Dec
28

Libraries Try to Update the Bookstore Model

Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York TimesVicki Culler shops for discounted books at the Friends of the Public Library in Cincinnati. At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to...
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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...
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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...
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Dec
27

Bolivia Makes Inroads Toward Reducing Coca Production

Meri Pintas, 30, center, harvests coca leaves with her children in the Yungas region of Bolivia. Bolivia, the world’s third-largest cocaine producer, has advanced its own unorthodox approach toward controlling the growing of coca, which veers markedly from the wider war on drugs and includes high-tech monitoring of thousands of legal coca patches intended to produce coca leaf for traditional us...
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Libraries Try to Update the Bookstore Model

Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York TimesVicki Culler shops for discounted books at The Friends of the Public Library in Cincinnati. At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to...
Read More..

Home Tech: Devices to Monitor Physical Activity and Food Intake

STEP LIVELY Fitbit One pedometer clips onto your belt or pocket to record activity. WHEN I received the results of a routine cholesterol test this summer, I was certain there had been some kind of mistake. I’m young, unstressed and healthy, or so I imagined. I work out, too, and most impartial observers — and some partial ones — would describe me as lean. Plus, I eat a nutritious diet, I swear. So...
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New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York TimesDr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel...
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Dec
26

Egypt’s Hamdeen Sabahi vs. Islamists and Free Markets

CAIRO — Hamdeen Sabahi was the most popular leader in the fight against Egypt’s new Islamist-backed constitution. Now he is preparing for his next battle: against Islamist leaders’ plans for Western-style free-market reforms. Do not listen to your allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Sabahi said he warned President Mohamed Morsi, of the Brotherhood’s political arm, in a private meeting a...
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The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito

Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties. Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial...
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Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear...
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Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear...
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Dec
25

No Easy Route If Assad Opts to Go, or Stay

BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad of Syria sits in his mountaintop palace as the tide of war licks at the cliffs below. Explosions bloom over the Damascus suburbs. His country is plunging deeper into chaos. The United Nations’ top envoy for the Syrian crisis, Lakhdar Brahimi, met with Mr. Assad in the palace on Monday in an urgent effort to resolve the nearly two-year-old conflict....
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Dec
24

Philippine Law Forbids Abductions by Military

MANILA — The Philippines has enacted a law aimed at stopping the military and police officers from abducting people suspected of antigovernment activity, one of the ugly legacies of years of dictatorship. The law, which President Benigno S. Aquino III signed late Friday, makes the “arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty committed by agents of the state” punishable...
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E-Book Price War Has Yet to Arrive

Thor Swift for The New York TimesA Google e-reader is displayed at a bookstore. Sales of e-books for the devices have slowed this year. Right about now, just as millions of e-readers and tablets are being slipped under Christmas trees, there was supposed to be a ferocious price war over e-books. Last spring, the Justice Department sued five major publishers and Apple on e-book price-fixing...
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Risks: Pedestrian Accidents More Deadly in Men

More than twice as many men as women die in pedestrian-vehicle accidents. Now researchers have partly determined why.Writing online last month in the journal Injury Prevention, investigators considered the contribution of three factors: distance walked, number of accidents and fatalities per collision.Researchers using data from a variety of sources found that men and women walk similar distances...
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Risks: Pedestrian Accidents More Deadly in Men

More than twice as many men as women die in pedestrian-vehicle accidents. Now researchers have partly determined why.Writing online last month in the journal Injury Prevention, investigators considered the contribution of three factors: distance walked, number of accidents and fatalities per collision.Researchers using data from a variety of sources found that men and women walk similar distances...
Read More..

E-Book Price War Has Yet to Arrive

Thor Swift for The New York TimesA Google e-reader is displayed at a bookstore. Sales of e-books for the devices have slowed this year. Right about now, just as millions of e-readers and tablets are being slipped under Christmas trees, there was supposed to be a ferocious price war over e-books. Last spring, the Justice Department sued five major publishers and Apple on e-book price-fixing...
Read More..
Dec
23

Syrian Airstrikes Reportedly Kill Dozens at Bakery

BEIRUT — A Syrian warplane was reported to have conducted airstrikes that killed dozens of people lined up for bread at a bakery in the central town of Hilfaya, according to anti-government activists in the area. The attack, and its toll, could not immediately be confirmed. A local activist in the town named Samer said he ran to the bakery soon after heard a warplane, then bombs and finally...
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Amazon Book Reviews Deleted in a Purge Aimed at Manipulation

Giving raves to family members is no longer acceptable. Neither is writers’ reviewing other writers. But showering five stars on a book you admittedly have not read is fine. After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months. Amazon...
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