used its parking meters in almost exactly the same way.

By the 1950s, parking regulations were much easier to enforce thanks to the nifty new meters. Photo courtesy Roth Hall.

Meanwhile, in Europe, where cities were predominately built without the car in mind, meters continued evolving to curb the negative impacts of private vehicles. “Although the parking meter was invented in the U.S.,” says Shoup, “most of the subsequent technological progress has been made in Europe, where the scarcity of parking creates a demand for more efficient and convenient metering.”

European cities have been quicker to adopt modern payment methods, such as credit cards linked to mobile phone applications or license plate numbers. Furthermore, their planners recognize the power of parking to manipulate driving habits: A 2011 report called “Europe’s Parking U-Turn” by Michael Kodransky and Gabrielle Hermann states that “every car trip begins and ends in a parking space, so parking regulation is one of the best ways to regulate car use.”

“Most motorists like the parking meter idea, for they find curb parking spaces more easily.”

Today, parking covers more of urban America than any other single-use space, yet the vast majority of meters are outdated, coin-only devices, charging a flat-rate during operating hours across all zones. “From the user’s point of view, most American parking meters remain identical to the original 1935 model,” writes Shoup. “You put coins in the meter to buy a specific amount of time, and you risk getting a ticket if you don’t return before your time expires. The main change in 70 years is that few meters now take nickels. In real terms, however, the price of most curb parking hasn’t increased; adjusted for inflation, 5 cents in 1935 was worth 65 cents in 2004, less than the price of parking for an hour at many meters in 2004.” Once praised as the answer to our auto problems, the invention has languished on American sidewalks. (POM, Inc., the descendant of the Magee-Hale company, is still producing standard meter designs, albeit with digital LCD screens and credit card payment modules.)

Studies show that under-priced meters have created a false sense of scarcity for drivers, who instead spend more time and gas circling the block than if they parked off-street in a free garage and walked to their destination. “The goal, of course, is to price both on-street and off-street parking in a carefully strategized way that results in cars being where you want them, when you want them, and keeps a 15 percent vacancy along the curb as Shoup recommends,” says Speck. “The parking meter and the price of parking is a tremendously powerful tool that cities can use to see their downtowns thrive.”

A vintage meter still in use in Waterloo, Iowa in 2010. Via Paul McClure DC’s flickr stream.

Shoup boils his recommendations down to three basic solutions to the parking disaster: Charge fair market prices for on-street parking, dedicate meter revenue toward public improvements on metered streets, and remove off-street parking requirements. “I think that more and more planners are beginning to realize that what they were saying as a routine thing was dangerous nonsense,” adds Shoup.

Ground zero for the U.S. parking revolution is San Francisco, one of the country’s most pedestrian-friendly cities. In 2011, the City of San Francisco instituted the groundbreaking SFpark program, outfitting certain neighborhoods with advanced meters and parking sensors whose rates can be programmed based on vehicle occupancy and turnover (Duncan Industries, originally called Duncan-Miller and one of the earliest meter manufacturers, is responsible for a portion of San Francisco’s new devices). Since the project’s debut, meter rates have been adjusted every six weeks to reach an optimal hourly charge that will keep between most meters occupied with a few always open for new vehicles. Recently, the San Francisco Examiner found the project to be an overall success, with parking rates and fines actually decreasing across the city even as spaces become more available.

A rendering of the new individual and multi-space machines installed for the SFpark program.

Though San Francisco is not the norm, Donald Shoup is hopeful about the results of parking meter experiments in smaller cities like Ventura, California, which installed an updated meter system in 2010 to allow for credit-card payments and improved meter pricing. Ventura offers a stellar example of what Shoup calls a “parking benefit district,” or a neighborhood that institutes updated parking policies, and in return spends its parking revenue on neighborhood improvements. As a result of its meter upgrades, the city was able to pay for street improvements and provide free wi-fi across its central business district, not to mention hiring parking-enforcement officers whose presence has helped reduce crime rates up to 40 percent.

“Parking reform is such a terrific opportunity for improving city life,” says Speck. “It’s something quite small that can be done on a single block; it’s very incremental. All the data is there. You just need to open your eyes.”

Thanks to scottamus and Roth Hall for their photographs.

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Body Armor Will Mimic Flexible Fish

IN DAYS of old, knights protected themselves in armour made up of tough, interlocking "scales". This idea might one day be revisited, with future soldiers decked out in scales inspired by the almost impenetrable skin of the "dragon fish".

This fish, Polypterus senegalus, is a tough beast whose strong bite and sturdy exoskeleton has kept its species going for 96 million years. Each of the scales that cover its long body is made up of multiple layers; when the fish is bitten, each layer cracks in a different pattern so that the scale stays intact as a whole (Nature Materials, doi.org/frkx9r).

Now we know how the different types of scales work - as a series of joints between "pegs" and "sockets", allowing the fish to bend as it swims. This combination of flexibility and strength is perfect for human armour, says Swati Varshney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco earlier this month. She and colleagues performed X-ray scans of scales, reconstructed the shapes and then worked out how they slotted together.

Scales near the flexible parts of the fish, such as the tail, are small and allow the fish to bend. Those on the side, protecting the internal organs, are larger and more rigid. Their joints fit together tightly so that each peg reinforces the next scale rather than allowing it to flex.

The researchers created computer models of the different scale types and blew them up to 10 times their original size. Using a 3D printer, they printed a sheet of 144 interlocking scales out of a rigid material (an early prototype is pictured). The group hopes to eventually develop a full suit of fish-scale body armour for the US military that could replace the heavy Kevlar armour currently used, but Varshney says this is still some way off. Such a suit would mimic the fish: rigid and strong across the torso and more flexible towards the joints.

These fish are promising models for human armour because they have already tested out engineering designs on themselves, says Dominique Adriaens of Ghent University in Belgium. Once the design is pinned down, researchers could use different materials to make suits. Ceramic, for instance, would provide heat protection; metal could prevent punctures.

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How To Be Schizophrenic -- And Successful

By ELYN R. SAKS

Published: January 25, 2013

LOS ANGELES

THIRTY years ago, I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My prognosis was “grave”: I would never live independently, hold a job, find a loving partner, get married. My home would be a board-and-care facility, my days spent watching TV in a day room with other people debilitated by mental illness. I would work at menial jobs when my symptoms were quiet. Following my last psychiatric hospitalization at the age of 28, I was encouraged by a doctor to work as a cashier making change. If I could handle that, I was told, we would reassess my ability to hold a more demanding position, perhaps even something full-time.

Then I made a decision. I would write the narrative of my life. Today I am a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I have an adjunct appointment in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, and am on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. The MacArthur Foundation gave me a genius grant.

Although I fought my diagnosis for many years, I came to accept that I have schizophrenia and will be in treatment the rest of my life. Indeed, excellent psychoanalytic treatment and medication have been critical to my success. What I refused to accept was my prognosis.

Conventional psychiatric thinking and its diagnostic categories say that people like me don’t exist. Either I don’t have schizophrenia (please tell that to the delusions crowding my mind), or I couldn’t have accomplished what I have (please tell that to U.S.C.’s committee on faculty affairs). But I do, and I have. And I have undertaken research with colleagues at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. to show that I am not alone. There are others with schizophrenia and such active symptoms as delusions and hallucinations who have significant academic and professional achievements.

Over the last few years, my colleagues, including Stephen Marder, Alison Hamilton and Amy Cohen, and I have gathered 20 research subjects with high-functioning schizophrenia in Los Angeles. They suffered from symptoms like mild delusions or hallucinatory behavior. Their average age was 40. Half were male, half female, and more than half were minorities. All had high school diplomas, and a majority either had or were working toward college or graduate degrees. They were graduate students, managers, technicians and professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, psychologist and chief executive of a nonprofit group.

At the same time, most were unmarried and childless, which is consistent with their diagnoses. (My colleagues and I intend to do another study on people with schizophrenia who are high-functioning in terms of their relationships. Marrying in my mid-40s â€" the best thing that ever happened to me â€" was against all odds, following almost 18 years of not dating.) More than three-quarters had been hospitalized between two and five times because of their illness, while three had never been admitted.

How had these people with schizophrenia managed to succeed in their studies and at such high-level jobs? We learned that, in addition to medication and therapy, all the participants had developed techniques to keep their schizophrenia at bay. For some, these techniques were cognitive. An educator with a master’s degree said he had learned to face his hallucinations and ask, “What’s the evidence for that? Or is it just a perception problem?” Another participant said, “I hear derogatory voices all the time. ... You just gotta blow them off.”

Part of vigilance about symptoms was “identifying triggers” to “prevent a fuller blown experience of symptoms,” said a participant who works as a coordinator at a nonprofit group. For instance, if being with people in close quarters for too long can set off symptoms, build in some alone time when you travel with friends.

Other techniques that our participants cited included controlling sensory inputs. For some, this meant keeping their living space simple (bare walls, no TV, only quiet music), while for others, it meant distracting music. “I’ll listen to loud music if I don’t want to hear things,” said a participant who is a certified nurse’s assistant. Still others mentioned exercise, a healthy diet, avoiding alcohol and getting enough sleep. A belief in God and prayer also played a role for some.

One of the most frequently mentioned techniques that helped our research participants manage their symptoms was work. “Work has been an important part of who I am,” said an educator in our group. “When you become useful to an organization and feel respected in that organization, there’s a certain value in belonging there.” This person works on the weekends too because of “the distraction factor.” In other words, by engaging in work, the crazy stuff often recedes to the sidelines.

Personally, I reach out to my doctors, friends and family whenever I start slipping, and I get great support from them. I eat comfort food (for me, cereal) and listen to quiet music. I minimize all stimulation. Usually these techniques, combined with more medication and therapy, will make the symptoms pass. But the work piece â€" using my mind â€" is my best defense. It keeps me focused, it keeps the demons at bay. My mind, I have come to say, is both my worst enemy and my best friend.

THAT is why it is so distressing when doctors tell their patients not to expect or pursue fulfilling careers. Far too often, the conventional psychiatric approach to mental illness is to see clusters of symptoms that characterize people. Accordingly, many psychiatrists hold the view that treating symptoms with medication is treating mental illness. But this fails to take into account individuals’ strengths and capabilities, leading mental health professionals to underestimate what their patients can hope to achieve in the world.

It’s not just schizophrenia: earlier this month, The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry posted a study showing that a small group of people who were given diagnoses of autism, a developmental disorder, later stopped exhibiting symptoms. They seemed to have recovered â€" though after years of behavioral therapy and treatment. A recent New York Times Magazine article described a new company that hires high-functioning adults with autism, taking advantage of their unusual memory skills and attention to detail.

I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna about schizophrenia; mental illness imposes real limitations, and it’s important not to romanticize it. We can’t all be Nobel laureates like John Nash of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” But the seeds of creative thinking may sometimes be found in mental illness, and people underestimate the power of the human brain to adapt and to create.

An approach that looks for individual strengths, in addition to considering symptoms, could help dispel the pessimism surrounding mental illness. Finding “the wellness within the illness,” as one person with schizophrenia said, should be a therapeutic goal. Doctors should urge their patients to develop relationships and engage in meaningful work. They should encourage patients to find their own repertory of techniques to manage their symptoms and aim for a quality of life as they define it. And they should provide patients with the resources â€" therapy, medication and support â€" to make these things happen.

“Every person has a unique gift or unique self to bring to the world,” said one of our study’s participants. She expressed the reality that those of us who have schizophrenia and other mental illnesses want what everyone wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, to work and to love.

Elyn R. Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California and the author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”

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The Soviet Fire That Might Have Saved Apollo 1

On Jan. 27, 1967, the crew of Apollo 1 was killed when a fire broke out in their pure oxygen-soaked capsule during a routine pre-launch test. The dangers of an oxygen fire should have been obvious to NASA. It was obvious to the Apollo spacecraft’s builder, North American Aviation, who recommended the space agency not run tests with a highly pressurized spacecraft.

It was also a danger the Soviet space agency knew well. In the early days of their training, cosmonaut hopeful Valentin Bondarenko was killed in an eerily similar accident to the Apollo 1 crew.

Cosmonaut training in the 1960s wasn’t all that different from the astronauts’ training at NASA. Neither nation’s space program was sure how men would react to orbital flight and each went to great lengths to prepare its men, both mentally and physically, for the anticipated stresses. For the cosmonauts, the mental training included time spent in an isolation chamber the cosmonaut trainees called the Chamber of Silence.

The Chamber was a spartan room with minimal furnishings: a steel bed, a wooden table, a seat identical to the Vostok capsule’s, toilet facilities, an open-coil hot plate, and a limited amount of water for both washing and cooking. Cosmonauts also had leisure materials. Mind games were posted on the walls, and some men were given books or drawing materials. That was it. As the “Chamber of Silence” moniker suggests, sensory deprivation was part of the test. The room was mounted on rubber shock absorbers that muffled any vibrations from movement outside, and the 16-inch thick walls absorbed all outside sounds.

During the test, cosmonauts had no voice communications with the test administrators outside the Chamber. They communicated with doctors by lights. A light would turn on, signaling the cosmonaut to apply medical sensors to his body; turning on an outside light from inside the Chamber cosmonauts could tell doctors when they were ready to start a test. A different light would signal the end of the isolation test. The only sound came from frequent, random interruptions. A sudden blast of classical music was designed to see how the cosmonauts would react to a pleasurable shock.

The test was meant to challenge the cosmonauts’ mental stability and ability to adapt to strange situations. The hardest part for the test subjects was waiting â€" cosmonauts weren’t told beforehand how long a test would last. It could run anywhere from a few hours to weeks. Completing the simulated spaceflight atmosphere, the Chamber was pressurized to mimic a Vostok in flight with 68 percent oxygen.

Valentin Bondarenko, known to his friends as a kind man of great athletic abilities who fought to prove he was worthy of the honor of flying in space, was the 17th cosmonaut to go into the Chamber of Silence. On March 23, 1961, his ten day stay in the Chamber ended; a light from technicians outside told him they had started depressurizing the cabin.

Bondarenko spent his last few minutes in the Chamber removing his biomedical sensors, wiping the adhesive off his skin with a rubbing alcohol soaked cotton pad. But his mind was elsewhere, likely outside the Chamber after ten days of mentally strenuous testing. He threw the alcohol soaked cotton pad towards the garbage but missed. It landed on the hot plate’s uncovered coil. It wasn’t uncommon for cosmonauts to leave the hotplate turned on all the time; many described the small test space as chilly.

The room and everything in it had been soaking in a high oxygen concentration for ten days. A fire sparked and engulfed the room in an instant. Technicians managed to open the door quickly, and exposed to air the fire died down almost immediately but the damage was done. A severely burnt Bondarenko was huddled on the floor. Miraculously, he was still alive.

The doctors that reached the cosmonaut trainee immediately saw the severity of the situation. Bondarenko’s wool clothes had melted onto his body, his skin had burned away, his hair had caught fire, and his swollen eyes were melted shut. “It’s my fault,” he whispered, “I’m so sorry… no one else is to blame.”

Bondarenko, wrapped in a blanket, was immediately transferred by a small army of men in uniforms to a hospital in Moscow. The cosmonaut asked for a pain killer. doctors obliged with a shot of morphine in the soles of his feet, the only unharmed part of his body thanks to his heavy boots. But there was nothing anyone could do to save him.

Just 24 years old, Valentin Bondarenko died the next morning. The official cause was shock and severe burns.

In keeping with the Soviets’ traditional secrecy, Bondarenko’s identity and the nature of the accident wasn’t publicized in the West. There’s been some speculation that had Soviet space officials shared Bondarenko’s story with their American counterparts, the Apollo 1 astronauts could have been spared. But it’s unlikely. By the mid-1960s, there was enough American-based research about the hazards of oxygen fires that a warning from the Soviets wouldn’t have changed NASA’s approach to the “plugs-out” test.

Image: Detail of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov’s spacesuit during his historic EVA in 1965, four years after Valentin Bondarenko died in an oxygen fire during training. Public domain.

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