Back to School, Bundled Up, but With Lingering Questions


Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times


George L. Egbert Intermediate School in Staten Island, deemed unable to reopen on Monday, is serving as a donation center.







Cots lined the hallways, and toilets were limited or clogged, so some evacuees went to the bathroom on the floor. Volunteers, gagging at air made more fetid by unwashed bodies, took to wearing masks. “We gave them wipes,” a volunteer said, “but there’s only so much you can do with wipes.”




Custodians spent Sunday scrubbing and mopping, preparing this makeshift storm shelter in Hell’s Kitchen, which at one point housed some 1,000 displaced men, women and children, for the return to its day job — as the High School of Graphic Communication Arts.


The rush to sanitize the school was just one piece of the sprawling, shifting logistical puzzle, some would say nightmare, as the city’s 1.1 million public school students faced an educational landscape drastically altered by Hurricane Sandy. The city said that 57 schools were too damaged to reopen, which meant the city had to find new places for their 34,000 students. Eight buildings that normally house 24,000 students currently serve as shelters, and are set to reopen on Wednesday, a target several educators believed unfeasible. It was still unclear on Sunday whether students and teachers would be sharing their buildings with people now using them for shelter. (Graphic Communication Arts housed people evacuated from Bellevue Hospital Center.)


As of Sunday afternoon, 29 schools remained without power, with parents, teachers and students — many of them storm victims themselves — unsure when classes might resume, though the Department of Education said they were hoping to open Wednesday. Some of those that will reopen Monday might not have heat; the mayor advised that students wear extra sweaters.


The city Education Department was updating its schools Web site Sunday with the latest information and placing full-page advertisements in some newspapers. The mayor said the city made 1.1 million robocalls to parents over the weekend, telling them the status of their schools, though many families received follow-up calls with different information as situations changed by the hour.


“It is complex and people are going to make mistakes, and people are going to get misinformed,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference Sunday. Noting that schools would be closed, as planned, for Election Day, he added: “We know that, but it’s better to have another day of school, get most kids to school, find out where we need more resources, and then we’ll have Tuesday to try to adjust.”


Around 300 of New Jersey’s 589 school districts were to remain closed on Monday, said Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the state Education Department. In a message Friday, John Bulina, president of the New Jersey School Boards Association, said it was possible some schools would “be unusable as educational facilities for quite some time.”


Some officials said they hoped to open schools by Wednesday, but cautioned against too much optimism. “Not all roads are safe for travel, student walkers, pickups and buses,” said an online note from Anthony Cacciola, the superintendent of the West Babylon school district, one of several on Long Island that were to be closed Monday. “The gas crisis,” he said, “has added another layer of great concern for staff travel and bus fuel.”


Students at the 57 New York City schools that cannot reopen will not relocate to their new schools until Wednesday. Sixteen schools in the eight buildings that have doubled as shelters were supposed to reopen Monday, but that date got bumped back two days after Department of Education officials toured the sites.


At Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island on Sunday, row upon row of cots made the gym look more like a Civil War field hospital than a high school. Piles of clothes and canned goods competed for space in the cafeteria with evacuees eating and milling about. Several dozen dogs, cats and birds — evacuees themselves — had taken up residence in the basement.


Because Staten Island was so brutally hit by Hurricane Sandy, it was not clear where all of the people housed in Wagner High School, which has 3,400 students, would go: many no longer had homes to return to.


Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, said the city was working with the Department of Homeless Services to ensure safe reopenings on Wednesday. But some staff members at schools being used as shelters were skeptical.


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Apple sells 3 million iPads since Friday

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MTV to air fundraiser for devastated Jersey shore

NEW YORK (AP) — MTV, home of the "Jersey Shore" reality show, plans to air a fundraising special to help rebuild New Jersey's devastated shoreline.

The one-hour program will air Nov. 15 from MTV's Times Square studio in New York City. It will feature the cast of "Jersey Shore" along with other guests.

The network said Monday the program will solicit contributions for the rebuilding of Seaside Heights, the heart of the Jersey shore and the principal setting for the "Jersey Shore" series.

For this effort, MTV will be partnering with Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization that provides design and construction services to communities in need.

Seaside Heights was among numerous coastal areas devastated by Sandy last week.

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Well: Embracing Children for Who They Are

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Jeanne and John Schwartz, parents of three children, the youngest of whom — Joseph — is completely different from the other two.

Offered a bin of toys, their daughter, Elizabeth, picked out the Barbies and their son Sam the trucks. But Joseph, like his sister, ignored the trucks and chose the dolls, which he dressed with great care. He begged for pink light-up shoes with rhinestones and, at 3, asked to be “a disco yady” for Halloween.

Joseph loved words and books, but “our attempts to get him into sports, which Sam had loved so much, were frustrating bordering on the disastrous,” Mr. Schwartz, a national correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in a caring and instructive new memoir, “Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with his Sexuality” (Gotham Books).

“This is not just a book about raising a gay child,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “It’s about raising children who are different,” both recognizing and adapting to those differences and being advocates for the children who possess them. Citing the novel “The Martian Child,” about an adopted son, he said, “We’ve got to take care of our little Martians.”

Adjust Expectations

The goal of parenting should be to raise children with a healthy self-image and self-esteem, ingredients vital to success in school and life. That means accepting children the way they are born — gay or straight, athletic or cerebral, gentle or tough, highly intelligent or less so, scrawny or chubby, shy or outgoing, good eaters or picky ones.

Of course, to the best of their ability, parents should give children opportunities to learn and enjoy activities that might be outside their natural bent. But, as attested to in many a memoir, forcing children to follow a prescribed formula almost always backfires.

For example, everyone in my family is a jock, with a strong belief in the importance of physical activity. Everyone, that is, except one of my four grandsons. Now 10, he is an intellectual, and has been since age 3, when he learned the entire world’s atlas of animals. He absorbs scientific information like a sponge and retains it. He can tell you about deep-sea creatures, planets and stars, chemical reactions, exotic caterpillars, geological formations — you name it — and he’s a whiz at the computer. But he has no athletic interest or apparent ability. His parents have introduced him to a variety of team and individual sports, but so far none has clicked.

Rather than try to remake him into someone he is not, the challenge for all of us is to appreciate and adapt to his differences, love him for who he is and not disparage him for what he is not. While the other three boys get basketballs, bicycles and tennis rackets as gifts, for his 10th birthday I gave him a huge book on the universe, which became his bedtime reading.

Lives Enriched

One persuasive voice for differences in children and how families must adapt better is Andrew Solomon, author of an ambitious new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity,” published this month by Scribner. Mr. Solomon, a gay man who has fathered four children, one of whom he is raising with his husband, has explored in depth the challenges and rewards of family diversity.

Mr. Solomon, who has written articles for The Times, interviewed more than 300 families, most of whom have successfully raised children who are deaf, dwarfs, autistic, schizophrenic, transgender, are prodigies or have Down syndrome, as well as those who were conceived in rape or became criminals.

He makes a strong case for accepting one’s children for who they are and, at the same time, helping them become the best they can be. Especially poignant is his account of a family with a high-functioning son with Down syndrome. For years, the boy progressed academically on pace with his peers and was a poster child for what a person with Down syndrome could do. But when the son could go no further, his mother recognized that he needed to be in a group home.

“We had worked so hard to make him the Down syndrome guy who didn’t need it,” the mother told Mr. Solomon. “But I had to look at what was best for him, and not some ideal we had built up for ourselves.”

Most of the parents interviewed found a lot of meaning and many rewards in dealing with a child who was different. “They told me it has given them a so much richer life that they wouldn’t have given it up for all the world,” Mr. Solomon said. “There are many ways to exist in this world and many different ways to be happy.”

As Mr. Schwartz described Joseph: “He’s a delightful guy, a joy. I couldn’t have made that mold. You can’t expect your kids to turn out as you planned, but you can be thrilled by how they turn out.”

He added: “You want your children to achieve and be comfortable with who they are. You should advocate for them and help them develop the skills to advocate for themselves. But parents shouldn’t try to mold their children. When you expect your kids to fit into a mold, especially a mold of your own making, you’ll be disappointed.”

Schools, too, should know how to accommodate children who are different, said Mr. Schwartz, whose book details the struggles his son faced even in a town with great schools.

It’s not just a matter of schools dealing effectively with bullying, he said. “Jeanne and I believe schools can do a lot with the resources they have to embrace differences in kids and recognize when they are unduly stressed,” he said.

Even with accepting and encouraging parents, Joseph Schwartz was unable for years to acknowledge his gay identity, which resulted in serious academic, social and psychological problems. Each of Mr. Solomon’s families also faced identity struggles, and many were helped greatly by finding peers with similar challenges, a task made so much easier by the Internet.

For many parents, he said, raising children who were different was “an occasion for growth that introduced them to social networks they never imagined.”

He said, “It added richness to the lives of those who said they could see a positive side to having a child who was different.”

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A Media Vow of Election Night Restraint Despite Social Media Clamor





This has been the year of the big media gaffe.




NBC News edited a 911 tape of George Zimmerman in a way that implied race as a factor in the Trayvon Martin shooting. CNN and Fox News falsely reported that the Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate at the heart of the Obama administration’s health care law. ABC News wrongly suggested a link between a mass shooting in Colorado and the Tea Party. Just last week during the storm, CNN repeated a false rumor about flooding at the New York Stock Exchange.


Now the media are gearing up for election night, the finale of the year’s biggest story. It’s a chance to regain some credibility — presuming, of course, that television networks and other news organizations get their state-by-state projections right. They all say they will, still mindful of the mistakes made in 2000, when the networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore and then George W. Bush.


The same precautions that were put in place after 2000 will be in place again this Tuesday. At NBC, for instance, the statisticians at the “decision desk” that makes projections “are literally sealed off from the rest of us,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, the senior vice president of specials for NBC News.


Different this time will be the level of noise on the Web, where armchair and professional pundits alike will react to the election results in real time. On election night in 2008, a few Web sites, including Slate and Time.com, stated the obvious — that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency — well before the TV networks and major newspapers said so. In large part that’s because the networks and newspapers were waiting for the polls to close on the West Coast.


They will abide by the same principle again on Tuesday night, ruling out any such pronouncement before 11 p.m. Eastern. But more Web sites and individual users will most likely try to call the race early, creating a cacophony on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.


A memo on Saturday to employees of The Associated Press, the country’s biggest news wire service, asked them to refrain from adding to the noise by posting to Twitter about other news outlets’ calls. “If A.P. has not called a particular state or race, it’s because we have specifically decided not to, based on the expertise and data we have spent years developing,” the memo read.


In calling a state for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney, news organizations will consider several data sources, including exit poll results and raw vote totals — “a brain trust of data,” said Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the vice president for news for CBS News.


Executives at the major networks said in interviews that they don’t expect to be able to project a winner at 11 p.m. this year, given the closeness of the presidential race in several swing states. “I’m not even going to guess what time it will be,” said Marc Burstein, the senior executive producer for special events at ABC News. He predicted an abundance of caution this year because of the trend of early voting in many states.


For election night ABC is uniquely situated in Times Square, which filled up with supporters of Mr. Obama on election night in 2008. This time, too, “I expect a gigantic crowd,” Mr. Burstein said. NBC is expecting the same at Rockefeller Plaza, which it has re-christened Democracy Plaza with exhibits and video screens, just as it did in 2004 and 2008.


All of the executives interviewed said they would be entirely comfortable making projections after their competitors. “In a close contest, we’ll simply wait,” said Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief for CNN. And all of them cited the journalism chestnut that it’s better to be right than first. “It’s always lovely when the two coincide,” said Ms. Ciprian-Matthews of CBS, “but everybody here is absolutely on the same page: accuracy comes first.”


Fox News did not respond to an interview request.


CNN, which was criticized for crowding its studio with anchors and analysts in 2008, will have more reporters in the field this time, including a half-dozen in Ohio alone. Reprising what it called “ballot cams” on primary nights, CNN will have crews at “key voting and vote-counting locations” in battleground states, Mr. Feist said.


“We proved during the primaries that doing real reporting on those nights can make a difference,” he said.


No matter the outcome, some partisans will claim that the election is illegitimate, if the election year rhetoric is to be believed. Continuing an effort that started in 2004, networks and other news outlets will ask the public to alert them to voter irregularities and allegations of voter suppression. “We have an entire team working on those stories,” Mr. Lukasiewicz of NBC said.


Dozens of news and opinion Web sites will offer essentially live coverage on election night, some with TV-like newscasts and others with live blogs. But the biggest audiences are still expected to tune to the big three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, and the big three cable news networks, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.


Four years ago, Brian Williams was the anchor on NBC, Charles Gibson on ABC and Katie Couric on CBS. Mr. Williams is back for his second presidential election night as anchor, but Mr. Gibson, who retired three years ago, will not; heading the coverage instead will be the pair that sat alongside him in 2008, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. Ms. Couric, now of ABC, will join them from time to time with social media reaction — a role that did not exist on the network’s coverage last time.


On CBS, Scott Pelley will anchor his first presidential election night. It’s also the first time for Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, and Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly, on Fox News. On PBS, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff will make up national television’s first two-woman anchor team on election night.


Half a dozen smaller channels will also have hours of live election talk, as will countless local stations — paid for in part by the revenue from innumerable election ads. Discussing the extent of the coverage, Mr. Feist of CNN said, “You cannot find an available high-definition satellite path for Tuesday night in this country. There are none left. The country is at capacity.”


Read More..

In Ohio, 2 Campaigns Offer a Study in Contrasts




The Ohio Ground Game:
In the final days of the presidential race, Ohio voters are being courted and pestered on the airwaves, on the phone and at their homes.







CINCINNATI — Inside a peeling former nightclub here, Obama volunteers are perched on any seats they can find, trays of half-eaten sandwiches line an old mirrored bar and a hand-scrawled list of “office needs” includes toilet paper and Teddy Grahams.




But if this campaign office conveys a casual, ragtag feel, it belies a sprawling operation with an intricate chain of command, volunteers who have been here for years and a lexicon worthy of the military. Volunteer red, white and blue team captains bear particular duties for getting voters to the polls, not to mention “comfort captains,” assigned to tend to coffee, meals and sore feet.


After extensive test runs the past few weekends for this Election Day get-out-the-vote machine, an Obama staff member held one final meeting with volunteers in a back room the other night, saying, “Next Tuesday, it’s showtime!”


The Kenwood Romney Victory Center — one of but three in this county around Cincinnati, five fewer than the Obama camp — is 10 miles and a world away. Inside a suburban office building populated by insurance firms and walk-in medical clinics, there are no dry runs, no flowchart bureaucracy and fewer young faces; many of the 20 or so volunteers are north of middle age.


What there is, is passion.


As a marathon campaign in Ohio nears a conclusion that its weary residents surely yearn for, the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney has devolved into political trench warfare. It is a close-quarters fight: Mr. Obama’s operation, built over four years with more than a hundred offices around Ohio and hundreds more living rooms, office basements and even garages set aside as Election Day “staging locations,” versus the raw anger, worry and drive of a more recent set of Romney organizers.


At age 62 still as earnest as a college student, Edward R. O’Donnell left his music production company in the hands of associates to walk neighborhoods for Mr. Romney, driven by a growing panic that government debt is dragging the nation into bankruptcy. Like many here, “I have never been involved in an election campaign before,” he said. But, he added, “I committed months ago to doing anything and everything I can to try to change that direction.”


The outcome rides largely on which campaign succeeds in getting its supporters to the polls by pestering, begging, calling, offering early-voting instructions or Election Day buses and then pestering some more. It is a competition that has played out here with paid workers and volunteers in a strange universe of sleep deprivation, interminable door-to-door marches through cold rains, borrowed guest rooms and donated junk food.


In Cincinnati, the signs of the showdown are everywhere — not just from the campaigns, but also from a vast array of groups that have descended, knocking on the doors of residents so exhausted by all the knocks that one resident warded off more by posting an announcement on her front door that she had voted early and was, thank you very much, done.


The fight is bitter, with reports of yard signs stolen, run over and even set afire, political phone calls so endless that at least one man was answering his home telephone by barking “Romney” rather than hello, and tales of front-door confrontations ending in curse words or worse.


“There’s nothing coming in this house that has the word ‘Obama’ on it,” one man told Liz Ping, an Obama volunteer, when she appeared at a doorstep. After the two disagreed over who ought to be blamed for the nation’s debt, Ms. Ping, who is 61 and retired, was chased from the porch and down the driveway, she recalled.


“We’re the tip of the spear,” she said.


One rejected Romney door knocker said, “I just tell them, ‘You can run me out of here, but somebody will be back next week unless you vote.’ ”


Publicly, at least, strategists on both sides here claim the edge.


Read More..

Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Read More..

Foxx, Wonder among stars honoring Eddie Murphy

LOS ANGELES (AP) — However riotous the Eddie Murphy stories from Arsenio Hall, Tracy Morgan, Adam Sandler and Russell Brand, the highlight of Spike TV's tribute to Eddie Murphy was the comedian's duet with Stevie Wonder.

Murphy joined the subject of one of his most classic impressions for a rousing rendition of Wonder's 1973 hit "Higher Ground" during the taping of the Spike TV special "Eddie Murphy: One Night Only," which is set to air Nov. 14. The Roots served as the house band.

Jamie Foxx, Tyler Perry, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock and Keenan Ivory Wayans were also among those paying tribute to Murphy Saturday at the Saban Theater.

Accompanied by a pretty blonde, Murphy beamed throughout the two-hour program Saturday, saying he was touched by the tribute.

"I am a very, very bitter man," he said with a beguiling smile. "I don't get touched easily, and I am really touched."

Morgan called Murphy "my comic hero" and came onstage wearing a replica of Murphy's red leather suit from his standup show "Delirious."

"He set the tone for the whole industry a long time ago," Morgan said before Saturday's tribute. "He inspired me in a fearless way."

Sandler said he was still in high school when he first saw "Delirious," which he described as "one of the most legendary standup specials of all time."

"Everybody on the planet wanted to be Eddie," he said. "He funnier than us. He's cooler than any of us."

Samuel L. Jackson said Murphy "changed the course of American film history" by giving Jackson his first speaking role on the big screen, in 1988's "Coming to America."

"If it weren't for Eddie, we might not have all the wonderful films that I've made," Jackson said.

"He is a true movie star," Jackson continued, lauding Murphy's performance in "48 Hours" and "Beverly Hills Cop." ''You became an inspiration for all young African-American actors."

The program featured clips of Murphy's standup shows, his film appearances in "Shrek" and "Nutty Professor" and his work on "Saturday Night Live."

Murphy insisted before the tribute that he is retired.

"I'm just a retired old song and dance man," he said, adding that he only makes rare appearances these days. "That's what you do when you're retired: You come out every now and then and talk about the old days."

The 51-year-old entertainer took the stage at the conclusion of the tribute to say that he was moved by the honor.

"This is really a touching moving thing, and I really appreciate it," he said. "You know what it's like when you have something like this? You know when they sing happy birthday to you? It's like that for, like, two hours... and I am Eddied out."

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen on Twitter at www.twitter.com/APSandy.

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Opinion: Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do





HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?




In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.


Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows.


At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.


Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.


But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”


Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.


People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.


I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”


Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.


Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.


Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.


WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.


My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.


David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”


Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.


Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Hallucinations.”



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Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites


Annie Tritt for The New York Times


Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.





In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”


But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.


Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.


The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”


Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.


So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.


The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.


The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.


The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.


Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.


For policy makers, Google is a tough call.


“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”


SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.


The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.


Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.


“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.


But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.


Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.


In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”


As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.


“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”


A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.


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