IHT Rendezvous: Hungry Enough to Eat a Horse?

LONDON — As new revelations emerged in the great horse meat scandal gripping the European food industry, there was no indication it would dim the enthusiasm of Continental foodies for their favorite equine delicacies.

Aldi, a cut-price supermarket chain, was the latest retailer to take action, announcing late on Friday that it had removed spaghetti bolognese and beef lasagne from stores in Britain and Ireland after samples were found to contain up to 100 percent horse meat.

In France, meanwhile, fraud inspectors were attempting to track down the origin of the meat, supplied by Comigel, a French supplier, but possibly originating from as far afield as Romania.

Government officials in Britain, who were on Saturday meeting food retailers for crisis talks, have assured consumers there is nothing intrinsically unsafe about eating horse meat.

But, as my colleagues Stephen Castle and Douglas Dalby write, “Few things divide British eating habits from those of continental Europe as much as a distaste for consuming horse meat.”

In many parts of Europe, from Iceland to Italy, gourmets will happily tuck into horse and proclaim its superiority over the humble beef steak.

France’s C4N news Web site took a poke at the fastidious British by asking unwitting consumers of the contaminated products: “Well, was it good or not?”

Umberto Bacchi, writing at International Business Times of the joy of horse tartare, said the scandal would baffle food lovers in other parts of the world, from Italy to Japan.

“As my father comes from Parma, I have eaten my share of horse meat from an early age,” Mr. Bacchi told his readers. “My late grandmother’s fried horse meatballs were a huge hit with the family.”

He went on to extol the virtues of horse meat as high in iron and often recommended to pregnant women, children and the anemic.

“Above all else, however, it is tasty and tender, particularly when cooked for a short time. Hence, the preference for rare steaks or tartare preparations.”

In Belgium, discerning diners delight in having their fries cooked in horse fat, while some Austrians swear by the benefits of horse meat in their dumplings.

Despite the taboo on horse meat that exists in the English-speaking world, the more inquisitive Anglo foodies might at least be tempted to try it the next time they venture to the Continent.

But beware. The esoteric tastes of some Europeans don’t stop at horse. A Swiss newspaper revealed in December that many people in Switzerland still regularly eat dogs and cats.

Apparently it’s perfectly legal and the most popular breed of dog for eating is said to be a close relative of the Rottweiler.

“There’s nothing odd about it”, said one Swiss farmer. “Meat is meat.”

Is he right? The meat-eaters among us happily consume cows, sheep or pigs. So what’s wrong with horse, or even dog? Tell us what you think. And, if you’re a culinary adventurist, where would you draw the line?

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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

Read More..

John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

Read More..

India Executes Man Tied to 2001 Attack on Parliament

MUMBAI - India on Saturday on Saturday hanged a man who was convicted of an attack on India’s Parliament in 2001 that killed nine people.

The hanging of Afzal Guru, a 43-year-old militant with the group Jaish-e-Mohammad, comes more than a decade after the Dec. 13, 2001, suicide attack on India’s parliament in which five gunmen opened fire, killing nine people, including security officials and one journalist. The execution drew protests from human rights groups concerned about the growing use of capital punishment in such cases.

Mr. Guru was convicted of conspiracy in the plot and sentenced to death by a special court in 2002. In 2004, the Supreme Court of India upheld the call for death sentence.

After the execution, clashes broke out in Mr. Guru’s hometown of Sopore, and police and paramilitary units were called to the scene to restore order.Days before the execution, President Pranab Mukherjee had rejected a mercy plea by Mr. Guru’s wife, according to reports from the Press Trust of India, paving the way for Mr. Guru’s hanging in the Tihar Jail complex, officials said.

Mr. Guru was originally from Sopore, in the northern part of the Kashmir. The clashes following his execution came despite the fact that in the hours following the hanging the Kashmir valley was placed under strict curfew in the anticipation of trouble from separatist leaders, according to reports. Authorities in the Srinagar asked citizens to remain indoors. They also closed the national highway for one day.

Omar Abdullah, the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, appealed for peace and calm.

“I understand there is certain degree of angst and there are some people who would like to take advantage of the situation,” Mr. Abdullah said. “I appeal to the people to allow us to get through this with peace and not to restore to violent protests.”

Congress Party officials said that the execution was a sign that India would not tolerate acts of terror.

“We have sent a message to the world that we cannot tolerate terrorism at any cost. Anybody committing any acts of terror will be punished,” said Rashid Alvi, a Congress Party spokesman. “People of our country and government have zero tolerance for terrorism.”

But the opposition Bharatiya Janta Party criticized the government’s delay in carrying out the execution.

“The attack on the Indian Parliament happened in 2001, that is 12 years ago, which was an attack on India,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Bharatiya Janta Party spokesman.

On Nov. 21, 2012, India hanged Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving gunman from the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, ending an eight-year moratorium on the death penalty and drawing criticism from rights groups, which they reiterated Saturday.

“The hanging of Afzal Guru, following closely behind the hanging of Ajmal Kasab in November, shows a very worrying trend by the Indian government,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances as an inherently irreversible, inhumane punishment.”

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European Leaders Struggle to Bridge Budget Gaps

BRUSSELS — European Union leaders on Friday morning edged closer to agreeing a budget worth nearly €1 trillion, or $1.3 trillion, to support farming, transportation and other infrastructure, as well as big research projects for the 27-nation bloc.

But after 15 hours of talks, the leaders were still seeking unanimity while also attempting to satisfy the wide array of national interests demanding attention.

The budget is negotiated every seven years and involves furious horse-trading as leaders focus on getting the best deal for their own countries’ citizens, rather than emphasizing pan-European considerations.

The marathon session was the second attempt to reach a deal on the funding package, which should run from 2014 to 2020, after the first attempt collapsed in November.

Another failure to strike a deal on a sum of money that represents only about 1 percent of the Union’s Gross Domestic Product would be a severe embarrassment for the leaders, who already have spent years bickering over how to save the euro.

The European Commission, the bloc’s policymaking arm, had sought an increase in the overall budget of around 5 percent to more than €1 trillion.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, which represents E.U. leaders, pruned that sum to about €973 billion at the previous summit in November.

On Friday morning, Mr. Van Rompuy presented further revisions lowering the overall sum to about €960 billion but holding down the amount of cash governments pay up-front to around €908 billion.

That formula was designed, in part, to satisfy countries like Britain and the Netherlands that pay more into the budget than they receive, while also accommodating the demands of countries like France and Italy that want to maintain generous payments for agriculture and infrastructure.

Some of the deepest cuts would be made to pan-European projects to improve transport, energy, and digital services that are overseen by the commission. About €1 billion in cuts would be made to the part of the budget used to employ 55,000 people, including 6,000 translators, most of them in Brussels, who run the Union’s day-to-day affairs.

Expert national advisors were reviewing the proposals on Friday morning, and leaders were expected to reconvene for further talks.

Leaders also were wrestling over demands by some countries to renew a system of rebates that raises the costs for other countries.

One of the complications in the current round of negotiations has been the call for budgetary rigor from leaders like David Cameron, the British prime minister, who says the Union should tighten its belt at a time when many European governments have been compelled to impose stringent budget cuts.

Mr. Cameron, in particular, has earned the enmity of some European leaders by demanding a renegotiation of Britain’s treaty with the Union and promised a referendum on his nation’s membership in 2017.

Reflecting growing irritation with Britain among a number of European leaders, Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, told a news conference late on Thursday night that leaders should not go out of their way to appease Mr. Cameron.

Because Britain could be outside the bloc by later this decade, there was little need to make concessions to Mr. Cameron that potentially jeopardized “the security of our financial planning,” Mr. Schulz suggested.

Mr. Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, had intended to start the session during the mid-afternoon on Thursday to force leaders to make their complaints clear in a roundtable session rather than being allowed to break into small groups.

But his plan was derailed, and the first roundtable session was delayed until late in the evening, as leaders formed the kind of pre-summit huddles that he seemingly wanted to avoid.

President François Hollande of France was an hour late to a meeting during the afternoon with Mr. Cameron, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Mr. Van Rompuy.

Mr. Hollande’s lateness was a sign of French displeasure with British demands that included strict limits on agriculture spending cherished by French farmers, according to an E.U. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Even if leaders eventually agree to a deal, it faces still more hurdles before it becomes law at the European Parliament, which has the power to veto the budget.

Some of the most influential figures in Parliament have already signaled that they are prepared to reject a budget that foresees spending less on Europe in the years ahead.

Guy Verhofstadt, the head of the alliance of liberals in the Parliament, called on Thursday for a full-revision clause to be inserted into the budget, so that it could be increased after three years if economic conditions improved.

Mr. Schulz, the president of the Parliament, said on Thursday that he would not approve a budget that ended up widening the overall gap between the amount of cash paid up-front by governments and the somewhat higher amounts known as commitments, which make up the overall budget.

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Well: Old Age and Motorcycles Are a Dangerous Mix

If you’re over 40 and planning to hop on a motorcycle, take care. Compared with younger riders, the odds of being seriously injured are high.

That is the message of a new study, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention, which found that older bikers are three times as likely to be severely injured in a crash as younger riders.

The percentage of older bikers on the road is quickly rising, and their involvement in accidents is a growing concern. Nationwide, from 1990 to 2003, the percentage of motorcyclists over age 50 soared from roughly 1 in 10 to about 1 in 4. At the same time, the average age of riders involved in motorcycle crashes has also been climbing. Injury rates among those 65 and older jumped 145 percent from 2000 to 2006 alone.

Because of the increase in motorcycle ridership among older Americans, the researchers, led by Tracy Jackson, a graduate student in the epidemiology department at Brown University, wanted a closer look at their injury patterns. So she and her colleagues combed through a federal database of motorcycle crashes that were serious enough to require emergency medical care. That yielded about 1.5 million incidents involving motorcyclists 20 or older from 2001 to 2008.

The researchers then split them into groups: those in their 20s and 30s, another group between 40 and 59, and those 60 and older.

Over all, the study showed that injury rates for all three groups were on the rise. But the rise was steepest for the oldest riders. Compared with the youngest motorcyclists, those who were 60 and older were two and a half times as likely to end up with serious injuries, and three times as likely to be admitted to a hospital. The riders who were middle age were twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be hospitalized.

For older riders, the consequences of a collision were also especially alarming. Older and middle-aged bikers were more likely to sustain fractures and dislocations, and they had a far greater chance of ending up with injuries to internal organs, including brain damage.

The researchers speculated that it was very likely that a number of factors played a role in older riders’ higher injury rates. For one, declines in vision and reaction time may make older riders more prone to mistakes that end up in collisions. Another theory is that older riders tend to ride bigger bikes, “which may be more likely to roll or turn over,” Ms. Jackson said.

Then there is the greater fragility that comes with age. Older riders may be involved in the same types of accidents as younger riders, Ms. Jackson said, but in some cases, a collision that a 20-year-old would walk away from might send a 65-year-old to the hospital.

“Your bones become more brittle, and you lose muscle mass as you get older,” she said. “It could just be a matter of aging and the body being less durable.”

Read More..

Well: Old Age and Motorcycles Are a Dangerous Mix

If you’re over 40 and planning to hop on a motorcycle, take care. Compared with younger riders, the odds of being seriously injured are high.

That is the message of a new study, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention, which found that older bikers are three times as likely to be severely injured in a crash as younger riders.

The percentage of older bikers on the road is quickly rising, and their involvement in accidents is a growing concern. Nationwide, from 1990 to 2003, the percentage of motorcyclists over age 50 soared from roughly 1 in 10 to about 1 in 4. At the same time, the average age of riders involved in motorcycle crashes has also been climbing. Injury rates among those 65 and older jumped 145 percent from 2000 to 2006 alone.

Because of the increase in motorcycle ridership among older Americans, the researchers, led by Tracy Jackson, a graduate student in the epidemiology department at Brown University, wanted a closer look at their injury patterns. So she and her colleagues combed through a federal database of motorcycle crashes that were serious enough to require emergency medical care. That yielded about 1.5 million incidents involving motorcyclists 20 or older from 2001 to 2008.

The researchers then split them into groups: those in their 20s and 30s, another group between 40 and 59, and those 60 and older.

Over all, the study showed that injury rates for all three groups were on the rise. But the rise was steepest for the oldest riders. Compared with the youngest motorcyclists, those who were 60 and older were two and a half times as likely to end up with serious injuries, and three times as likely to be admitted to a hospital. The riders who were middle age were twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be hospitalized.

For older riders, the consequences of a collision were also especially alarming. Older and middle-aged bikers were more likely to sustain fractures and dislocations, and they had a far greater chance of ending up with injuries to internal organs, including brain damage.

The researchers speculated that it was very likely that a number of factors played a role in older riders’ higher injury rates. For one, declines in vision and reaction time may make older riders more prone to mistakes that end up in collisions. Another theory is that older riders tend to ride bigger bikes, “which may be more likely to roll or turn over,” Ms. Jackson said.

Then there is the greater fragility that comes with age. Older riders may be involved in the same types of accidents as younger riders, Ms. Jackson said, but in some cases, a collision that a 20-year-old would walk away from might send a 65-year-old to the hospital.

“Your bones become more brittle, and you lose muscle mass as you get older,” she said. “It could just be a matter of aging and the body being less durable.”

Read More..

Hewlett-Packard Joins Push to Limit Use of Student Labor in China

Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

A worker checks parts of a laptop on a Hewlett Packard assembly line in Chongqing, China.

HONG KONG — Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s largest makers of computers and other electronics, is imposing new limits on the employment of students and temporary agency workers at factories across China. The move, following recent efforts by Apple to increase scrutiny of student workers, reflects a significant shift in how electronics companies view problematic labor practices in China.

Many factories in China have long relied on high school students, vocational school students and temporary workers to cope with periodic surges in orders as factory labor becomes increasingly scarce. Students complain of being ordered by school administrators to put in very long hours on short notice at jobs with no relevance to their studies; local governments sometimes order schools to provide labor, and the factories pay school administrators a bonus.

For much of the last decade, many of the world’s big electronics companies have largely neglected the problem, beyond in some cases tracking reports of the abuses. Apple made the unusual move last year of joining the Fair Labor Association, one of the largest workplace monitoring groups, which inspects factories in China that make computers, iPhones and other devices under contract from Apple. And last month, Apple said it would begin requiring suppliers to provide information about their student workers “so we can monitor this issue more carefully.”

Now H.P. is pushing even harder. Its rules, given to suppliers in China on Friday morning, say that all work must be voluntary, and that students and temporary workers must be free “to leave work at any time upon reasonable notice without negative repercussions, and they must have access to reliable and reprisal-free grievance mechanisms,” according to the company.

The rules also require that student work “must complement the primary area of study” — a restriction that could rule out huge numbers of students whose studies have nothing to do with electronics or manufacturing.

Enforcing workplace rules in China has always been difficult, as even Chinese laws on labor practices are flagrantly ignored by some manufacturers as they struggle to keep up with production demand amid labor shortages. The Chinese government announced last month that the nation’s labor force had begun to shrink slowly because of the increasingly rigorous one-child policy through the 1980s and 1990s.

But complying with the new rules might be easier for suppliers contracting with H.P., which has relatively steady demand through the year for its products, than for suppliers working for rivals like Apple, with its big bursts of sales when new models are introduced.

Howard Clabo, an H.P. spokesman, said that the company would hold training sessions for suppliers starting in March and also discussion sessions for government officials, nongovernment organizations and academics — an initiative that could put pressure on other companies.

Tony Prophet, H.P.’s senior vice president for worldwide supply chain operations, said in a phone interview that H.P. was also capping the combined number of students and temp workers at any supplier factory at no more than 20 percent of labor during peak periods, which tend to be during summer vacations and the lengthy Chinese New Year holiday. H.P. plans to reduce that to 10 percent, but has not decided when, Mr. Prophet said.

The practice of employing students and temporary workers has been at the center of growing criticism of employment practices at Chinese suppliers used by big international electronics companies. Some of the companies are now seeing that the problems can harm their reputations.

In announcing increased scrutiny of student workers last month, Apple said in its supplier responsibility report that the “cyclical nature” of the student work “makes it difficult to catch problems.”

“We’ve begun to partner with industry consultants to help our suppliers improve their policies, procedures and management of internship programs to go beyond what the law requires,” Apple said.

Mr. Prophet of H.P. presented his company’s new rules as a sign of corporate responsibility, as opposed to a competitive maneuver. “We’re doing this because we think this is an important issue, and there are certainly concerns around it and some ambiguity around the appropriate standards,” he said.

Labor activists have been particularly critical of Foxconn, a large Taiwanese contract manufacturer that produces electronic devices for Hewlett-Packard, Apple and other companies.

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and David Barboza from Shanghai. Xu Yan contributed research from Shanghai.

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