IN the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged. The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants.

Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.”

Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Once chief economist to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Feldstein has devoted much of his career to studying how high tax rates distort incentives and impede economic growth. But like most other policy wonks, he appreciates that some taxes align private incentives with social costs and move us toward better outcomes.

Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word “tax” only if followed immediately by the word “cut.” Democratic consultants recommend the word “tax” be followed by “on the rich.”

Yet this natural aversion to carbon taxes can be overcome if the revenue from the tax is used to reduce other taxes. By itself, a carbon tax would raise the tax burden on anyone who drives a car or uses electricity produced with fossil fuels, which means just about everybody. Some might fear this would be particularly hard on the poor and middle class.

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

The case for a carbon tax looks even stronger after an examination of the other options on the table. Lawmakers in both political parties want to require carmakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they sell. Passing the buck to auto companies has a lot of popular appeal.

Increased fuel efficiency, however, is not free. Like a tax, the cost of complying with more stringent regulation will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher car prices. But the government will not raise any revenue that it can use to cut other taxes to compensate for these higher prices. (And don’t expect savings on gas to compensate consumers in a meaningful way: Any truly cost-effective increase in fuel efficiency would already have been made.)

More important, enhancing fuel efficiency by itself is not the best way to reduce energy consumption. Fuel use depends not only on the efficiency of the car fleet but also on the daily decisions that people make — how far from work they choose to live and how often they carpool or use public transportation.

A carbon tax would provide incentives for people to use less fuel in a multitude of ways. By contrast, merely having more efficient cars encourages more driving. Increased driving not only produces more carbon, but also exacerbates other problems, like accidents and road congestion.

Another popular proposal to limit carbon emissions is a cap-and-trade system, under which carbon emissions are limited and allowances are bought and sold in the marketplace. The effect of such a system depends on how the carbon allowances are allocated. If the government auctions them off, then the price of a carbon allowance is effectively a carbon tax.

But the history of cap-and-trade systems suggests that the allowances would probably be handed out to power companies and other carbon emitters, which would then be free to use them or sell them at market prices. In this case, the prices of energy products would rise as they would under a carbon tax, but the government would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.

The international dimension of the problem also suggests the superiority of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade. Any long-term approach to global climate change will have to deal with the emerging economies of China and India. By some reports, China is now the world’s leading emitter of carbon, in large part simply because it has so many people. The failure of the Kyoto treaty to include these emerging economies is one reason that, in 1997, the United States Senate passed a resolution rejecting the Kyoto approach by a vote of 95 to zero.

Agreement on a truly global cap-and-trade system, however, is hard to imagine. China is unlikely to be persuaded to accept fewer carbon allowances per person than the United States. Using a historical baseline to allocate allowances, as is often proposed, would reward the United States for having been a leading cause of the problem.

But allocating carbon allowances based on population alone would create a system in which the United States, with its higher standard of living, would buy allowances from China. American voters are not going to embrace a system of higher energy prices, coupled with a large transfer of national income to the Chinese. It would amount to a massive foreign aid program to one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies.

A global carbon tax would be easier to negotiate. All governments require revenue for public purposes. The world’s nations could agree to use a carbon tax as one instrument to raise some of that revenue. No money needs to change hands across national borders. Each government could keep the revenue from its tax and use it to finance spending or whatever form of tax relief it considered best.

Convincing China of the virtues of a carbon tax, however, may prove to be the easy part. The first and more difficult step is to convince American voters, and therefore political consultants, that “tax” is not a four-letter word.

THE costliest place in the world to get high is Japan, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime's annual World Drug Report. The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive nation, Australia. Americans pay nearly twice as much as Canadians. Similar disparities occur in Europe. Although the Netherlands is the only Western country where cannabis can be bought legally, punters pay more there than in Germany or France. Prices are cheapest in developing countries, where enforcement is less strict.

AP

Diana Ross
[Bild: Keystone]

Oscar-Preisträger Martin Scorsese und die Musik-Ikone Diana Ross erhalten in diesem Jahr den begehrten Kennedy-Preis, mit dem Künstler für ihr Lebenswerk ausgezeichnet werden. Das Washingtoner Kennedy Center gab die insgesamt fünf Preisträger bekannt.

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Neben Scorsese und Ross werden der Pianist Leon Fleisher, der frühere "Beach Boy" Brian Wilson und der Hollywood-Komiker Steve Martin geehrt. Die Preisträger sollen am 2. Dezember bei einem Gala-Empfang im Opernhaus der Kultureinrichtung gefeiert werden.

Zuvor wird US- Präsident George W. Bush die Stars im Weissen Haus empfangen. Zum 30. Mal honoriert das Kennedy-Center damit Künstler, die einen "lebenslangen Beitrag zur amerikanischen Kultur" geleistet haben. Kollegen und frühere Preisträger bestimmen, an wen der Preis geht.

2006 wurden unter anderem Hollywood-Starregisseur Steven Spielberg und die Country-Sängerin Dolly Parton ausgezeichnet. Auch die Schauspielerinnen Elizabeth Taylor und Katherine Hepburn, der Sänger Bob Dylan und der Tenor Luciano Pavarotti nahmen in früheren Jahren die Ehrung entgegen.

Get article background

IN MARCH 1986 this newspaper celebrated “The Charm of Nuclear Power” on its cover. The timing wasn't great. The following month, an accident at a reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine spread radioactivity over Europe and despair in the Western world's nuclear industry.

Some countries never lost their enthusiasm for nuclear power. It provides three-quarters of French electricity. Developing countries have continued to build nuclear plants apace. But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline. The public got scared. The regulatory environment tightened, raising costs. Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it.

Now nuclear power has a second chance. Its revival is most visible in America (see article), where power companies are preparing to flood the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with applications to build new plants. But the tide seems to be turning in other countries, too. Finland is building a reactor. The British government is preparing the way for new planning regulations. In Australia, which has plenty of uranium but no reactors, the prime minister, John Howard, says nuclear power is “inevitable”.

Managed properly, a nuclear revival could be a good thing. But the industry and the governments keen to promote it look like repeating some of the mistakes that gave it a bad name in the first place.

Geopolitics, technology (see article), economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear power's favour. Western governments are concerned that most of the world's oil and gas is in the hands of hostile or shaky governments. Much of the nuclear industry's raw material, uranium, by contrast, is conveniently located in friendly places such as Australia and Canada.

Simpler designs cut maintenance and repair costs. Shut-downs are now far less frequent, so that a typical station in America is now online 90% of the time, up from less than 50% in the 1970s. New “passive safety” features can shut a reactor down in an emergency without the need for human intervention. Handling waste may get easier. America plans to embrace a new approach in which the most radioactive portion of the waste from conventional nuclear power stations is isolated and burned in “fast” reactors.

Technology has thus improved nuclear's economics. So has the squeeze on fossil fuels. Nuclear power stations are hugely expensive to build but very cheap to run. Gas-fired power stations—the bulk of new build in the 1980s and 1990s—are the reverse. Since gas provides the extra power needed when demand rises, the gas price sets the electricity price. Costly gas has therefore made existing nuclear plants tremendously profitable.

The latest boost to nuclear has come from climate change. Nuclear power offers the possibility of large quantities of baseload electricity that is cleaner than coal, more secure than gas and more reliable than wind. And if cars switch from oil to electricity, the demand for power generated from carbon-free sources will increase still further. The industry's image is thus turning from black to green.

Nuclear power's moral makeover has divided its enemies. Some environmentalists retain their antipathy to it, but green gurus such as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore have changed their minds and embraced it. Public opinion, confused about how best to save the planet, seems to be coming round. A recent British poll showed 30% of the population against nuclear power, compared with 60% three years ago. An American poll in March this year showed 50% in favour of expanding nuclear power, up from 44% in 2001.

Yet the economics of nuclear still look uncertain. That's partly because its green virtues do not show up in its costs, since fossil-fuel power generation does not pay for the environmental damage it does. But it is also because nuclear combines huge fixed costs with political risk. Companies fear that, after they have invested billions in a plant, the political tide will turn once more and bankrupt them. Investors therefore remain nervous.

How, then, to get new plants built? America's solution is to lard the industry with money. That is the wrong answer.

Nuclear and other clean energy sources do indeed deserve a hand from governments—but through a carbon tax which reflects the benefits of clean energy, not through subsidies to cover political risk. Exposure to public nervousness is a cost of doing business in the nuclear industry, just as exposure to volatile prices is a cost in the gas industry.

It may be that fears of nuclear power are overblown: after all, the UN figure of around 4,000 eventual deaths as a result of the Chernobyl accident is lower than the official annual death-rate in Chinese coal mines. Yet there are good reasons for public concern. Nuclear waste is difficult to dispose of. More civil nuclear technology around the world increases the chance of weapons proliferation. Terrorists could attack plants or steal nuclear fuel. Voters will support nuclear power only if they believe that governments and the nuclear industry are doing their best to limit those risks, and that such risks are small enough to be worth taking in the interests of cheap, clean energy.

One of the reasons why the public turned against nuclear power last time round is that it found itself bailing the industry out. It would be wrong, not just for taxpayers but also for the industry, to set up another lot of cosy deals with governments. The nuclear industry needs to persuade people that it is clean, cheap and safe enough to rely on without a government crutch. If it can't, it doesn't deserve a second chance.

EPA

A DECADE or so ago, thinkers and pundits were fond of discussing the emerging threat of cyber attacks as a matter of international affairs. The growing reliance of advanced economies on the internet, and the increasing use of the internet by governments and armies, seemed to offer vulnerability along with riches and convenience. The scare of the “Y2K bug” seemed to highlight the danger, at least until it became obvious that the bug was of no threat to anyone.

Now, despite preoccupation with more old-fashioned sorts of terrorism and war, is there, again, reason to fret about the cyber sort? Revelations this year that hackers successfully broke into Pentagon computers, followed by off-the-record confirmation by officials speaking to the Financial Times this week that the assailants were connected to China’s army, have brought the issue back to the fore. Reports suggest that the online intruders were probably engaged in espionage, downloading information. The ability to spy is threatening enough. But hackers may also discern vulnerabilities in computer systems and inflict damage. One fear is that hackers who peeked into the American government’s networks could possibly, one day, work out how to shut them down, at least for a time.

The Pentagon is presumably better able to protect itself against cyber attacks than most. Other targets have been shown to be more vulnerable. The potential impact of cyber-vandalism became obvious this year when Russian hackers unleashed the biggest-ever international cyber-assault on tiny Estonia, after the Baltic country caused offence by re-burying a Russian soldier from the second world war. “Denial of service” attacks, when huge numbers of visitors overwhelm public websites, crippled Estonian government computers. Some breathlessly called it the first direct Russian attack on a NATO member.

The Russian government claimed in that incident that the hackers were incensed ordinary Russians. But some experts said they saw Kremlin footprints. In the current Chinese case the script has been repeated; some at the Pentagon say they can pin the attacks on the People’s Liberation Army. Germany’s government has protested to China’s rulers, saying it too was once hacked by the PLA. Other governments, such as the British one, say that cyber-attacks are increasingly common problems. China, too, says it has been a victim of cyber-assault, and that it takes the issue seriously. In all likelihood—as with the more traditional spying of the cold war days—many countries are attempting some sort of cyber-attacks, while condemning others who do it.

Some of the more effective cyber snoops and vandals may not be government employees. Rather, as pirates would once loot on behalf of particular governments, a few of today’s more effective hackers may be freelancers acting perhaps with tacit official approval. But governments are also developing capability themselves. A Pentagon report this year on China’s military forces said baldly that the country was developing tactics to achieve “electromagnetic dominance” early in a conflict. It added that, while China had not developed a formal doctrine of electronic warfare, it had begun to consider offensive cyber-attacks within its operational exercises.

Cyber-attacks present an attractive option to America’s foes, as a form of guerrilla or asymmetrical warfare. In 2002 the Pentagon ran a war-game with the evocative title “Digital Pearl Harbour”. In it, simulated attacks showed only temporary and limited effect (for example shutting down some electricity supplies). But this week’s revelation may show that America has underestimated its Chinese rival.

The legal world has always been slow to keep up with technology, and the international law of cybercrime is no exception. The first international legal instrument on the subject was the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime. It requires members to pass appropriate laws against cybercrime—including unauthorised access and network disruption, as well as computer-aided traditional crimes like money-laundering and child pornography. It also mandates a certain level of law-enforcement to prevent laxer jurisdictions from becoming cybercrime havens. But its reach is limited. It came into force in 2004 among just six Council of Europe members; others have since joined, including America at the start of this year. No other non-member of the Council of Europe has joined. This means that the Chinese shenanigans, whatever they were, continue to exist in a legal netherworld.

[Bild: keystone.ch]

Wer die in Kunststoff gepackte Festplatte unter dem Fernseher satt hat, dem bietet Toshiba neue Möglichkeiten, digitale Videos zu archivieren.

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[SonntagsZeitung] -  Die japanische Firma erweitert ihre Bonsai-SpeicherReihe mit dem Raivu eiei (ewiges Leben). Die Pflanzen stammen aus den Baumschulen des renommierten BonsaiMeisters Nobuichi Urushibata und werden bis zu 4000 Jahre alt. Der Speicherplatz beträgt 120 Terabytes. Mitgeliefert werden eine komplette Pflege-Ausrüstung und ein HDMIKabel für den Anschluss an den TV-Apparat. Die Nutzung von Pflanzen als Speichermedien geht auf die Technik zurück, die im Jahr 2007 an der Tokioter Keio-Uni entwickelt wurde. Damals gelang es einer Forschergruppe, Einsteins Formel der Relativitätstheorie «E = mc2» auf ein Bakterium zu speichern. Bonsais eignen sich wegen ihrer langen Lebensdauer besonder gut als Speichermedien.

Der Raivu eiei ist im Handel für 749Franken erhältlich.

[Bild: nokia.com]

Mit dem neuen Premium-Gerät setzt Nokia seine Tradition fort, einzigartige und sehr wertvolle Mobiltelefone aus hochwertigen Materialien wie Chrom, Edelstahl und Titan zu schaffen.

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[Bild: nokia.com]

[pd] -  Das neue Mobiltelefon ist ein Meisterwerk der Präzision aus dem Material, das Künstler und Handwerker seit Jahrhunderten gleichermaßen inspiriert: Glas.

Ein besonderes Erlebnis

Die Verbindung aus nahezu lichtundurchlässigem Rauchglas mit einzigartigen Elementen aus Edelstahl mit Soft-Touch-Finish macht es zu einem Erlebnis, das Nokia 8600 Luna zu berühren und anzuschauen. Die unter dem Glas sanft pulsierende Tastaturbeleuchtung verleiht dem Mobiltelefon bei Eingang eines Telefongespräches etwas Geheimnisvolles. Dieser "Herzschlag", kombiniert mit der Wärme des Glases und seinem Gehäuse aus Edelstahl, verwandelt das Nokia 8600 Luna in einen zuverlässigen Begleiter mit einer organischen, geradezu lebendigen Form. Wenn ein Anruf eingeht, erhebt sich die ergonomische Tastatur durch die einzigartige Schiebebewegung auf sanfte Weise aus ihrem Glas-Kokon.

«Die Leidenschaft zum Detail kennzeichnet jeden Schritt im Entwicklungsprozess des Nokia 8600 Luna. Wir haben jede erdenkliche Mühe in Kauf genommen, um mit der Oberfläche dieses Mobiltelefons ein außergewöhnliches Erlebnis zu schaffen, das alle Erwartungen übertrifft. Dies beginnt mit der angenehmen Glätte des Glases und der Wärme, die der Edelstahl in der Hand ausstrahlt, und geht hin bis zum angenehmen Gefühl, das die einzigartigen ergonomischen Tasten an den Fingerspitzen vermitteln", so Heikki Norta, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia. „Bereits der Name dieses Gerät hat eine ganz besondere Bedeutung: Wie das Nokia 8600 Luna selbst, huldigen wir mit diesem Namen der Göttin des Mondlichts, Luna – die bereits von den Römern häufig als eine geheimnisvolle, verführerische Schönheit in einem weichen, strahlenden Licht dargestellt wurde.»

Ergonomisches Design

Die Balance aus Ästhetik und Ergonomie, die das Design des Nokia 8600 Luna kennzeichnet, setzt sich in seinen wohldurchdachten Funktionen fort. Das erste Nokia Mobiltelefon mit einem einzigen Micro-USB-Anschluss ermöglicht nicht nur ein elegantes Design, dessen Erscheinungsbild nicht durch überflüssige Anschlüsse gestört wird, sondern sorgt beim User auch für größere Bewegungsfreiheit. So werden das Aufladen des Geräts und das Übertragen von Daten und Musik über eine einzige Verbindung möglich. Dank Quadband-Betrieb in GSM-Netzen kann der User mühelos unterwegs überall in Verbindung bleiben, während sich auf dem großen und hellen Display die mit der integrierten 2-Megapixel-Kamera aufgenommenen Fotos in brillanter Qualität darstellen lassen.

Das Nokia 8600 Luna wird voraussichtlich im Verlauf des zweiten Quartals 2007 erhältlich sein und ohne Steuern und Mobilfunkvertrag ungefähr 700 Euro kosten.

[Bild: xexoo.com]

Die neuen XEXOO Cases aus purem Gold machen aus jedem iPod oder iPod nano ein wertvolles Schmuckstück und das im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Das vorhandene Gehäuse des iPod wird ausgetauscht gegen ein Case aus purem 18 kt Gold.

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[pd] -  Fast 100 Gramm Gold werden für das XEXOO Case für den iPod nano von Hand verarbeitet. So viel Gold und Handwerkskunst hat natürlich seinen Preis, die Schmuckstücke sind ab 8.000.- Euro erhältlich

Individuelle Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten:
Noch exklusiver und individueller präsentiert sich die Signature Edition der XEXOO Cases. Zur Auswahl stehen verschiedene edle Materialien wie Gelb-, Rosé- oder Rotgold aus denen die Cases hergestellt werden. Auf Wunsch des Kunden werden Initialen, Wappen oder Logos aus Brillanten und Edelsteinen in das Case gefasst. Somit wird jedes XEXOO Case ein Unikat. Die Grenze der Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten liegt weniger bei XEXOO sondern mehr am Budget des Kunden.

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Die 17-Jährige geht im Dress mit der Nummer 79 auf Punktejagd
[Bild: holley mangold.net]

[daw] -  «Ich liebte Football von Anfang an», wird Holley in krone.at zitiert. «Nicht nur beim Zusehen, sondern auch bei meinen ersten Versuchen auf dem Feld. Ich fand es cool.»

Entsprechend hart, gezielt und diszipliniert trainierte sie, um in das High-School-Team von Kettering (USA) aufgenommen zu werden. Für ihre Leidenschaft nimmt Holley Mangold Strapazen, dumme Sprüche der Gegner und auch «Trophäen» in Form von Wunden gerne in Kauf.

Raue Sitten auf dem Feld

«Es geht wirklich rau zu beim Spielen. Das muss ich ehrlich zugeben», erzählt Mangold. Aber jammern, etwa über Schürfwunden und Prellungen, hört man 17-Jährige, welche seit kurzem eine eigene Homepage besitzt, nie.

Da sie ihr überdurchschnittliches Gewicht geschickt einsetzt, hat sich Holley in ihrem Team bereits viel Respekt als eigentlicher «Sturmtank» verschafft. Und die Burschen staunen, wenn die einzige Dame im Team satte 120 Kilo beim Bankdrücken stemmt.

Werden dereinst aus den nicht zu übersehenden Fettpölsterchen noch Muskeln, muss die angestrebte Sport-Karriere kein Traum bleiben.

When I first walked into the house the day I bought my iPhone, I had a moment of panic. After six months of media frenzy and amongst all of the excitement, I had lost sight of the fact that the 8GB iPhone I bought at a nearby AT&T store had set me back $600.

Not that I hadn't been warned; the price information was everywhere, sensationalized and vilified, even, by people who thought that the price tag outrageous. In my determination to pick up the phone as soon as they went on sale, I discounted the cost -- until I got home with it and realized that I spent serious money on something that might not live up to the hype.

A bit of background: I hate cell phones. They're a necessary evil in terms of convenience, but with each latest and greatest model I bought, I became increasingly critical. The last straw came after I was suckered in by the thin design of the Razr a couple of years ago.

While it was nice that the phone slid in and out of pockets with ease because of its size, using the Razr's software for anything other than making calls was an abject exercise in exasperation. Potentially useful features were hidden underneath menus and submenus and sub-submenus, it couldn't autosync with my Mac, Internet access was mediocre, and the user interface clunky. The only thing that prevented me boycotting Motorola products after buying the Razr was the fact that the company wasn't alone when it came to disjointed design.

Click to see video of iPhone in action.

As I waited for a worthwhile phone to appear, it dawned on me that cell phones were adding more and more capabilities, while the physical design and user interface continued to rely on unwieldy physical buttons. That alone seemed to limit what you could reasonably expect a phone to do well, even as music and media player functions were being added.

The problem seemed obvious: They were trying to be everything to everyone using an outmoded design that relied on keypads. The software, in turn, had to work with the layout of the physical buttons. And for anyone looking to watch movies and video, the screens were almost always too small. The result: clumsy hardware married to lousy software, new features without a new form.

Enter Apple Inc. On stage for his January keynote at MacWorld San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled his answer to the problem, touting the iPhone as the ultimate phone, the ultimate iPod and the ultimate Internet experience. It looked like the iPhone might really be the first useful and user-friendly convergence device and, more importantly, might actually be worth my $600. But I had to wait six months -- until it went on sale June 29 -- to find out.

Best. Phone. Ever.
Now I know. The iPhone is the first phone I've liked in well over six years. To call the iPhone the best phone I've ever used is the biggest understatement of the decade. It's like saying Jupiter is big, or infinity a long time. From the moment you pick it up, you can feel the weight and sturdiness of the phone, inspiring the sort of confidence you get from a quality build. The display is gorgeously integrated, the streamlined face covered by glass. Finally -- a design worthy of being called a design!

But the attention to detail doesn't stop there. The iPhone as a phone is actually remarkable, given that you can easily swap between multiple calls, connect them, separate them, put some on private ... all without hanging up on any of the parties. I couldn't do that with any other phone before and always assumed that feature was faulty. These are among the details I've discovered with constant use of my iPhone over the past two months.

However, the beauty of the iPhone lies beyond its deliciously simple shell and goes way beyond being just a phone. That beauty -- and the iPhone's success -- lies with the way you interact with it. Use the multitouch screen, along with the changing set of "buttons" and icons that adjust themselves to the task at hand, and you can't help be reminded of classic science fiction, in which devices are so easy to use anyone can pick up anything and begin operating it. That's what the iPhone is.

That point hit home when my mother picked up my iPhone. Over the years, not a single device ever made it through my mother's hands without being returned to me with a frustrated laugh and a shrug. With the iPhone, once the screen lit up and my mother discovered that Swipe to Unlock really did mean swipe to unlock, she was sold.

And so was I. This is the first device to successfully integrate multiple layers of functionality with hardly any compromise on quality or ease of use. With the iPhone, you're not left wondering what this button does in that app. With its full-screen interface for every function and its incredibly simple iTunes integration and updates, it's easy to see why the iPhone looks to be a huge hit. After all, it isn't just the first convergence device to be brilliantly useful; it's also the first convergence device to be useful without requiring its user to be brilliant.

Not that it's perfect -- yet. But with Version 1.0 of the iPhone, Apple laid a solid foundation for future advances. As you read this, multitudes of developers are working to extend the functionality of the iPhone, some using Web 2.0 applications, others building native applications.

And there lies the true genius of the iPhone: OS X. Even with no official software development kit from Apple, because of iPhone's OS X foundation, the open-source community has been able to provide solutions to gaps in software that Apple has yet to release itself. Save for a couple of software updates labeled bug fixes, there hasn't been much in terms of major software announcements from Apple concerning the iPhone. The single exception was the addition of the Send to Web Gallery option, loosely tying the iPhone with Apple's recent iLife '08.

While it's clear that Apple is working to make the iPhone better, speculation about what Apple has up its sleeve remains just that: speculation. But the prospect of new applications and updates from Apple and independent developers is what makes the iPhone exciting to those who shelled out money to own one.

What needs fixing
That being said, there are a few tweaks that need to be made. The biggest issue for me is the inconsistencies in the user interface. There are certain capabilities that are available only in certain locations, yet not in apps where you think they'd make sense.

For instance, the landscape-mode keyboard works only in Safari. As nice as that is for browsing, wouldn't it make sense if all apps gained that function? I don't have any trouble typing on the virtual keyboard when the iPhone is in portrait orientation, but I could see how the larger-finger-friendly landscape keyboard mode would be beneficial to others.

Also peculiar: How come I can use the swipe gesture to delete e-mails, Short Messaging Service messages and even videos, yet I can't do the same with notes or bookmarks? This isn't a deal-breaking problem, but some consistency would be nice.

Another thing that bugs me is the inability to select multiple e-mails for deletion. Since the iPhone doesn't have spam filtering, I often find myself waking up to e-mail accounts filled with junk mail. Swipe deleting is fun for the first three e-mails. But after a bit, I found myself wondering why Apple didn't allow you to select multiple e-mails from within Mail and delete them all at once. Right now, you have to navigate to your in-box, click "edit," click the little red button next to each e-mail, and click "delete." Try doing that 25 times and see how long it takes.

And speaking of e-mails, I'd like to check one place for all of my e-mail accounts listed on the phone, yet the iPhone's user interface makes you go into each e-mail in-box individually. Certainly, the option for a universal in-box similar to the one in Mac OS X's Mail would be useful.

These quirks stand out because of how thoughtfully designed the interface is overall. After spending time with the iPhone, I've run into many more "ah-ha!" moments -- where the interaction surprises you with its intuitiveness -- than those "oh no" moments where the user interface falls short.

The beauty of the iPhone's design is that these interface quirks can be fixed because the entire interaction is based on a touch screen. When users call out these details to Apple, Apple can do something about them.

What can't be fixed (yet)
There are some shortcomings that can't be fixed in software, though, which may be a deal breaker for some. I'm referring to the lack of Global Positioning System (GPS) and 3G networking support. Since I don't live in a 3G area and most places I end up at have wireless anyway, I've not run into many issues.

Generally, AT&T Inc.'s EDGE (enhanced data rates for GSM evolution) network is acceptable for Maps, e-mail and, surprisingly enough, YouTube. It's with Web browsing that EDGE falls a bit short in terms of speed. But it's still good enough for light surfing.

The lack of GPS is offset by the functionally handy turn-by-turn feature in Maps. For some, this might not be enough, but for me, it does the job of getting me from Point A to Point B. Though lack of GPS hasn't stopped me from finding Maps enormously useful, I'd be one of the first in line if Apple ever released a separate GPS add-on, perhaps not unlike the Nike+ sports kit.

Another thing that can't be fixed in software is AT&T. While I haven't had as many dropped calls as I did with the Razr, there have been some dropped call issues. It's not to the point that it's annoying, but it does happen on occasion. Here's hoping that AT&T takes the cash it's receiving from the new members that have come on because of the iPhone and uses that money to upgrade and expand its networks.

The multifunction nature of the phone, along with the use of the touch screen, means there are some functions that actually require more steps than other phones. For instance, with my Razr, I'd flip open the phone and dial the number I wanted. If I was feeling brave, I'd even use the built-in contact manager, which was only a shortcut key away. In other words, making phone calls from the Razr didn't involve putting it into a "phone mode" as its primary function by default was making phone calls. (It was all of the other "features" that made me miserable.)

The iPhone requires a couple of extra steps. To make a call from the iPhone's default sleep mode, you have to first press the top button or the Home button to wake it up. Then, a swipe of your finger lets the iPhone know that you woke it intentionally, therefore unlocking the phone for use. From there, you have to click on the Phone icon before you can access your favorites, contacts, visual voice mail, recent phone calls or the keypad.

This might be an issue for some, but, personally, I've never really noticed. The extra steps -- a click, swipe and a tap before you're in phone app -- just give you more reasons to touch the screen.

And what about that screen? Mine looks as good and works as well as it did the day I brought the iPhone home. Even after two months of constant use, it looks new -- no dings, scratches or worn areas have shown up yet, a testament to the overall hardware design. Yes, the glass screen gets smudged from your fingers, and from your face when you hold it up to talk. But it's as easy to clean as any other glass surface, especially with the cleaning cloth supplied by Apple.

Convergence with thoughtfulness
In the end, Apple's latest device continues the company's tradition of rocking industry complacency, with the brilliance of the iPhone shining brighter the more you use it. The iPhone is physical proof that convergence with thoughtfulness really does work, actually making me -- after all of these years -- optimistic about the future of computing devices.

Watching others with the phone, you can see how its design seems to rekindle the joy people had for gadgets when technology first moved into the mainstream. Apple's efforts promise a future where technology works intuitively, making manuals -- and frustration -- a thing of the past.

Michael DeAgonia is a computer consultant and technologist who has been using Macintoshes for a decade and working on them professionally since 1996. His tech support background includes tenures at Computerworld, colleges, the biopharmaceutical industry, the graphics industry and Apple. Currently, he is working as an independent consultant at YourMacTek specializing in all things Macintosh.

AP

AS RECENTLY as two years ago, a forest fire came close to burning down the home of Costas Karamanlis. The Greek prime minister’s seaside villa outside Athens escaped the conflagration. But the event prompted Mr Karamanlis to promise strict measures to dissuade developers from building on land cleared by the blaze; satellite photos, for example, would be taken at regular intervals to help enforce Greece’s law banning construction in forest areas.

Mr Karamanlis and his conservative government have failed to deliver. This week the emergency services struggled to contain the worst forest fires to strike Greece in more than a century. The latest blazes sweeping the countryside have left more than 60 people dead. The problems of tackling the fire were compounded by the forestry department’s lack of access to satellite pictures that could have enabled fire-fighters to find and douse blazes before they caused serious damage.

Many perished trying to escape from Zacharo, a village in the Elis district in south-west Greece, as it was engulfed by flames. Other villages in the Peloponnese region were still being evacuated on Wednesday Aug 29th, six days after the fires started. Homes in more than 100 villages were gutted, livestock died and the olive crop was destroyed. So far the fires are reckoned to have caused €5 billion-worth of damage by some estimates.

The government, preparing for a snap election on September 16th, was quick to come up with some financial assistance for the stricken: €13,000 in cash, equivalent to more than a year’s income for most villagers from Elis, was handed out to anyone affected by the fires. Few were grateful; many who escaped from burning villages said they felt the emergency services had let them down.

Greek forestry officials blame arsonists for more than half of the fires. The remainder, they claim, were caused by flying sparks from electricity pylons or human carelessness. Seven people were arrested in the aftermath of the fires that struck Elis and Evia, an island in the Agean Sea near Athens; both the anti-terrorist squad and the intelligence service joined the hunt for fire-raisers.

Conspiracy theories are rife. Hardline members of Mr Karamanlis’s New Democracy party claim that the left had organised a fire-raising campaign to discredit the party and damage its chances of being re-elected. But there is probably no single culprit. An exceptionally hot summer following on the heels of a winter drought has made Greece’s resinous pine forests even more flammable than usual. Strong winds helped a spark from a chainsaw start one big fire.

Eye witnesses claim that several fires in the Peloponnese were started deliberately. Arsonists certainly have strong motives for starting blazes. Rising incomes have fuelled a construction boom. Demand is high for land near the sea to build second homes. Although Greek law states that builders cannot put up homes on forest land, developers are practised at getting around the rules.

Because Greece still lacks a land registry covering the whole country—a programme to put this right paid for by the European Union is moving at snail’s pace—it is easy to have burned land reclassified as farmland, which can then be sold for development. And in many places local officials are open to bribery to ease the issuing of planning permits without asking too many questions. Politicians often declare an amnesty for illegal buildings ahead of an election.

Will things be different next summer? Better fire-fighting is a priority. Greece has almost 40 water-bombing aircraft, more than any other southern European country. But its forestry service and fire-brigade are under-staffed, ill-equipped and poorly trained.

The civil-defence department lacks a fire-prevention strategy, which could lessen the impact of future fires. In other places prone to burning people clear undergrowth from their local forests during the winter and bulldoze fire-breaks around villages. In summer round-the-clock fire-watches are maintained. The next government, whether led by Mr Karamanlis or George Papandreou, leader of the main opposition Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, will have to take fire prevention seriously.

Sergio Urday/European Pressphoto Agency

A man sitting in the rubble of his home today in Canete, Peru.

LIMA, Peru, Aug. 16 — A powerful earthquake shook Peru Wednesday night, killing at least 337 people, Civil Defense authorities said today. More than 800 people are believed to have been injured.

Most of the reported dead were in the region near Ica, south of the capital, which emergency workers said appeared to be the area that was hardest hit. The earthquake, whose magnitude was estimated at 7.9, was centered off Peru’s Pacific shore near Ica.

Many people were killed in the rubble of their homes, and about 200 people were buried under a collapsed church. Emergency workers said the death toll might be even greater.

Ica was blacked out, as were smaller towns along the coast south of Lima. Rescue workers reported difficulty getting to Ica because of cracks in the highway and downed power lines.

At least 200 people in Pisco in southern Peru were crushed under the rubble of a church that collapsed during a religious service, The Associated Press reported, citing the mayor of Pisco, Juan Mendoza Uribe.

Mr. Mendoza Uribe said 70 percent of Pisco, a port city of about 60,000 people located 135 miles south of Lima, was leveled by the quake.

“So much effort and our city is destroyed,” he said, crying audibly, in comments broadcast on radio station RPP in Lima.

The city remained without electricity this morning. Peruvian news organizations reported that bodies were strewn in streets where houses had collapsed.

Office workers in Lima fled tall buildings that shook in two waves that lasted around 20 seconds each and cut power lines, Reuters reported.

“I was in class on the fifth floor, and suddenly everything started to shake and glass began falling,” said Carolina Montero, 37, a banking administrator and finance student who lives in Callao, a coastal city near Lima. “People got extremely nervous.”

Fernando Calderon, an American in Lima, said he was in his hotel when the quake struck. He described the scene as unreal, with buildings swaying from right to left, and the ground shaking.

“We realized everybody was out, and the ground was shaking for a minute,” he said by telephone in an interview with CNN. “Finally we started hearing glass breaking, and things falling out of the building and that’s when everybody started screaming, praying, children crying. It was just awful.”

Electra Anderson, another American, told CNN by telephone from her apartment in Peru that it seemed when the quake began that many people had no idea what was happening, and ran into the streets screaming and crying.

“We’re used to earthquakes,” said Ms. Anderson, who is from California. “But it just didn’t stop; it kept going and going, and it kept getting stronger and stronger.”

She added that she counted about 70 aftershocks: “It’s just been non-stop.”

Her belongings in the apartment went flying and the glass windows appeared to be bending in. “People really thought they were going to die,” Ms. Anderson said.

The United States Geological Survey said the earthquake struck about 90 miles southeast of Lima at a depth of about 25 miles. Four strong aftershocks ranging from magnitudes of 5.4 to 5.9 followed.

A tsunami warning was issued for Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, and a small tsunami was detected, but it posed no major threat and the warning was later lifted, news services reported.

The last time a quake of magnitude 7.0 or larger struck Peru was in September 2005, when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocked Peru’s northern jungle, killing four people. In 2001, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck near the southern Andean city of Arequipa, killing 71 people.

. 23 Love Mobiles, hunderttausende tanzwütiger Raver und ein Motto mit Ausrufezeichen: «Respect!». Am Samstag rollte zum 16. Mal die Street-Parade ums Zürcher Seebecken. Und auch das ist eine gute Nachricht: Wer scharfe Bilder schoss, kann hier attraktive Preise gewinnen.

Zum Thema Alle Videos Myworld-Galerie Kyte-Galerie Wettbewerb Forum Street Parade Hymne Zur Übersicht Alle Videos im Überblick Am Samstag um genau 14.30 Uhr gab Street-Parade-Gründer Marek Krynski am Utoquai den Startschuss für den farbenfrohen Umzug. Darauf setzte sich die fröhliche Menge in Bewegung, um tanzend die 2.4 Kilometer lange Strecke rund ums Seebecken zu bewältigen. Die Love Mobiles fuhren dieses Jahr erstmals klimaneutral und zum Dank dafür gabs gleichzeitig mit dem Startschuss endlich den heissersehnten Sonnenschein. Die Temperaturen wollten jedoch nie so richtig ansteigen. Wer nach Umzugsende um 22 Uhr beim Hafendamm Enge noch immer nicht genug hatte, war mit den über 100 Veranstaltungen in und um Zürich gut bedient. Die Street Parade steht aber nicht nur für Musik und Party, sondern zelebriert auch die Schönheit des Lebens. Und wo das Leben schön ist, gibt es reichlich Gelegenheit, schöne Bilder und Filme zu machen. Schick uns dein bestes Streetparade-Foto/ -Movie und gewinne mit etwas Glück ein Sony Ericsson W880i oder vier Swisscom-Gutscheine im Wert von je CHF 200.-* Hier gehts zum Wettbewerb.

Copyright © 2007, Cinergy AG

Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89.

Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

In Bergman, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”

He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.

Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.”

He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, “Smiles” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent “Seventh Seal,” with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, “The Magician” took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, “The Virgin Spring”, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable.

“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”

The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.

“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”

His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:

“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.

He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.

He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.”

In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in the southern Swedish city of Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.

In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in “Torment,” which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.

Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style.

Most experts agree that his first film of note was “Prison,” his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.

In the next few years, he made “Summer Interlude” (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; “Waiting Women” (1952), his first successful comedy; “Sawdust and Tinsel” set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as “The Naked Night”; “A Lesson in Love” (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “The Seventh Seal,” his breakthroughs to fame.

In 1957, the same year as “Seventh Seal,” Mr. Bergman also directed “Wild Strawberries,” his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”

Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for “Through a Glass Darkly,” and then came the turning point in his career — “Winter Light,” which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with “The Silence” and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.

Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.

Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.

But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as “Persona” — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — “The Passion of Anna,” “Cries and Whispers” — a stark portrait of three sisters — and “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

The ideas for his films, he said, came to him in many ways. “Persona,” the study of two women in neurotic intimacy, came to life, he said, when one day he saw two women sitting together comparing hands. “I thought to myself,” he said, “that one of them is mute and the other speaks.”

The germ for “The Silence” — in which a dying woman and her sister are in a foreign country with no means of communication — came from a hospital visit, he said, where “I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park.”

“As I watched,” he said, “four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind.”

In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience.

“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.”

Mr. Bergman used his memories in many other films: “Scenes From a Marriage” (which was originally done for television), “Autumn Sonata,” “From the Life of the Marionettes,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Shame,” “Face to Face” and his version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” considered by many to be the most successful film ever made of an opera.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Bergman maintained his successful theatrical career in Sweden. It was while rehearsing Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1976 that he was arrested for tax evasion. The incident received a great deal of publicity, and while the charges were later dropped and the Swedish Government issued a formal apology, Mr. Bergman exiled himself from Sweden to West Germany, where he made “The Serpent’s Egg.” He had a nervous breakdown over the incident and was hospitalized for a time. The exile lasted for a number of years and he only returned permanently to his native country in the mid-80s.

In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film — it was “Fanny and Alexander,” a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the last century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.

“Making ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.”

“Fanny and Alexander” won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.

Mr. Bergman did not, however, leave the world of film altogether. He spent much of his time on Faro, a sparsely populated island that visitors described as chilly and desolate but that he considered the one place he felt safe, secure and at home. And he would devote his mornings to working on his plays, novels and television scripts.

He made a television film, “After the Rehearsal” — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s “Dream Play” — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote “The Best Intentions,” first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.

“The slightly fictional Anna and Henrik Bergman are complex, stubborn, well-meaning people who share a heartbreaking inability to be happy no matter what they try,” Ms. James wrote, and Mr. Bergman “is a benevolent ghost hovering over the film.”

Mr. Bergman said in an interview in Sweden that the act of writing the film had changed his attitude toward his parents. “After this,” he said, “every form of reproach, blame, bitterness or even vague feeling that they have messed up my life is gone forever from my mind.”

“The Best Intentions” was one of three novels he wrote in the 80s and 90s about his parents. The second, “Sunday’s Children,” was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, “Private Confessions,” about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.

In 1997, he directed a two-hour made-for-television movie, “In the Presence of Clowns,” set in the 1920s and based on a story he discovered among the papers left by an uncle who appeared as a main character in “Fanny and Alexander” and “Best Intentions” and was played in all three films by Borje Ahlstedt.

He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.”

He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern.”

[In the fall of 2002, Bergman, at age 84, started production on “Saraband,” a 120-minute television movie based on the two main characters in “Scenes From a Marriage,” The Associated Press reported. In a news conference, the director said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.” “At first I felt sick, very sick,” he said. “It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,” he said, referring to biblical characters. “It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.”]

In addition to Oscars and prizes at film festivals, Mr. Bergman’s films won many awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, among others. In 1977, he was given the Swedish Academy of Letters’ Great Gold Medal, one of only 17 people to have received it in this century.

Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships.

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

According to The A.P., which cited TT, the Swedish news agency, the date of Mr. Bergman’s funeral has not been set but will be attended by a close group of his friends and family.

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THE population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the curve flattens out as the colony stops growing.

Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar. For thousands of years, the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden spurt during the industrial revolution which produced, between 1900 and 2000, a near-quadrupling of the world's population.

Numbers are still growing; but recently—it is impossible to know exactly when—an inflection point seems to have been reached. The rate of population increase began to slow. In more and more countries, women started having fewer children than the number required to keep populations stable. Four out of nine people already live in countries in which the fertility rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Last year the United Nations said it thought the world's average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025. Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century.

As population predictions have changed in the past few years, so have attitudes. The panic about resource constraints that prevailed during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was rising through the steep part of the S-curve, has given way to a new concern: that the number of people in the world is likely to start falling.

Some regard this as a cause for celebration, on the ground that there are obviously too many people on the planet. But too many for what? There doesn't seem to be much danger of a Malthusian catastrophe. Mankind appropriates about a quarter of what is known as the net primary production of the Earth (this is the plant tissue created by photosynthesis)—a lot, but hardly near the point of exhaustion. The price of raw materials reflects their scarcity and, despite recent rises, commodity prices have fallen sharply in real terms during the past century. By that measure, raw materials have become more abundant, not scarcer. Certainly, the impact that people have on the climate is a problem; but the solution lies in consuming less fossil fuel, not in manipulating population levels.

Nor does the opposite problem—that the population will fall so fast or so far that civilisation is threatened—seem a real danger. The projections suggest a flattening off and then a slight decline in the foreseeable future.

If the world's population does not look like rising or shrinking to unmanageable levels, surely governments can watch its progress with equanimity? Not quite. Adjusting to decline poses problems, which three areas of the world—central and eastern Europe, from Germany to Russia; the northern Mediterranean; and parts of East Asia, including Japan and South Korea—are already facing.

Think of twentysomethings as a single workforce, the best educated there is. In Japan (see article), that workforce will shrink by a fifth in the next decade—a considerable loss of knowledge and skills. At the other end of the age spectrum, state pensions systems face difficulties now, when there are four people of working age to each retired person. By 2030, Japan and Italy will have only two per retiree; by 2050, the ratio will be three to two. An ageing, shrinking population poses problems in other, surprising ways. The Russian army has had to tighten up conscription because there are not enough young men around. In Japan, rural areas have borne the brunt of population decline, which is so bad that one village wants to give up and turn itself into an industrial-waste dump.

States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them. But the transition to a lower population can be a difficult one, and it is up to governments to ease it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways of going about it—most of which involve social changes that are desirable in themselves.

The best way to ease the transition towards a smaller population would be to encourage people to work for longer, and remove the barriers that prevent them from doing so. State pension ages need raising. Mandatory retirement ages need to go. They're bad not just for society, which has to pay the pensions of perfectly capable people who have been put out to grass, but also for companies, which would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a criterion for employing people. Rigid salary structures in which pay rises with seniority (as in Japan) should also be replaced with more flexible ones. More immigration would ease labour shortages, though it would not stop the ageing of societies because the numbers required would be too vast. Policies to encourage women into the workplace, through better provisions for child care and parental leave, can also help redress the balance between workers and retirees.

Some of those measures might have an interesting side-effect. America and north-western Europe once also faced demographic decline, but are growing again, and not just because of immigration. All sorts of factors may be involved; but one obvious candidate is the efforts those countries have made to ease the business of being a working parent. Most of the changes had nothing to do with population policy: they were carried out to make labour markets efficient or advance sexual equality. But they had the effect of increasing fertility. As traditional societies modernise, fertility falls. In traditional societies with modern economies—Japan and Italy, for instance—fertility falls the most. And in societies which make breeding and working compatible, by contrast, women tend to do both.

Angekündigt: tragbares Satellitentelefon mit Dampfmaschinenbetrieb

Der Multimediaspeicher umfasst 12 auswechselbare Musikdosen mit Miniaturnadeln

Die Satellitentechnik benutzt die gesamte Umgebung, inklusive Autos, Schiffe, Nachbarn, Haustiere und Kinder, um das eigene Signal mit einer Art Echo zu verstärken.
[Bild: piratepalooza.com]

Vermutlich war die Ankündigung des rPhone auf den 1. April geplant. Doch nun erscheint das revolutionäre Satellitentelefon zeitgleich mit dem iPhone auf der Bühne der Weltöffentlichkeit – und sticht Apples neusten Wurf locker aus. Noch nie vereinigte ein Gerät derart viele revolutionäre Neuerungen in sich.

Anders als herkömmliche PDAs verzichtet das rPhone auf all die überflüssigen Spielereien, die sowieso niemand braucht. Es konzentriert sich auf das Wesentliche: eine Wählscheibe und einen extrem leistungsfähigen Vibracall. Die Bedienung ist äusserst einfach. Laut eigenen Angaben richtet es sich damit in erster Linie an hauptberufliche Piraten.

Die Satellitentechnik benutzt die gesamte Umgebung, inklusive Autos, Schiffe, Nachbarn, Haustiere und Kinder, um das eigene Signal mit einer Art Echo zu verstärken und in die Stratosphäre zu heizen, wo es über den ganzen Globus verteilt wird. Mit einem Gewicht von 1,8 kg liegt das dampfbetriebene rPhone ausgezeichnet in der Hand. Der Multimediaspeicher umfasst 12 auswechselbare Musikdosen mit Miniaturnadeln.

Die eingebaute Kamera verfügt laut Herstellerangaben über 35 Gigapixel. Da eine so hohe Auflösung ohnehin nicht adäquat auf einem Display dargestellt werden könnte, passt der Verzicht auf einen LCD ins Gesamtkonzept des rPhone.
Bis zur tatsächlichen Markteinführung dürften zwar noch mindestens einige Jahrhunderte verstreichen. Aber entweder ist man seiner Zeit voraus, oder eben nicht.

Kritik an Atomkraftwerkbetreiber
[Bild: Keystone]

Der Betreiber des bei einem schweren Erdbeben in Japan beschädigten Atomkraftwerks hat Fehler eingeräumt. Laut TEPCO war es beim Beben zu insgesamt 50 Funktionsstörungen in der aus sieben Reaktoren bestehenden Atomanlage gekommen.

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[sda] - Unter anderem waren am Montag rund 100 Fässer mit radioaktivem Abfall umgekippt, von denen einige offen vorgefunden wurden. Zudem war neben einem Reaktor ein Transformator in Brand geraten und Wasser mit radioaktivem Material ins Meer ausgelaufen.

Der Reaktor hatte sich während des Erdbebens automatisch abgeschaltet. Bis zur Anpassung der Sicherheitsmassnahmen soll die Anlage nach dem Willen der japanischen Regierung nicht wieder ans Netz.

Die Informationen aus dem weltgrössten Atomkraftwerk Kashiwazaki-Kariwa seien zu gering gewesen, gab der Betreiber TEPCO laut der japanischen Nachrichtenagentur Kyodo zu.

Die Menge an Radioaktivität liege aber unterhalb der staatlichen Sicherheitsstandards und stelle kein Sicherheitsproblem dar, hiess es.

Ministerpräsident Shinzo Abe hatte TEPCO vorgeworfen, die Öffentlichkeit "zu langsam" über die Vorfälle informiert zu haben. Wirtschaftsminister Akira Amari bestellte TEPCO-Chef Tsunehisa Katsumata ein und rügte ihn.

Das Atomkraftwerk Kashiwazaki-Kariwa liegt vermutlich direkt über der Erdverwerfung, die am Montag das Beben ausgelöst hatte. Das habe die Auswertung seismologischer Daten der Meteorologischen Behörde gezeigt, berichtete Kyodo.

Die Erschütterungen in der Atomanlage seien erheblich stärker gewesen als beim Bau des Kraftwerks einkalkuliert worden war. Bei dem Erdbeben waren am Montag neun Menschen ums Leben gekommen.

Novartis mit hohem Gewinn
[Bild: Keystone]

Novartis ist weiterhin auf Rekordkurs. Der Basler Pharmagigant hat im ersten Halbjahr 2007 beim Gewinn die Vier-Milliarden-Dollar-Grenze geknackt. Die Zeichen für weiteres ungebremstes Wachstum bei Gewinn und Umsatz stehen gut.

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[sda] - Der Gewinn legte in den ersten sechs Monaten 2007 um 14 Prozent auf 4,2 Mrd. Dollar zu, wie Novartis mitteilt. Der Umsatz nahm um 14 Prozent auf 19,9 Mrd. Dollar zu. Das operative Ergebnis steig um 10 Prozent auf 4,7 Mrd. Dollar.

Allein im zweiten Quartal steigerte Novartis den Reingewinn um 18 Prozent auf auf 2,0 Mrd. Dollar. Der Umsatz legte gleichzeitig um 10 Prozent auf 10,1 Mrd. Dollar. Damit übertraf Novartis die Erwartungen von Analysten deutlich. Für das Gesamtjahr 2007 erwartet Novartis weiterhin Rekordwerte.

Die zweistellige Umsatzsteigerung beruhe auf der dynamischen Performance der Divisionen Sandoz und Vaccines and Diagnostics sowie auf dem soliden Wachstum der Divisionen Pharmaceuticals und Consumer Health, heisst es. Volumensteigerungen machten sieben, Akquisitionen drei Prozentpunkte des Nettoumsatzwachstums des Konzerns aus.

Die grösste Division Pharmaceuticals steigerte den Umsatz um 12 Prozent auf 12,0 Mrd. Dollar. Das operative Ergebnis legte um 10 Prozent auf 3,6 Mrd. Dollar zu. Das anhaltend starke Wachstum der umsatzstärksten Medikamente hätten massgeblich zum Erfolg beigetragen.

Die Division Vaccines und Diagnostics erzielte einen Umsatz von 482 Mio. Dollar, nach 127 Mio. Dollar im Vorjahr. Das operative Ergebnis erreichte 7 Mio. Dollar, nach einem Minus von 38 Mio. Dollar im Vorjahr.

In der Generika-Division Sandoz steigerte Novartis die Verkäufe um 19 Prozent auf 3,4 Mrd. Dollar. Beim operativen Gewinn legte Sandoz 26 Prozent auf 561 Mio. Dollar zu. Die operative Marge verbesserte sich um einen Prozentpunkt auf 16,4 Prozent.

Die fortzuführenden Geschäfte in der Division Consumer Health steigerten die Umsätze um 9 Prozent auf 2,6 Mrd. Dollar. Das operative Ergebnis wuchs um 8 Prozent auf 483 Mio. Dollar.

HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”

The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.

GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”

Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.

“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”

Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.

But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)

“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”

For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).

One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.

Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.

Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.

“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”

It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.

Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.

“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.

“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”

For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.

INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”

In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.

Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.

People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”