Personal Best: Training Insights From Star Athletes

Of course elite athletes are naturally gifted. And of course they train hard and may have a phalanx of support staff — coaches, nutritionists, psychologists.

But they often have something else that gives them an edge: an insight, or even an epiphany, that vaults them from the middle of the pack to the podium.

I asked several star athletes about the single realization that made the difference for them. While every athlete’s tale is intensely personal, it turns out there are some common themes.

Stay Focused

Like many distance swimmers who spend endless hours in the pool, Natalie Coughlin, 30, used to daydream as she swam laps. She’d been a competitive swimmer for almost her entire life, and this was the way she — and many others — managed the boredom of practice.

But when she was in college, she realized that daydreaming was only a way to get in the miles; it was not allowing her to reach her potential. So she started to concentrate every moment of practice on what she was doing, staying focused and thinking about her technique.

“That’s when I really started improving,” she said. “The more I did it, the more success I had.”

In addition to her many victories, Ms. Coughlin won five medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke.

Manage Your ‘Energy Pie’

In 1988, Steve Spence, then a 25-year-old self-coached distance runner, was admitted into the United States Long Distance Runner Olympic Development Program. It meant visiting David Martin, a physiologist at Georgia State University, several times a year for a battery of tests to measure Mr. Spence’s progress and to assess his diet.

During dinner at Dr. Martin’s favorite Chinese restaurant, he gave Mr. Spence some advice.

“There are always going to be runners who are faster than you,” he said. “There will always be runners more talented than you and runners who seem to be training harder than you. The key to beating them is to train harder and to learn how to most efficiently manage your energy pie.”

Energy pie? All the things that take time and energy — a job, hobbies, family, friends, and of course athletic training. “There is only so much room in the pie,” said Mr. Spence.

Dr. Martin’s advice was “a lecture on limiting distractions,” he added. “If I wanted to get to the next level, to be competitive on the world scene, I had to make running a priority.” So he quit graduate school and made running his profession. “I realized this is what I am doing for my job.”

It paid off. He came in third in the 1991 marathon world championships in Tokyo. He made the 1992 Olympic marathon team, coming in 12th in the race. Now he is head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. And he tells his teams to manage their energy pies.

Structure Your Training

Meredith Kessler was a natural athlete. In high school, she played field hockey and lacrosse. She was on the track team and the swimming team. She went to Syracuse University on a field hockey scholarship.

Then she began racing in Ironman triathlons, which require athletes to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and then run a marathon (26.2 miles). Ms. Kessler loved it, but she was not winning any races. The former sports star was now in the middle of the pack.

But she also was working 60 hours a week at a San Francisco investment bank and trying to spend time with her husband and friends. Finally, six years ago, she asked Matt Dixon, a coach, if he could make her a better triathlete.

One thing that turned out to be crucial was to understand the principles of training. When she was coaching herself, Ms. Kessler did whatever she felt like, with no particular plan in mind. Mr. Dixon taught her that every workout has a purpose. One might focus on endurance, another on speed. And others, just as important, are for recovery.

“I had not won an Ironman until he put me on that structure,” said Ms. Kessler, 34. “That’s when I started winning.”

Another crucial change was to quit her job so she could devote herself to training. It took several years — she left banking only in April 2011 — but it made a huge difference. Now a professional athlete, with sponsors, she has won four Ironman championships and three 70.3 mile championships.

Ms. Kessler’s parents were mystified when she quit her job. She reminded them that they had always told her that it did not matter if she won. What mattered was that she did her best. She left the bank, she said, “to do my best.”

Take Risks

Helen Goodroad began competing as a figure skater when she was in fourth grade. Her dream was to be in the Olympics. She was athletic and graceful, but she did not really look like a figure skater. Ms. Goodroad grew to be 5 feet 11 inches.

“I was probably twice the size of any competitor,” she said. “I had to have custom-made skates starting when I was 10 years old.”

One day, when Helen was 17, a coach asked her to try a workout on an ergometer, a rowing machine. She was a natural — her power was phenomenal.

“He told me, ‘You could get a rowing scholarship to any school. You could go to the Olympics,’ ” said Ms. Goodroad. But that would mean giving up her dream, abandoning the sport she had devoted her life to and plunging into the unknown.

She decided to take the chance.

It was hard and she was terrified, but she was recruited to row at Brown. In 1993, Ms. Goodroad was invited to train with the junior national team. Three years later, she made the under-23 national team, which won a world championship. (She rowed under her maiden name, Betancourt.)

It is so easy to stay in your comfort zone, Ms. Goodroad said. “But then you can get stale. You don’t go anywhere.” Leaving skating, leaving what she knew and loved, “helped me see that, ‘Wow, I could do a whole lot more than I ever thought I could.’ ”

Until this academic year, when she had a baby, Ms. Goodroad, who is 37, was a rowing coach at Princeton. She still runs to stay fit and plans to return to coaching.

The Other Guy Is Hurting Too

In 2006, when Brian Sell was racing in the United States Half Marathon Championships in Houston, he had a realization.

“I was neck-and-neck with two or three other guys with two miles to go,” he said. He started to doubt himself. What was he doing, struggling to keep up with men whose race times were better than his?

Suddenly, it came to him: Those other guys must be hurting as much as he was, or else they would not be staying with him — they would be pulling away.

“I made up my mind then to hang on, no matter what happened or how I was feeling,” said Mr. Sell. “Sure enough, in about half a mile, one guy dropped out and then another. I went on to win by 15 seconds or so, and every race since then, if a withering surge was thrown in, I made every effort to hang on to the guy surging.”

Mr. Sell made the 2008 Olympic marathon team and competed in the Beijing Olympics, where he came in 22nd. Now 33 years old, he is working as a scientist at Lancaster Laboratories in Pennsylvania.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 15, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the year in which Steve Spence competed in the Olympic marathon, finishing 12th. It was 1992, not 2004. It also misidentified the institution at which he is a coach. It is Shippensburg University, not Shippensburg College. The article also misstated the circumstances under which Helen Goodroad attended Brown. She was recruited to row at the university, she did not receive a rowing scholarship. And the article misstated the length of some races that Meredith Kessler has won. They are 70.3 mile championships, not 70.3 kilometers.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Unveils a New Search Tool

8:53 p.m. | Updated

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has spent eight years nudging its users to share everything they like and everything they do. Now, the company is betting it has enough data so that people can find whatever they want on Facebook. And on Tuesday, it unveiled a new tool to help them dig for it.

The tool, which the company calls graph search, is Facebook’s most ambitious stab at overturning the Web search business ruled by its chief rival, Google. It is also an effort to elbow aside other Web services designed to unearth specific kinds of information, like LinkedIn for jobs, Match for dates and Yelp for restaurants.

Facebook has spent over a year honing graph search, said Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, at an event here at Facebook’s headquarters introducing the new product. He said it would enable Facebook users to search their social network for people, places, photos and things that interest them.

That might include, Mr. Zuckerberg offered, Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto that his friends have “liked” on Facebook or checked into. It might be used to find a date, dentist or job, other Facebook executives said.

“Graph search,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “is a completely new way to get information on Facebook.”

Graph search will be immediately available to a limited number of Facebook users — in the “thousands,” Mr. Zuckerberg said — and gradually extended to the rest.

Every Internet platform company has been interested in conquering search.

But Facebook search differs from other search services because of the mountain of social data the company has collected over the years. It knows which parks your friends like to take their children to, or which pubs they like to visit, and who among their network is single and lives nearby.

The company is betting that its users are more eager to hear their friends’ recommendations for a restaurant than advice from a professional food critic or from a stranger on Yelp.

Its search tool is based on the premise that the data within Facebook is enough and that its users will have little reason to venture outside its blue walled garden. What they cannot find inside the garden, its search partner, Bing, a Microsoft product, will help them find on the Web.

For now, the Facebook tool will mine its users’ pictures, likes and check-ins, but not their status updates. Graph search, Mr. Zuckerberg explained, is aimed at answering questions based on the data contained in your social network, not serving you a list of links to other Web sites.

Say, for example, you are searching for a grocery store in Manhattan. You would type that question into a box on your Facebook page and the results would show stores your friends liked or where they had checked in.

It remains unclear how users will react to having others mine the data they share on Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg took pains to reassure users that what they post would be found only if they wanted it to be found. Before the new search tool is available to them, he said, users will see this message: “Please take some time to review who can see your stuff.” Facebook tweaked its privacy controls last December.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Tuesday that initially, photos posted on Instagram, which Facebook owns, would not be part of the database of photos that can be searched. Nor would he specify how soon graph search would be available to those who log in using the Facebook app on their cellphones.

The search tool is plainly designed with an eye toward profits. If done right, said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, it could offer marketers a more precise signal of a Web user’s interests. “It’s going to lend itself to advertising or other revenue-generating products that better matches what people are looking for,” he said. “Advertisers are going to be able to better target what you’re interested in. It’s a much more meaningful search than keyword search.”

News of the new search tool offered a modest lift to Facebook shares, which rose 2.7 percent to a close at $30.10 Tuesday. Google remained stable, with a share price of nearly $725. Google retains two-thirds of the search market, and Facebook’s search tool by itself is not likely to affect Google’s business.

Still, introduction of the graph search sharpens the divide between Facebook and Google.

“If Facebook can truly provide relevant answers based on mining data from the social graph, it has an advantage,” said Venkat N. Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University.

Google has been scrambling for several years to collect social data and incorporate it into search results, as Web users increasingly turn to social networks to seek friends’ recommendations.

It introduced Google Plus, its Facebook rival, in 2011, and from the beginning said its main purpose was to use social information to improve and personalize all Google products, from search to maps to ads. Last year, Google began showing posts, photos, profiles and conversations from Google Plus in Google search results. A search for restaurants in Seattle, for instance, could show posts and photos shared by friends in addition to links from around the Web. Google declined to comment for this article.

The kind of personal search that Facebook is promising is rife with potential privacy hazards, which Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged repeatedly. “The search we wanted to build is privacy aware,” he maintained. “On Facebook, most of the things people share with you isn’t public.”

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately posted a warning, reminding Facebook users to review their privacy settings. It pointed out that advertisers who, until now, could target only certain categories of people anonymously — “users under 35 who live in Texas,” for instance — could now find specific users under 35 who live in Texas, if their privacy settings allowed them to be found. It cautioned that “controlling your personal data means controlling not only who can see your information but how it can be found and what can be done with it.”

But Facebook pointed out that even though a business owner could personally search for specific personal data, a brand page could not. Detailed searching of Facebook data for the sake of sending promotional messages would violate the site’s internal policies.

The search team was led by two former Google engineers, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky. As they explained in a blog post on the Facebook Engineering Department page, graph search solves a problem of Facebook’s own making: it has collected so much information.

“As people shared more and more content, we saw that we needed to give them better ways to explore and enjoy those stories and memories,” they wrote.

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Cholula Journal: Looting of Cholula Churches Stirs Locals to Action

CHOLULA, Mexico — Three men, field laborers by day, huddle on a bench as night descends, a mess of empty bottles of hard liquor strewn nearby. Another man gets a refresher on how to ring the bell in case of emergency. One listens attentively to orders from their leader.

It is time to guard the churches of Cholula.

A small, picturesque city 80 miles southeast of Mexico City, Cholula is said to have a church for every day of the year. There are, in reality, about 80 in all, many dating to the 17th century and filled with paintings and sculptures from that time. It is enough to draw hordes of worshipers — and thieves.

At the Church of Santa María Acuexcomac, an imposing golden frame hangs on the wall by the entrance, empty except for the jagged edges of the canvas where thieves plunged their knives. Angel-shaped shadows, etched by years of sunlight, now appear eerily on walls where sculptures have been snatched, haunting the altar like ghosts.

Theft of religious art is not new here, but an elaborate robbery last October — at least a dozen images were taken, some with the help of scaffolding — left the community on edge.

Add in the increase in gang activity throughout town, and the largely unresponsive and underequipped authorities, and the citizens here, known for their religious fervor, have come up with a grass-roots response: to increase vigilance themselves.

A human surveillance system for churches has been in place in Cholula since colonial times, but as thefts have increased in scope, some churches have doubled up on volunteers, added night shifts and armed their protectors.

“It went from being a tranquil town to entirely the opposite,” said Rufino Arenas, squinting down at a notebook with bell-ringing instructions. He had been living and working in Mexico City but came back at the beginning of January to help protect Santa María Acuexcomac, his childhood church.

Fidela Quia Torres, a stout woman with dark, narrow eyes, has been volunteering at the church during the day. She watches church visitors for suspicious behavior, like picture taking, out of concerns that the photographs will be compiled into a catalog for art traffickers.

In the nearby Church of the Santísima Trinidad, which was almost completely pillaged in 2008, Herminio Toxqui has moved his family into a tiny room behind the altar with two mattresses and a rickety dining table, leaving him ready to ring the bell and summon help from the community at any time if he detects suspicious activity.

And in the Church of San Gregorio Zacapechpan, looted in 2010, mandatory shifts for all able-bodied men in the neighborhood have been put into effect. They are expected to show up ready for battle with armed bandits.

“People know that when they come for a watch, they bring their own weapons,” said the Rev. Patricio Solís Soriano, the church priest.

Even migrants from Cholula living in the United States, typically in Illinois and New York, have gotten involved in community protection efforts. After a handful of paintings that may have been 400 years old were stolen, a group of expatriates in the United States organized a fund-raiser. They bought and sent video cameras that almost successfully blend in with the gold-trimmed arches in San Gregorio Zacapechpan.

Still, the citizen efforts can seem haphazard and disorganized. In several of the churches that have set up closed-circuit camera systems, including San Gregorio Zacapechpan, no one seems to know who has the key to the monitoring center, or sometimes even where these rooms are located.

In the Church of Santa María Tonanzintla, the crown jewel of Cholula’s churches for its 16th-century indigenous Baroque art, a monitor that receives a continuous feed of images from cameras inside is always on, but it is locked away and blocked by an imposing wooden cabinet, so no one can look at it.

Many community members who have gotten involved in these efforts say they have done so to prove their religious devotion and are unaware of how much the artworks they are guarding are worth.

“Even our great-grandparents didn’t know,” said a woman attending Sunday Mass at Santa María Acuexcomac.

Those involved in the thefts clearly have a better sense of how lucrative a business it is. A group of religious-themed 18th-century paintings by the Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera sold for $362,500 in 2010, according to an online listing by Sotheby’s auction house.

Art experts say that it is impossible to know how many of the Mexican paintings sold abroad are stolen, but that global interest in Mexican art was piqued in the 1990s, after the “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Clara Bargellini, an art history investigator at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says there is a particular hunger for this kind of art in the southeastern United States. Last October, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned more than 4,000 pieces of looted cultural artifacts to Mexico, including pieces of pottery dating back 1,500 years.

But efforts by Mexican, American and international authorities to find stolen religious paintings and return them to their original place often fail because few of the artworks have been cataloged.

Despite plans by the National Institute of Anthropology and History and the federal attorney general’s office to create comprehensive catalogs, documentation of this type of art remains incomplete and decentralized.

Volunteers in at least half a dozen churches in Cholula complained that the institute had yet to visit them. Most lack access to computers and cameras to document their art and, in case of theft, aid investigations.

The situation not only has left church walls bare, but has spread gloom and skepticism over once-trusting communities.

“Many times, the thieves are already inside; sometimes they are the same ones that have the key to the church,” said Jorge Segovia, who is in charge of an art-cataloging project for the Archdiocese of Mexico.

Now, when new faces enter most churches here, they stir discomfort and raise alertness, a loss of trust and good will that people here lament. The thieves, churchgoers say, took more than just art.

“They are even stealing our faith,” Mr. Arenas said.

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Economic Scene: When Privatization Works, and Why It Doesn’t Always

William Philpott/Agence France Presse — Getty Images

The remnants of a BP refinery in Texas City after a 2005  explosion. BP had a string of accidents following its privatization. 

Few corporate sagas capture the virtues and vices of state-owned companies and private enterprise better than the drama of BP’s roller-coaster ride between failure and success.

Ten years ago, BP was the darling of the energy world — the unprofitable duckling transformed by privatization under the government of Margaret Thatcher into a highly profitable swan.

The London civil servants of the 1960s and ’70s who all but ignored profitability as they issued directives across British Petroleum’s bloated corporate network were replaced by highly motivated managers who were rewarded for cutting costs, reducing risk and making money. The company’s more incongruous businesses — food production and uranium mines, for instance — were sold. Payroll was cut by more than half. Oil reserves jumped. The time it took to drill a deepwater well plummeted. Profits soared.

But then, in 2005, a BP refinery in Texas City blew up, killing 15 and injuring around 170. In 2006, a leak in a BP pipeline spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. And in 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 and resulted in the biggest offshore oil spill in the history of the United States. These days, BP’s stock trades about 25 percent below where it was before the disaster off the coast of Louisiana, about the same place it was a decade ago.

BP’s bumpy ride is recorded in “The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office,” a compelling new book by Ray Fisman, a professor at Columbia Business School, and Tim Sullivan, the editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press. “The Org” aims to explain why organizations — be they private companies or government agencies — work the way they do.

The book offers telling insight on a topic that has ebbed and flowed across the world over the last 30 years, as governments of all stripes have set out to privatize state-owned enterprises and outsource services — what does the private sector do better than government, and what does it do worse? Long dormant in the United States, the debate has acquired new urgency as governments from Washington to state houses and city halls around the country consider privatizing everything from Medicare to the management of state parks as a possible solution to their budget woes. One the authors’ chief insights is that every organization faces trade-offs — inherent conflicts between competing objectives. The challenge is to manage them. This is way more difficult than it sounds.

While in government hands, British Petroleum paid too little attention to profitability, constrained by its need to please elected officials who often cared more about keeping energy cheap and employment high. But in private hands, it may have cared about profits far too much, at the expense of other objectives. “BP veered from being a company that made sure nothing blew up to one focusing on cost-cutting at all costs,” Professor Fisman said.

The success or failure of an organization often depends on whether it can clearly identify its goals and align the interests of managers and employees to serve them. Yet whatever reward structure an organization picks can skew incentives in an undesirable way.

“The Org” tells us of the sociologist Peter Moskos, who joined the Baltimore police force to study police behavior. The police hierarchy demanded arrests, so police officers arrested people: 20,000 in one year in the Eastern District alone, out of a local population of 45,000. One officer set a record by locking up people for violating bicycle regulations. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Baltimore’s murder rate continued to climb.

“The more we reward those things that we can measure, and not reward the things we care about but don’t measure, the more we will distort behavior,” observed Burton Weisbrod, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who was a pioneer in research on the comparative behavior of nonprofit institutions, corporations and government organizations. As Professor Fisman and Mr. Sullivan put it: “If what gets measured is what gets managed, then what gets managed is what gets done.”

Rewarding teachers for how well their students perform on standard math and reading tests will encourage lots of teaching of reading and math, at the expense of other things an education might provide. Private prison operators who bid for government contracts by offering the lowest cost per inmate will most likely focus on cutting costs rather than tightening security. Unsupervised apple pickers who are paid by the apple will probably pick them off the ground.

This insight is important to the debate over the competence of public and private organizations because it underscores a significant difference in how they meet their goals. Profit is one of the most potent incentives known to man — a powerful tool to align managers’ interests with corporate goals. But it also has drawbacks. With earnings as the overriding, nonnegotiable priority, private enterprise often has little wiggle room to handle the tension between conflicting objectives.

There are instances in which privatization can help achieve broad social goals. After Argentina privatized many of its municipal water supply systems in the 1990s, investment soared, the network expanded into previously underserved poor areas and the number of children dying of infectious and parasitic diseases tumbled. (Most water companies were nonetheless renationalized by a later government.)

Still, our recent memory of mortgage banks blindly offering risky mortgages to shaky borrowers and bundling them into complex bonds to sell to unwary investors should dispel the notion that the profit motive inevitably aligns incentives in a socially desirable way.

The pursuit of financial rewards, by private companies or even nonprofit organizations, can directly undermine public policy goals. A recent study found that private universities and colleges collect higher fees from poor students who receive Pell Grants, absorbing over half the value of federal aid. Public colleges, by contrast, do not discriminate against those who get aid.

This suggests a good rule of thumb to determine when a private company will outperform the public sector: if the task is clear-cut and it’s possible to define concrete goals and reward those who meet them, the private sector will probably do better. “If I can write a perfect contract in which I pay for a concrete observable outcome, can rule out cream-skimming and can ensure the measure is not gamed, there is no reason that the private sector can’t do it better,” Professor Fisman said.

But if the objectives are complex and diffuse — making it difficult to align profit with goals without undermining some other desirable outcome — the profit motive could well make conflicts more difficult to manage. In these cases, privatization is probably not the best solution. In their rush to save money by outsourcing services, governments might forget that.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo

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Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

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What are your vegantips? We’re collecting suggestions on ingredients, recipes and strategies.

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Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

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Fortunes of Facebook May Hinge on Searches

SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly a year after it announced its bid to go public, Facebook is confronting the ultimate burden of the information age: how to help its users find what they are looking for amid the billions of pictures, “likes” and status updates they post every day.

Ferreting out treasure from junk is its biggest challenge — and potentially its most lucrative opportunity, a chance to topple Google as the king of search.

If you’re looking for, say, a movie to watch next weekend, Google can provide long lists of movie reviews from strangers. Facebook, though, could theoretically tell you what movies your friends liked — and what, by extension, you may be predisposed to like. That kind of service would delight advertisers — and, by extension, Wall Street.

“If Facebook would decide to become serious about search, it would be in a position to give Google a run for its money,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC, a financial research company.

Facebook has had a tumultuous run on Wall Street. It made its public debut last May at $38 a share, the most highly valued technology stock in history, but it plummeted almost immediately. But the stock has been climbing for the last month, benefiting from a coy invitation the company sent to reporters about a product announcement scheduled for Tuesday.

“Come see what we’re building,” the invitation read. It promptly set off speculation and sent the stock flying. Shares opened Monday at $32, the highest in six months, and closed at $30.95.

Facebook declined to comment for this article.

The stock rally has occurred as Facebook has zeroed in on new ways to make money for a skeptical Wall Street. It is showing many more ads on its mobile news feed. It has expanded a lucrative form of advertising known as retargeting, which tracks what users search for outside the Facebook platform and tailors advertisements accordingly when users return to Facebook.

It has encouraged users to buy gifts for their friends, and it has charged users to make sure a post or message is seen by more of their friends.

The next frontier that Facebook needs to conquer, analysts say, is search. That would help it significantly expand revenues and, in turn, its market value. “Search, I would say, is a very high priority for Facebook,” Colin Sebastian, an analyst for Robert W. Baird & Company said. “Facebook has this incredible treasure trove of unstructured data on the site.”

Even a tease about search from Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, last September sent the shares up.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the industry blog TechCrunch, Mr. Zuckerberg dropped hints about how Facebook search might look.

“I think search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, not just ‘type in something and show me some relevant stuff’, but ‘I have this specific question, answer this question for me,’ ” he said. “When you think about it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have.”

But building a search tool is a challenge. Try finding on Facebook what’s-his-name who worked in accounting last year, let alone a list of movies that your friends raved about last weekend.

To tackle the problem, Facebook has aggressively expanded its staff of search engineers in recent months. It now has nearly 100 devoted to cracking the search puzzle, led by a former Google engineer, Lars Rasmussen.

It has also tried to acquire at least one start-up focused on search, Ark, which is building a tool to help users find people whose names they do not know, but whose skills or interests they would find useful. It also has rolled out a number of new features to help Facebook users better discover information on the site.

The search challenge confronts every Internet platform company. Amazon has steadily improved how users find things to buy. Twitter has continuously tweaked how its users find news that interests them. Apple tried to upend the traditional search engines by assigning a robot named Siri to help iPhone owners answer their questions.

Patrick Riley, a founder of Ark, called search the holy grail of Web companies. “Everyone wants to get to the ultimate personal assistant — ask it any question and it can give you the right answer,” Mr. Riley said. “Facebook has the advantage of social data. No other company has that kind of social data.”

Mr. Riley turned down Facebook’s acquisition offer last spring, saying he preferred to build a “neutral” people search tool that would not be tethered to any one Internet platform. Facebook more than any other platform has a singular and huge data collection; its users gush about what they like and listen to, whom they admire, where they jog, even what they eat.

To leverage some of this information. Facebook has added the tab “nearby” to help users find businesses in proximity. The company has also rolled out a jobs board, to help users search for employment, in an apparent bid to compete with LinkedIn. Since last summer, it has offered businesses a chance to pay for sponsored search results. And it has reminded users in the last few weeks to review their privacy settings, to better control if and how their information on Facebook can be found.

The largest share of online advertising revenue overall comes from search, which is why Google’s earnings remain nearly 10 times Facebook’s. It is also why even a modest expansion of search could be enormously lucrative for the social network.

“When there is too much information, there is high value in search, navigation and discovery,” said Bill Tai, a venture capitalist who has invested in some of Facebook’s rivals, including Twitter. “Facebook has a lot of data, but it’s very noisy data.”

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Cubans Take Advantage of Day 1 of New Travel Rules

HAVANA — Cubans flocked to immigration offices and travel agencies on Monday, eager to take advantage of a lifting of government travel restrictions that have been in place since Fidel Castro was a dark-bearded firebrand in his 30s.

The new rules eliminate the expensive bureaucratic hurdles long faced by Cubans wishing to go overseas, many of whom know loved ones who lost everything when they emigrated or who left the island in the dead of night on rafts and powerboats.

As of Monday, most Cubans can head for the airport with only a passport, a plane ticket and a visa, if required, from the country they intend to visit.

“We have lived for decades in captivity,” said Marta Rodríguez, 65, a retired office manager who was waiting to pick up a tourist visa from the United States Interests Section in Havana. “It’s a positive move — one they should have taken 50 years ago.”

The reform is not expected to prompt a major exodus, because most countries use entrance visas to control the number of visiting Cubans, and international travel remains way beyond the means of most islanders, who earn state salaries of about $20 per month. There are, of course, Cubans who want to travel from the island and return.

The government says it will continue to limit travel for tens of thousands of Cubans who work in strategic sectors, such as military personnel and scientific workers, as well as those they deem a threat to national security.

How tightly, and for how long, the government will continue to control those sectors’ movements will only become apparent over time, Cubans and outside analysts said. In a development that could signal new government flexibility, Yoani Sanchez, a prominent blogger and activist who says she has been denied an exit visa by the Cuban government at least 19 times in the past, said on Monday that she was one of the first in line at the immigration office and submitted paperwork for a new passport without any problems.

Arturo López-Levy, a Cuban-born academic who left the island 10 years ago and lectures at the University of Denver, said the migration reform was not simply a maneuver to defuse political pressure but a structural shift in the relationship between the island and the diaspora that the government once rejected as traitorous “worms.”

“This is a real change in the way in which the government perceives the relationship between the Cuban population and the outside world,” he said.

At immigration offices, Cubans scrutinized posters clarifying the new rules, stood in line to get new passports and pressed around immigration officials in spearmint-colored uniforms seeking details of what paperwork was now required.

More police were on hand than usual outside immigration offices and near consular offices, particularly the small park near the United States Interests Section — known locally as “the place between life and death” — where Cubans wait each day for appointments with American consular officers.

The Obama administration was watching the developments with interest. “We will see if this is implemented in a very open way and if it means that all Cubans can travel,” said Roberta S. Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, according to The Associated Press.

Despite multiple reports in recent weeks by official Cuban news media, many Cubans seemed unclear about how the new law would work: whether it applied to them, whether they needed a new passport or a special stamp (they do not), how it would work for minors.

Under the old system, most Cubans who applied for an exit permit to travel received it — if they could provide the authorities with an invitation letter from someone in the country they intended to visit — all at a cost of nearly $400.

Caridad Reyes Risse, 69, a retiree who was in line at a downtown travel agency to buy a ticket to visit her daughter in the United States, said she had waited until Monday to avoid that $400 expense.

“The question now is, ‘Will I get a ticket?’ ” she said, gesturing to the gaggles of Cubans that spilled out of the tiny agency.

Ramona María Moreno, 61, a restaurant worker, said that even though most Cubans who sought permission in the past received it, the change had psychological importance.

“It’s the idea you can go,” said Ms. Moreno, who was at an immigration office looking for a list of countries that admit Cubans without a visa. “It’s a freedom that we have never had.”

She acknowledged there were still barriers to travel. “I have no money,” she said with a chuckle.

The news last week that the government would allow members of its jealously guarded medical corps to travel has prompted excitement among doctors who for decades have had to go through a lengthy process to get permission, if they got it at all.

“Everyone is waiting to see what happens,” said Niurka, 45, a doctor who would like to join her family in Miami. Requesting that her last name not be published to avoid riling the authorities, she said she did not believe the tight restrictions on medical professionals would be lifted overnight.

“Still, it gives me hope,” she said.

However the government chose to carry out the new regulations, they signified a new era in Cuba’s relationship with its diaspora and the wider world, said Ms. Rodríguez, the retiree.

“They have realized the island needs to open up to the world,” she said “They can’t go back on this now.”

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Coke TV Ads Confront Obesity and Soda’s Role

The Coca-Cola Company began a new television ad campaign Monday aimed at getting on the healthy side of the national debate over obesity — a novel step for a company built on sugary soft drinks.

“We’d like people to come together on something that concerns all of us, obesity,” began the two-minute ad, which is scheduled to run during prime-time cable news shows. “The long-term health of our families and our country is at stake, and as the nation’s leading beverage company, we can play an important role.”

The ad goes on to promote steps Coke has taken, like putting calorie counts on “the front” of its cans and other packaging and increasing the number of its brands sold in smaller cans, to help consumers make healthier choices.

“There’s a really important conversation going on out there about obesity, and we want to be a part of it because our consumer is telling us they want us to be a part of it,” said Stuart Kronauge, general manager for sparkling beverages at Coca-Cola North America.

This ad is aimed at policy makers, but a second ad, to be broadcast Wednesday during the first episode of the new season for “American Idol,” will focus on consumers, emphasizing the calories in a can of soda and offering ideas about how to work them off, like walking the dog for 25 minutes, doing a victory dance or even laughing.

The ads establish a link between the company and its products and obesity, which could be risky. “We thought about that, but we’ve learned that consumers love more information from us — and we really believe Coke has the power to connect people in a way that can help solve issues,” Ms. Kronauge said.

It is the first time the company has gone on the offensive to tackle widespread criticism that sugary sodas are one of the biggest contributors to the obesity epidemic, and the ads drew criticism even before they were shown.

“This is not about changing the products but about confusing the public,” said Michele R. Simon, a public health lawyer who writes frequently about the food and beverage business and its role in public health issues on her blog, Appetite for Profit. “They are downplaying the serious health effects of drinking too much soda and making it sound like balancing soda consumption with exercise is the only issue, when there are plenty of other reasons not to consume too much of these kinds of products.”

Ms. Simon dismissed the ads as pure public relations and noted that the industry faced an onslaught of public health efforts to curb consumption of sugary sodas, like efforts around the country to impose taxes on high-sugar drinks and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s move to restrict the sizes of sodas sold in movie theaters and other spots in New York City.

The American Beverage Association, the organization that represents the industry, has filed a lawsuit against New York City and has fought successfully so far to defeat soda tax initiatives. Sales of carbonated sodas in general and sugary sodas in particular continue to slide, however, as consumers choose water, juices and other alternatives.

“They are clearly running scared and for good reason,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, which led the charge to get sugary sodas out of schools.

Dr. Goldstein said that if Coke really wanted to do something to reduce consumption of sugary sodas, it would sell them for a higher price than its other low- and no-calorie beverages. “Instead of spending millions on a P.R. campaign that will do nothing to combat obesity, diabetes and tooth decay, they would reap profits and change the beverage consumption of Americans in a big and beneficial way,” he said.

John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest and a longtime observer of the industry, said he thought soda companies had for too long avoided the issue of obesity as criticism mounted. “Letting the industry’s adversaries define it isn’t smart or in its self-interest,” he said.

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City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.

“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.

Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.

While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.

There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.

In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.

“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”

There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.

In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.

As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.

According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.

Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.

Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.

The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.

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