Voters in Egypt Cast Ballots on Draft Constitution

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

A polling site in Cairo on Saturday. Lines were long as a referendum on an Islamist-backed charter got off to an orderly start. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egyptians voted peacefully and in large numbers on Saturday in a referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution, hoping that the results would end three weeks of violence, division and distrust between the Islamists and their opponents over the ground rules of Egypt’s promised democracy.

Not long after polls closed at 11 p.m., the main Islamist group aligned with President Mohamed Morsi predicted a big win for ratification with a higher than expected turnout. The group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said that after counts from about 86 percent of the stations that voted Saturday, the first of two days of voting, ballots were running 59 percent in favor of the proposed constitution.

The opposition strongholds of Cairo and Alexandria, however, were still being counted.

A spokesman for the main coalition opposing the charter charged systematic violation of voting rules, but its leaders put off a final statement.

Regardless of the results, the unexpectedly heavy turnout and orderly balloting was yet another turning point for Egypt’s nearly two-year-old revolution. After three weeks of violence and threats of a boycott, voters appeared for the moment to pull back from the brink of civil discord and reaffirm their trust in the ballot box, spending hours in long lines to vote in the sixth national election since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak 22 months ago.

It remained to be seen if the losing side would accept the results, or how long the peace might last. Many who voted yes said they were doing so to end the chaos of the transition rather than to endorse the text of the charter. But the crowded polling places suggested a turn toward stability, if not necessarily the liberal outcome some revolutionaries had hoped for. Despite opposition warnings of chaos, the streets of the capital were free of major protests for the first time in weeks.

And if the constitution is approved by the margins his supporters predict, the smooth vote could fortify Mr. Morsi’s power and legitimacy.

Military officers guarded polling places, and there were few reports of violence. Egyptian state media reported nine injuries in clashes around the Nile Delta town of Dakahleya, and that unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails near the headquarters of a liberal party that had been part of the opposition under Mr. Mubarak.

As they waited in line to vote, neighbors continued to spar over the contentious process that produced the charter. Some said that it had been unfairly steamrolled by Egypt’s new Islamist leaders over the objections of other parties and the Coptic Christian Church, and that as a result the new charter failed to protect fundamental rights.

Others blamed the Islamists’ opponents for refusing to negotiate, in an effort to undermine democracy because they could not win at the ballot box. Many expressed discontent with political leaders on both sides.

“Neither group can accept its opposition,” said Ahmed Ibrahim, 40, a government clerk waiting to vote in a middle-class neighborhood in the Nasr City area of Cairo. Whatever the outcome, he said, “one group in their hearts will feel wronged, and the other group will gloat over their victory, and so the wounds will remain.”

The referendum once promised to be a day when Egyptians realized the visions of democracy, pluralism and national unity that defined the 18-day revolt against Mr. Mubarak. But then came nearly two years of chaotic political transition in which Islamists, liberals, leftists, the military and the courts all jockeyed for power over an ever-shifting timetable.

The document that Egyptians voted on was a rushed revision of the old Mubarak charter, pushed through an Islamist-dominated assembly in an all-night session, after Christian and secular representatives quit in protest. Many international experts faulted the charter as a missed opportunity, stuffed with broad statements about Egyptian identity but riddled with loopholes regarding the protection of rights.

Worse still, for many, was the polarizing endgame the charter provoked. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood said more than 35 of its offices, including its Cairo headquarters, had been attacked and vandalized over the last three weeks. A night of street fighting between his Islamist supporters and their opponents killed at least 10 people.

Many voters waiting in line on Saturday said they rejected the exploitation of religion by both sides: the Islamists who sought to frame the debate as an argument over Islamic law, and opponents who accused Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies of laying the groundwork for a theocracy.

Mayy El Sheikh and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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Bits: New Apps Recall the Details of Your Online Past

THE holiday season of 2011 was a hive of activity for me. One week in early December, I managed to attend a party at the Bowery Ballroom, a movie premiere and a Justin Bieber-themed dinner event. A few days later, in a single afternoon, I saw the movie “Young Adult,” bought animal-shaped glassware as Christmas gifts and shared dishes of handmade pasta with a few friends from college. And three nights after that, I attended a concert at a local music venue with a friend from Australia, then woke up the next morning and hopped on an Amtrak train to Virginia for Christmas.

I know all of this not because my memory is superhuman, or because I keep a detailed journal. My gift of meticulous recollection comes courtesy of several apps I’ve signed up for, including Timehop and Rewind.me. They tap into my social media history and send daily reminders of my past postings, from pictures uploaded to Instagram, the photo-sharing application, to messages on Facebook and Twitter.

At a basic level, these services serve as a cognitive crutch, excavating details about the past that I might not otherwise remember. They offer historical insight into a digital world that is in many ways ephemeral — full of constantly refreshing newsfeeds.

While social networks tell their users what is happening right now, these newer services document life of a year or more ago. They rely on a proliferation of personal data scattered around the Web and easily retrieved with the help of clever engineering and software algorithms. And they offer a rare backward glance, an anthropological perspective on our own online behavior. For example, I’ve noticed that last year, I was posting many photographs and disclosing personal details of my life on social networks, but that these days, I’ve shifted into a cooler, less intimate mode.

Danielle Morrill, founder and chief executive of Referly, a product-recommendation start-up in San Francisco, found that using Timehop, which pings her iPhone with information about how she spent her day exactly one, two, three or even five years ago, reminded her just how “powerful time can be.”

“Sometimes I’ll realize I was doing the exact same thing I was doing a year ago, and I’ll have to ask myself if I’m cool with that,” Ms. Morrill said. “I was grinding through work last year, and I’m still doing that now. Maybe I should think about taking a break. It makes you reflect.”

Timehop and its peers are byproducts of a time of information overload. Many of us can barely keep up with the nearly nonstop stream of news, updates and details about the world around us, let alone find time to put the past into the context of the present.

“Every social network is based in real time,” said Jonathan Wegener, one of the founders of Timehop, which was released to the public in October. “They tend to push down old information, but they don’t leave space to remember it.”

Mr. Wegener has joined a small cluster of entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on a kind of Internet-era archaeology, excavating the troves of data we’ve left on the Web and repackaging them for our enjoyment. It’s an economy betting that as much as people want to pipe details of their daily lives into the social Web as they happen, they will also want reminders on the anniversaries of those experiences — whether theirs or, in some cases, someone else’s. People who sign up for Timehop, for example, can see the social-media pasts of friends who are also using the service. And if Timehop users choose to do so, they can send their memories to other social networks where friends can comment about them.

EXHUMING the past, of course, is fun only until you stumble onto something unpleasant.

In my case, a recent perusal offered photographs of a pet cat that had died, as well as pictures of an exuberant evening with a friend I no longer spend time with. Such reminders can be almost unbearably painful, or they can provide the extra nudge to send a “hello, again” e-mail.

Mr. Wegener said users often requested features that would let them block a particular person or period from appearing in their digest.

Technologically, building such filters would not be impossible, Mr. Wegener said, but he hasn’t done so yet. He said the notion reminded him of the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a quirky romantic comedy in which the main characters wipe away any traces of their past relationship, and presumably, the trauma inflicted.

Such filters are “something we’re considering carefully,” he said.

It’s not clear whether these applications have long-term business potential. Timehop, for example, says it is focused on attracting people to its app, rather than worrying about how it will make money. The company has raised a little more than $1 million from a list of investors that includes Spark Capital and the founders of Foursquare.

Some researchers who study how people interact online say that these services are a logical evolution for social media and hold the potential for longer-term value.

For one thing, they can remind us exactly how long the “half-life of our digital footprints can be” said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “People who never stopped to think that their digital postings would be archived could become more aware of their actions online.”

They could usher in a much-needed dose of reality about the permanence of the digital Web, a truth that is hard to grasp when so much of what we post online feels so ephemeral, visible for only a few seconds.

Behaving as if our digital data is fleeting can cause serious trouble, said Mr. Sundar, especially as our offline and online worlds merge. Our actions, documented through the content we share, can have very real effects on what colleges we get into, what jobs we qualify for and what people we meet.

“We have to start taking seriously the idea of social media as self-representation,” he said. “Social media is no longer just a mirror of the present, but also the past.”

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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

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Obama Walks a Fine Line With Egyptian President

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians opposed to President Mohamed Morsi prayed in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Friday. More Photos »

CAIRO — Tanks and barbed wire had surrounded Egypt’s presidential palace and crowds of protesters were swarming around last week when President Obama placed a call to President Mohamed Morsi.

Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood stood accused of  a sudden turn toward authoritarianism, as they fulminated about conspiracies, steamrollered over opponents, and sent their supporters into a confrontation with protesters the night before that call; the clash left seven people dead. But Mr. Obama did not reprimand Mr. Morsi, advisers to both leaders said.

Instead, a senior Obama administration official said, the American president sought to build on a growing rapport with his Egyptian counterpart, arguing to Mr. Morsi that it was in his own interest to offer his opposition compromises, in order to build trust in his government.

“These last two weeks have been concerning, of course, but we are still waiting to see,” said another senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid aggravating relations with Egypt. “One thing we can say for Morsi is he was elected, so he has some legitimacy.” He noted that Mr. Morsi was elected with 51 percent of the vote.

As Egyptians vote Saturday on the draft constitution, the results may also render a verdict on Mr. Morsi’s ability to stabilize the country and the Obama administration’s bet that it can build a workable partnership with a government guided by the Brotherhood — a group the United States shunned for decades as a threat to Western values and interests.

White House officials say that as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi has a unique chance to build a credible democratic process with broad participation, which is the surest source of stability.

But critics of the Brotherhood have cited Mr. Morsi’s strong-arm push for the Islamist-backed charter as vindication of their argument that Islamist politics are fundamentally incompatible with tolerance, pluralism and the open debate essential to democracy. They say that his turn to authoritarianism has discredited the Obama administration’s two-year courtship of Egypt’s new Islamist leaders.

Some say they suspect the White House may envision the trade-off it offered to the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak: turning a blind eye to heavy-handed tactics so long as he continues to uphold the stability of American-backed regional order.

And by muting its criticism, the Obama administration shares some of the blame, said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation in New York and an Egyptian-American in Cairo for the vote. “Silence is acquiescence,” he said, adding about Mr. Morsi: “At some point if you are so heedless of the common good that you are ready to take the country to the brink and overlook bodies in the street, that is just not O.K.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers, though, say that in Egypt the dual goals of stability and democracy are aligned, because in the math of the revolution Egyptians will no longer accept the old autocracy.

As for Mr. Morsi, administration officials and other outside analysts argue that so far his missteps appear to be matters of tactics, not ideology, with only an indirect connection to his Islamist politics. “The problem with Morsi isn’t whether he is Islamist or not, it is whether he is authoritarian,” said a Western diplomat in Cairo, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic protocol.

What is more, the leading opposition alternatives appeared no less authoritarian: Ahmed Shafik, who lost the presidential runoff, was a former Mubarak prime minister campaigning as a new strongman, and Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly missed the runoff, is a Nasserite who has talked of intervention by the military to unseat Mr. Morsi despite his election as president.

“The problem with ‘I told you so’ is the assumption that if things had turned out differently the outcome would be better, and I don’t see that,” the diplomat said, noting that the opposition to the draft constitution had hardly shown more respect than Mr. Morsi has for the norms of democracy or the rule of law. “There are no black hats and white hats here, there are no heroes and villains. Both sides are using underhanded tactics and both sides are using violence.”

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On Instagram, a Thriving Bazaar Taps a Big Market

Instagram, the picture-sharing application that Facebook bought earlier this year, has not yet figured out a way to make money. But some of its users have.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Services like Prinstagram let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers.

These entrepreneurs have realized that they can piggyback on the popularity of Instagram, which has more than 100 million users, and create their own businesses, some of which have turned out to be quite profitable. They join a long line of innovators who have found creative ways to build new services on top of existing sites and platforms.

Services like Printstagram, for example, let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers. A group of designers are building a digital picture frame for Instagram photos. Some early users of the service are leveraging their expertise and sizable followings and starting consulting agencies, advising big-name brands on how best to use Instagram themselves.

And others have simply realized that the app is a great place to post photos of things they are trying to sell. Jenn Nguyen, 26, who lives in Irvine, Calif., has 8,300 followers on Instagram, where she posts images of lavishly made-up women who are wearing her brand of false eyelashes.

“When we post a new picture of someone wearing our lashes, we instantly see sales,” she said.

Ms. Nguyen is part of a wave of entrepreneurial Instagrammers who have transformed their feeds into virtual shop windows, full of handmade jewelry, retro eyewear, high-end sneakers, cute baking accessories, vintage clothing and custom artwork.

Those who want to sell things on Instagram have to resort to surprisingly low-tech tactics. Instagram does not allow users to add links to their photo posts, so merchants have to list a phone number for placing orders, or hope their followers will type the Web address of their store into a browser.

Shoppers seem willing to put up with that hassle. Ms. Nguyen said that during a recent holiday sale, she offered Instagram followers a coupon for 35 percent off their orders. That day, she said, she netted 100 orders, about $4,000 in sales, up from her usual $500. In her photo captions she mentions her online store and highlights products that are new or soon to be sold out.

Most of the people taking this sales approach are small-scale entrepreneurs and artists, looking for another way to find customers for their consignment shops and jewelry businesses. Hundreds of larger companies and big-name brands have accounts on Instagram, but only a few have taken steps toward actually selling there. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer, has posted photographs of women’s shoes and jewelry alongside telephone numbers for the store.

Instagram is a compelling medium “because a photo translates to any language,” said Liz Eswein, one of the founders of the Mobile Media Lab, a digital agency focused entirely on helping companies figure out their Instagram strategies. “It’s easier to get lost in the shuffle on other networks” like Facebook and Twitter, she added.

Ms. Eswein, Brian DiFeo and Anthony Danielle formed the company in March after realizing that their collective Instagram followers — nearly 850,000 — and understanding of the service could be valuable to companies like Nike, Delta, Samsung and Marc Jacobs who were hoping to reach fans of their brands. Now Mobile Media Lab runs promotions and special campaigns for those clients and others.

“We aren’t saying ‘Click here and buy this product’ — it’s more about putting the image in their head and introducing them to a product within the service,” said Ms. Eswein. In that way, it’s closer to traditional advertising, Mr. DiFeo said: “It’s classic marketing. You see an ad on a billboard, or on a bus as it goes by, on TV and now, in an Instagram post. It sticks.”

The mini-industries cropping up on and around Instagram are fueled by the service’s explosive growth. In April, Instagram had 25 million users. Eight months later it has quadrupled that figure and amassed more than five billion photos. In October, the mobile service had 7.8 million daily active visitors, according to comScore, more than Twitter’s 6.6 million.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to talk about how Instagram might make money directly. But analysts suspect that Facebook will try to weave advertising into the Instagram app at some point, much as it has with its own app.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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Life Expectancy Rises Around World, Study Finds

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and infectious diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a report published on Thursday, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases mostly associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged in mortality gains, compared with Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are striking: infant mortality declined by more than half from 1990 to 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

“The growth of these rich-country diseases, like heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes, is in a strange way good news,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It shows that many parts of the globe have largely overcome infectious and communicable diseases as a pervasive threat, and that people on average are living longer.”

In 2010, 43 percent of deaths in the world occurred at age 70 and older, compared with 33 percent of deaths in 1990, the report said. And fewer child deaths have brought up the mean age of death, which in Brazil and Paraguay jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 30 in 1970, the report said. The measure, an average of all deaths in a given year, is different from life expectancy, and is lower when large numbers of children die.

But while developing countries made big strides the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries’ female populations between 1990 and 2010. American women gained just under two years of life, compared with women in Cyprus, who lived 2.3 years longer and Canadian women who gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990. Life expectancy for American women was 80.5 in 2010, up from 78.6 in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said. American men gained in life expectancy, to 75.9 years from 71.7 in 1990.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which provided estimates of disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The World Health Organization issued a statement on Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differed substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others were similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries — representing about 15 percent of the world’s population — produce quality cause-of-death data.

Sub-Saharan Africa was an exception to the trend. Infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternity-related causes of death still account for about 70 percent of the region’s disease burden, a measure of years of life lost due to premature death and to time lived in less than full health. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

Globally, AIDS was an exception to the shift of deaths from infectious to noncommunicable diseases. The epidemic is believed to have peaked, but still results in 1.5 million deaths each year.

Over all, the change means people are living longer, but it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization.

Tobacco use is a rising threat, especially in developing countries, and is responsible for almost six million deaths a year globally. Illnesses like diabetes are also spreading fast.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.

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On Instagram, a Thriving Bazaar Taps a Big Market

Instagram, the picture-sharing application that Facebook bought earlier this year, has not yet figured out a way to make money. But some of its users have.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Services like Prinstagram let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers.

These entrepreneurs have realized that they can piggyback on the popularity of Instagram, which has more than 100 million users, and create their own businesses, some of which have turned out to be quite profitable. They join a long line of innovators who have found creative ways to build new services on top of existing sites and platforms.

Services like Printstagram, for example, let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers. A group of designers are building a digital picture frame for Instagram photos. Some early users of the service are leveraging their expertise and sizable followings and starting consulting agencies, advising big-name brands on how best to use Instagram themselves.

And others have simply realized that the app is a great place to post photos of things they are trying to sell. Jenn Nguyen, 26, who lives in Irvine, Calif., has 8,300 followers on Instagram, where she posts images of lavishly made-up women who are wearing her brand of false eyelashes.

“When we post a new picture of someone wearing our lashes, we instantly see sales,” she said.

Ms. Nguyen is part of a wave of entrepreneurial Instagrammers who have transformed their feeds into virtual shop windows, full of handmade jewelry, retro eyewear, high-end sneakers, cute baking accessories, vintage clothing and custom artwork.

Those who want to sell things on Instagram have to resort to surprisingly low-tech tactics. Instagram does not allow users to add links to their photo posts, so merchants have to list a phone number for placing orders, or hope their followers will type the Web address of their store into a browser.

Shoppers seem willing to put up with that hassle. Ms. Nguyen said that during a recent holiday sale, she offered Instagram followers a coupon for 35 percent off their orders. That day, she said, she netted 100 orders, about $4,000 in sales, up from her usual $500. In her photo captions she mentions her online store and highlights products that are new or soon to be sold out.

Most of the people taking this sales approach are small-scale entrepreneurs and artists, looking for another way to find customers for their consignment shops and jewelry businesses. Hundreds of larger companies and big-name brands have accounts on Instagram, but only a few have taken steps toward actually selling there. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer, has posted photographs of women’s shoes and jewelry alongside telephone numbers for the store.

Instagram is a compelling medium “because a photo translates to any language,” said Liz Eswein, one of the founders of the Mobile Media Lab, a digital agency focused entirely on helping companies figure out their Instagram strategies. “It’s easier to get lost in the shuffle on other networks” like Facebook and Twitter, she added.

Ms. Eswein, Brian DiFeo and Anthony Danielle formed the company in March after realizing that their collective Instagram followers — nearly 850,000 — and understanding of the service could be valuable to companies like Nike, Delta, Samsung and Marc Jacobs who were hoping to reach fans of their brands. Now Mobile Media Lab runs promotions and special campaigns for those clients and others.

“We aren’t saying ‘Click here and buy this product’ — it’s more about putting the image in their head and introducing them to a product within the service,” said Ms. Eswein. In that way, it’s closer to traditional advertising, Mr. DiFeo said: “It’s classic marketing. You see an ad on a billboard, or on a bus as it goes by, on TV and now, in an Instagram post. It sticks.”

The mini-industries cropping up on and around Instagram are fueled by the service’s explosive growth. In April, Instagram had 25 million users. Eight months later it has quadrupled that figure and amassed more than five billion photos. In October, the mobile service had 7.8 million daily active visitors, according to comScore, more than Twitter’s 6.6 million.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to talk about how Instagram might make money directly. But analysts suspect that Facebook will try to weave advertising into the Instagram app at some point, much as it has with its own app.

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Rice Ends Bid to Succeed Clinton as Secretary of State

WASHINGTON — President Obama knew before he picked up the phone on Thursday afternoon what Susan E. Rice, his ambassador to the United Nations, was calling about: she wanted to take herself out of the running for secretary of state and spare him a fight.

By acceding to Ms. Rice’s request, which she had conveyed to White House aides the night before, Mr. Obama averted a bitter, potentially disruptive battle with Republicans in Congress at the start of his second term and at a time when his administration is struggling to reach a politically difficult deal on the federal budget.

In a statement, the president praised Ms. Rice and expressed some anger over the withering criticism directed at her by Republicans because of  comments she made in the aftermath of the lethal attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“While I deeply regret the unfair and misleading attacks on Susan Rice in recent weeks,” he said, “her decision demonstrates the strength of her character, and an admirable commitment to rise above the politics of the moment to put our national interests first.”

By all accounts, Ms. Rice had been Mr. Obama’s first choice to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton, though recently he seemed to be signaling that her nomination was far from a foregone conclusion. Her decision to withdraw, which senior officials insist Ms. Rice made without prodding from the White House, clears the way for Mr. Obama to nominate Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, officials said.

Republicans say Mr. Kerry would sail through a confirmation process, while several senators had vowed to block Ms. Rice’s nomination, citing what they said were her misleading statements about the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

By stepping aside, Ms. Rice will allow Mr. Obama to present a full slate of appointees to his national security team, as early as next week. Among the other candidates for key posts, officials said, is former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, for secretary of defense. Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who opposed the Iraq war, would be supported by many of his former colleagues.

Their nominations would also remove a major source of tension between the White House and Congressional Republicans, who had expanded their attack on Ms. Rice from Benghazi to a broader indictment of her record as a policy maker on Africa, her role in securing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that came under terrorist attack, and even her personal finances.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and one of Ms. Rice’s fiercest critics, said Thursday that he respected her decision, but added in a statement that he planned “to continue working diligently to get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi.”

In a letter she sent to Mr. Obama before her call, Ms. Rice attributed her decision to a recognition that “the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly — to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities. The trade-off is simply not worth it to our country.”

Mr. Obama said he accepted her request with regret, describing her in a statement as “an extraordinarily capable, patriotic, and passionate public servant” with a “limitless capability to serve our country” — a line that one official said signaled that Ms. Rice, who will continue in her job at the United Nations, remains a candidate for other senior posts, including national security adviser.

Republicans are eager to see a new appointee, and should it be Mr. Kerry, his party’s 2004 presidential nominee, he would receive a far different reception.  “She made her own decision and I think it’s the right decision,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “I think she would have had a very hard time getting through.” Mr. Kerry, by contrast, is “immensely qualified and he would be easily confirmed,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Kerry heaped praise on Ms. Rice. In a statement, he said, “As someone who has weathered my share of political attacks and understands on a personal level just how difficult politics can be, I’ve felt for her throughout these last difficult weeks, but I also know that she will continue to serve with great passion and distinction.”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91

N. Joseph Woodland, who six decades ago drew a set of lines in the sand and in the process conceived the modern bar code, died on Sunday at his home in Edgewater, N.J. He was 91.

His daughter Susan Woodland confirmed the death.

A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.

The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion a day.

The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:

Had Mr. Woodland not been a Boy Scout, had he not logged hours on the beach and had his father not been quite so afraid of organized crime, the code would very likely not have been invented in the form it was, if at all.

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.

As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. His system, which recorded 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock, was less cumbersome than existing methods, which relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes.

He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.

The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.

The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.

An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.

But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.

To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.

What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.

“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”

That transformative sweep was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle.”

Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.

On Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded United States patent 2,612,994 for their invention — a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands — on which they had bestowed the unromantic name “Classifying Apparatus and Method.”

But that method, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.

The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 — all they ever made from their invention.

By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.

Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.

Thanks largely to the work of Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped select and popularize the rectangular bar code and who died in 2011, it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973.

Mr. Woodland, who earned a master’s in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in the 1950s, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1992. Last year, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. (Mr. Silver, who died in 1963, was inducted posthumously along with him.)

Besides his daughter Susan, Mr. Woodland is survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Blumberg, whom he married in 1951; another daughter, Betsy Karpenkopf; a brother, David; and a granddaughter.

Today, the bar code graces nearly every surface of contemporary life — including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding — all because a young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.

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My Story: Taking on Cancer Again, This Time With the Wisdom of Age

After I finished eight months of treatment for testicular cancer in my mid-20s, my psychologist said, “Well, that was like having five years of therapy all at once.” What he meant was that you learn a lot about yourself in weekly talk sessions, but during a life-threatening illness, the “issues” come at you nonstop. I relished the slow unfolding of myself in the first, but I resented — no, hated — every step of the second. Nearly two decades later, when confronted with the same diagnosis, I finally understood the benefits of that earlier trial by fire, much as I did the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he wrote, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”

To be sure, there were benefits to being young — I was 26 — when I was first diagnosed, not the least of which was my competitive swimmer’s body. After almost dying in the I.C.U. and becoming a “patient-in-residence,” I plunged back into the pool (and my day job) just a fortnight after my release.

Ah, the determination — and denial — of youth.

But facing cancer at that young age had more drawbacks than benefits, not the least of which was losing my sense of invulnerability when confronted with the prospect of disfigurement and disability, even death.

Less obvious, but still unsettling, was the loss of my laissez-faire attitude toward life itself. I had always been the kind of guy who focused on the journey (the experience) more than the destination (winning). During backstroke events prior to falling ill I was more interested in watching the clouds race overhead than the swimmer racing in the next lane. This mindset didn’t do much for my success in the pool, but it helped define who I was.

To make matters worse, conventional wisdom says only one thing matters when it comes to cancer: Beating the hell out of it. Suddenly I had to find an emotional depth I hadn’t sought before, a passion for a fight that I didn’t want.

Am I the kind of person who can win this battle? I asked myself early on.

To ensure that I was, I did a complete about-face, saying “No way” to the journey and “Hell, yes” to the destination. Every decision began to turn on life and longevity, and for that I tolerated side effects like hair loss, neuropathy and “dry ejaculation” — because I simply had to win.

I re-read Dylan Thomas, who told me to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and I did. I became a rager. And it almost ruined my life.

Not in terms of my health, because in fact my treatment was effective. I was “clinically cured” and chalked up that achievement to my new “Top Gun” mentality. Then I jumped back into daily life — and managed to mess everything up. I applied my new approach to relationships (“My way or the highway”), and got dumped by my boyfriend. In graduate school, I aced my studies but lost friends.

Fortunately, my best friends didn’t hold back on telling me I had become a jerk, and that got my attention. I had upshifted at the start of my treatment, but now I needed to downshift. I struggled to find my pace, but eventually found a middle gear, more vulnerable than I cared to be but also more human.

The second time I was diagnosed, the oncologist sat me down to give me the new installment of the old bad news. I surprised myself and my friends with a very different approach.

I did not rage, which isn’t to say I was happy about this predicament. And I had moved on from my original question to a new one: How can I go through this and still be the kind of person I want to be?

In the intervening years, I had come to realize that cancer victories are not won by personality types, but by a combination of doggedness (choosing the best physician, getting the right diagnosis and treatment), responsibility (doing your own research and taking care of your overall health), and plain old luck.

From that very first day of my second time around, I challenged myself not to shift into that “win at any cost” mentality. That’s where the gift of age and experience came to my aid, even if my older body did not. Over the years I had learned that life was not a series of choices between winners and losers — I knew that way of seeing things to be oversimplified, if not dead wrong. You can be stronger than an ox, never miss a day of work, or swim your lungs out and, damn it, still die.

I could become a jerk again and focus on the end point, or I could accept that the journey is the destination – which I did.

Two months after I had been diagnosed and two days before the surgeon was scheduled to excise my remaining testicle, I had a dream so vivid — “I am cancer-free!” — that I demanded to go on a “surveillance” protocol. Reluctantly my doctor agreed, but by year’s end I had “won” the debate when my so-called tumor was reclassified as a benign nodule.

The years had taught me much — both to listen to my body and to trust in its wisdom. And, most importantly, to find the courage to speak its truth — whether in the doctor’s office or out in the world.

Steven Petrow writes the Civil Behavior column for Booming, addressing questions about gay and straight etiquette for a boomer-age audience. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

Read More..

My Story: Taking on Cancer Again, This Time With the Wisdom of Age

After I finished eight months of treatment for testicular cancer in my mid-20s, my psychologist said, “Well, that was like having five years of therapy all at once.” What he meant was that you learn a lot about yourself in weekly talk sessions, but during a life-threatening illness, the “issues” come at you nonstop. I relished the slow unfolding of myself in the first, but I resented — no, hated — every step of the second. Nearly two decades later, when confronted with the same diagnosis, I finally understood the benefits of that earlier trial by fire, much as I did the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he wrote, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”

To be sure, there were benefits to being young — I was 26 — when I was first diagnosed, not the least of which was my competitive swimmer’s body. After almost dying in the I.C.U. and becoming a “patient-in-residence,” I plunged back into the pool (and my day job) just a fortnight after my release.

Ah, the determination — and denial — of youth.

But facing cancer at that young age had more drawbacks than benefits, not the least of which was losing my sense of invulnerability when confronted with the prospect of disfigurement and disability, even death.

Less obvious, but still unsettling, was the loss of my laissez-faire attitude toward life itself. I had always been the kind of guy who focused on the journey (the experience) more than the destination (winning). During backstroke events prior to falling ill I was more interested in watching the clouds race overhead than the swimmer racing in the next lane. This mindset didn’t do much for my success in the pool, but it helped define who I was.

To make matters worse, conventional wisdom says only one thing matters when it comes to cancer: Beating the hell out of it. Suddenly I had to find an emotional depth I hadn’t sought before, a passion for a fight that I didn’t want.

Am I the kind of person who can win this battle? I asked myself early on.

To ensure that I was, I did a complete about-face, saying “No way” to the journey and “Hell, yes” to the destination. Every decision began to turn on life and longevity, and for that I tolerated side effects like hair loss, neuropathy and “dry ejaculation” — because I simply had to win.

I re-read Dylan Thomas, who told me to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and I did. I became a rager. And it almost ruined my life.

Not in terms of my health, because in fact my treatment was effective. I was “clinically cured” and chalked up that achievement to my new “Top Gun” mentality. Then I jumped back into daily life — and managed to mess everything up. I applied my new approach to relationships (“My way or the highway”), and got dumped by my boyfriend. In graduate school, I aced my studies but lost friends.

Fortunately, my best friends didn’t hold back on telling me I had become a jerk, and that got my attention. I had upshifted at the start of my treatment, but now I needed to downshift. I struggled to find my pace, but eventually found a middle gear, more vulnerable than I cared to be but also more human.

The second time I was diagnosed, the oncologist sat me down to give me the new installment of the old bad news. I surprised myself and my friends with a very different approach.

I did not rage, which isn’t to say I was happy about this predicament. And I had moved on from my original question to a new one: How can I go through this and still be the kind of person I want to be?

In the intervening years, I had come to realize that cancer victories are not won by personality types, but by a combination of doggedness (choosing the best physician, getting the right diagnosis and treatment), responsibility (doing your own research and taking care of your overall health), and plain old luck.

From that very first day of my second time around, I challenged myself not to shift into that “win at any cost” mentality. That’s where the gift of age and experience came to my aid, even if my older body did not. Over the years I had learned that life was not a series of choices between winners and losers — I knew that way of seeing things to be oversimplified, if not dead wrong. You can be stronger than an ox, never miss a day of work, or swim your lungs out and, damn it, still die.

I could become a jerk again and focus on the end point, or I could accept that the journey is the destination – which I did.

Two months after I had been diagnosed and two days before the surgeon was scheduled to excise my remaining testicle, I had a dream so vivid — “I am cancer-free!” — that I demanded to go on a “surveillance” protocol. Reluctantly my doctor agreed, but by year’s end I had “won” the debate when my so-called tumor was reclassified as a benign nodule.

The years had taught me much — both to listen to my body and to trust in its wisdom. And, most importantly, to find the courage to speak its truth — whether in the doctor’s office or out in the world.

Steven Petrow writes the Civil Behavior column for Booming, addressing questions about gay and straight etiquette for a boomer-age audience. You can find him on Facebook and Twitter.

You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.

Read More..

10 Arrested in Theft of Personal Data

International authorities, with some help from Facebook, have arrested 10 people accused of operating a network of infected computers that stole personal information from millions of victims.

The Justice Department said Tuesday night that the F.B.I. and international agencies were helped in their investigations by Facebook, whose users were among those targeted by the malware, or malicious software, over the last several years.

The agencies arrested people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru and the United States, the F.B.I. said.

The suspects used a chain of infected computers to form what was known as the Butterfly botnet, which spread a piece of malicious software called Yahos, officials said. Versions of the software have long been trafficked among criminals who spread it over social networks and by other means, compromising the security of infected PCs and letting criminals steal personal data, including credit card numbers.

In a statement, the Justice Department said variants of this kind of software had infected about 11 million computers and caused more than $850 million in losses. A Justice Department official said those figures referred to the cumulative damage from the long-running problem, not a measure of the damage done by the people who were arrested.

Mark Hammell, Facebook’s Internet threat researcher, said the company had begun investigating suspicious behavior on its service two years ago. The malware had hijacked some users’ accounts and posted links on their friends’ Facebook pages. A person who clicked on those links could download the software and infect his computer.

Facebook’s researchers reverse-engineered the software to understand how it worked, and eventually traced some of its activities to computer servers controlled by the suspects. That helped Facebook determine the identities of some of the people involved in the crime ring, Mr. Hammell said.

“We realized we didn’t have the ability to stop it completely, and at that point, we decided the best response was to escalate this to law enforcement,” he said in an interview. Two of the people who were arrested were the original authors of the malware, he noted. Facebook said its users made up only a small percentage of those who were infected.

Security firms and social networks are generally on the lookout for this particular form of malware, and software to detect and eliminate it has been available for years. The Justice Department urged computer users to take common-sense measures, like antivirus scanning, to guard against the risk of infections, and said people who suspect they have been victimized should file a complaint with the F.B.I.’s Internet crime complaint center at ic3.gov.

Facebook said users who were concerned about being infected could check their computers at on.fb.me/infectedMSE. The malware does not infect Apple computers, Facebook said.

Manos Antonakakis, director of academic research at Damballa, a company that specializes in fighting botnets, said the size of the Butterfly botnet was significant. It was more than double the size of the last major botnet that authorities took down last November, one that used a piece of malware called DNSChanger that had infected an estimated four million computers.

“This is a major achievement for law enforcement,” he said, “and we look forward to many things like this, so we can effectively tackle emerging botnets out there.”

But Dr. Antonakakis said the estimate of 11 million infected machines was probably high, because a computer could be counted as a new device each time it connected to a different network, like the Wi-Fi at a Starbucks or a home router.

The $850 million figure may also be high given that credit card companies typically wipe out fraudulent charges.

Peter G. Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International, an engineering research laboratory, was less excited about the arrests. He said that defeating this particular botnet did not solve the fundamental problem of computer security being too weak. Anybody could easily take the same software and create the botnet again, he said.

“You’re solving a problem that wouldn’t exist if the systems were designed properly,” he said.

Read More..

10 Arrested in Theft of Personal Data

International authorities, with some help from Facebook, have arrested 10 people accused of operating a network of infected computers that stole personal information from millions of victims.

The Justice Department said Tuesday night that the F.B.I. and international agencies were helped in their investigations by Facebook, whose users were among those targeted by the malware, or malicious software, over the last several years.

The agencies arrested people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru and the United States, the F.B.I. said.

The suspects used a chain of infected computers to form what was known as the Butterfly botnet, which spread a piece of malicious software called Yahos, officials said. Versions of the software have long been trafficked among criminals who spread it over social networks and by other means, compromising the security of infected PCs and letting criminals steal personal data, including credit card numbers.

In a statement, the Justice Department said variants of this kind of software had infected about 11 million computers and caused more than $850 million in losses. A Justice Department official said those figures referred to the cumulative damage from the long-running problem, not a measure of the damage done by the people who were arrested.

Mark Hammell, Facebook’s Internet threat researcher, said the company had begun investigating suspicious behavior on its service two years ago. The malware had hijacked some users’ accounts and posted links on their friends’ Facebook pages. A person who clicked on those links could download the software and infect his computer.

Facebook’s researchers reverse-engineered the software to understand how it worked, and eventually traced some of its activities to computer servers controlled by the suspects. That helped Facebook determine the identities of some of the people involved in the crime ring, Mr. Hammell said.

“We realized we didn’t have the ability to stop it completely, and at that point, we decided the best response was to escalate this to law enforcement,” he said in an interview. Two of the people who were arrested were the original authors of the malware, he noted. Facebook said its users made up only a small percentage of those who were infected.

Security firms and social networks are generally on the lookout for this particular form of malware, and software to detect and eliminate it has been available for years. The Justice Department urged computer users to take common-sense measures, like antivirus scanning, to guard against the risk of infections, and said people who suspect they have been victimized should file a complaint with the F.B.I.’s Internet crime complaint center at ic3.gov.

Facebook said users who were concerned about being infected could check their computers at on.fb.me/infectedMSE. The malware does not infect Apple computers, Facebook said.

Manos Antonakakis, director of academic research at Damballa, a company that specializes in fighting botnets, said the size of the Butterfly botnet was significant. It was more than double the size of the last major botnet that authorities took down last November, one that used a piece of malware called DNSChanger that had infected an estimated four million computers.

“This is a major achievement for law enforcement,” he said, “and we look forward to many things like this, so we can effectively tackle emerging botnets out there.”

But Dr. Antonakakis said the estimate of 11 million infected machines was probably high, because a computer could be counted as a new device each time it connected to a different network, like the Wi-Fi at a Starbucks or a home router.

The $850 million figure may also be high given that credit card companies typically wipe out fraudulent charges.

Peter G. Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International, an engineering research laboratory, was less excited about the arrests. He said that defeating this particular botnet did not solve the fundamental problem of computer security being too weak. Anybody could easily take the same software and create the botnet again, he said.

“You’re solving a problem that wouldn’t exist if the systems were designed properly,” he said.

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Eli Lilly to Conduct Additional Study of Alzheimer’s Drug

The drug maker Eli Lilly & Company said on Wednesday that it planned an additional study of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that failed to improve the condition of people with the disease, saying that it remained hopeful about the drug’s prospects.

The newest study is expected to get under way in the third quarter of 2013 and will focus on patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly released results of two clinical trials in August that showed the drug, called solanezumab, did not significantly improve either the cognition or the daily functioning of people with mild and moderate forms of the disease. But despite that failure, the results also gave some reason for hope: when patients with mild Alzheimer’s were separated out, the drug was shown to significantly slow their decline in cognition.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company said it decided not to pursue approval of the drug based on existing study results after it met with officials from the Food and Drug Administration. A Lilly executive said, however, that the company was still optimistic.

“We remain encouraged and excited by the solanezumab data,” David Ricks, a senior vice president at Lilly and president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, said in the statement. “We are committed to working with the F.D.A. and other regulatory authorities to bring solanezumab to the millions of patients and caregivers suffering from this devastating disease who urgently need this potential treatment.”

The Lilly drug is the second Alzheimer’s treatment to fail in clinical trials this year. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stopped development of a similar treatment, bapineuzumab, after it, too, was not shown to work. Both drugs target beta amyloid, a protein in the brain that is found in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Lilly shares closed at $49, down 3.2 percent.

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