New Online Privacy Rules for Children

In a move intended to give parents greater control over data collected about their children online, federal regulators on Wednesday broadened longstanding privacy safeguards covering children’s mobile apps and Web sites. Members of the Federal Trade Commission said they updated the rules to keep pace with the growing use of mobile phones and tablets by children.

The regulations also reflect innovations like voice recognition, location technology and behavior-based online advertising, or ads tailored to an individual Internet user.

Regulators had not significantly changed the original rule, based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa. That rule required operators of Web sites directed at children under 13 to notify parents and obtain their permission before collecting or sharing personal information — like first and last names, phone numbers, home addresses or e-mail addresses — from children.

The intent of that was to give parents control over entities seeking to collect information about their children so that parents could, among other things, prevent unwanted contact by strangers.

The new rule, unveiled at a news conference in Washington, significantly expands the types of companies required to obtain parental permission before knowingly collecting personal details from children, as well as the types of information that will require parental consent to collect.

Jon D. Leibowitz, the chairman of the trade commission, described the rule revision as a major advance for children’s privacy. “Congress enacted Coppa in the desktop era and we live in an era of smartphones and mobile marketing,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “This is a landmark update of a seminal piece of legislation.”

The agency’s expanded privacy protections for children also represent the first step in a larger effort by a few regulators and legislators to give adult consumers some rights to control data collected about them.

“The Coppa rule revisions which we are announcing today are a critical piece in our overall approach to how we deal with consumer privacy in this technological age,” said Julie Brill, a member of the commission.

Industry analysts said the new rule represented a partial victory for Web site operators, app developers and advertising networks because regulators watered down some of their original proposals to which companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter had objected. Apple and Google, for example, opposed proposals that suggested they would be responsible for the data collected by children’s apps sold in their app stores. Regulators have now clarified that general-interest app stores would not be held liable for that.

Yet, few companies lent any support to the commission at its news conference; Viacom and Disney sent representatives, but other companies were absent.

“What we’ve got here is an expansion of Coppa that some in the industry would say has gone too far,” said Alan Friel, a lawyer who leads the media and technology practice at the firm of Edwards Wildman Palmer. “But the F.T.C. has provided exceptions that continue to allow internal use of a child’s data, including one-time use of contact information for facilitating promotions and send-a-friend e-mails.”

In an era of widespread photo sharing, video chatting and location-based apps, the revised children’s privacy rule makes clear that companies must obtain parental consent before collecting certain details that could be used to identify, contact or locate a child. These include photos, video and audio as well as the location of a child’s mobile device.

While the new rule strengthens such safeguards, it could also disrupt online advertising. Web sites and online advertising networks often use persistent identification systems — like a cookie in a person’s browser, the unique serial number on a mobile phone, or the I.P. address of a computer — to collect information about a user’s online activities and tailor ads for that person.

The new rule expands the definition of personal information to include persistent IDs if they are used to show a child behavior-based ads. It also requires third parties like ad networks and social networks that know they are operating on children’s sites to notify and obtain consent from parents before collecting such personal information. And it makes children’s sites responsible for notifying parents about data collection by third parties integrated into their services.

Collecting data to show children contextual ads based on the content of a site or app, however, will not require parental consent. “The only limit we place is on behavioral advertising,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “Until and unless you get parental consent, you may not track children to create massive profiles” for behavior-based ads.

Stuart P. Ingis, a lawyer representing several marketing associations, said that reputable online marketers did not knowingly profile children to show them behavior-based ads. He added that industry guidelines prohibited the practice.

He agreed with regulators that privacy protections for children online needed to keep pace with new technologies. But he said he was concerned that the restrictions on cookie-based identifiers might cause some children’s sites to reduce their use of ad networks to avoid having to notify parents about data collection by those services.

“There might be overreaction that would limit just general third-party collection of data, which is very useful to businesses and consumers,” said Mr. Ingis, who represents the Direct Marketing Association and the Association of National Advertisers.

The revised rule also clarifies requirements for sites that are not primarily directed at young children but whose audience may include them, like a Disney family site, for example. Those sites can now screen visitors by age, but they will be required to obtain permission from a parent to collect personal data about children under 13.

Children’s advocates generally welcomed the strengthened protections.

“Clearly, this is a major step forward, but the devil is in the details,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group in Washington.

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U.N. Predicts 1 Million Syrian Refugees by Mid-2013

GENEVA — The United Nations appealed on Wednesday for $1.5 billion in new aid to handle the steadily worsening humanitarian crisis created by spiraling violence in Syria and predicted that the number of refugees fleeing the conflict would double to more than 1 million in the next six months.

The increased refugee estimate represents at least the fourth time the United Nations has revised its projections upward on refugees in the nearly two-year-old uprising against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, which has turned into a civil war that has left at least 40,000 people dead and has threatened to destabilize the Middle East. The revised figures came as both Syrian antigovernment activists and state media in Syria reported new mayhem convulsing the capital, Damascus, and other areas.

Meeting representatives of donor governments here in Geneva, United Nations agencies said they were seeking $1 billion to assist Syrian refugees in five neighboring countries and a further $519 million to provide emergency aid to four million people inside Syria over the same period. There are 20.8 million people living in Syria, according to the World Bank.

“This massive humanitarian crisis requires urgent support from governments, businesses and private individuals,” Panos Moumtzis, the United Nations regional coordinator for Syrian refugees, said in a statement. “Unless these funds come quickly we will not be able to fully respond to the lifesaving needs of civilians who flee Syria every hour of the day — many in a truly desperate condition.”

More than 525,000 Syrians have now registered as refugees, the United Nations refugee agency reported, roughly double the number it had recorded in early September. These include approximately 160,000 in Lebanon, 150,000 in Jordan, 140,000 in Turkey and more than 65,000 in Iraq. The agency also included Egypt for the first time as a sanctuary for fleeing Syrians, reporting more than 10,000 had registered there.

The refugee agency now expects the number to double again within the next six months, Mr. Moumtzis said.

He based that forecast on present trends in the conflict, with 2,000 to 3,000 Syrians crossing into neighboring countries every day. Under a worst-case outcome, in which the conflict results in a massive exodus of civilians, the number of refugees could rise to 1.85 million, he said.

As it is, “the violence in Syria is raging across the country, there are nearly no more safe areas where people can flee,” Radhouane Nouicer, the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian aid based in Damascus, told journalists in Geneva, citing daily shelling and bombings in the suburbs of the capital.

The needs of Syria’s increasingly desperate population, facing winter cold and shortages of basics like food, were much greater than the aid sought by the United Nations, Mr. Nouicer said, but the appeal was “realistic assessment of what we can achieve” in the complex and dangerous conditions prevailing in the country.

Among the immediate concerns is the fate of around half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria, a legacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, mostly living in Damascus. An aerial assault on Yarmouk, a vast Palestinian neighborhood in the south of the capital on Sunday, had caused many to flee. Hundreds are known to have crossed into Lebanon while others sought protection with relatives living elsewhere in Syria, but the whereabouts of many Yarmouk inhabitants as of Wednesday was unclear.

“We don’t know where they are, it’s a humanitarian crisis that still playing itself out,” said Martha Myers, director of relief and social services for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid to Palestinian refugees.

In Syria, the state-run SANA news agency reported that military forces had attacked insurgent positions in and around Damascus, Idlib, Hama and Dara, and had seized weapons and “eliminated a number of terrorists,” the government’s generic term for Mr. Assad’s armed opponents.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria, said much of the fighting on Wednesday was in districts adjoining the Yarmouk neighborhood, which insurgents have sought to occupy as part of their stated intention to seize control of the central part of the capital.

Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Rick Gladstone from New York

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Op-Ed Contributor: Why Google Has Too Much Power Over Your Private Life

A FEW years after it was founded, Google adopted a list of guiding principles it titled, “Ten things we know to be true.” No. 4 was “Democracy on the Web works.”

That’s a worthy sentiment — though a bit surprising coming from the Web’s emperor.

For that, arguably, is what Google has become. Its search engine accounts for nearly 80 percent of all Web searches in the United States — and a remarkable 98 percent of searches from mobile devices. In that role, Google is not just an eponymous verb but perhaps the most central conduit of information in the nation — and, indeed, on the planet. No other search engine comes close.

News accounts suggest that the Federal Trade Commission will delay any decision on whether to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google until perhaps next year. That decision had been expected to come this week.

The F.T.C. has spent nearly two years investigating whether Google’s search engine favors the company’s own commercial endeavors over rival offerings, thereby stifling competition. And even now, some analysts believe that the commission might forgo any legal action against the company in exchange for Google’s willingness to make some modest changes in the way it uses certain consumer information.

This would be a severe setback for Internet users. It will allow Google to continue to amass unbridled control over data gathering, with grave consequences for privacy and for consumer choice. (European regulators are conducting their own antitrust inquiry into Google.)

Google has been modest about its dominance in the modern information society, asserting that competing search engines, like Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing, are just “one click away” if people wish to use them. The Internet is an extraordinarily complex domain with equally powerful challengers, the company points out. Facebook makes Google’s own social media platform look like a joke. Far more shoppers begin their online product searches through Amazon than Google. In short, there’s enough competition out there, Google says, that consumers ought not to fear the company’s mighty role in the information economy.

But we need to look at Google’s market role — and behavior — through a different prism. Google is not just a “search engine company,” or an “online services company,” or a publisher, or an advertising platform. At its core, it’s a data collection company.

Its “market” is data by, from and about consumers — you, that is. And in that realm, its role is so dominant as to be overwhelming, and scary. Data is the engine of online markets and has become, indeed, a new asset class.

In March, when Google replaced the more than 60 privacy guidelines that governed its products and services with a single policy, it also moved to consolidate the personal data it collects. The company creates as much data in two days — roughly 5 exabytes — as the world produced from the dawn of humanity until 2003, according to a 2010 statement by Eric Schmidt, the company’s chairman, who later declared that he didn’t “believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.”

For now, Google uses the data to sell targeted ads, but who says the company’s use of the data will be restricted to that purpose? Opt out of Google’s data collection? Sure, you can do that — but you’ll also have to delete your Gmail account and leave Google’s ecosystem. With Google’s Android operating system — which is activated in 1.3 million new mobile devices every day, and is used by more people than use Apple’s iPhone — that ecosystem is growing.

I’ve been concerned about Google’s dominant role in data collection — and the profound privacy concerns it raises — since my time at the F.T.C. When the commission approved Google’s 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick, I dissented — because I was concerned that combining the two companies’ vast troves of consumer information would allow Google, which was largely unchecked by competition, to develop invasive profiles of individuals’ Internet habits.

Now, the F.T.C. has another chance to protect consumers, promote innovation and ensure fair competition online. In making its decision, it must understand that while Google may be the runaway leader in Web search and online advertising, its most troubling dominance is in the marketplace of private consumer data. If real competition in this area can be restored, I am confident that market forces will provide the incentives necessary for companies to offer attractive services and relevant, engaging ads without violating consumer privacy.

I am no longer an F.T.C. commissioner, but a lawyer representing companies — including Microsoft — that are concerned about Google’s power as a data collector. Yes, there’s some irony in that — it wasn’t long ago that Microsoft faced its own major antitrust lawsuit and had to change its anticompetitive practices.

But then, an emperor is an emperor. And when it comes to the Web, as Google’s wise founders said, democracy works best.

Pamela Jones Harbour, a member of the Federal Trade Commission from 2003 to 2010, is a lawyer at Fulbright & Jaworski, where she represents technology companies, including Microsoft.

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No Clear Link Between Cancer and 9/11 Debris, New York Health Dept. Study Finds

Six months after the federal government added cancer to the list of sicknesses covered by the $4.3 billion World Trade Center fund, a New York City health department study has found no clear link between cancer and the dust, debris and fumes released by the burning wreckage of the twin towers.

The study was by far the largest to date. It examined 55,700 people, including rescue and recovery workers who were present at the World Trade Center site, on barges or at the Staten Island landfill where debris was taken in the nine months after Sept. 11, 2001, as well as residents of Lower Manhattan, students, workers and passers-by exposed on the day of the terrorist attacks.

Over all, there was no increase in the cancer rate of those studied compared with the rate of the general population, researchers concluded after looking at 23 cancers from 2003 to 2008. The prevalence of three cancers — multiple myeloma, prostate and thyroid — was significantly higher, but only in rescue and recovery workers and not in the rest of the exposed population. But since the number of actual cases was small and the subjects of the study may have been screened more frequently for cancer than other people on average, the researchers noted that it was too early to draw any correlation to time spent at ground zero.

In one of many counterintuitive findings, the incidence of cancer was not higher among those who were exposed more intensely to the toxic substances than among those who were exposed less.

The lack of clear evidence of a link between cancer and the debris from Sept. 11 casts into doubt the decision by the federal government in June to add 50 different types of cancer to the list of illnesses covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, signed by President Obama in early 2011. That decision meant that people with other sicknesses linked more strongly to ground zero were likely to receive less money.

Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, said in an interview on Monday that it was too soon to take the study as a repudiation of the government’s decision.

“Cancers take 20 years to develop,” Dr. Farley said, “and we might see something different 20 years down the line.” But echoing Dr. John Howard, head of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, who made the final decision on covering cancer, the commissioner added, “You don’t want to wait 20 to 30 years to get a definitive answer” to people suffering today.

On Tuesday, Dr. Howard issued a statement that said, “The W.T.C. Health Program welcomes this addition to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and we have long encouraged the growth of such peer-reviewed research.”

Dr. Alfred I. Neugut, an oncologist and professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said he was not surprised by the study. “I think, given the time frame and the exposures,” he said, “that there wasn’t a high likelihood that there would be an elevated risk, certainly for cancer, and to the degree that it was, it would not be for the cancers that they’re finding.”

Dr. Neugut said he sympathized with people who had cancer they attributed to the disaster, but added that their emotional response was not necessarily valid scientifically. “The 9/11 attack was a terrible thing, but it doesn’t cause everything in the world,” he said. “Cancer is a very specific outcome, and in most exposures, you have to be exposed for an extended time before you get the cancer.”

Initially, the money set aside by the law — $2.8 billion to compensate victims and $1.5 billion for monitoring and treatment costs not covered by health insurance — covered mainly respiratory illnesses. (Mental health problems were included in the treatment fund but not the compensation fund.) Studies by the city health department have found asthma and post-traumatic stress disorder to be linked to the 2001 attacks. But cancer is expected to be far more expensive to treat than other qualifying illnesses, and the economic loss caused by cancer could require more compensation, since many cancer patients cannot work, and some have died.

The study was released on Tuesday, and was to be published in the Wednesday issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association — too late to influence Dr. Howard’s decision, but perhaps not too late to influence public opinion going forward or to affect whether Congress will decide to replenish the victim compensation fund should more money be needed.

The fund has not yet begun making payments, and it is supposed to make its final payments in 2016-17. In the meantime, some police officers and other rescue and recovery workers who worked at ground zero and have cancer have been receiving enhanced pension benefits based on a 2005 state law that said they were presumed to have contracted cancer from the ground zero substances.

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Global Update: African Children Still at Risk of Pneumonia Despite Ceramic Stoves

Small ceramic indoor stoves, such as those sold by women in AIDS self-help groups in Africa, do save fuel and cut down on eye-irritating smoke, a new study has found — but they do not save children from pneumonia.

The study, published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, compared 168 households in rural Kenya that used either “upesi jiko” stoves or traditional three-stone indoor fires. The former — the name means “quick stove” in Swahili — has a locally made ceramic firebox that sells for $3. Clay and mud must be built up around it to insulate it and support the pot.

Since it uses less wood, it saves local forests. But it has no chimney, so the smoke stays indoors.

Biweekly visits by researchers found that children in both the stove and open-fire homes got pneumonia equally often. Pneumonia is a leading cause of death for infants in poor countries, and a 2008 study showed that the fine particles and toxic gases in cooking smoke inflame their lungs, doubling the pneumonia risk.

Two years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton committed $50 million in American aid to help the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves get 100 million efficient stoves into households by 2020. But experts are still divided over which stove to pursue; chimneys do not solve all the problems, and stoves with fans burn more cleanly but are expensive and fragile.

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Richard Engel of NBC Is Freed in Syria

Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, and three of his crew members were freed on Monday after five days in captivity in Syria, the news organization said on Tuesday.

The journalists were unharmed. The news organization released a short statement that said, “We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country.”

The identities of the kidnappers and their motives were unknown. But an article on the NBC News Web site quotes Mr. Engel as saying their captors “were talking openly about their loyalty to the government” of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Their kidnapping once again highlights the perils of reporting from Syria, which is said by the Committee to Protect Journalists to be “the world’s most dangerous place for the press.”

NBC declined to specify the number of crew members that were with Mr. Engel. Two of the crew members, John Kooistra and Ghazi Balkiz, appeared with Mr. Engel on NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday morning. A third, Aziz Akyavas, spoke at a news conference in Turkey. Mr. Akyavas said in an interview on the Turkish television channel NTV that a technician who traveled with the crew was still missing. NBC did not respond to a request for comment about that report.

Mr. Engel and the crew members covertly entered Syria several times this year to report on the insurgency that is fighting Mr. Assad there. Mr. Engel was last seen on television last Thursday in a taped report from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, where he reported that “the Syrian regime appears to be cracking, but the rebels remain outgunned.”

In order to transmit their report in safety, Mr. Engel and his crew apparently crossed the border into Turkey. Their effort to cross back into the country on Thursday led to their capture.

About 15 men, Mr. Engel said on the “Today” show, “just literally jumped out of the trees and bushes” and “dragged us out of the car.” The kidnappers killed one of the rebels whom the crew had been traveling with, he said.

NBC’s Web site said there was “no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing.”

Mr. Engel said on “Today” that the kidnappers had a plan to exchange the crew for several people being held by Syrian rebels. “We were told that they wanted to exchange us for four Iranian agents and two Lebanese people who are from the Amal movement,” he said.

But the crew members were freed when the captors “ran into a checkpoint manned by members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group,” NBC’s Web site reported. “There was a confrontation and a firefight ensued. Two of the captors were killed, while an unknown number of others escaped.” The rebels then helped escort the crew to the border with Turkey.

“We are very happy to be back in Turkey,” Mr. Engel said, speaking in front of cameras at Cilvegozu border gate in southern Turkey. He added, “The last five days are the days that we want to forget.”

NBC tried to keep the crew’s disappearance a secret for several days while it sought to ascertain their whereabouts. Its television competitors and many other major news organizations, including The New York Times, refrained from reporting on the situation, in part out of concern that any reporting could worsen the danger for the crew. News outlets similarly refrained from publishing reports about a 2008 kidnapping in Afghanistan of David Rohde of The New York Times and a local reporter, Tahir Ludin. The two reporters escaped in June 2009 after seven months in captivity.

In the case of Mr. Engel, some Web sites reported speculation about his disappearance on Monday. NBC declined to comment until the crew members were safely out of Syria on Tuesday.

While none of the crew members suffered any physical injuries, there was “psychological pressure,” Mr. Akyavas told NTV. He said they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and “every now and then had guns pointed on our heads. It was not pleasant.”

In his comments on “Today” Mr. Engel said: “They made us choose which one of us would be shot first, and when we refused there were mock shootings. They pretended to shoot Ghazi several times.”

The crew members were also filmed for a video that showed them being held in a small, nondescript room.

Mr. Engel is perhaps the best-known foreign-based correspondent on television in the United States. Hop-scotching from Iraq to Afghanistan to Egypt and other countries in recent years, he has had more airtime than any other such correspondent at NBC, ABC or CBS. Thus the news of his kidnapping and safe release is likely to generate widespread interest from viewers.

Mr. Engel has worked for NBC since May 2003, two months into the Iraq war. He was promoted to chief foreign correspondent in 2008. At the time, the NBC News president Steve Capus said, “There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the work that Richard has done in some of the most dangerous places on earth for NBC News. His reporting, his expertise on the situation in the Middle East, his professionalism and his commitment to telling the story of what is happening there is unparalleled.”

The “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams has been among Mr. Engel’s most ardent fans. Without alluding to his disappearance, Mr. Williams brought up Mr. Engel while being interviewed onstage at a charity fund-raiser in New Jersey on Sunday night. “What I know about Richard Engel is, he’s fearless, but he’s not crazy,” Mr. Williams said. When Mr. Engel’s name came up, there was spontaneous applause from the crowd.

Brian Stelter reported from New York and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul. Bill Carter contributed reporting from New York.

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Bobby Kotick of Activision, Drawing Praise and Wrath

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, with images of characters from the Skylanders series, one of the company’s successful franchises.

PEOPLE who love video games love to hate Bobby Kotick.

Mr. Kotick, the C.E.O. of Activision Blizzard, the world’s largest video game publisher, inspired a stocky, auburn-haired character named Money Sack, who, in a game created by a competitor and a former employee, wields a wide grin and an automatic weapon. In another video, Mr. Kotick pops up from behind a fortified wall, and in a husky, ominous voice says he’ll set the price of his biggest game, Call of Duty, to “your soul” — a dig at its cost. Then fiery lasers shoot out of his eyes, wreaking havoc on an apocalyptic fantasy world. In several online photographs he is depicted as the Devil, with red horns against a Hades-like background.

On this particular Sunday, it’s those Photoshopped horns that really irk Mr. Kotick. He is seated at a corner table in the cavernous breakfast room of the Pierre hotel, across the street from Central Park, shaking a leg nervously and whispering in a conspiratorial hush.

“Think about what it’s like for my dating life when the first picture that comes up is me as the Devil,” says Mr. Kotick, who is recently divorced. “You see all this chatter and you realize that they game the search results. These super-sophisticated 19-year-olds are smarter than our expensive P.R. firm.” (His publicist, Steven Rubenstein, shrugs sheepishly.)

Mr. Kotick, 49, has reason to be annoyed. Not since the music industry’s heyday has there been a business with such a wide disparity between the popularity of its products and its customers’ perception of the chief executive who made those products possible. Video games are among the most successful segments in the entertainment industry, and the disdain heaped on Mr. Kotick in video game blogs is second only to the admiration for him on Wall Street.

He bought the company that is now Activision in 1990, when it was nearly bankrupt and when analysts dismissed video games as fads. But in his 22 years as C.E.O. he has built Activision into a company with a stock market value of $12.7 billion, almost three times that of its top rival, Electronic Arts.

Mr. Kotick isn’t the most technology-driven executive. (He still prefers a BlackBerry.) And he doesn’t get into the weeds of creative storytelling; he leaves that to the studios Activision has acquired. But like David Geffen, who never played a musical instrument well but signed Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Eagles, Mr. Kotick has a knack for identifying hit after blockbuster hit. He wakes up each day thinking about those hits — some would say obsessing about them — and how Activision can lavish games like Call of Duty, Diablo and World of Warcraft with ever more bells and whistles to keep customers happy and ensure that the next release is a big success, too.

The latest edition of Activision’s biggest game, the shoot’em-up megahit Call of Duty: Black Ops II, was released Nov. 13 and had sales of $500 million in its first 24 hours and more than $1 billion in the first 15 days. That fell short of some analysts’ expectations but was nevertheless more than the total domestic box-office revenue of “Avatar,” the highest-grossing movie of all time.

BUT expensive, immersive games now face a challenge as free online games from companies like Zynga and Rovio compete for users’ attention. Retail sales of video games in the United States totaled $7.5 billion from January to October, down 26 percent from the same period in 2011, according to the NPD Group.

In response, Activision is doubling down on a handful of games with high margins. The strategy is to have customers pay $60 or more to traverse for hundreds of hours through story lines with orchestral soundtracks and realistic, hologram-like heroes and heroines. With each new version “we need more resources, more time, and our development schedule has to get longer,” Mr. Kotick says. “How do you make the games better each year?”

Developers of Call of Duty took the risky step of bringing the mostly historical war series into the not-so-distant future of 2025. David S. Goyer, co-writer of the story for “The Dark Knight Rises,” was a co-writer on the story for the latest Call of Duty. Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails singer who won an Oscar for the soundtrack of “The Social Network,” did the theme song. Oliver L. North served as an adviser for the game, which features a virtual David H. Petraeus, the former Central Intelligence Agency director.

The Activision strategy relies heavily on the holiday season. “This is a nail-biting time for us,” said Brian G. Kelly, Mr. Kotick’s longtime business partner, who is co-chairman of the Activision Blizzard board.

In the three months ended Sept. 30, Activision exceeded analysts’ expectations and increased its earnings by 53 percent, to $226 million, or 20 cents a share, even as video game console sales declined slightly.

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Mind: A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Control Debate

The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides.

Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ”

Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

This does not mean that mental illness is not a risk factor for violence. It is, but the risk is actually small. Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence.

One of the largest studies, the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which followed nearly 18,000 subjects, found that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.

It’s possible that preventing people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses from getting guns might decrease the risk of mass killings. Even the Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, at the same time endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill.”

But mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mental illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

Jeffery Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence?  ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”

It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”

Even if clinicians could predict violence perfectly, keeping guns from people with mental illness is easier said than done. Nearly five years after Congress enacted the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, only about half of the states have submitted more than a tiny proportion of their mental health records.

How effective are laws that prohibit people with mental illness from obtaining guns? According to Dr. Swanson’s recent research, these measures may prevent some violent crime. But, he added, “there are a lot of people who are undeterred by these laws.”

Adam Lanza was prohibited from purchasing a gun, because he was too young. Yet he managed to get his hands on guns — his mother’s — anyway. If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people.

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.

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Mind: A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Control Debate

The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides.

Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ”

Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

This does not mean that mental illness is not a risk factor for violence. It is, but the risk is actually small. Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence.

One of the largest studies, the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which followed nearly 18,000 subjects, found that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.

It’s possible that preventing people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses from getting guns might decrease the risk of mass killings. Even the Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, at the same time endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill.”

But mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mental illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

Jeffery Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence?  ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”

It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”

Even if clinicians could predict violence perfectly, keeping guns from people with mental illness is easier said than done. Nearly five years after Congress enacted the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, only about half of the states have submitted more than a tiny proportion of their mental health records.

How effective are laws that prohibit people with mental illness from obtaining guns? According to Dr. Swanson’s recent research, these measures may prevent some violent crime. But, he added, “there are a lot of people who are undeterred by these laws.”

Adam Lanza was prohibited from purchasing a gun, because he was too young. Yet he managed to get his hands on guns — his mother’s — anyway. If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people.

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.

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Advertising: Finding a Documentary Audience, for a Cause

DOCUMENTARY films are notoriously difficult to finance, with filmmakers often spending more time scrounging up money to make a film than actually producing it. Unlike big Hollywood films, where having the presence of a marquee name can attract dollars, documentary filmmakers often must try to explain how a niche idea can succeed at the box office.

The director and backers of “Girl Rising,” a documentary that is a cornerstone of a media campaign about educating girls around the world, hope to change that. To promote the new film, and demonstrate the impact that documentaries can have on audiences, they will rely on technologies often used by more traditional advertisers, including personalized ads for employees of companies viewing them online.

“If what you are after is engagement and connection to a cause,” said Richard E. Robbins, the director, “how you use the tools that are available to you is very different than if you are trying to market ‘Batman.’ ”

Money donated by consumers seeing the film will be funneled to a nonprofit group, 10x10, which will then distribute the funds to various nonprofits helping to educate girls.

Many documentary filmmakers have trouble quantifying the social and financial impact their films can have, Mr. Robbins said. And many are confronted with “a dearth of evidence to support the idea that documentary films affect change.”

But using highly targeted advertising can help filmmakers learn who is donating, how much they are donating, how much interest there is in a film and whether there is enough interest to warrant a screening in a city, he said. Having that information might also help persuade future investors to support documentaries connected to causes.

“Girl Rising,” which will be released in March, is being financed in part by 10x10, which supports educating girls around the world through film and social media advocacy.

Ads promoting “Girl Rising” will be shown to employees of 57 companies that the filmmakers selected in hopes they will support efforts to educate girls in developing countries. Those companies include Apple, Bank of America, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Disney and Procter & Gamble.

“Those companies are deeply invested in vibrant economies overseas, healthy supply chains, diversity, attracting and retaining and identifying new employees, skilled employees,” said Holly Gordon, executive director at 10x10. “We thought that they would be advocates for these issues of gender diversity and global education.”

Employees at the companies will see ads on their computers at work, customized to use the company name. For example, an Oracle employee will see an ad that says “Oracle employees can change the world,” with a link to see a trailer for the film and donate to the cause.

A group of former ABC News journalists, known as the Documentary Group, and Vulcan Productions announced the creation of 10x10 and its media campaign at the United Nation’s first International Day of the Girl in October. Additional funds for organization came from Intel, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Nike Foundation, the Skoll Foundation and the Fledgling Fund.

“Girl Rising,” the first film backed by the group, features stories inspired by nine girls in countries like Haiti, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Afghanistan. Some of the segments are narrated by celebrities like Meryl Streep, Selena Gomez and Kerry Washington.

Well-known writers from each of the countries, including Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American author, and Edwidge Danticat of Haiti helped to write the stories of each of the girls to whom they were paired. Each story will be presented differently; some will be animated while others will be live action.

Chris Golec, the chief executive of Demandbase, the company behind the ads, said technology that aimed at the Internet addresses at the companies would be used to find the right users for each ad.

“Targeting people at work is four times more likely to drive engagement than somebody coming from a residential I.P. address,” said Mr. Golec, referring to the Internet addresses of home viewers. “If you personalize the ad with the company name that they work for you get a three times higher click through rate on the ad.”

Using such digital advertising also helps the filmmakers and producers in another way, said Mr. Robbins. “It’s infinitely more trackable, there’s so much more data,” he said. “We can measure conversion rates, who our audience is — its not just anonymous people buying tickets.”

Distribution of “Girl Rising” will be in phases, beginning in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where one chapter will be shown. It will make its official debut in March for International Women’s Day at an event in New York City, and with a smaller event in Los Angeles. CNN will show the film in June as part of the network’s new film division.

Organizers are also using technology to get viewers to book a screening of the film in the city of their choice. Supporters of 10x10 will receive an e-mail asking them to go to a Web site, Gathr.us, which will keep track of the number of screening requests from various cities.

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