Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work out of their home in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

Read More..

Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work out of their home in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

Read More..

Bits Blog: Intel Chief Executive to Retire in May

8:21 p.m. |Update

SAN FRANCISCO — After almost 40 years at Intel, its chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, is retiring, just as the company struggles with a momentous challenge: computing’s big shift to mobile devices.

Mr. Otellini, 62, surprised the technology world Monday by announcing that he would retire as an officer and director of the chip company this May, three years before he hits Intel’s mandatory retirement age. The board said it would immediately begin a search for a successor.

During a tenure that began in May 2005, Mr. Otellini established a strong track record. He increased Intel’s revenue 57 percent, to $55 billion at the end of 2011, and slightly widened its gross profit margin. Along the way, Mr. Otellini had to settle an antitrust suit for $1.25 billion, persuaded Apple to put Intel chips in its computers and cut 20,000 workers. Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, now employs 100,000 people.

But the company’s share price has fallen about 20 percent in Mr. Otellini’s time. That is because the world of personal computers and computer servers, which Intel dominated partly through a close relationship with Microsoft, now competes with a global explosion of smartphones and tablets, which connect to large data centers. While Intel has some presence in these areas, it faces many new competitors and challenges, both to its business and to its way of thinking about products.

The right successor to Mr. Otellini, said Andrew Bryant, Intel’s chairman, would preserve Intel’s engineering-driven culture but turn it into an organization that is better able to anticipate rapidly changing consumer tastes.

“We don’t see the PC category going away, but we see that the market has changed,” Mr. Bryant said. “We need to figure out what the market wants.”

Mr. Otellini could not be reached for comment. In a statement issued by Intel, he said that “after almost four decades with the company and eight years as C.E.O., it’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership.”

Last month Intel reported that its third-quarter net income fell 14.3 percent from a year earlier, to $3 billion, largely because of poor demand for PCs. The research firm IDC said that worldwide PC shipments fell 8.6 percent to 87.8 million units in the third quarter. Adding to the woes, Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which Intel hoped would lift sales, was released in October to tepid reviews.

While they are both hurting from the PC plunge, Intel and Microsoft may be the best off of a troubled bunch. Last week, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s top competitor in chips for PCs, was forced to deny rumors that it was looking for a buyer. Its stock is down about 65 percent this year. Hewlett-Packard and Dell, both big PC makers, are also struggling.

Mr. Bryant said that Mr. Otellini had informed the board of his decision last Wednesday, citing a need for new leadership. He credited Mr. Otellini with putting Intel on track to produce chips that require less power. That is important both for battery-dependent smartphones and for data centers running hundreds of thousands of servers.

He also noted Mr. Otellini’s efforts in spearheading a category of lightweight laptop computers called ultrabooks, which have yet to take off in the market. Mr. Otellini also championed a wireless technology called WiMAX that never lived up to its billing.

Intel influences PC manufacturers in a number of ways. Besides designing and making the very core of their products, Intel also invests heavily in related fields; for example, through its venture arm it created a $300 million fund to promote ultrabooks. And it teaches its customers what they can do with each new generation of Intel chips, which in turn leads to new software development.

While Intel will look at both internal and external candidates, Mr. Bryant said, an internal candidate would probably prove a better fit, as that person would understand the culture. In its 45-year history, all of Intel’s five chief executives have been insiders.

Mr. Otellini’s departure is the third exit of a prominent executive from a major tech company in the last few weeks. In late October, Scott Forstall, who was the head of Apple’s mobile software development, was fired by Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive. Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows at Microsoft, left the company a week ago, just after the introduction of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet. His brash personality led to internal clashes, and he and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, agreed that it was time for him to go, according to a person briefed on the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

While both of those men were regarded as abrasive by those who worked with them, Mr. Otellini was not. A generally well-liked San Francisco native with an M.B.A. from Berkeley, Mr. Otellini was considered a break from Intel’s norm when he became chief because he was not formally trained in engineering.

But Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, drew a connection between the departures of the Microsoft and Intel executives.

“While Sinofsky and Otellini are gone for different reasons, underneath it similar forces are at work,” said. “Microsoft and Intel haven’t done a good job making PCs more compelling, and people are spending their dollars for electronics differently.”

Read More..

Hamas Strengthens as Palestinian Authority Weakens

RAMALLAH, West Bank — In the daily demonstrations here of solidarity with Gaza, a mix of sympathy and anguish, there is something else: growing identification with the Islamist fighters of Hamas and derision for the Palestinian Authority, which Washington considers the only viable partner for peace with Israel.

“Strike a blow on Tel Aviv!” proclaim the lyrics of a new hit song blasting from shops and speakers at Monday’s demonstration, in a reference to Hamas rockets that made it nearly to Israel’s economic and cultural capital. “Don’t let the Zionists sleep! We don’t want a truce or a solution! Oh Palestinians, you can be proud!”

Pop songs everywhere are filled with bravado and aggression. But this one reflects a widespread sentiment that does not augur well for President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, which is rapidly losing credibility, even relevance. The Gaza truce talks in Cairo, involving Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, offer a telling tableau. The Palestinian leader seen there is not Mr. Abbas, but Khaled Meshal, the leader of the militant group Hamas, who seeks to speak for all Palestinians as his ideological brothers in the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power around the region.

Israel is also threatening Mr. Abbas, even hinting that it may give up on him, as he prepares to go to the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 29 to try to upgrade the Palestinian status to that of a nonmember state. The Israelis consider this step an act of aggression, and even some Palestinians say it is somewhat beside the point at this stage.

“His people are being killed in Gaza, and he is sitting on his comfortable chair in Ramallah,” lamented Firas Katash, 20, a student who took part in the Ramallah demonstration.

For the United States, as for other countries hoping to promote a two-state solution to this century-old conflict, a more radicalized West Bank with a discredited Palestinian Authority would mean greater insecurity for Israel and increased opportunity for anti-Western forces to take root in a region where Islamism is on the rise.

Since Hamas, which won parliamentary elections in 2006, threw the Fatah-controlled authority out of Gaza a year later, Mr. Abbas has not set foot there. Yet he will be asking the world to recognize the two increasingly distinct entities as a unified state.

Manar Wadi, who works in an office in Ramallah, put the issue this way: “What is happening in Gaza makes the Palestinian Authority left behind and isolated. Now we see the other face of Hamas, and its popularity is rising. It makes us feel that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t offer a path to the future.”

In Cairo on Monday, Mr. Meshal seemed defiant and confident in his new role, daring the Israelis to invade Gaza as a sixth day of Israeli aerial assaults brought the death toll there to more than 100 people, many of them militants of Hamas and its affiliates. Rockets launched from Gaza hit southern Israel, causing some damage and panic, but no casualties, leaving the death toll there at three.

“Whoever started the war must end it,” Mr. Meshal said at a news conference. “If Israel wants a cease-fire brokered through Egypt, then that is possible. Escalation is also possible.”

Officials in the authority have been holding leadership meetings, staying in close touch with the talks in Cairo and issuing statements of solidarity. They have also sent a small medical delegation to Gaza and argue that there is a new opportunity to forge unity between the two feuding movements. But they are acutely aware of their problem.

“The most dangerous thing is the fact that what we could not do in negotiations, Hamas did with one rocket,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The people had such excitement seeing the occupiers run in panic. It’s a very dangerous message.”

Mr. Abbas, whose popularity has been on the decline as the Palestinian Authority faces economic difficulty and growing Israeli settlements, also ran into trouble not long before the Gaza fighting began when he seemed to give up on the Palestinian demand of a right of return to what is now Israel.

Many Palestinians believe that Israel launched its latest operation in Gaza to block the Palestinian Authority’s United Nations plans by embarrassing it. Israeli officials say that is ridiculous: the operation’s purpose is to stop the growing number of rockets being fired at their communities, and Israelis interrupted their deliberations over the United Nations bid to wage the military campaign.

But Israel says anything that does not involve direct negotiations is a waste of time. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to take severe retaliatory steps against the Palestinian Authority, including cutting off badly needed tax receipts to Palestinian coffers, should Mr. Abbas go ahead at the United Nations.

In a speech here on Sunday night at a Palestinian leadership meeting, Mr. Abbas repeated his determination to go to New York and ask for a change in status to that of nonmember state. He has chosen the symbolically significant date of Nov. 29, when the General Assembly voted in 1947 to divide this land into two states, one Jewish and the other Palestinian Arab.

The United States has asked Mr. Abbas not to do so, but instead to resume direct negotiations with Israel, which have essentially been frozen since 2008.

Read More..

Solar Power as Solution for Storm-Darkened Homes

When Hurricane Sandy wiped out the power in areas like coastal Long Island and the Jersey Shore, what should have been beacons of hope — hundreds of solar panels glinting from residential rooftops — became symbols of frustration.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

R. David Gibbs of the nonprofit group Solar One directed volunteers in an installation at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club.

A blog about energy and the environment.

Despite the popular perception that installing solar panels takes a home “off the grid,” most of those systems are actually part of it, sending excess power to the utility grid during the day and pulling electricity back to run the house at night. So when the storm took down power lines and substations across the Northeast, safety systems cut the power in solar homes just like everywhere else.

“Here’s a $70,000 system sitting idle,” said Ed Antonio, who lives in the Rockaways in Queens and has watched his 42 panels as well as those on several other houses in the area go unused since the power went out Oct. 29. “That’s a lot of power sitting. Just sitting.”

Yet there are ways to tap solar energy when the grid goes down, whether by adding batteries to a home system or using the kinds of independent solar generators that have been cropping up in areas hard-hit by the storm.

In the Rockaways, where nearly 14,000 customers still had no power as of Monday morning, volunteers set up a makeshift solar charging station between a car roof and a shopping cart. A multipanel, battery-tied system is helping fuel a relief center’s operations.

In the storm’s wake, solar companies have been donating equipment across New York and other stricken areas to function as emergency power systems now and backups in the longer term. It is important, executives say, to create smaller, more decentralized ways of generating and storing electricity to help ease strain on the grid in times of high demand or failure.

“The grid won’t evolve into something more distributed and fault-tolerant overnight — it’s still dependent upon a centralized system,” said Ben Tarbell, vice president for products at SolarCity, a leading installer that has donated generators after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and is developing a battery backup system for its customers. “But the components are starting to come together.”

Generally, home systems like Mr. Antonio’s are engineered to feed electricity from the roof array through an inverter and into the home’s electrical panel, sending the excess to the broader electric grid. But during a failure, the inverter automatically shuts down the system to guarantee that no electricity is flowing into equipment that workers will be trying to fix. The shutdown also ensures that the system’s current will sync with the grid when power is restored and guards against damaging the lines.

Certain systems allow solar panels to run a household directly during prolonged power failures, generally combined with battery storage to keep the power functioning around the clock. Those require installing a separate electrical panel and a more complicated inverter that would switch the flow of electricity entirely over to the house, perhaps to a few critical circuits to run, say, the refrigerator, some lights, television and minimal heat.

“You size the battery system to go with that, and then the system will work just on those dedicated circuits,” said Tony Clifford, chief executive of Standard Solar, an installer based in Maryland.

The cost of adding battery storage to an existing system can range from $500 to $30,000, depending on how large the solar array is and how much the customer wants to be able to run.

Although demand for battery backup is not yet widespread, interest tends to go up after storms, said David Panico, senior vice president of the industrial power group at SunWize, a solar supplier that provided a low-cost mobile system to the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, a hub of that area’s relief effort.

But a drawback is that residents have to figure out where to put the batteries — a particular quandary for those with homes vulnerable to flooding.

So some are looking at electric vehicles as potential backup energy sources instead. In some cases, a car could fuel a house for days on a single charge.

Read More..

Daniel Stern, Who Studied Babies’ World, Dies at 78

Dr. Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist who increased the understanding of early human development by scrutinizing the most minute interactions between mothers and babies, died on Nov. 12 in Geneva. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Dr. Nadia Bruschweiler Stern.

Dr. Stern was noted for his often poetic language in describing how children respond to their world — how they feel, think and see. He wrote one of his half-dozen books in the form of a diary by a baby. In another book, he told how mothers differ psychologically from women who do not have children. He coined the term “motherese” to describe a form of communication in which mothers are able to read even the slightest of babies’ emotional signals.

Dr. Stern, who did much of his research at what is now Weill Cornell Medical College and at the University of Geneva, drew inspiration from Jay S. Rosenblatt’s work with kittens at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. Dr. Rosenblatt discovered that when he removed kittens from their cage, they made their way to a specific nipple of their mother’s even when they were as young as one day old. That finding demonstrated that learning occurs naturally at an exceptionally early age in a way staged experiments had not.

Dr. Stern videotaped babies from birth through their early years, and then studied the tapes second by second to analyze interactions between mother and child. He challenged the Freudian idea that babies go through defined critical phases, like oral and anal. Rather, he said, their development is continuous, with each phase layered on top of the previous one. The interactions are punctuated by intervals, sometimes only a few seconds long, of rest, solitude and reflection. As this process goes on, they develop a sense that other people can and will share in their feelings, and in that way develop a sense of self.

These interactions can underpin emotional episodes that occur years in the future. Citing one example in a 1990 interview with The Boston Globe, Dr. Stern told of a 13-month-old who grabbed for an electric plug. His alarmed mother, who moments before had been silent and loving, suddenly turned angry and sour. Two years later, the child heard a fairy tale about a wicked witch.

“He’s been prepared for that witch for years,” Dr. Stern said. “He’s already seen someone he loves turn into something evil. It’s perfectly believable for him. He maps right into it.”

Dr. Stern described such phenomena in 1985 in “The Interpersonal World of the Infant,” which the noted psychologist Stanley Spiegel, in an interview in The New York Times, called “the book of the decade in its influence on psychoanalytic theory.”

In recent years, Dr. Stern ventured beyond childhood development to examine the psychology of how people thought about time. In one experiment, he interviewed people in depth about a single brief moment at breakfast and found that it took them a full hour to describe all that went through their minds in 30 seconds. This resulted in the 2004 book “The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life,” which called for people to appreciate every moment of experience and discussed the nature of memory.

In 2010, he published “Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development,” which used new understandings of neuroscience to explain human empathy.

Dr. Stern, who wrote hundreds of scientific articles, also painted, wrote poetry and had friendships with important artists. He gave Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, the title for his “Dances at a Gathering.” His friend Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director and playwright, said Dr. Stern’s slow-motion baby films helped inspire his seven-hour “silent opera,” “Deafman Glance.”

“So many things are going on, and the baby is picking them up,” Mr. Wilson said.

Daniel Norman Stern was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1934. He graduated from Harvard and completed his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After conducting psychopharmacology research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., he did his residency in psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He later trained as a psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia.

Dr. Stern is survived by his wife, a physician who collaborated on much of his research; two sons, Michael and Adrien; three daughters, Maria, Kaia and Alice Stern; a sister, Ronnie Chalif; and 12 grandchildren.

Dr. Stern pointed out how the evolution of the human body bolstered mother-child interaction. He noted that the distance between the eyes of a baby at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about 10 inches, exactly the distance for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for a young infant.

“Her smile exerts its natural evocative powers in him and breathes a vitality into him,” he wrote. “It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His joy rises. Her smile pulls it out of him.”

Read More..

Daniel Stern, Who Studied Babies’ World, Dies at 78

Dr. Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist who increased the understanding of early human development by scrutinizing the most minute interactions between mothers and babies, died on Nov. 12 in Geneva. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Dr. Nadia Bruschweiler Stern.

Dr. Stern was noted for his often poetic language in describing how children respond to their world — how they feel, think and see. He wrote one of his half-dozen books in the form of a diary by a baby. In another book, he told how mothers differ psychologically from women who do not have children. He coined the term “motherese” to describe a form of communication in which mothers are able to read even the slightest of babies’ emotional signals.

Dr. Stern, who did much of his research at what is now Weill Cornell Medical College and at the University of Geneva, drew inspiration from Jay S. Rosenblatt’s work with kittens at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. Dr. Rosenblatt discovered that when he removed kittens from their cage, they made their way to a specific nipple of their mother’s even when they were as young as one day old. That finding demonstrated that learning occurs naturally at an exceptionally early age in a way staged experiments had not.

Dr. Stern videotaped babies from birth through their early years, and then studied the tapes second by second to analyze interactions between mother and child. He challenged the Freudian idea that babies go through defined critical phases, like oral and anal. Rather, he said, their development is continuous, with each phase layered on top of the previous one. The interactions are punctuated by intervals, sometimes only a few seconds long, of rest, solitude and reflection. As this process goes on, they develop a sense that other people can and will share in their feelings, and in that way develop a sense of self.

These interactions can underpin emotional episodes that occur years in the future. Citing one example in a 1990 interview with The Boston Globe, Dr. Stern told of a 13-month-old who grabbed for an electric plug. His alarmed mother, who moments before had been silent and loving, suddenly turned angry and sour. Two years later, the child heard a fairy tale about a wicked witch.

“He’s been prepared for that witch for years,” Dr. Stern said. “He’s already seen someone he loves turn into something evil. It’s perfectly believable for him. He maps right into it.”

Dr. Stern described such phenomena in 1985 in “The Interpersonal World of the Infant,” which the noted psychologist Stanley Spiegel, in an interview in The New York Times, called “the book of the decade in its influence on psychoanalytic theory.”

In recent years, Dr. Stern ventured beyond childhood development to examine the psychology of how people thought about time. In one experiment, he interviewed people in depth about a single brief moment at breakfast and found that it took them a full hour to describe all that went through their minds in 30 seconds. This resulted in the 2004 book “The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life,” which called for people to appreciate every moment of experience and discussed the nature of memory.

In 2010, he published “Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development,” which used new understandings of neuroscience to explain human empathy.

Dr. Stern, who wrote hundreds of scientific articles, also painted, wrote poetry and had friendships with important artists. He gave Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, the title for his “Dances at a Gathering.” His friend Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director and playwright, said Dr. Stern’s slow-motion baby films helped inspire his seven-hour “silent opera,” “Deafman Glance.”

“So many things are going on, and the baby is picking them up,” Mr. Wilson said.

Daniel Norman Stern was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1934. He graduated from Harvard and completed his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After conducting psychopharmacology research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., he did his residency in psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He later trained as a psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia.

Dr. Stern is survived by his wife, a physician who collaborated on much of his research; two sons, Michael and Adrien; three daughters, Maria, Kaia and Alice Stern; a sister, Ronnie Chalif; and 12 grandchildren.

Dr. Stern pointed out how the evolution of the human body bolstered mother-child interaction. He noted that the distance between the eyes of a baby at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about 10 inches, exactly the distance for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for a young infant.

“Her smile exerts its natural evocative powers in him and breathes a vitality into him,” he wrote. “It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His joy rises. Her smile pulls it out of him.”

Read More..

The iEconomy: As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Shawn and Stephanie Grimes’s efforts have cost $200,000 in lost income and savings, but their apps have earned less than $5,000 this year.

ROSEDALE, Md. — Shawn and Stephanie Grimes spent much of the last two years pursuing their dream of doing research and development for Apple, the world’s most successful corporation.

But they did not actually have jobs at Apple. It was freelance work that came with nothing in the way of a regular income, health insurance or retirement plan. Instead, the Grimeses tried to prepare by willingly, even eagerly, throwing overboard just about everything they could.

They sold one of their cars, gave some possessions to relatives and sold others in a yard sale, rented out their six-bedroom house and stayed with family for a while. They even cashed in Mr. Grimes’s 401(k).

“We didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Mr. Grimes, 32. “I’ll retire when I die.”

The couple’s chosen field is so new it did not even exist a few years ago: writing software applications for mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad. Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers.

Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago, apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering, organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds.

Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be.

Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts. The Grimeses began their venture with high hopes, but their apps, most of them for toddlers, did not come quickly enough or sell fast enough.

And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their résumés, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.

One success story is Ethan Nicholas, who earned more than $1 million in 2009 after writing a game for the iPhone. But he says the app writing world has experienced tectonic shifts since then.

“Can someone drop everything and start writing apps? Sure,” said Mr. Nicholas, 34, who quit his job to write apps after iShoot, an artillery game, became a sensation. “Can they start writing good apps? Not often, no. I got lucky with iShoot, because back then a decent app could still be successful. But competition is fierce nowadays, and decent isn’t good enough.”

The boom in apps comes as economists are debating the changing nature of work, which technology is reshaping at an accelerating speed. The upheaval, in some ways echoing the mechanization of agriculture a century ago, began its latest turbulent phase with the migration of tech manufacturing to places like China. Now service and even white-collar jobs, like file clerks and data entry specialists or office support staff and mechanical drafters, are disappearing.

“Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business.

Still, the digital transition is creating enormous wealth and opportunity. Four of the most valuable American companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft and I.B.M. — are rooted in technology. And it was Apple, more than any other company, that set off the app revolution with the iPhone and iPad. Since Apple unleashed the world’s freelance coders to build applications four years ago, it has paid them more than $6.5 billion in royalties.

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Congo Rebels Advancing on City of Goma

KAMPALA, Uganda — Fighting inched perilously close to one of Congo’s largest cities on Sunday, and United Nations forces turned to heavy aerial bombardments to stop a rebel advance that broke into a sprint over the weekend, according to witnesses and officials of Congo’s army.

The rebels, members of the March 23 Movement, or M23, have advanced 18 miles along eastern Congo’s principal road since Saturday, capturing villages and beating back a seemingly broken Congolese Army. They are now only a few miles from Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, which is home to nearly one million people and United Nations peacekeepers who have a mandate to use force to protect civilians.

It is the heaviest fighting in eastern Congo since Goma faced a similar rebel offensive in 2008.

“We are losing,” said Col. Olivier Hamuli, a spokesman for the Congolese Army.

The fighting had waned by early Sunday evening, and a spokesman for the rebels said they would not attack the city or the airport.

“We’re just doing this to break the capacity” of Congo’s army, said the rebel spokesman, Col. Vianney Kazarama, according to a Reuters report.

Officials from the United Nations mission in Congo could not be reached for comment.

“This is the big escalation we’ve been expecting for months,” said Jason K. Stearns, an expert on eastern Congo and author of “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters,” a history of Congo. “But for the M23, taking Goma is a gamble. It gives them huge leverage, but also brings greater infamy.”

And, he added, “It will be a serious blow to the region’s stability.”

The M23 group is made up of soldiers from a former rebel army that signed a peace deal with the government on March 23, 2009, and was integrated into Congo’s national army. But last spring, hundreds of them mutinied, claiming that the government had failed to meet their demands under the 2009 agreement.

The figurehead of the group is believed to be Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, a former rebel and high-ranking army officer wanted by the International Criminal Court to answer charges that he committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The rebellion broke out as Congo and foreign governments called for the arrest of General Ntaganda. Since then, Rwanda and Uganda have been accused by a United Nations panel of experts of aiding the rebel movement, a charge that both countries deny.

The violence has ebbed and flowed over the year, and many analysts see it as political posturing rather than an attempt to overthrow the government.

But a new wave of fighting erupted last week, with the army claiming to have killed more than 150 rebels and the rebels capturing the town of Kibumba, about 18 miles from Goma.

The forces of the United Nations mission in Congo bombed rebel positions on Saturday and Sunday, but that did not seem to blunt the rebels’ advance.

After taking Kibumba, the rebels, who are said to be well equipped with arms and even night-vision goggles, sped down the main road southward toward Goma. By Sunday evening, they had reached Kibati, a refugee camp about two miles away.

Witnesses in Kibati said that the camp, which had tens of thousands of displaced residents early Sunday, was empty by evening.

“We are still holding the airports,” said a Congolese Army spokesman, Olivier Hamuli. “Goma till now is not yet in rebel hands. And until now we are holding the line.”

Mr. Hamuli dismissed reports from Goma that said the Congolese Army had abandoned the city, saying that some troops were moving just for “relief,” and that the army was prepared to defend Goma if attacked.

The situation is reminiscent of the rebel offensive of 2008 that threatened Goma after a string of rapid military victories against the army. The rebels’ leader at the time, Laurent Nkunda, threatened to advance all the way to Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, and neighboring nations readied themselves for a regional war.

But Mr. Nkunda was arrested by Rwanda, which denied claims that it had been supporting him, just as it has denied that it is backing the current rebel leader, General Ntaganda.

After an emergency meeting over the weekend, the United Nations Security Council called for the rebels to halt their advance toward Goma, The Associated Press reported.

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Machinima Using Game-Themed Videos to Lure Young Men

LOS ANGELES — Big Media’s hunt for young male viewers is not going so well.

News Corporation is holding a fire sale for IGN, its online network aimed at guys. Disney XD, a cable channel for boys, is growing in popularity — among girls. Comcast’s game-focused G4 channel is retooling its entire programming strategy.

Where are all the “lost boys,” as analysts sometimes call them? Increasingly, the answer involves Machinima.

Intensely focused on 18- to 34-year-old men, Machinima (pronounced ma-SHIN-i-ma) is a Web and mobile distribution network that delivers free game-oriented shows, trailers and news reports. The company, founded in 2000, generates more than 2.2 billion video views a month, according to comScore data. Machinima Prime, a YouTube channel that arrived in August and is dedicated to highly polished episodic series, ranked as the video hub’s No. 1 destination this month.

Despite their escalating reluctance to watch television or go to the movies, young men continue to flock to traditional outlets like Disney’s ESPN or Viacom’s Comedy Central.

And Machinima is certainly not the only online network where young men congregate; Break Media operates testosterone-heavy sites like ManMade.com and HolyTaco.com.

But Machinima has rapidly evolved into a must-visit site for young men by improving the quality of its programming. The company’s mission is not dissimilar to that of cable channels: gain a foothold with inexpensive content (in Machinima’s case it was user-generated videos) and then use that perch to attract higher-quality programs, as AMC did with “Mad Men.”

Ultimately, Machinima intends to produce its own long-form episodic series.

First, Machinima must prove that YouTube can indeed become the new television — that consumers will watch long videos and come back the next week for another episode. In many ways, Machinima just pulled that off with “Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn,” a five-part live-action series.

“Forward Unto Dawn,” which cost Microsoft $10 million to make and was meant to promote the release of the game Halo 4 on Xbox, has been viewed about 27 million times; four related videos delivered 9.2 million additional views. Machinima also said it experienced very little viewer “fall off,” an industry term for people leaving after watching only a couple of minutes.

Fans understand that this kind of programming is really marketing masquerading as entertainment, said Allen DeBevoise, Machinima’s chief executive. But he contended that “high-quality content is better marketing than traditional advertising; if it’s the equivalent of what people would watch on their own anyway, fans really appreciate that.”

Halo 4 had $220 million in global sales in its first 24 hours in stores.

“If you’re a marketer and not paying serious attention to Machinima, you’re really behind the curve,” said Matt Britton, a founder of MRY, a youth-focused New York marketing firm. “College kids may not be bringing TVs to their dorm rooms anymore, but Machinima, because it has smartly built itself around YouTube, is right there on their laptops.”

NBCUniversal recently decided Machinima was the best way to bring one of its TV movies to consumers. “Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome,” a prequel to the Syfy channel’s 2004 “Battlestar Galactica” series, was cut into 10 episodes and is rolling out on Machinima Prime. “Blood and Chrome” will then run on Syfy next year as a two-hour movie.

Warner Brothers is completing a programming deal with Machinima for a new series tied to its Mortal Kombat game franchise. “Mortal Kombat: Legacy,” a nine-part series, ran on Machinima last year, and at least one installment captured over 10 million views — on par with viewership for some fantasy programs on television.

Machinima, which is based in Los Angeles and makes money by selling advertising, got its start in 2000 as a Web site dedicated to a genre of digital filmmaking that uses video game graphics to create original animated movies.

In 2005, Mr. DeBevoise and his brother, Philip, bought the Web site and set about turning it into a global entertainment network. It has about 200 employees and secured a $35 million round of financing in May; the company declined to discuss revenue or profitability.

Mr. DeBevoise said about 50 percent of Machinima’s total traffic now came from overseas. The company — with backing from MK Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Google, which owns YouTube — also has a significant presence on mobile devices.

Machinima Prime is part of YouTube’s strategy, started a year ago, to lure television viewers and advertisers with higher-quality videos, even if aimed at niche interests.

YouTube invested about $100 million in the overall effort — Machinima received an undisclosed portion — and in recent weeks YouTube began evaluating which channels had done well enough to receive a second round of financing.

In addition to Machinima Prime, YouTube successes include AwesomenessTV, aimed at 12- to 17-year-olds, and Vice, which also courts young men. In an e-mail, Malik Ducard, YouTube’s director of content strategy, called Machinima “a great example of how a Web brand with a laserlike focus on serving a single audience can drive massive eyeballs.”

Mr. Ducard added that YouTube partners like Machinima, sometimes dismissed as niche players, were adding subscribers at a rate “four times faster” than they did just a couple of years ago.

“Niche may not be the right word because that may sound small,” he said. “Billions of views is not small.”

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