In Old Taliban Strongholds, Qualms About What Lies Ahead

LOY BAGH, Afghanistan — The battle against the Taliban in Helmand Province was so fierce two years ago that farmers here say there were some fields where virtually every ear of corn had a bullet in it.

Now it is peaceful enough that safety concerns were an afterthought during this year’s harvest. In districts of Helmand like Marja and Nad Ali that used to be Taliban strongholds, life has been transformed by the American troop surge that brought in tens of thousands of Marines three years ago. Over several recent days, a reporter was able to drive securely to places that in the past had been perilous without a military escort, and many of the roads were better paved, too.

So why, then, was it so difficult to find an optimist in Helmand Province?

In conversations with dozens of tribal elders, farmers, teachers and provincial officials, three factors loomed large: dissatisfaction with the Afghan government, the imminent departure of Western troops and recognition that the Taliban are likely to return. Few expressed much faith in the ability of the Afghan government and security forces to maintain the security gains won by the huge American and British military effort here.

Although some people said they believed that areas near the provincial capital would remain secure, beyond that there was little confidence, and many voiced worries that much of the province would drift back under Taliban control after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014.

Even now, with at least 6,500 Marines still in Helmand after a peak of 21,000 troops last year in Helmand and neighboring Nimroz Provinces, local people say the Taliban have begun “creeping back.” Residents report that threats from nearby militant commanders have increased, and that the Taliban are sending in radical mullahs to preach jihad in the mosques and woo the young and unemployed to their cause.

As fearful as residents may be of a resurgent Taliban, they are also angry at the government for what they see as widespread corruption and hypocrisy. Some of that anger focuses on bribery connected with government services, and some on policies relating to the opium trade, which still thrives here. Helmand is the supplier of more than 40 percent of the world’s opium, according to United Nations statistics, and the poppy crop is still the most profitable one by far. Even farmers who are willing to grow other crops are angry at officials who have eradicated poppy but failed to provide enough help with alternatives. Farmers say some of those same officials profit from the drug trade they profess to be fighting.

“Before the surge, the government in Helmand did not control even a single district,” said Hajji Atiqullah, a leader of the powerful Barakzai tribe in the Nawa district of central Helmand. “They had a presence in the district centers, a very small area, but the Marines cleared many districts, and they expanded the presence of the central government.”

Afghan forces now control his district, he said, but will not be able to hold it unless “the foreigners manage to get rid of corruption in the Afghan government, in the districts and the province levels.”

Local elders fear that many farmers, especially those impoverished by the government’s strict poppy eradication policies, will return to opium cultivation and look to the Taliban or other criminals for protection because the government has not offered them a satisfactory substitute livelihood.

“Before the Marines launched this big offensive, Marja was the center of the opium trade,” said Ahmad Shah, the chairman of the Marja development shura, a group of elders that works with the government to try to bring change here. “Millions and millions of Pakistani rupees were being traded every day in the bazaar. People were so rich that in some years a farmer could afford to buy a car.

“We were part of the eradication efforts by the government, and if they had provided the farmer with compensation, we could have justified our act. But the government failed to provide compensation, and unless it does so, the people will turn against us or join the insurgency and be against development, as they were during the Taliban.”

Part of the government’s rationale for poppy eradication was to starve militants of the opium profits that have been important to their finances. As opium cultivation was pushed away from the centers of the American troop surge, the Taliban made new allies by providing protection for farmers who moved their poppy cultivation to outlying deserts. Over the past few years, militants and opium farmers have increasingly found common cause.

A largely British-financed alternative crop program made significant headway at first in persuading farmers to switch crops, but few farmers could do as well as they had with opium.

Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Read More..

Chinese Man Pleads Guilty in Copyright Violation Case

Nearly five years ago, a Chinese man named Xiang Li registered several domain names, including www.crack99.com, and embarked on an ambitious, and ultimately illegal, venture.

Mr. Li, who was based in Chengdu, paid a network of computer experts to scour the Internet to find commercial software they could “crack,” meaning they bypassed security protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access or reproduction.

Ultimately, Mr. Li offered more than 2,000 pirated software products that could be used as applications in the military, engineering, space exploration, mathematics and explosive simulation, and sold them at a fraction of their retail price, which federal prosecutors said was over $100 million.

Among his biggest customers were an electronics engineer at NASA and the chief scientist at a government military contractor, but his clients also included students, inventors and small-business owners. Mr. Li sold the products for $20 to $1,200, accepting payments by Western Union and MoneyGram, according to government documents.

But Mr. Li’s criminal enterprise officially ended last year when he was arrested by undercover agents. On Monday, he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Delaware to one count of conspiring to steal copyrighted software. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Mr. Li, who is 36, could not be reached for comment, nor could his lawyer, Mingli Chen. Mr. Li’s wife, Chun Yan Li, was also indicted on charges of participating in the illegal scheme; she remains at large, presumably in China, officials said.

Mr. Li was arrested in June 2011 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands during a meeting that had been arranged by undercover agents posing as American businessmen. The agents arranged the meeting under the guise of picking up their purchase of pirated software, design packaging and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data, and to discuss a plan to transmit cracked software over the Internet so they could resell it to small businesses in the United States.

After the arrest, agents recovered six disks from Mr. Li containing an assortment of data pirated from an unidentified American software company, including military and civilian aircraft image models and a software module containing data about the International Space Station.

Edward J. McAndrew, one of the prosecutors on the case, said Mr. Li’s arrest was among the largest criminal copyright cases to be successfully prosecuted by the government.

Mr. McAndrew and his colleague, David L. Hall, explained in court documents that once Mr. Li obtained cracked software, he would advertise it on his Web sites, which also included www.cad100.net and www.dongle-crack-download.com. Mr. Li’s customers would then wire him money, some of which he deposited in an account at the Bank of China. From February 2008 to June 2011, Mr. Li and his customers exchanged more than 25,000 e-mails about pirated products, according to the government, which obtained a search warrant for his Gmail account.

Mr. Li used his Gmail account to orchestrate more than 500 illegal transactions with customers in at least 28 states and more than 60 foreign countries, according to court documents. Software was pirated from more than 200 manufacturers.

Mr. McAndrew said none of the pirated software obtained by the undercover agents from Mr. Li contained classified material. But Mr. McAndrew said the government could not determine whether any classified material was distributed to other buyers since it did not have access to all the pirated products that Mr. Li sold.

One of Mr. Li’s biggest customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, a NASA electronics engineer, who bought 12 cracked software programs with a retail value exceeding $1.2 million. Another was Dr. Wronald Best, chief scientist at an unidentified government contractor that provides services to the United States military and law enforcement, like radio transmissions, microwave technology and vacuum tubes used in military helicopters. Dr. Best exchanged more than 260 e-mails with Mr. Li to obtain 10 cracked software programs, with a retail value of more than $600,000, prosecutors said.

Both Mr. Wedderburn and Dr. Best pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Starting in January 2010, undercover agents began buying pirated software from Mr. Li’s Web sites, receiving electronic files with the pirated software or hyperlinks that allowed the agents to download the software from servers in the United States.

In all, the agents paid the Lis $8,615 for the software.

For instance, in January 2010, the agents bought a pirated copy of Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, a software product from Analytical Graphics that has a retail value of more than $150,000. The software includes several functions used by the military and intelligence communities, including three-dimensional warfare simulations.

Mr. Li’s e-mails suggest he was aware of the illegality of his venture, prosecutors say. “I am not a crack production engineers (my job is to collect)(.) This is an international organization created to crack declassified document (s),” he said in a 2009 e-mail. In another he wrote, “I need to use your money to seek the help of experts to cracker master I earn 10 percent of the profits.”

One customer asked who did the cracking. “Experts crack,” Mr. Li wrote. “Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more.”

Read More..

Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

Analysts Skeptical as Majority Owner Takes Role as Chief Executive of Sears

Elise Amendola/Associated Press

A Sears in Peabody, Mass.

Just hours after a board discussion on Monday, a note went out to Sears Holdings employees from Edward S. Lampert, the company’s majority owner and chairman, that he would now be its chief executive.

“I believe in our company,” Mr. Lampert wrote.

But not everyone shares his optimism.

Seven years after he engineered the merger of Sears and Kmart, Mr. Lampert’s plans for the company face a new round of skepticism.

On Monday, Sears announced that its chief executive of two years, Louis J. D’Ambrosio, would be stepping aside because of a health issue in his family and that Mr. Lampert would assume the role. Despite the unexpected departure, Sears is not expected to change course.

“The reality is, Eddie’s been running the company the whole time,” said Gary Balter, an analyst at Credit Suisse.

Mr. Lampert once stepped back from day-to-day management, but more recently he has increased involvement in Sears as he has scaled back his influence on other investments. He maintains an office at Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., although he lives on the East Coast.

If employees “wanted to make merchandising decisions, they had to fly up to Connecticut to get approval from Eddie. He was making day-to-day decisions in this company, and clearly he’s making the capital decisions,” Mr. Balter said.

But Mr. Lampert is a money man, not a merchant, and analysts question his plans for reviving Sears, which has faltered since he combined Sears and Kmart. It has valuable assets, they say, but sales and profitability continue to slide. In his most recent chairman’s letter, Mr. Lampert outlined some ways he wanted to take Sears forward, including building on its loyalty program and expanding what he called “integrated” options — allowing shoppers to buy online, in stores, via mobile devices or a combination. He highlighted Sears’s liquidity options and its ownership of and access to cash from Lands’ End, the clothing retailer Sears bought in 2002, and its real estate, “should the circumstances warrant.” He further wrote, “We do not expect to utilize or execute all of these options,” but he said he wanted to reassure vendors.

“If you’re unwilling to try new things, and to fail and learn, you don’t have a shot,” Mr. Lampert said in an interview last year. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, but you have to try to change.”

Mr. Lampert’s new role as chief executive of a struggling company is a new one for him.

When he was younger, Mr. Lampert made a name for himself with his fast rise through the ranks at Goldman Sachs, his brash courtship of Wall Street idols like Richard Rainwater and Robert Rubin and, when he started his investment fund ESL Investments in 1988, the high returns at the fund. He invested in struggling retailers like AutoNation and AutoZone in the 1990s and early 2000s, then bought a controlling stake in Kmart when it was in bankruptcy. In 2005, he completed the merger with Sears.

And, adding some Hollywood flair to the story line, after being kidnapped at gunpoint from a parking garage in 2003, Mr. Lampert, after being held for about 30 hours, managed to negotiate his own release.

Fortune called the billionaire “the best investor of his generation.” Bloomberg Businessweek asked if he was “The Next Warren Buffett?”

But Sears value has declined since then. His initial idea was to combine the best of Sears and Kmart and sell some appealing locations to competitors. But the recession meant the real estate was no longer in demand, and now many large retailers are downsizing or closing stores.

As the real estate options diminished, Sears was losing sales. The people Mr. Lampert hired to run the company were not retailers, and instead had backgrounds in fast food, supply chains and technology.

Sears’s sales have declined for five straight years, and its market capitalization now is 15 percent of what it was at the beginning of 2006. In the third quarter, the company lost $498 million, up from $410 million for the same quarter in 2011. Sales fell by $548 million, to $8.9 billion.

In the last year, Mr. Lampert has directed a cleanup of the balance sheet. He sold some valuable real estate, spun off business units and reduced inventory to assuage liquidity concerns after a dismal 2011 holiday sales season.

This year, it spun off a profitable hardware retail division and part of its stake in Sears Canada.

Read More..

Chemical Weapons Showdown With Syria Led to Rare Accord

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

The violence in Syria continued on Monday. Above, Syrians went to the aid of a man who was wounded when a missile hit the al-Mashhad district of Aleppo.

WASHINGTON — In the last days of November, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.

Within hours President Obama was notified, and the alarm grew over the weekend, as the munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases. In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria’s increasingly desperate president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.

What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

But concern remains that Mr. Assad could now use the weapons produced that week at any moment. American and European officials say that while a crisis was averted in that week from late November to early December, they are by no means resting easy.

“I think the Russians understood this is the one thing that could get us to intervene in the war,” one senior defense official said last week. “What Assad understood, and whether that understanding changes if he gets cornered in the next few months, that’s anyone’s guess.”

While chemical weapons are technically considered a “weapon of mass destruction” — along with biological and nuclear weapons — in fact they are hard to use and hard to deliver. Whether an attack is effective can depend on the winds and the terrain. Sometimes attacks are hard to detect, even after the fact. Syrian forces could employ them in a village or a neighborhood, some officials say, and it would take time for the outside world to know.

But the scare a month ago has renewed debate about whether the West should help the Syrian opposition destroy Mr. Assad’s air force, which he would need to deliver those 500-pound bombs.

The chemical munitions are still in storage areas that are near or on Syrian air bases, ready for deployment on short notice, officials said.

The Obama administration and other governments have said little in public about the chemical weapons movements, in part because of concern about compromising sources of intelligence about the activities of Mr. Assad’s forces. This account is based on interviews with more than half a dozen military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the intelligence matters involved.

The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, warned in a confidential assessment last month that the weapons could now be deployed four to six hours after orders were issued, and that Mr. Assad had a special adviser at his side who oversaw control of the weapons, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported. Some American and other allied officials, however, said in interviews that the sarin-laden bombs could be loaded on planes and airborne in less than two hours.

“Let’s just say right now, it would be a relatively easy thing to load this quickly onto aircraft,” said one Western diplomat.

How the United States and Israel, along with Arab states, would respond remains a mystery. American and allied officials have talked vaguely of having developed “contingency plans” in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require upward of 75,000 troops. But there have been no evident signs of preparations for any such effort.

The United States military has quietly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there, among other things, prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to have traveled to Jordan in recent weeks, and the Israeli news media have said the topic of discussion was how to deal with Syrian weapons if it appeared that they could be transferred to Lebanon, where Hezbollah could lob them over the border to Israel. But the plans, to the extent they exist, remain secret.

Read More..

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

Online Learning, en Masse:
More top colleges are offering free massive open online courses, but companies and universities still need to figure out a way to monetize them.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

Read More..

Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-pit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

Read More..

Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-pit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

Read More..

Euro Watch: Unemployment Continues to Climb in Euro Zone

PARIS — Unemployment in the euro zone rose to a new record in November, according to data released Tuesday that also showed that the troubles in the 17-nation currency zone are straining its strongest member, Germany.

The euro zone jobless rate rose to a new high of 11.8 percent in November from 11.7 percent in October, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. Eurostat estimates that about 18.8 million in the euro zone were unemployed in November – 2 million more than a year earlier.

Germany has provided necessary momentum to Europe’s overall economy throughout the past three years, proving resilient to the crisis plaguing the common currency, largely due to the strength of its exports.

But on Tuesday, the Federal Statistics Office in Berlin said that German imports slid 3.7 percent in November, while exports dropped 3.4 percent, resulting in a narrowing of Germany’s trade surplus to €14.6 billion, or $19 billion.

German factory orders also fell in November amid weak demand from outside the euro area, the Economy Ministry in Berlin said Tuesday. Orders, adjusted for seasonal swings and inflation, dropped 1.8 percent from October, when they jumped a revised 3.8 percent.

“The November numbers are not a one-off but an extension of the current trend of weakening exports,” Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING, wrote in a research note on Tuesday in which he pointed out an overall decline in German exports of about 4 percent since last May.

“Today’s data confirmed our view that exports should have turned from driver of growth into drag on growth,” he wrote.

A separate report from Eurostat showed retail sales fell 2.6 percent in November from a year earlier, though they managed a 0.1 percent gain from October.

The latest dire reports come as the governing council of the European Central Bank prepares to hold a policy meeting Thursday, followed by an interest-rate announcement. Despite a sharp dip in bank lending reported last week that has some analysts suggesting the central bank might try new steps to stimulate the economy, economists surveyed by Reuters expect the E.C.B. to leave policy unchanged this month, as it waits for a clearer picture of this year’s economic situation to emerge.

Like their counterparts in the United States, Japan and Britain, the euro zone monetary authorities have already opened the spigots, allowing banks to borrow essentially as much as they want at the benchmark rate. Mario Draghi, the E.C.B. governor, has pledged to do whatever is necessary to ensure the stability of the euro, including, if necessary, buying the sovereign bonds of Spain and Italy to hold their borrowing costs to sustainable levels.

The central bank's action has succeeded in calming markets and driving down government bond yields for embattled countries. The European Commission reported Tuesday that an index of economic sentiment in the euro zone had improved in December by 1.3 points, to 87.0 “Economic sentiment in the euro area improved among consumers and across all sectors, except retail trade,” the commission reported.

Europe also got a vote of confidence from Tokyo on Tuesday, as Finance Minister Taro Aso said Japan would buy bonds of the European Stability Mechanism, the euro zone bailout fund, as well as euro sovereign debt.

“The financial stability of Europe will help the stability of foreign exchange rates, including the yen,” Mr. Aso was quoted by the Nikkei newspaper as saying.

Attacking joblessness may require governments to ease back on austerity measures that many economists, including some at the International Monetary Fund, say might have gone too far. In France, President François Hollande has vowed to turn around the flagging labor market in France, where, according to Eurostat, unemployment as 10.5 percent in November.

Eurostat said Spain, suffering from the collapse of a property bubble and struggling to cope with tough austerity measures, had the highest unemployment rate, at 26.6 percent. Greece, the beleaguered country where the sovereign debt crisis began, was next at 26.0 percent, according to September data. Austria, at 4.5 percent, tiny Luxembourg, at 5.1 percent, and Germany, at 5.4 percent, were the lowest.

Worryingly, youth unemployment continues to grow, with 5.8 million people under 25 classified as jobless in November, up 420,000 from a year earlier.

In Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, singled out youth unemployment as one of the largest challenges Greece faces in trying to revive its economy. But he told reporters before meeting the chancellor that his overall message was one of optimism.

“I see the glass half-full,” Mr. Samaras said before taking part in an economic conference held behind closed doors in the German capital. “We’re delivering and Europe’s helping.”

It was the Greek prime minister’s second trip to Berlin since taking office and although the mood appeared lighter than during his inaugural visit in August, which came on the heels of calls from within Ms. Merkel’s government for Greece to leave the common currency, his country still faces enormous challenges.

Greece is focusing its efforts on winning back the trust of Europeans, as well as the markets, Mr. Samaras said. But he stressed that the high unemployment, especially among young people, was weighing heavily on Greeks.

“I would like to make it clear up front that our country is making enormous efforts and many are paying a high price, in order to get things back on track,” Mr. Samaras said.

Ms. Merkel stressed that Greece’s European partners must not leave it alone with its troubles, perhaps wary of the fragility of Mr. Samaras’ three-party coalition government which has been forced to push through deeply unpopular, painful reforms.

“We also must do everything to guarantee economic growth, security and jobs,” Ms. Merkel said.

David Jolly reported from Paris. James Kanter in Brussels and Niki Kitsantonis in Athens contributed reporting.

Read More..