Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

Read More..

Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

Read More..

After Moves on New Constitution, Protesters Gather in Cairo

CAIRO — In the second potent showing of opposition rage in less than a week, tens of thousands of people streamed into Tahrir Square on Friday, angrily denouncing Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, and the hasty passage earlier in the day of a draft constitution written by an Islamist assembly.

The gathering on Friday was smaller than one that packed the square on Tuesday, raising the question of whether Mr. Morsi’s opponents — liberals, leftists and fierce opponents of the Islamist group that the president once helped lead — could maintain their momentum. As they planned ways to escalate the protests with civil disobedience, Mr. Morsi had to face his critics personally at a mosque in Cairo, where, state news media reported, the president was heckled during Friday Prayer.

Egypt’s often fractured opposition banded together this week to protest a series of moves by Mr. Morsi that had led to accusations that he was reviving the country’s autocracy, presenting the president with the most severe crisis in the five months since he took office.

Mr. Morsi’s moves to issue an edict that places his decisions above judicial review and to press the constitutional assembly to pass a draft constitution hastily, despite a walkout by non-Islamists, have provided the opposition with a rallying cry. Despite the heady atmosphere on Friday, protesters and activists in Tahrir Square’s choked approaches, bus shelters and plazas predicted an increasingly bitter standoff, given the slim likelihood that the president planned to accede to their demands.

Slogans calling on Mr. Morsi to leave or for the fall of his government have energized crowds and drawn new faces to the opposition, including people staunchly opposed to Islamist rule and those who have supported figures from Hosni Mubarak’s government, like Ahmed Shafik, a former minister who ran against Mr. Morsi in the presidential race. Strikingly, some revolutionary activists now refuse to use the word “remnant,” as they had in the past, to describe their new allies, saying instead that they are glad for the support of people who decided to stay home during the uprising.

It was unclear whether the newcomers would remain as the opposition pressed more concrete demands and stepped up its confrontation with the government. Sitting on a curb in Tahrir Square on Friday night, Adel Abdullah, an unemployed Web designer, said he was happy to find like-minded people also bitterly opposed to Mr. Morsi. But, short of demanding that Mr. Morsi leave office, he said he was not sure, practically, what the president’s opponents should do.

“The people don’t want him,” he said of Mr. Morsi. “I’m so glad he made a mistake.”

Other opposition figures were trying to find ways to capitalize on the president’s mistakes. Leaders of the newly formed National Salvation Front, a coalition of parties, threatened to call for a national strike and possibly to march on the presidential palace to prevent the draft constitution’s going to referendum.

Mohamed Ahmed, a leader of the April 6th Revolutionary Youth Group, spoke of plans to escalate the protests in an effort to win concessions on key demands, including a rescinding of Mr. Morsi’s edict; a new, more representative constituent assembly; and an overhaul of the Interior ministry.

“We’re going to have demonstrations in places that affect the regime,” he said, also mentioning the possibility of strikes and civil disobedience. Nearby, a judge speaking to a crowd compared Mr. Morsi to Hitler and Caligula.

Mr. Ahmed said that the talk of toppling Mr. Morsi was unrealistic — but tactically important. “We have to raise our demands to get our demands,” he said.

Islamist parties have repeatedly prevailed at the polls since Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow, leaving the opposition to rely on obstructionist tactics to try to thwart them. Some activists say they hope for help from an Egyptian judiciary angered at Mr. Morsi’s bid to place his decisions out of their reach. They have argued that the president will be unable to hold a referendum on the constitution because the interim charter requires judicial supervision of the vote. Most of Egypt’s judges, though, have gone on strike to protest the decree.

“The judicial bodies don’t approve of the decree, and they don’t approve of the draft constitution, and under current constitutional articles, it is impossible to hold a referendum without judicial monitoring,” said Ahmed Kamel, a spokesman for Amr Moussa, a former diplomat under Mr. Mubarak who ran for president last year and has emerged as an opposition leader.

On Friday, with Mr. Morsi in attendance, worshipers at the Al-Sharbatly mosque heckled the imam as he called on the public to support the president and recited religious verse that called on people to “obey those in authority,” according to an account of the visit in the semiofficial newspaper Al-Ahram. After the imam stopped his sermon, some worshipers chanted, “Down with the rule of the supreme guide,” referring to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist party. The president asked the crowd to calm down and tried to explain recent decisions, as some supporters chanted his name, the paper said.

David D. Kirkpatrick, Joe Gabra and Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

Read More..

Syrian Forces Strike Rebels on Damascus Outskirts

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian forces pummeled the outskirts of Damascus with artillery and airstrikes on Friday, antigovernment activists reported, apparently in an effort to insulate the city — the cornerstone of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule — from rebels who have pushed deeper into a semicircle of suburbs along the city’s eastern and southern edges.

Foreign airlines suspended flights into Damascus International Airport for a second day as the air force bombarded rebels along the airport road. Rebels clashed with government forces along the road, lobbing a mortar onto a bridge, activists reported.

Holding Damascus, the capital, is crucial for the government, which keeps its highest concentration of troops and its most loyal and best-trained units in and around the city. Though rebels were unlikely to be able to overrun Damascus soon, analysts said, the encroachment of fighting there — particularly at the airport — has a profound psychological effect on government supporters, making them feel trapped. It also forces the military to pull resources from other areas to defend the capital.

Damascus residents reached by phone and by Skype reported hearing explosions and seeing billowing smoke in the distance, and they described an atmosphere of tension and fear. Government checkpoints were so numerous that it was difficult to travel anywhere without passing through one.

Activists reported that violence had spilled into areas that had usually been calm. A mortar shell landed on Baghdad Street, a downtown thoroughfare, killing a 22-year-old man, said Salam Mohammed, an activist in Damascus. There were clashes at Mezze Airport, west of the capital, near a wealthy pro-government area that had usually been isolated from fighting, another activist said.

Emile Hokayem, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described the fighting as “part of the strategy of encirclement of the city.”

“The rebels are making a very strong point: that they can go after anything that is seen as critical infrastructure,” Mr. Hokayem said, adding that while the government would be able to reopen the airport and the airport road, “the cost of doing so is only going to increase over time.”

Fighting has plagued the Damascus suburbs throughout the 20-month conflict, and rebels have tried several times to push into the city. Most recently, they held the southern neighborhood of Medan for several days over the summer. The government responded by moving forces from other areas to Damascus, analysts said, and there were indications that it had also done so in recent days. Activists reported that government forces had withdrawn from one of their last bases in the remote eastern province of Deir al-Zour, leaving rebels in control of oil fields there.

There was less detailed information than usual about the conflict on Friday because Internet access was cut to the entire country for a second day, in what seemed to be a government effort to disrupt the communications of its opponents, although some activists and other residents used the Web through satellite services.

Fighter jets bombarded neighborhoods in Daraya, south of the capital, and in East Ghouta, to the east, and artillery pounded other areas in the crescent of territory where rebels have been trying to consolidate gains. Activists and analysts said the attacks could herald a counteroffensive, or might simply be further retaliation against pro-rebel areas.

Hania Mourtada and Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2012

An earlier version of this article reversed the given name and surname of an activist in the Damascus suburbs who said rebels had recently captured 40 pro-government militiamen, and misspelled his given name. He is AlBaara Abdul Rahman, not Abdul Rahman al-Barra.

Read More..

Hockey Coaches Defy Doctors on Concussions, Study Finds

Despite several years of intensive research, coverage and discussion about the dangers of concussions, the idea of playing through head injuries is so deeply rooted in hockey culture that two university teams kept concussed players on the ice even though they were taking part in a major concussion study.

The study, which was published Friday in a series of articles in the journal Neurosurgical Focus, was conducted during the 2011-12 hockey season by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the University of Montreal, Harvard and other institutions.

“This culture is entrenched at all levels of hockey, from peewee to university,” said Dr. Paul S. Echlin, a concussion specialist and researcher in Burlington, Ontario, and the lead author of the study. “Concussion is a significant public health issue that requires a generational shift. As with smoking or seat belts, it doesn’t just happen overnight — it takes a massive effort and collective movement.”

The study is believed to be among the most comprehensive analyses of concussions in hockey, which has a rate of head trauma approaching that of football. Researchers followed two Canadian university teams — a men’s team and a women’s team — and scanned every player’s brain before and after the season. Players who sustained head injuries also received scans at three intervals after the injuries, with researchers using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques.

The teams were not named in the study, in which an independent specialist physician was present at each game and was empowered to pull any player off the ice for examination if a potential concussion was observed.

The men’s team, with 25 players and an average age of 22, played a 28-game regular season and a 3-game postseason. The women’s team, with 20 players and an average age of 20, played 24 regular-season games and no playoff games. Over the course of the season, there were five observed or self-reported concussions on the men’s team and six on the women’s team.

Researchers noted several instances of coaches, trainers and players avoiding examinations, ignoring medical advice or otherwise obstructing the study, even though the players had signed consent forms to participate and university ethics officials had given institutional consent.

“Unless something is broken, I want them out playing,” one coach said, according to the study.

In one incident, a neurologist observing the men’s team pulled a defenseman during the first period of a game after the player took two hits and was skating slowly. During the intermission the player reported dizziness and was advised to sit out, but the coach suggested he play the second period and “skate it off.” The defenseman stumbled through the rest of the game.

“At the end of the third period, I spoke with the player and the trainer and said that he should not play until he was formally evaluated and underwent the formal return-to-play protocol,” the neurologist said, as reported in the study. “I was dismayed to see that he played the next evening.”

After the team returned from its trip, the neurologist questioned the trainer about overruling his advice and placing the defenseman at risk.

“The trainer responded that he and the player did not understand the decision and that most of the team did not trust the neurologist,” according to the study. “He requested that the physician no longer be used to cover any more games.”

In another episode, a physician observer assessed a minor concussion in a female player and recommended that she miss the next night’s game. Even though the coach’s own playing career had ended because of concussions, she overrode the medical advice and inserted the player the next evening.

According to the report, the coach refused to speak to another physician observer on the second evening. The trainer was reluctant to press the issue with the coach because, the trainer said, the coach did not want the study to interfere with the team.

Read More..

General Assembly Grants Palestine Upgraded Status in U.N.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations before the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember observer state” on Thursday.

UNITED NATIONS — More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

But the vote, at least for now, did little to bring either the Palestinians or the Israelis closer to the goal they claim to seek: two states living side by side, or increased Palestinian unity. Israel and the militant group Hamas both responded critically to the day’s events, though for different reasons.

The new status will give the Palestinians more tools to challenge Israel in international legal forums for its occupation activities in the West Bank, including settlement-building, and it helped bolster the Palestinian Authority, weakened after eight days of battle between its rival Hamas and Israel.

But even as a small but determined crowd of 2,000 celebrated in central Ramallah in the West Bank, waving flags and dancing, there was an underlying sense of concerned resignation.

“I hope this is good,” said Munir Shafie, 36, an electrical engineer who was there. “But how are we going to benefit?”

Still, the General Assembly vote — 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed and 41 abstaining — showed impressive backing for the Palestinians at a difficult time. It was taken on the 65th anniversary of the vote to divide the former British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, a vote Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.

The past two years of Arab uprisings have marginalized the Palestinian cause to some extent as nations that focused their political aspirations on the Palestinian struggle have turned inward. The vote on Thursday, coming so soon after the Gaza fighting, put the Palestinians again — if briefly, perhaps — at the center of international discussion.

“The question is, where do we go from here and what does it mean?” Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who was in New York for the vote, said in an interview. “The sooner the tough rhetoric of this can subside and the more this is viewed as a logical consequence of many years of failure to move the process forward, the better.” He said nothing would change without deep American involvement.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the assembly’s member nations, said, “The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine,” and he condemned what he called Israeli racism and colonialism. His remarks seemed aimed in part at Israel and in part at Hamas. But both quickly attacked him for the parts they found offensive.

“The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces and the citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded. “Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner.”

While Hamas had officially backed the United Nations bid of Mr. Abbas, it quickly criticized his speech because the group does not recognize Israel.

“There are controversial issues in the points that Abbas raised, and Hamas has the right to preserve its position over them,” said Salah al-Bardaweel, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday.

“We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and Israel has no right in Palestine,” he added. “Getting our membership in the U.N. bodies is our natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, spoke after Mr. Abbas and said he was concerned that the Palestinian Authority failed to recognize Israel for what it is.

“Three months ago, Israel’s prime minister stood in this very hall and extended his hand in peace to President Abbas,” Mr. Prosor said. “He reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples, where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“That’s right. Two states for two peoples. In fact, President Abbas, I did not hear you use the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ this afternoon. In fact, I have never heard you say the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ because the Palestinian leadership has never recognized that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

The Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by Hamas, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank.

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? — Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “ — for my kid?” “ — for my elderly father?” “ — just for reading?” “ — for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch-screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.

It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of traits included in the proposed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.   The final proposal relies on two personality traits, not four.

Read More..

Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.

Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.

Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.

But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.

The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.

Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”

The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.

Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.

Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.

“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”

Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”

Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.

In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.

These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.

Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.

This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.

It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.

Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.

“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.

Resisting Simplification 

It was easier said than done.

The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.

A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.

The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.

Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of traits included in the proposed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.   The final proposal relies on two personality traits, not four.

Read More..

DealBook: Vinod Khosla Keeps Long-Term Bet on Clean Technology

Vinod Khosla crowed about the clean energy industry last year. Three of the biofuel start-ups in his venture capital portfolio had just gone public, and the stocks had risen considerably after their debuts. “I challenge anybody to claim that clean tech done right is a disaster,” Mr. Khosla said at a conference, rebuffing recent criticism. “We’ve generated more profits there than anybody has.”

Since then, Mr. Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, has watched much of those paper gains evaporate. As the clean energy industry broadly has taken a hit, shares of the biofuel companies — Amyris, Gevo and KiOR — have slumped 70 percent to 90 percent from their peaks. His stakes, once worth as much as $1.3 billion, are now valued at roughly $378 million.

The billionaire investor has been caught in the cyclical downdraft.

The public stocks of solar, wind and biofuel companies are suffering amid industrywide pressures. The price of natural gas remains low. Europe has pulled back on incentives. American subsidies are in question after the bankruptcy of the solar panel maker Solyndra. And China is providing formidable low-cost competition.

“The whole clean tech sector has been out of favor,” said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates, a brokerage firm. “I’d be hard pressed to name one trading above its I.P.O. price.”

Despite the crosscurrents, Mr. Khosla seems unwavering in his commitment. He is pouring money into start-ups. Khosla Ventures recently invested more in LightSail Energy, a three-year-old start-up working to develop low-cost energy storage. He is also sticking with his public companies. His firm, for example, still owns 54 percent of KiOR.

“He’s a visionary who likes to make big bets on ideas that can really change the world,” said Andy Bechtolsheim, who co-founded Sun Microsystems with Mr. Khosla 30 years ago and shares a house with him at Big Sur on the California coast. “I would think he’s made a larger personal bet on green tech than anybody else.”

While the public markets are raising short-term doubts, the long-term investment thinking remains unchanged. Governments around the globe are pushing to find alternative sources of energy in an effort to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels that may hurt the environment. In a television interview in 2007, Mr. Khosla said “mainstream solutions” could replace up to 80 percent of oil-based power. Without them, he said, “this planet is history the way we know it today.” After Hurricane Sandy, the subject of global warming — and changing climate conditions — has again come to the forefront.

In a recent blog post on the Forbes Web site, Mr. Khosla acknowledged the shift in market sentiment. “Clean tech went through a time when it was in vogue and now it is not,” he wrote. “The financing environment for clean tech companies is tough today,” he added. But he said he still expected “to do better than industry averages by keeping our losing companies to a minority.”

Since founding his venture capital firm in 2004, Mr. Khosla has become one of the most vocal advocates for clean tech innovation, buying stakes in about 60 industry start-ups. Ausra, a solar thermal start-up that had drawn $130 million in venture backing, was sold in 2010 to the French nuclear plant builder Areva for about $250 million, according to one industry estimate. And SeaMicro, a low-power server maker, was bought this year by Advanced Micro Devices for $334 million, more than five times the amount invested by its venture backers, according to a SeaMicro co-founder, Andrew Feldman.

It’s unclear how the broader clean tech portfolio has performed at Khosla Ventures. Mr. Khosla declined to disclose the firm’s returns or to comment for the article.

But one of his funds, which raised $1 billion to invest in clean tech and other start-ups, shows gain of 30 percent since its inception in 2009, according to filings by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest state pension fund. In his Forbes blog post, Mr. Khosla said a recent fund, which raised $1.05 billion in October 2011, was oversubscribed, and his firm’s broader performance since 2006 had “well exceeded typical venture funds.” In that period, venture funds over all have returned 7.25 percent annually after fees, according to industry data.

Mr. Khosla’s commitment is an outgrowth of his three decades at the cutting edge of technology.

A native of India, Mr. Khosla, 57, earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1980. After starting the design automation company Daisy Systems in 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, then a growing technology company.

At Sun, he supplied drive and vision. But Mr. Khosla, who is known for his blunt talk and intense manner, was replaced as chief executive two years later and left the company shortly thereafter.

In 1986, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Over the next two decades, Mr. Khosla scored sizable returns betting on the growth of fiber optic networks. Two companies, Cerent and Siara Systems, were sold for a combined $15 billion-plus at the height of the late-1990s dot-com bubble.

Mr. Khosla was looking into alternative fuel technologies at Kleiner Perkins when a business plan for an ethanol start-up crossed his desk in 2003. The plan “sat on a corner of my desk for nearly 18 months while I read everything I could about petroleum and its alternatives,” he wrote in an article for Wired magazine in 2006.

When he branched out on his own in 2004, Mr. Khosla invested millions in the ethanol start-up, Celunol. He soon established himself as a top venture capitalist in clean tech, attracting prominent outside investors like Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined the firm as a senior adviser.

Over the years, Mr. Khosla has experienced his share of blowups.

In September 2011, Khosla-backed Range Fuels, a wood-chips-to-ethanol company, went bankrupt after receiving a $44 million grant from the Department of Energy and $33 million under a Department of Agriculture loan guarantee. When The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticized Range Fuels as an “exercise in corporate welfare,” Mr. Khosla lashed back, saying the authors inhabited an “ivory tower” that was “full of people who don’t understand technology.”

Sometimes, Mr. Khosla’s companies had to pivot from their original plans and focus on new markets. For example, Calera was founded in 2007 with plans to use power plant exhaust to make cement. Mr. Khosla called its technology “game changing” in 2008.

But the company encountered some setbacks. It postponed plans for commercial-scale production in 2010 pending further research and later cut its 145-employee work force by two-thirds. Since then, Calera has broadened its focus, developing other products like fillers for paper and plastics.

Like many venture capital investors, Mr. Khosla will risk a few strikeouts for the chance to hit home runs. “My willingness to fail is what gives me the ability to succeed,” the investor has said frequently.

The odds can be especially brutal in clean technology. The projects are often capital-intensive — like $200 million or more for a biofuels plant — and they can take years to pay out, said Sam Shelton, a research engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology. By comparison, social media start-ups often require little upfront money and few employees. “The economics are totally different,” Mr. Shelton said.

In part, Mr. Khosla aims to take stakes when the companies are still getting off the ground, rather than waiting until they’re more mature and more expensive. He first bought a stake in KiOR, which aims to convert wood chips to gas and diesel fuel, in 2007. The company is now completing the first of five planned plants in Mississippi with the help of a $75 million interest-free loan from the state.

Mr. Khosla is “always thinking at a very high level about the potential of an idea,” KiOR’s chief executive, Fred Cannon, said. “He has a very good feel for when to step on the gas.”

After jumping in early, Mr. Khosla appears willing to ride out the swings, in both directions. Over the years, public filings indicate he has plowed roughly $80 million into KiOR, amassing a 54 percent stake in the company. Although the stock is off its peak levels and I.P.O. investors are still underwater, his holdings are worth $356 million — a threefold gain.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 30, 2012

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Mr. Khosla's return on his investment in KiOR. He invested roughly $80 million and his holdings are worth $356 million — a threefold gain, not a fourfold gain.

Read More..