Bargains Are Near; Just Keep Waiting

As the economy slows, manufacturers and consumer electronics retailers are growing more anxious — and pushy.

Continue your buying binge, they tell consumers. Now is the best time to buy digital cameras, notebook computers and big-screen televisions, they say.

Annoy them. Wait even longer to buy any electronics. The cardinal rule of the industry is that prices always go down. There is no reason, despite increasing inflation pressures elsewhere in the economy, for that to change this year. Remember that you rarely need new electronic devices.

When you do — or you think you’ve waited long enough — you can turn the makers’ and merchants’ competitive natures to your advantage. The market for digital cameras, flat-panel TV’s and external hard drives for backing up data, an emerging category, are especially tumultuous right now.

Manufacturers are adding myriad features and making pricing more opaque, but there is a method to cut through the confusion to spot the bargains.

If you were shopping at the grocery store and wanted to figure out what the better deal was, the 2-liter bottle of Coke for $1.39 or the six-pack of Pepsi for $3.89, it is a fairly simple equation. For one thing, the unit price is often right there on the store shelf. But even when it is not, you just take the price and divide it by the number of liters or, for the traditionalists, ounces. (The liter bottle is the better deal at 2 cents an ounce.)

What you are really looking for, though, is the deal. You want to find the two-liter bottle of Coke selling for less, per milliliter or ounce, than the one-liter bottle.

Could you do the same thing with consumer electronics to find the sweet spot before you buy? You could if the devices had essentially the same features; in other words, if they were a commodity product, like a DVD player or a wireless router. Many, though, are not.

But if you can strip a product down to its essence, to that one thing that is most important, you might be able to find the bigger or newer product selling for less than the smaller or older. Here are ways to look for the better deal in the competitive markets for cameras, televisions and hard drives:

CAMERAS The shift from film to digital is almost complete. Because of that, demand for digital cameras is expected to slow. Prices have fallen about 9 percent this year, but in certain categories where competition is intense, like the slim cameras, the price decline has been greater. Sales of cameras that are less than an inch thick have increased 131 percent over the last year, according to a survey of retailers by NPD, a consumer products consulting service. The average price for those cameras has fallen 14.7 percent, to $290 from $340.

The prices of digital single-lens-reflex cameras, preferred by professionals and experienced hobbyists, have dropped significantly. About 22 percent of sales in this category were for cameras that cost less than $700. That is remarkable because a year ago, there was not a single camera selling for less than $700.

In the main market of compact cameras, manufacturers were saying last year that consumers were no longer making their purchases based on the picture resolution, measured in megapixels. They were said to be looking at other features like styling, image stabilization or the various automated shooting modes.

It turns out, megapixels still matter. “I don’t think the resolution war is finished yet,” said Liz Cutting, an imaging analyst with NPD. The average price for a 5-megapixel compact camera, which about a third of consumers are buying, has fallen 34.4 percent, to $212 this year. That comes to about $42 a megapixel.

The average price of an 8-megapixel compact camera has fallen even more, about 47 percent, to $394. That’s about $49 a megapixel. With only a 17 percent increase in price for a camera with 60 percent more pixels, manufacturers are encouraging consumers to trade up.

So watch for the anomalies when the 8-megapixel cameras drop below $336, or $42 a megapixel. CompUSA, for instance, was recently offering the 10-megapixel Exilim Z1000 for $400, or $40 a megapixel.

TELEVISIONS Demand for liquid-crystal-display televisions softened in the first part of the year. Inventories grew, so manufacturers cut prices almost 20 percent in the first three months, and another 20 percent in the second quarter.

Samsung and Sony provoked a price war in the market for L.C.D. sets this year as they fought for market share. Sony cut prices twice in one week in May on one 40-inch model.

“They are fighting neck and neck, and both companies really want the No. 1 spot,” said Ross Young, president of DisplaySearch, a TV market consulting firm. “I’d expect it to continue as long as it is this close.”

The L.C.D. price-cutting forced plasma prices to fall faster to stay competitive, even though supply was tight. Plasma TV’s usually cost more than L.C.D.’s, but the gap is narrowing, again presenting opportunities for smart shoppers who prefer the plasma picture.

As those prices drop, makers of the slightly bulkier rear-projection TV’s have swung into action. They are selling larger sizes, 55 inches to 59 inches, and offering them for about the same price as smaller plasma or L.C.D. televisions. Pacific Media Associates, a market analysis firm, found, for instance, that a 50-inch Sony rear-projection TV started the month at $3,500 at major retailers, but by midmonth it had fallen 23 percent, to $2,700.

To give themselves more of an advantage, the makers are selling more rear-projection TV’s with 1080p resolution, or about twice as many pixels as the current 720p models.

The sweet spot in rear projection is less than $40 for each inch of the screen’s 42-inch diagonal measurement compared with about $62 a diagonal inch for an L.C.D. TV of about the same size. In the meantime, one can find plasma sets selling for about $55 to $60 a diagonal inch and even larger sets going for $60 a diagonal inch when some companies, like LG and Hewlett-Packard, set out to win market share. The best advice is to wait and watch for the 1080p plasma or L.C.D. at the same price that the 720p plasma or L.C.D. is selling for now.

EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES Large-capacity hard drives for the home are being pushed as the next must-have device. Consumers need them, marketers say, to back up all the valuable music and movies downloaded on home computers. Sales are growing about 20 percent a year, said Krishna Chander, an analyst with iSuppli, a market analysis firm. “It’s the rage right now,” he said.

These consumer external hard drives are still a very small portion of all the hard drives sold — most are used in PC’s or corporate data storage devices — but nevertheless are affected by trends in the industry. Manufacturers faced an oversupply of the hard drives in the last three months as desktop PC sales slowed. Makers cut prices to slice inventories. At the same time, Seagate’s acquisition of Maxtor enticed rivals to lower prices to try to steal market share while those two companies were distracted.

That has led more manufacturers to push a consumer product. Western Digital, which is fighting hard against Seagate, was selling a 500-gigabyte MyBook hard drive for $200 at Best Buy late last month; that works out to 40 cents a gigabyte. The sweet spot, Mr. Chander said, is about 50 cents to $1 a gigabyte for an external hard drive and about 30 cents a gigabyte for an internal drive.

He does expect price cuts to slow in the latter part of the year and then fall again after Christmas.

You have to wait only 122 more days until Dec. 26.

E-mail: yourmoney@nytimes.com

¶ Saturday, August 26, 2006 0 comments

With Child Sex Sites on the Run, Nearly Nude Photos Hit the Web

In the photograph, the model is shown rising out of a bubble bath, suds dripping from her body. Her tight panties and skimpy top are soaked and revealing. She gazes at the viewer, her face showing a wisp of a smile that seems to have been coaxed from off-camera.

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Steve Forrest for The New York Times

Bonnie Breen, chief booker at Bizzykidz, a prominent booking agency for children, said that many Internet child modeling sites “are clearly not bona fide companies.”

Dark Corners

The first of two articles

Earlier Coverage

Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World (December 19, 2005)

Related

Editors’ Note (August 20, 2006)

The Internet logo for PlayToy Entertainment asserts that its Web site is legal. PlayToy has offered links to other sites with images of little girls.

In just over seven months, the model has become an online phenomenon. She has thousands of fans from around the world, membership lists show, who pay as much as $30 a month to see images of her. According to the posted schedule, new photographs of her — many clearly intended to be erotic, all supposedly taken that week — are posted online every Friday for her growing legions of admirers.

The model’s online name is Sparkle. She is — at most — 9 years old.

Sparkle is one of hundreds of children being photographed by adults, part of what appears to be the latest trend in online child exploitation: Web sites for pedophiles offering explicit, sexualized images of children who are covered by bits of clothing — all in the questionable hope of allowing producers, distributors and customers to avoid child pornography charges.

In recent months, an array of investigations of the child pornography business — by the Justice Department, state and local law enforcement and Congress — have contributed to wholesale shutdowns of some of the most sexually explicit Internet sites trafficking in child images. But they have been rapidly replaced by a growing number of these so-called model sites, Internet locations that offer scores of original photographs of scantily clad under-age children like Sparkle, often posed in ways requested by subscribers.

More than 200 of the sites have been found by The New York Times through online advertising aimed at pedophiles, and a vast majority focus mostly on one child. Almost all the children appear to be between the ages of 2 and 12.

Based on descriptions in online customer forums and in Web pages showing image samples, the children are photographed by people who have frequent access to them. The sites often include images of “guests”: children who are described as a friend of the featured child, but who appear for only a day. The sites say the children come from different parts of the world, including the United States.

Based on the images and wording from online advertisements, the sites show toddlers wearing tight thongs, and slightly older children posing evocatively while wearing makeup and feather boas. There is even a site that offers images of girls and boys who appear to be 5 or 6 years old, wearing just diapers.

In online conversations observed by The Times over four months, pedophiles portrayed model sites as the last of a shrinking number of Internet locations for sexual images of minors.

”I considered the authors of those sites as leaders of a rebellion movement for child porn,” a man calling himself Heartfallen wrote in an online site for pedophiles, discussing the decline in the number of sites featuring images of naked minors. “They’ve vanished. There is much less freedom on the Internet now. We still have a rebellion made up of nonnude child modeling sites. But are they going to suffer the same fate as their predecessors?”

Insight to the Ramsey Case

The secretive world of child exploitation is in the spotlight because of an arrest last week in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty pageant princess. The suspect was a fugitive from charges of possessing child pornography and had exhibited a fascination with the sexual abuse of children.

While many of the recently created sites are veering into new territory, the concept of for-pay modeling sites using children has been around for years. They first appeared in the late 1990’s, when entrepreneurs, and even parents, recognized that there was a lucrative market online for images of girls and boys.

Sites with names like lilamber.com emerged, showing photographs of children, usually modeling in clothes or swimsuits. Their existence set off a fury of criticism in Congress about possible child exploitation, but proposed legislation about such sites never passed.

The sites that have emerged in recent months, however, are markedly different. Unlike the original sites, the newer ones are explicit in their efforts to market to pedophiles, referring to young children with phrases like “hot” and “delicious.” The children involved are far younger, and the images far more sexual, emphasizing the minors’ genitals and buttocks.

Some modeling sites have already attracted the attention of law enforcement. Earlier this year, prosecutors obtained a guilty plea on child pornography charges from Sheila L. Sellinger, then of Shoals, Ind., who had been selling illegal photographs of her 10-year-old daughter on a modeling Web site. Last month, Ms. Sellinger was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison.

Ms. Sellinger, who earned thousands of dollars a week from the pornographic yet clothed images of her daughter, cooperated with law enforcement, leading to the arrest of two men who had been assisting her with her site and had been running several more, court records show.

To attract subscribers, central marketing sites, called portals, list scores of available modeling sites that accept money in exchange for access to children’s images. The portals promote the busiest sites, ranking them by the number of hits they receive.

Such a marketing approach proved effective for some online child pornography businesses that have disappeared over the last year, including those that offered illicit videos of children generated by Webcams.

The Times did not subscribe to any sites, which it first saw referenced in online conversations among pedophiles. The Times followed a link posted in those conversations to forum postings and images on freely accessible pages of the modeling sites. Because those sites appeared to be illegal, The Times was required by law to report what it had found to authorities. Federal law enforcement officials were notified in July about the sites.In contrast to their advertising, many of the sites portray themselves on their main pages as regular modeling agencies trying to find work for their talent. But executives in the legitimate modeling business said that virtually everything about the sites runs contrary to industry practice. Most child images for genuine agencies are password-protected, the executives said, with access granted to companies and casting agents only after a check of their backgrounds.

These executives said that real modeling agencies would refuse to use the types of sexualized images of children sought by pedophiles, not only because they are exploitative and illegal, but also because they would be bad business.

Such images on an agency Web site would drive away many parents who might be seeking representation for their child, executives said; indeed, most photographs of child models are nothing more than head shots. And the legitimate agents provide the phone numbers, addresses and names of their executives so potential clients can contact them; most of the sites aimed at pedophiles not only provide little or no means of contact, but even hide the identities of the owners behind anonymous site registrations.

“These are clearly not bona fide companies, and it’s obvious these are just Web sites for people to go on and view children in an unhealthy manner,” Bonnie Breen, chief booker for the Bizzykidz Agency, a prominent modeling agency for children based in London, said when provided with a description of the emerging modeling sites.

Despite repeated statements on the sites that they are lawful, they may well run afoul of American law. While the issues are far from settled — thus leading to the attempts by Congress to clarify the law — courts have worked over the last two decades to define standards for what constitutes potentially illegal images of children.

‘Lascivious Exhibition’ Standard

Under law, for an image that does not involve a child engaged in a sex act, a court must find that it entails “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area” of a minor to determine that it is child pornography. As a result, courts have ruled that images of naked children were not automatically pornographic, and thus not illegal, while also holding that the mere presence of clothing on a photographed child was not, in itself, adequate to declare the image lawful.

Instead, the courts often apply a six-pronged test, developed in a 1986 case called United States v. Dost, to determine whether an image meets the “lascivious exhibition” standard. That test — which requires a court to examine the child’s pose and attire, the suggestiveness and intent of the image and other factors — includes one standard on whether the child is naked. However, no single standard under Dost is absolute, and courts must continuously examine potentially illegal images while considering each part of the test.

The leading precedent on child pornography involving clothed minors is a federal case known as United States v. Knox, which involved a pedophile who obtained erotic videos of girls. In that 1994 case, the Federal Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of the pedophile, Stephen Knox, saying explicitly that clothing alone did not automatically mean that images of children were legal.

“The harm Congress attempted to eradicate by enacting the child pornography laws is present when a photographer unnaturally focuses on a minor child’s clothed genital area with the obvious intent to produce an image sexually arousing to pedophiles,” the court’s ruling says. “The rationale underlying the statute’s proscription applies equally to any lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area whether these areas are clad or completely exposed.”

While adult pornography has some First Amendment protections, there are no such protections for child pornography. Still, some experts have expressed discomfort, in general, at criminalizing clothed pictures of minors.

“This is a difficult area,” said Michael A. Bamberger, a First Amendment specialist at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, based in New York, who filed a brief on behalf of a booksellers’ group in the Knox case. “The whole history of the exception from First Amendment protections for child pornography is based on the harm to the child. But there is in my view a free speech issue with respect to designating photographs of persons under the age of 18 who are clothed as child pornography.”

But Mr. Bamberger expressed uncertainty about whether his concerns applied when told details of the model sites found by The Times. “To me, it sounds as if you are really talking about nude equivalents, almost like cellophane clothing, and that’s not clothing at all.”To distinguish between illegal images and, say, photographs of children posing in underwear for a store catalog, the court said it had to apply the Dost standards and review a range of facts, like the nature of the images and whether the marketing was intended to appeal to pedophiles.

For example, the court noted, a potential customer could know the images of minors were illegal if they were marketed with statements proclaiming that they would “blow your mind so completely you’ll be begging for mercy.” Explicit listing of the children’s ages, along with sexually loaded terms like “hot,” could also be used as evidence of illegality, the court said.

The modeling sites reviewed by The Times incorporated many such references to encourage viewers to subscribe.

That is true for one of the most successful collections of sites, according to some portal rankings, run by an entity called PlayToy Entertainment. On its central site, PlayToy holds itself out as a company that helps children start modeling careers. There is, however, no phone number, address or prominent e-mail address available for companies that might seek to hire the girls or for parents who might want their children to be models.

The central PlayToy site originally located by The Times contained links to as many as six sites featuring little girls. In recent days, the central site has been redesigned, removing the links to the girls’ individual sites.

Those sites still exist, however, including the one for the girl called Sparkle. Another site features a prepubescent girl named Lolly — a widely used online code word for pornographic images of girls. There are even sexualized images of a girl called Baby, who appears younger than 5 and whose photographs seem to go back as far as her second birthday or earlier, when she was still in diapers.

The marketing makes clear that this is no typical modeling company.

“Call 911 before viewing!!!” proclaims the site for Sparkle, which shows her in a thong so revealing that she appears to be naked below the waist. The ad for the site uses words that echo those cited in the Knox decision, reading, “Only 9 years old! Hot!”

Other PlayToy sites are more explicit. “Feel her breathe on your face, take a gentle touch from your screen, open your mind and push the limits,” reads the site for the girl called Lolly. “If you are ready to handle this trip, PlayToy Lolly is calling.”

An advertisement for another PlayToy site, featuring a girl called Peach, declares, “A peach has never looked so delicious.**8 years old**.”

The site includes a picture of the young girl wearing a tank top pulled off one shoulder. Directly below that is a purple emblem with the company name and the words, “Nonnude website: 100% legal.”

But experts said that assurance was almost certainly not true. Based on the ages of the children, the marketing words and customer comments on the PlayToy sites described to him by The Times, a lead lawyer in the Knox case said that the subscribers had plenty of reason to worry.

“They shouldn’t have any comfort that they are not breaking the law,” said Edward W. Warren, a partner from the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis who helped to argue Knox as a representative of 234 members of Congress who joined the case. “This sounds worse and more graphic and more grotesque than what we were dealing with, particularly given how young the children are.”

The assurance by the company that the sites are lawful is irrelevant to any potential prosecution, experts said. Indeed, in the Knox decision, the court held that defendants could be found guilty if they were aware of the “general nature and character” of images that they bought involving clothed children in sexual poses.

“The child pornography laws would be eviscerated if a pedophile’s personal opinion about the legality of sexually explicit videos was transformed into the applicable law,” the court held.

In their comments on PlayToy’s site, which can be viewed without registering with the company, the subscribers make clear that they are aware these are sites for pedophiles, not legitimate modeling clients.

“I think it would be awesome to have the models start off fetchingly clothed, and then strip down to tops or panties (or thongs!!),” a customer calling himself head2fat wrote on the forum.

Another client, calling himself ludwig66, instead requested that the girls appear in stockings, “ending up removing them to reveal bare feet and legs.” And still another customer, calling himself littlefeet, asked the site owners to pose the girl known as Baby in bare feet with her toes pointed, “so all of those beautiful wrinkles show!!!”

While PlayToy’s management and its members repeatedly assure themselves online about the legality of their images, they did not hesitate to post images from known child pornography sites. For example, when Ms. Sellinger was arrested this year for selling photos of her daughter, PlayToy members — and even the site operator — posted messages of dismay, referring to both mother and daughter by name. They also composed a photographic homage to the girl in the forum discussion, using images from the site that had been deemed illegal.

PlayToy’s sites have been online since October, company records show. But in that short time, the records show, 6,000 people have subscribed to view the images of the girls. Each subscriber is paying $30 a month for each site; that means the operators have collected a minimum of $180,000 in that short time, assuming every subscriber bought only one site for one month.

The cash has been collected either by credit card — processed through a company called Advanced Internet Billing Services, or through Western Union payments — as well as through an online money system called e-gold. A Tortuous Digital Trail

Attempts to learn the identities of the people behind PlayToy suggested many possible locations. Payments through Western Union were processed through Ukraine. An administrative e-mail address suggested the company was based in Russia. Using a commercial software program, The Times traced messages sent by the PlayToy sites back to servers in Germany and obtained what is known as the Internet protocol address of that online host.

An examination of the registration documents for the sites’ names led to a company that is essentially a front, permitting its name to be used as the registrant by people who wish to remain anonymous.

The Times then obtained business records about the site prepared by someone involved in its operation.

If true, the records show the name, address, telephone number and other personal information of a man in Florida who is involved in running the site. An e-mail address listed in the records was traced to postings that appeared in pedophile conversation sites, including comments praising child pornography and images of young girls in thongs. Because of the possibility of identity theft, The Times has elected not to publish the name of that man or of associates who also appear to be involved in the business.

The Florida man did not return a voice mail message left on his cellphone or respond to an e-mail message.

Still, even if the operators of PlayToy are positively identified and compelled to shut their sites, the growing business of model sites would probably continue to thrive. PlayToy’s many subscribers, a large number of whom identify themselves on the site as living in America, could simply drift over to other model sites, all offering similar fare.

There, on each of those hundreds of competing sites, the subscribers will find at least one other little girl who, every few days or so, is dressed in panties or thongs, placed in a bathtub or posed on a bed, while a nearby adult snaps pictures for the delight of a paying audience of thousands.

¶ Sunday, August 20, 2006 0 comments

Need for Battery Power Runs Into Basic Hurdles of Science

It always seems to happen: Long before it is time to stow your tray table, your laptop battery gives out, and you spend the rest of your cross-country trip reading the SkyMall catalog.

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In the information age, people want their electronics everywhere they go, and they want them to be on all the time. But they rely on batteries that have not improved as rapidly as the devices they power. Moore’s Law, which offers a yardstick for the exponential advances in computer chips, has no counterpart in the world of batteries.

Researchers are certainly trying to improve the situation, in part because there is money to be made. Portable rechargeable batteries are expected to be a $6.2 billion market this year, and more than one billion batteries will be made by some of the largest electronics companies in the world: Sony, Sanyo, Matsushita and Samsung.

But scientists are running into some basic hurdles of chemistry and physics. The more energy they store in a small package, the more volatile and dangerous that package becomes.

The volatility of batteries in laptops, and those powering millions of portable consumer devices from cellphones to power drills, was made apparent Monday with Dell’s recall of 4.1 million laptop batteries. Dell said the batteries, made by Sony, could catch fire because of a problem in the manufacturing process.

Though the chance of a flaming notebook is small, the number of incidents involving burning batteries is rising each year because there are so many more devices using small and powerful power sources.

There is another pressing reason for the quest for improvements: battery-powered cars. An electric car needs a power source that is 2,000 times as powerful as a laptop battery. “That size would be extremely dangerous,” said Sanjeev Mukerjee, a chemistry and chemical biology professor at Northeastern University. “This technology has a downside, and that is that it is very sensitive to how it is manufactured.”

The potential for fire in a lithium-ion battery is a result of its chemical composition. Contained in that small package are all the elements needed for a fierce blaze: carbon, oxygen and a flammable fluid. The battery is made of a thin layer of lithium cobalt oxide, which serves as the cathode, and a strip of graphite, the anode. These are separated by a porous insulator and surrounded by fluid, a lithium salt electrolyte that happens to be highly flammable.

When the battery is charged, lithium ions on the cathode migrate to the anode. As the battery is used, the ions migrate back to provide the energy. In the charged state, the cathode without most of its ions is highly unstable. If a spark occurs, the temperature of the cathode can exceed 275 degrees.

That is hot enough to cause the cathode to decompose and release oxygen. A fire starts, and as heat builds the battery begins what scientists call a “thermal runaway.” In the case of the Sony-made batteries recalled by Dell, a microscopic metal particle that contaminated the electrolyte during manufacturing caused the spark.

Scientists are looking for new battery chemistry that does not involve carbon, oxygen and fuel. One route is to make an electrolyte that is not flammable, said Jai Prakash, associate professor of chemical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But much of the work is concentrated on replacing the cobalt-based cathode with magnesium. Others want to get the carbon out of the system. Sony, for instance, has a new generation of batteries that use tin.

Valence Technology, a maker of alternatives to lithium-ion batteries in Austin, Tex., uses a phosphate-based cathode. “Consumers do a lot of bad things to battery packs,” said James R. Akridge, Valence’s chief executive. “These provide an extra measure of safety if they shake it or smack it.”

Valence products are used in Segway scooters and hospital diagnostic equipment. But the company has no intentions of competing against the large lithium-ion battery makers in the market for consumer devices. Mr. Akridge said the big companies dominate because they compete on price, and “price is determined by scale.”

As consumers demand more from notebooks and cellphones, the electronics industry may need a whole new way of thinking about power supplies. The most likely candidates are miniaturized versions of the fuel cells that are being developed for cars. Fuel cells use hydrogen, but because hydrogen is hard to store and handle, many microcells get hydrogen from fuels like methanol.

Microcells intrigue companies that make laptops, cellphones and other portable devices because they can store far more energy than comparably sized batteries. Methanol-based microcells, for instance, have roughly 10 times the energy density, creating the prospect of wireless laptops that could run all day without recharging, according to Rick Cooper, vice president for business development of PolyFuel Inc. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., supplies components to several Asian manufacturers that have been working on such devices.

“The energy capacity of batteries is increasing 5 percent to 8 percent annually, but demand is increasing exponentially,” Mr. Cooper said.

The tweaking of materials and chemicals in the lithium-ion battery will extend its usefulness for at least another decade or more, said Gao Liu, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He expects innovation to come slowly.

“We don’t see any new energy storage devices,” Mr. Liu said. The best bet for the future is probably fuel cells, he said, but it may be more than a decade before they start appearing in mass-market portable devices.

Microcells have been just over the industry’s horizon since Toshiba demonstrated a prototype at a trade show in 2003. Pulling together all of the components has proved more challenging than fuel cell advocates predicted.

Manufacturers of fuel cells have been looking to the military and niche markets like users of professional video cameras as their first customers.

Nanotechnology, the fast-developing field that involves manipulating materials at scales measured in billionths of a meter, is likely to play a significant role in the future of consumer batteries. One essential for further development of current battery designs is the ability to cram more energy into today’s packaging. Nanoscale processes could be used to make the surfaces of electrodes more porous, creating a larger surface area for chemical reactions.

Nanotechnology could also help improve the performance of competing technology like fuel cells. “Designer” molecules and films that could act as improved catalysts in fuel cells are a hot research area.

But to some nanotechnology companies, consumer batteries are too competitive to be a high priority. Altair Nanotechnologies, based in Reno, Nev., claims that its technology has safety advantages over lithium-ion batteries, but Altair executives say the difference would not be enough to win over makers of laptops and cellphones. Nor could Altair compete on cost.

“If you go into laptops, you are competing with well-entrenched companies that make millions of batteries and have been doing it for years,” said Alan J. Gotcher, Altair’s chief executive.

¶ Thursday, August 17, 2006 0 comments

Atkins backlash?
Each year, Americans spend more on healthy food, diet books, and exercise equipment. And each year, Americans get heavier, which makes obesity treatment a growth industry. The logical investment thesis: Invest in an organic-foods company and in a chain of surgical centers specializing in liposuction.

When the Atkins diet was all the rage in the early part of this decade and millions of Americans shifted away from carbohydrates and toward proteins, there was another obvious paired trade: Buy the stock of protein-pushers like steakhouses and meat processors and sell the stock of carbohydrates machines like bakeries and pasta makers. After all, in 2004, carb-dependent companies rushed to use the Atkins excuse to explain poor results. By early 2005, the shift to protein was creating a chicken boom.

But in the last year, the balance of power between carbs and proteins has shifted, in part because of diets and in part because of global economic trends. As a result, there seems to be a glut of protein and a huge demand for corn and grain.

The July 31 earnings release from Tyson, the nation's biggest meat processor, tersely noted that "[o]versupply of proteins negatively impacted sales prices and operating results." Across the board, prices for its products were down sharply: 13.9 percent for chicken, 8 percent for beef, and 5.2 percent for pork. And thanks to higher energy and operating costs, the company lost money on its operations. The next day, No. 2 chicken processor Pilgrim's Pride likewise reported a loss. The culprit: too many chicken parts chasing too few mouths. O.B. Goolsby Jr., the company's chief executive officer, cited the "challenging protein environment seen in the first half of the fiscal year." In a set of illuminating charts, Pilgrim's Pride noted that consumption of all red meat and poultry fell 0.2 percent in 2005 and is projected to rise just 0.7 percent this year. Earlier this week, Gold Kist, a big chicken producer, similarly blamed its quarterly loss on "an oversupply of broilers and competing meats and low export sales prices." Here's the sad-looking one-year chart of Gold Kist, Tyson, and Pilgrim's Pride against the S&P 500. Meanwhile, the stock of steakhouse chain Morton's, a barometer for Americans' relative preference for beef, has performed poorly since its initial public offering earlier this year.

Overcapacity and fears of avian flu and mad-cow disease aren't the only factors hurting the profits of protein-based companies. They're being forced to swallow higher costs for energy and for their main input: the carbohydrates they use to fatten up chickens, pigs, and cattle. For in the last year, as the price of protein has plummeted, carbs have been enjoying a bull run. Check out these charts that track futures prices on corn, wheat, and soybeans at the Chicago Board of Trade during the last year. The trends for corn and wheat have been up significantly, while soybeans have fallen somewhat. That translates into thinner margins for protein companies. Gold Kist noted that for the nine months ended July 1, 2006, the average price of corn was 4.5 percent higher than in the previous year. Pilgrim's Pride noted that through the third quarter of the current fiscal year, the price it paid for corn was up 5.2 percent. And, according to this presentation (see Page 9 of the PDF), the U.S. Department of Agriculture and traders at the Chicago Board of Trade expect the price of corn to rise sharply in the coming year.

High crop prices are good news for the farmers who grow carbohydrates and for the companies that process them. ADM, one of the world's biggest processors of grains and oilseeds, just reported record annual results, with sales, margins, and profits all on the rise. Here's a one-year chart of ADM against the S&P 500.

But here's where the diet thesis breaks down: The prices of corn and grains aren't rising because people are consuming more to fuel their bodies. They're rising because people are consuming more carbohydrates to fuel their cars. Amid the investment boom surrounding alternative energy, a great deal of capital is flowing into ethanol, and corn is the main ingredient in ethanol. In its annual outlook, the Renewable Fuels Association noted that in 2005, ethanol production rose 17 percent to 4 billion gallons, more than double the 2001 total. In 2005, according to the National Corn Growers Association, 14.6 percent of corn production, or 1.575 billion bushels, went to produce ethanol. At the end of 2005, there were 29 refineries under construction with a combined annual capacity of 1.5 billion gallons. The ethanol boom has increased both demand—and hypothetical future demand—for corn and other biomass. Today, ethanol plants increasingly compete with protein-raisers to buy corn. To be sure, environmental factors such as weather and pestilence affect the price of corn, but the capital and excitement surrounding the ethanol market is also helping to push up the price of corn.

On Wall Street, protein is down and carbs are up. But it has less to do with what we're stuffing into our mouths than what we're funneling into our SUVs.

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¶ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 0 comments

Several months after injuring my shoulder in October 2004, I flew to my hometown of Houston and paid out of pocket to consult a trusted family doctor about the pain that inexplicably wouldn't go away. He examined my clothed torso for about 15 seconds before offering this perfunctory analysis: "You're getting older, and your body's falling apart—it happens to the best of us. Something new'll break down every day, so you might as well start adapting."

When I protested feebly that I'd just turned 27, he threw up his arms and laughed. "I know—terrible, isn't it? Now don't forget to say hi to your mother for me, or you'll be in big trouble!" With that, he called for the next patient.

I tried, in the ensuing months, to embrace this philosophical outlook, to regard my pain with detached stoicism. By this past February—after traveling, with mixed results, to China and then to India in search of alternative remedies—I'd given up on fixing my shoulder for good and sought only the occasional stopgap. Back in Texas, I began receiving weekly vitamin B-12 injections from a protégé of Dr. Janet Travell, whose trigger-point injections of procaine JFK said got him through his Senate term and into the White House. To show his gratitude for these injections—and doubtless also for her lies about his health in the run-up to the 1960 election—JFK appointed Travell his back doctor and also the first, and to this day only, female chief White House physician. I liked this oblique connection to presidential (and feminist) history. I didn't care that the B-12 injections were expensive ($250) and their benefits short-lived, lasting a week at best.

But satisfaction, like some psychiatry services, operates on a sliding scale. Four injections and $1,000 after my first visit, temporary relief was no longer good enough. When I returned to New York, a friend advised me to contact Dr. Norman Marcus, who runs an eponymous pain institute a few blocks from Grand Central. Dr. Marcus, it turned out, was the protégé of another Kennedy back doctor, Hans Kraus. He reintroduced the question posed on umpteen topics, from Vietnam to civil rights: What if the president had lived? In this case, the follow-up was: Might the history of back pain have been different?

Kraus began treating JFK in October 1961. Over the next two years, the president submitted to supervised strengthening exercises and occasional "needling" procedures to soften the knots and break up the trigger points in his muscles. Kraus' treatment produced spectacular results. The back pain that had dogged Kennedy since late adolescence gradually diminished, and legend has it he was almost ready to remove the corset that kept him catastrophically upright after the first two shots were fired from the Dallas book depository.

Kraus and now Marcus think the most pervasively undiagnosed cause of pain is muscular in origin. It's a pretty straightforward theory: Because muscles account for more than 50 percent of the body's weight, they must surely be responsible for some of the body's pain as well. Curiously, though, there is no standardized diagnostic label for muscular pain, no universal treatment protocol. Over the past 19 months, I'd consulted endless highly recommended specialists—orthopedists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, chiropractors, acupuncturists, physical therapists—and not a single one had so much as mentioned muscles.

At my first meeting with Dr. Marcus, I was surprised when he didn't demand to see my MRIs or X-rays. He told me he considers imaging studies overused, no substitute for the good, old-fashioned physical exam. Dr. Marcus began by asking me what hurt and where, and during which activities. Then, after kneading my back and evaluating my range of motion, he used an electrical "muscle pain detection device" to contract my muscles and reproduce the motions of everyday activities. This step is crucial, he told me, because most exams assess bodies at rest, while people with muscle injuries usually experience pain in action.

On my back, the instrument glided painlessly over the scapular peninsula that throbbed and pinched after five minutes of typing or driving—a common enough occurrence, Dr. Marcus explained, since we don't necessarily feel pain at the place where it originates. And sure enough, at the infraspinatus and the teres major, almost a hand's width away from my scapula, the device that had passed so smoothly over my central back caused me to yelp out loud.

Dr. Marcus could now treat the trigger points. Several days later, I showed up at his office on an empty stomach. He injected Demerol into my arm, numbed my back with topical lidocaine, and—before I could finish telling him about my weekend—began stabbing my back with a needle, mashing up the hardened tissue there. If this sounds dramatic, trust me, it wasn't. I felt no pain until later that evening, and within the hour, I was crumpled in a taxi, en route home. Later that evening, I examined my back in the mirror and was delighted by the reticulation of red dots zigzagging its contour.

For the next three days, I returned to Dr. Marcus' office for physical therapy. He hooked me up to a neuromuscular electrical stimulator that rehabilitates the injected muscle. He also taught me the upper-body Kraus-Weber exercises his mentor developed in the 1950s, which are critical for the upkeep of healthy muscles. Between appointments, I set the kitchen timer as a reminder to change my body position every 15 minutes. Several times an hour, I rose and circled the apartment, or harassed the cats, or ate, or practiced my exercises. Even with all these breaks, I got more work done than before, since I no longer retired to the tub after two hours.

By the end of the week, my knotted right shoulder, source of protracted, high-pitched agony, was squishier than a wet uncooked slab of steak. No Baywatch boob job has stirred such buyer's pride: I couldn't stop showing off my shoulder and its gorgeous new slope. But, as Dr. Marcus warned, the injury so long untreated has given rise to smaller aches and imbalances. Without hesitation, I made an appointment for another round of injections, this time targeted at my pectoralis major.

Following this treatment, I woke up a little looser every day—almost, astonishingly, pain-free. I'm functional for the first time in 19 months, but I'm still not, as the sportscasters say, 100 percent. And now that's what I want. I don't have to get my scalene muscles injected next week, but why shouldn't I? If my pain is treatable, why shouldn't I treat it?

No more adapting for me, no more aging before my time. Along with reading in bed and watching TV lying down—both major causes of the isometric muscle contractions that lead to trigger points—I've given up browsing catalogs filled with wheelchairs and quad canes. Don't get me wrong, I still like a good orthopedic sandal. But after next week's injections, I think I'll buy a new pair of running shoes instead.

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¶ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 0 comments

Skin Cancer Up Among Young; Tanning Salons Become Target

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times

Since 2003, 19 states have passed laws restricting access to tanning salons.

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Even the most conscientious health officials cannot keep the sun from rising; so in response to an unexplained increase in skin cancer among young people, some have fixed their sights on a more governable suspect: the $5 billion-a-year indoor tanning industry.

Since 2003, 19 states have passed laws restricting access to tanning salons among those under 18. State laws have been adopted in the past year in New York and New Jersey, as have local laws in Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk and Rockland Counties.

Though less stringent than some health advocates would like, the new legislation reflects a growing sense of alarm among public health organizations about unregulated use of tanning beds by young people, especially teenage girls.

In the last two years, the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Dermatology have labeled tanning beds as the health-peril equivalent of cigarettes. All have urged prohibiting their use by minors.

“If adults want to make the decision to use tanning beds, fine,” said Dr. James M. Spencer, clinical professor of dermatology at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and a co-author of a 2004 paper published by the Academy of Dermatology proposing regulations to bar minors in tanning salons. “But we don’t sell cigarettes to minors, and indoor tanning is similar — we know it will cause cancer. Not maybe. Not might. It’s going to cause cancer. No one under 18 should be allowed to use those things.”

There has been contradictory evidence about the relationship between skin cancer and ultraviolet light. In 2002, the federal government’s National Toxicology Program listed broad-spectrum ultraviolet radiation, whether from sunlight or sun lamps, as a known cause of both melanoma and the less lethal forms of skin cancer in humans.

Some studies, however, including one conducted by the Food and Drug Administration’s Working Group on Sunlamps, suggest a more ambiguous linkage. The working group’s study said that while it was suggestive of a link, the evidence that ultraviolet light causes skin cancer was inconclusive. And, while the reported incidence of skin cancer has been on the rise, some cancer researchers have suggested that greater vigilance in cancer screening may be part of the reason.

In response to the broadside against it by various medical organizations, the tanning industry has mounted a vigorous counteroffensive to persuade lawmakers to circumscribe the regulation of an industry that until recently was virtually free to serve clients of any age. Since 2001, the Indoor Tanning Association has retained the services of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a Washington lobbying firm.

Claiming that 30 million people safely use tanning facilities each year in the United States, industry representatives have argued their case against age-limit bills in state capitols across the country.

“The dermatologists have been trying to link indoor tanning to skin cancer for 20 years, and there is no proof,” said John Overstreet, executive director of the tanning association, which represents several thousand tanning parlor owners and equipment distributors nationally. “Melanoma takes years to develop,” he said. “So for them to say that we are causing an increase in melanoma among young people — well, it’s the opposite of the truth.”

Melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer, claims an estimated 8,000 lives annually in the United States. It is the most common cancer in young women aged 25 to 29, according to recent dermatological studies.

Despite the lack of indisputable evidence of the cause, however, dermatologists have taken a hard line against tanning. They point to three intersecting reasons for concern — the rising number of melanomas being diagnosed, studies indicating possible links between melanomas and sunburning in early life, and the popularity of tanning among teenage girls — to support their proposal to bar those under 18 from indoor tanning parlors.

While it has been unable to stop a tide of new restrictions, the tanning lobby has consistently fought to limit outright prohibitions against serving minors, and so far, none of the laws ban all people under 18. Most set the minimum age requirement at 14.

“Personally, I don’t think they go far enough,” said Dr. Darrell S. Rigel, past president of the American Academy of Dermatology and a professor of dermatology at N.Y.U. Medical Center. “But there are 60,000 tanning salons in this country, and only 8,000 of us practicing dermatologists. So the reality is our proposals will get watered down.”

The Texas Dermatological Association pushed for a bill to bar those under 18 from tanning salons, but settled for a law passed in 2001 that set the cutoff at 13.

“We wanted to have photos posted in every tanning parlor, showing the different types of skin cancer,” said Dr. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, who was then president of the Texas Dermatological Association and is now a member of the Houston City Council. “That was shot down, too.”

The new laws in New York and New Jersey, which ban all children under 14, are among the toughest in the nation. Only California’s law is as strict. In Massachusetts, Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, Florida and Louisiana, for example, children under 14 are allowed to visit tanning salons accompanied by a parent. In Michigan, the statute only suggests parental consent.

“We’re very grateful for the law passed in the New York State Legislature,” said Colette Coyne of New Hyde Park, the mother of a 30-year-old woman who died of melanoma and one of a cadre of private citizens lobbying for restrictions around the country. “But in order to get these bills passed, you have to accept certain limits.”

Mr. Overstreet, the industry lobbyist, traveled to Albany to meet with the sponsor of the New York bill, Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr., a Republican from Long Island. “He was very receptive to what we had to say,” Mr. Overstreet said.

He said he made a pitch for what he termed “a parent’s right to decide,” and argued against any law that restricted it. “I contend that very few youngsters are using our facilities anyway, and that making these laws — there’s no point to it,” he said.

Mr. Fuschillo said he never considered a bill to bar all minors from tanning salons. He said no one suggested one, including Ms. Coyne, with whom he also met. “Our purpose was to protect children from excessive exposure to ultraviolet rays, not to put anybody out of business,” he said.

In the suburbs around New York City, where a fad in indoor tanning has taken hold among children of high school age, local laws have been adopted during the past year in Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland Counties that in some cases are slightly stricter than the state laws.

In Suffolk County, for example, the law passed in June prohibits anyone under 14 from using a tanning bed, just as the state law does, but adds the requirement that the parents of those 14 to 17 must sign a consent form in the presence of the tanning operator, renewable every six months.

“I was a high school teacher, and I remember sending one girl to the school nurse because her skin was so leathery I thought she had a condition of some sort,” said Vivian Viloria-Fisher, the Suffolk County legislator who sponsored the measure. “The nurse just said, ‘Oh, she’s just been tanning at a salon.’ ”

In Rockland County, after a heated debate involving lawmakers, industry representatives and local members of the American Cancer Society, the County Legislature passed one of the strictest laws in the country earlier this month. It bans children under 16 from using tanning beds. For 16- and 17-year-olds, a parent has to be present during the first session and then sign a consent form that must be renewed every month.

“This is one of the most obnoxious laws I ever saw,” said one of the legislators, Patrick J. Moroney of Pearl River, during the public hearing on Aug. 1. “So a teenager can have an abortion but not get a tan without her parent’s consent?”

In the audience, a small group of owners and distributors softly applauded the remark. One of them, Louis DiGioia, who identified himself as a distributor of tanning beds, later addressed the lawmakers, saying, “What you’re doing with this legislation is telling people how to raise their kids.”

Alden H. Wolfe, the Suffern lawmaker who introduced the bill, said its intent was the opposite: “to put parents back into the equation.”

Although various studies have shown steady increases in skin cancer, including melanoma, dermatologists are most troubled by a jump in its incidence among the young.

“The tanning industry will say there is no study that says if you go to tanning salons you will get cancer, and they’re right; we’re all exposed to sun from the day we’re born,” said Robin Ashinoff, the director of dermatologic Mohs and laser surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. To her and other advocates, though, the possibility that using sunlamps increases the risk of skin cancer is enough reason to seek protections for children.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from New York City, has sponsored a bill requiring that a clearly legible sign be prominently posted on all tanning beds citing the National Toxicology Report listing of ultraviolet light as a known carcinogen. “In my view, this is a women’s issue,” she said. “It is women who are using these tanning facilities, and they who are the most at risk.”

She cited a study by the American Academy of Dermatology last year indicating that Caucasian women between age 16 and 49 make up 70 percent of those who regularly visit tanning salons.

One such woman, Emily Konesky, 20, who lives near Buffalo and has been a regular indoor tanner from the age of 15, was found to have melanoma last year, three days after her 19th birthday.

“My friends and I started using tanning beds in our freshman year,” she said. “There were always coupons for free visits circulating around the high school — ‘bring a friend, get one free’ — and by the time I was 16 I was going about three times a week.”

Melanoma has occurred before in her extended family, and she suspects that there is a genetic factor in her illness. “But I never thought it would happen at 19,” she said. “I can’t help thinking there was a connection to my tanning.”

Mr. Overstreet, the lobbyist, would disagree.

“There may be an increase in skin cancer,” he said, “but there are many complex factors that could be involved, including climate change and the ozone. The fact is, medical science has no idea why there is an increase in skin cancer. No idea.”

¶ Monday, August 14, 2006 0 comments