IHT Rendezvous: Calls for Press Freedom in China's South

BEIJING — Something remarkable was under way in southern China on Monday: an open revolt at one of the country’s biggest and most popular news groups against the propaganda authorities, who apparently censored an outspoken New Year’s “greeting” in a major newspaper calling for constitutionalism and greater rights in China.

On Monday, protesters were gathering at the Southern Media Group headquarters in Guangzhou, capital of the southern province of Guangdong, holding handwritten signs and white and yellow chrysanthemums, the flowers of mourning, to express their outrage at the censorship.

Among the signs, according to photographs circulating online, was one reading: “You can speak, he can speak, I can speak: Speak well!”

Another read, simply: “Freedom of speech.”

A row of people (below), each holding a single flower, held signs saying: “Each flower blooms into strength.”

For lots of photos of the scene, check out the blogger John Kennedy’s Twitter feed, @28wordslater.

In a sign of how far the row is spreading, on Monday some of the country’s most famous actresses — usually known more for posing than for protesting — were joining in online, with the superstars Li Bingbing and Yao Chen both posting messages of support on their Weibos, or microblogs. (Ms. Yao has nearly 32 million followers on Weibo, while Ms. Li has more than 19 million.)

“Good morning, eight days work in a row and the weekend isn’t the weekend,” read a post on Ms. Li’s account, a reference both to the newspaper group’s troubles and to the eight consecutive workdays mandated by the government after the New Year holiday.

“Good morning, there is no warm wind from the south, take care everyone. Good morning, in the severe winter we wait for spring to come,” Ms. Li wrote, obliquely but pointedly, to a Chinese readership used to deciphering coded messages.

A message on Ms. Yao’s microblog read, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world,” citing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Southern Weekend Group is known for pushing the envelope on China’s press freedoms, but it is also a major business with diverse interests and powerful friends in high places. Ms. Yao had been a guest of honor at an event sponsored by the group in December 2011, entitled, ironically, “China Dream,” a title very similar to that of the censored article, which also talked of “China’s Dream” — a dream of greater civil rights.

The “New Year’s Greeting” incident, as it’s being called, poses an early challenge to the new leader, Xi Jinping. As my colleague at The New York Times, Ian Johnson, wrote, the turmoil is “pitting a pent-up popular demand for change against the Communist Party’s desire to maintain a firm grip.”

And although the year is young, the China Media Project, a Web site that closely monitors the news media, society and politics in China from Hong Kong, outside of China’s “Great Firewall” of censorship, declared that the incident was “without a doubt one of the most important we will witness in China this year.”

The unrest at the influential Southern Weekly newspaper (it’s also called Southern Weekend in English) began last week when journalists accused the propaganda chief of Guangdong Province, Tuo Zhen, of censoring the paper’s New Year’s letter to its readers — traditionally a call for progress in the new year.

“The stand-off arose after the journalists blamed Tuo for turning the editorial, calling for political reform, into a tribute to one-party rule the day before publication. Hundreds of intellectuals, journalists and Internet users have since signed an online petition condemning the lack of press freedom and censorship,” the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

As Ian wrote: “By Sunday night, the protests had transformed into a real-time melee in the blogosphere — a remarkable development in a country where protests of all kinds are tightly controlled and the media largely know the boundaries of permissible debate.”

By Monday morning, several different protest letters, signed by journalists, academics, students, and others, were circulating, the China Media Project reported.

In one, writers said that “the incident was like the fuse on a detonator,” with more than 1,000 stories censored or scrapped altogether last year, The South China Morning Post wrote.

“What we have been through was the endless routine of unjustifiable censorship, the killing of stories or entire pages and complete rewrites,” the petition lamented. People were fed up.

The Post quoted the Shaanxi-based China Business News, which apparently defied government orders to stay silent on the turmoil, as publishing a commentary saying the row was “a test of the leadership’s ability to govern and heed public concerns.”

“The conflict between public opinions and authorities in Guangdong also underlines a pressing issue of greater importance: it is high time to review and reform our policies regarding media control,” The Post quoted the newspaper as writing.

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Design: Who Made That Universal Product Code?

On a Sunday afternoon in 1971, an I.B.M. engineer stepped out of his house in Raleigh, N.C., to consult his boss, who lived across the street. “I didn’t do what you asked,” George Laurer confessed.

Laurer had been instructed to design a code that could be printed on food labels and that would be compatible with the scanners then in development for supermarket checkout counters. He was told to model it on the bull’s-eye-shaped optical scanning code designed in the 1940s by N. Joseph Woodland, who died last month. But Laurer saw a problem with the shape: “When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared,” he says, “so I came up with my own code.” His system, a pattern of stripes, would be readable even if it was poorly printed.

That pattern became the basis for the Universal Product Code, which was adopted by a consortium of grocery companies in 1973, when cashiers were still punching in all prices by hand. Within a decade, the U.P.C. — and optical scanners — brought supermarkets into the digital age. Now an employee could ring up a cereal box with a flick of the wrist. “When people find out that I invented the U.P.C., they think I’m rich,” Laurer says. But he received no royalties for this invention, and I.B.M. did not patent it.

As the U.P.C. symbol proliferated, so, too, did paranoia about it. For decades, Laurer has been hounded by people convinced that he has hidden the number 666 inside the lines of his code. “I didn’t get the meat,” Laurer said ruefully, “but I did get the nuts.”

CODE BREAKER
Bill Selmeier runs the ID History Museum, an online archive dedicated to the bar code.

You worked at I.B.M. in the 1970s and then helped promote the U.P.C.?
Yes, I started the seminars where we invited people from the grocery and labeling industry into I.B.M. We were there to reduce their fear.

What were they afraid of?
They were afraid that anything that didn’t work right would reflect badly on them — particularly if it was only their own package that wouldn’t scan. The guy from Birds Eye said, “My stuff always has ice on it when it goes through the checkout.” So we put his package in the freezer and took it out and showed him how it scanned perfectly.

Why are you still so interested in the history of the U.P.C.?
Let me put it this way: What bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?

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Design: Who Made That Universal Product Code?

On a Sunday afternoon in 1971, an I.B.M. engineer stepped out of his house in Raleigh, N.C., to consult his boss, who lived across the street. “I didn’t do what you asked,” George Laurer confessed.

Laurer had been instructed to design a code that could be printed on food labels and that would be compatible with the scanners then in development for supermarket checkout counters. He was told to model it on the bull’s-eye-shaped optical scanning code designed in the 1940s by N. Joseph Woodland, who died last month. But Laurer saw a problem with the shape: “When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared,” he says, “so I came up with my own code.” His system, a pattern of stripes, would be readable even if it was poorly printed.

That pattern became the basis for the Universal Product Code, which was adopted by a consortium of grocery companies in 1973, when cashiers were still punching in all prices by hand. Within a decade, the U.P.C. — and optical scanners — brought supermarkets into the digital age. Now an employee could ring up a cereal box with a flick of the wrist. “When people find out that I invented the U.P.C., they think I’m rich,” Laurer says. But he received no royalties for this invention, and I.B.M. did not patent it.

As the U.P.C. symbol proliferated, so, too, did paranoia about it. For decades, Laurer has been hounded by people convinced that he has hidden the number 666 inside the lines of his code. “I didn’t get the meat,” Laurer said ruefully, “but I did get the nuts.”

CODE BREAKER
Bill Selmeier runs the ID History Museum, an online archive dedicated to the bar code.

You worked at I.B.M. in the 1970s and then helped promote the U.P.C.?
Yes, I started the seminars where we invited people from the grocery and labeling industry into I.B.M. We were there to reduce their fear.

What were they afraid of?
They were afraid that anything that didn’t work right would reflect badly on them — particularly if it was only their own package that wouldn’t scan. The guy from Birds Eye said, “My stuff always has ice on it when it goes through the checkout.” So we put his package in the freezer and took it out and showed him how it scanned perfectly.

Why are you still so interested in the history of the U.P.C.?
Let me put it this way: What bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?

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Assad Says Syria ‘Accepts Advice but Not Orders’

BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, sounding defiant, confident and, to critics, out of touch with the magnitude of his people’s grievances, proposed Sunday what he called a plan to resolve the country’s 21-month uprising with a new constitution and cabinet.

But he offered no new acknowledgment of the gains by the rebels fighting against him, the excesses of his government or the aspirations of the Syrian people. Mr. Assad also ruled out talks with the armed opposition and pointedly ignored its central demand that he step down, instead using much of a nearly hourlong speech to justify his harsh military crackdown.

Mr. Assad waved to a cheering, chanting crowd as he strode to the stage of the Damascus Opera House in the central Umayyad Square — where residents said security forces had been deployed heavily the night before. In his first public speech since June 2012, he repeated his longstanding assertions that the movement against him was driven by “murderous criminals” and terrorists receiving financing from abroad, and he appeared to push back hard against recent international efforts to broker a compromise.

“Everyone who comes to Syria knows that Syria accepts advice but not orders,” he said.

His speech came a week after the United Nations and Arab League envoy on Syria, the senior Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, visited Damascus, the capital, in a push for a negotiated solution.

“Who should we negotiate with? Terrorists?” Mr. Assad asked. “We will negotiate with their masters.”

Mr. Assad’s speech was a disappointment for international mediators and many Syrians who say they believe that without a negotiated settlement, Syria’s conflict will descend into an even bloodier stage. The United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have died in what began as a peaceful protest movement and transformed into armed struggle after security forces fired on demonstrators.

Rebels have made gains in the north and east of Syria and in the Damascus suburbs, but Mr. Assad’s government has pushed back with devastating airstrikes and artillery bombardments and appears confident that it can hold the capital. Neither side appears ready to give up the prospect of a military victory.

The tenor of Mr. Assad’s speech is likely to raise the question of whether Mr. Brahimi’s mission serves any purpose; there was no immediate comment from him or his staff.

Mr. Assad’s opponents rejected the proposal as meaningless, sticking to their longstanding demand that the president resign as a precondition to negotiations.

“We can’t deal with this murderous regime at all,” George Sabra, a member of the opposition Syrian National Council, said in a brief interview. “This regime has killed 60,000 people, so no one could possibly think that working with this regime is a possibility. It is out of the question.”

Mr. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 42 years, said Sunday that he was open to dialogue with “those who have not betrayed Syria,” apparently a reference to tolerated opposition groups that reject armed revolution, like the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change, whose members have been floated by Syria’s allies China and Russia as possible compromise brokers.

Yet Mr. Assad’s speech appeared unlikely to satisfy even those among his opponents who reject the armed rebellion, since it made no apology for the arrests of peaceful activists or for airstrikes that have destroyed neighborhoods. Mr. Assad gave no sign of acknowledging that the movement against him was anything more than a foreign plot or had any goals other than to inflict suffering and destroy the country.

“They killed the intellectuals in order to afflict ignorance on us,” Mr. Assad said. “They attacked the infrastructure in order to make our life difficult, they deprived children from school in order to bring the country backward.”

He added, “The enemies of the people are the enemies of God, and the enemies of God will burn in hell.”

Mr. Assad has framed the uprising as an attack by the West and its allies, and the members of the exile opposition leadership as puppets of their foreign supporters, including Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States, which has offered what it calls nonlethal support and recognized the main opposition body, now known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

Some armed rebel groups have used techniques that randomly target civilians, like car bombs, and there are foreign fighters among the rebels. But most of the armed movement is made up of Syrians who took up arms during the uprising or defected from the armed forces.

In his speech, Mr. Assad thanked officers and conscripts and vowed that he would stay by their side, apparently seeking to dispel speculation that he will flee the country. He spoke against a backdrop of snapshots that was reminiscent of montages that the opposition shows of people killed by the government.

When he finished the crowd chanted, “With our souls, with our blood, we defend you, Assad,” and vowed to be his “shabiha,” the term that has come to designate pro-government militias that have attacked demonstrators.

Scores of people then rushed toward him with an almost aggressive frenzy. Bodyguards pushed them back to form a phalanx that slowly escorted Mr. Assad through the crowd.

Many observers wryly noted on social media that the opera house was a fitting setting for the speech.

“It was operatic in its otherworldly fantasy, unrelated to realities outside the building,” Rami G. Khouri, of the Beirut-based newspaper The Daily Star, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Assad said the first step in his plan would be for foreign countries to stop financing the rebels; then his government would put down its weapons, he said — although he reserved the right to continue to fight terrorism, which his government has defined as nearly any opponent.

Next would come national dialogue, but only with groups Mr. Assad termed acceptable; then a constitution approved by referendum; then a coalition government. There was no mention of holding elections before Mr. Assad’s term expires in 2014.

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting.

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Preoccupations: Teaching Meditation Techniques to Organizations

IN 1972, I was a 30-year-old American traveling in India, with the smell of incense in my hair and mantras repeating in my ears. Back then, if you had told me that I would someday be training employees of corporate America to apply contemplative practices to help them become more successful, I would have said you’d been standing too long in India’s hot noonday sun.

Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times

Mirabai Bush is a co-founder and senior fellow at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which offers meditation techniques to organizations.

Yet not long ago, I was standing in front of employees at Google in Mountain View, Calif. They were dutifully following my instructions to feel the sensations of their breath as it passed in and out of their nostrils, and learning how to send e-mail mindfully, by taking three deep breaths before hitting “send.”

I am a co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a nonprofit organization that is now 16 years old, and we have undertaken a daunting task: to convince people in their workplaces that the simple meditation techniques developed 2,500 years ago by the Buddha might help increase productivity, reduce absenteeism and inspire greater creativity. We have introduced contemplative exercises that can reduce stress and heart rate and increase attention and awareness of self and others. We teach what we call “mindful listening,” so that a speaker is fully heard.

For our first project, we chose a large corporation in the Midwest whose C.E.O. knew one of our board members. We created a three-day, mostly silent retreat off site.

I encountered workers who were exhausted, overworked and stressed. They were curious whether these practices could help, but also skeptical. Before the retreat, several people said, in effect: “Stress got me where I am. I don’t want to lose my edge.”

I thought to myself: This won’t be easy; maybe they won’t even attend.

But they all showed up. First, I asked them to lie on the floor for a deep-relaxation exercise. They didn’t balk; instead, they followed my instructions to let go and relax their bodies. We also introduced mindfulness meditation, which we believe builds attention and insight and helps people become more kind and loving. We taught the practice of bringing our minds to our breath, noticing our breath, and returning to our breath each time the mind wanders off — a task that’s tougher than it sounds.

“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said the C.E.O., who had a brilliant mind and thousands of employees. But the participants learned how to bring their minds to a place that was calm and clear, a great place to begin thinking and making decisions. When it was over, all felt that it was helpful.

SINCE that first foray into the corporate world, we have worked with many other organizations. For a small group, we have had a big reach, working with high-profile organizations like Yale Law School, Hearst Publications and the Army. We’ve offered programs as diverse as one-hour introductions, four-day intensive retreats, and courses with six weekly sessions.

At first, resistance was everywhere, but so were the possibilities. A litigation lawyer thought that if he became more compassionate toward the opposition in his cases, he couldn’t be a zealous advocate for clients. But he found that being calm, clear and compassionate gave him better insights and better timing.

An environmental leader thought that if others knew he practiced meditation, they wouldn’t take him seriously — and would write him off as a tree-hugger without scientific rigor. Instead, he found that he became more resilient, and less overwhelmed by climate-change predictions, and that he collaborated better with colleagues.

Magazine editors thought that they would miss deadlines; in fact, they learned to focus on priorities and work better in teams to meet the deadlines in new ways. Data-driven Google engineers questioned the value of developing capacities that can’t be quantified, but many of them learned better ways to communicate. One engineer told me his wife had noticed a change in the way he listened to her. She asked him: “What happened to you?”

As we continue exploring the benefits of mindfulness for work, scientists are researching the effects of the practices on the brain. Neuroscientists have confirmed much of what we were experiencing: that meditation improves attention, reduces stress hormones, increases appreciation and compassion for others and helps us recover faster from negative information.

Personally, this work has made me feel more connected to the world. Watching the responses of so many people — from an economics professor to Army soldiers — I’ve come to believe that it’s a basic human need to be calm and clear, to be aware of ourselves and others, to be kind and collaborative, to be fully present in each moment.

It turns out that people work better when they are happy and feel aligned with their work. I know I do.

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The New Old Age: Murray Span, 1922-2012

One consequence of our elders’ extended lifespans is that we half expect them to keep chugging along forever. My father, a busy yoga practitioner and blackjack player, celebrated his 90th birthday in September in reasonably good health.

So when I had the sad task of letting people know that Murray Span died on Dec. 8, after just a few days’ illness, the primary response was disbelief. “No! I just talked to him Tuesday! He was fine!”

And he was. We’d gone out for lunch on Saturday, our usual routine, and he demolished a whole stack of blueberry pancakes.

But on Wednesday, he called to say he had bad abdominal pain and had hardly slept. The nurses at his facility were on the case; his geriatrician prescribed a clear liquid diet.

Like many in his generation, my dad tended towards stoicism. When he said, the following morning, “the pain is terrible,” that meant agony. I drove over.

His doctor shared our preference for conservative treatment. For patients at advanced ages, hospitals and emergency rooms can become perilous places. My dad had come through a July heart attack in good shape, but he had also signed a do-not-resuscitate order. He saw evidence all around him that eventually the body fails and life can become a torturous series of health crises and hospitalizations from which one never truly rebounds.

So over the next two days we tried to relieve his pain at home. He had abdominal x-rays that showed some kind of obstruction. He tried laxatives and enemas and Tylenol, to no effect. He couldn’t sleep.

On Friday, we agreed to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. Maybe, I thought, there’s a simple fix, even for a 90-year-old with diabetes and heart disease. But I carried his advance directives in my bag, because you never know.

When it is someone else’s narrative, it’s easier to see where things go off the rails, where a loving family authorizes procedures whose risks outweigh their benefits.

But when it’s your father groaning on the gurney, the conveyor belt of contemporary medicine can sweep you along, one incremental decision at a time.

All I wanted was for him to stop hurting, so it seemed reasonable to permit an IV for hydration and pain relief and a thin oxygen tube tucked beneath his nose.

Then, after Dad drank the first of two big containers of contrast liquid needed for his scan, his breathing grew phlegmy and labored. His geriatrician arrived and urged the insertion of a nasogastric tube to suck out all the liquid Dad had just downed.

His blood oxygen levels dropped, so there were soon two doctors and two nurses suctioning his throat until he gagged and fastening an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

At one point, I looked at my poor father, still in pain despite all the apparatus, and thought, “This is what suffering looks like.” I despaired, convinced I had failed in my most basic responsibility.

“I’m just so tired,” Dad told me, more than once. “There are too many things going wrong.”

Let me abridge this long story. The scan showed evidence of a perforation of some sort, among other abnormalities. A chest X-ray indicated pneumonia in both lungs. I spoke with Dad’s doctor, with the E.R. doc, with a friend who is a prominent geriatrician.

These are always profound decisions, and I’m sure that, given the number of unknowns, other people might have made other choices. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide; I could ask my still-lucid father.

I leaned close to his good ear, the one with the hearing aid, and told him about the pneumonia, about the second CT scan the radiologist wanted, about antibiotics. “Or, we can stop all this and go home and call hospice,” I said.

He had seen my daughter earlier that day (and asked her about the hockey strike), and my sister and her son were en route. The important hands had been clasped, or soon would be.

He knew what hospice meant; its nurses and aides helped us care for my mother as she died. “Call hospice,” he said. We tiffed a bit about whether to have hospice care in his apartment or mine. I told his doctors we wanted comfort care only.

As in a film run backwards, the tubes came out, the oxygen mask came off. Then we settled in for a night in a hospital room while I called hospices — and a handyman to move the furniture out of my dining room, so I could install his hospital bed there.

In between, I assured my father that I was there, that we were taking care of him, that he didn’t have to worry. For the first few hours after the morphine began, finally seeming to ease his pain, he could respond, “OK.” Then, he couldn’t.

The next morning, as I awaited the hospital case manager to arrange the hospice transfer, my father stopped breathing.

We held his funeral at the South Jersey synagogue where he’d had his belated bar mitzvah at age 88, and buried him next to my mother in a small Jewish cemetery in the countryside. I’d written a fair amount about him here, so I thought readers might want to know.

We weren’t ready, if anyone ever really is, but in our sorrow, my sister and I recite this mantra: 90 good years, four bad days. That’s a ratio any of us might choose.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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App City: Taking Stock of Mobile Apps

Testing apps from week to week, it’s easy to fill my phone with a seemingly endless number of theoretically helpful programs. But how many of them do I actually use? To start off 2013, I decided to take stock of my apps, with a focus on those that relate to my life as a New Yorker. Here are my favorites, many — but not all — of which I reviewed for App City. — JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Christoph Hitz

Embark NYC

Free for iOS and Android

For directions, the default is Google Maps. But Embark, which helps you chart a trip on the New York City subway, is the other transportation app I use regularly, largely because it can generate directions without a data connection. After all, plans can change while you are underground. Offline, you can get only directions between stations, not for street addresses, but it’s a start.

Instapaper

$3.99 for iOS; $2.99 for Android

Instapaper is not new, but the idea of setting aside articles that I see online so that I can read them when I get stuck on the subway never gets old.

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Seamless

Free for iOS and Android

This tool for placing orders for delivery or takeout food through a smartphone app has drastically increased the likelihood that I will order in on any given day. I do not know if this is a good thing, but it is certainly a testament to its effectiveness.

Christoph Hitz

Immaculate Infatuation

Free for iOS

Apps for finding restaurants are plentiful, but most of them leave me feeling overwhelmed. I want someone to choose for me, and I trust the authors of this app to do that. Their taste has never led me astray — although unlike them, I have no problem with the immense popularity of brussels sprouts.

Christoph Hitz

Taskrabbit

Free for iOS

One of the neatest things to come from the current generation of tech companies are informal communities where strangers do things for one another, like share a ride or a spare room. Taskrabbit allows people to hire one another for odd jobs. These jobs can be pretty much anything, but for tasks like taking in clothing for donation, I would much rather give $20 to a neighbor with a car than figure it out myself. Getting tasks done may be easy, but becoming someone who does the tasks isn’t: there are 1,500 people on the waiting list in New York City.

Songkick

Free for iOS and Android

It analyzes the music you listen to and tells you when bands you may like are playing nearby. It has successfully kept me away from Seamless on a number of nights. But being constantly reminded of great shows has the potential to be somewhat expensive.

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Nike+ Fuelband

Wristband $149, app free for iOS and Android

This setup serves as a pedometer for the digital age, keeping track of your physical activity 24 hours a day. The app’s graphical representations of miles walked and calories burned are addictive. While the Fuelband does not do a good job of measuring exercise in a gym, it is a great way to keep a tally of all the walking you do. And if I’m going to spend my life wandering around the city, I might as well get credit for it.

Christoph Hitz

Craft Beer New York

$1.99 for iOS

This app is great when deciding which bars to visit. Of course, it works only for beer drinkers; good bars without good beer selections do not make the cut. There is a nice coffee app designed by the same team, and I use it in essentially the same way, although a bit earlier in the day.

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Your Money: An Invitation to High School Seniors to Write About Money

At the University of Michigan, the application essay talked about how local education cutbacks forced high school students to pay money to play team sports. As a result, the writer could no longer afford to play.

At Pitzer College, a student used the example of the Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff to take a philosophical look at how much money people truly need to be happy.

As the economy has suffered in recent years and college costs have risen, high school seniors have grappled with the fallout in their own families and channeled their feelings into an increasing number of memorable college application essays about sacrifice, social policy and affluence or its opposite. “Students never used to write about this stuff,” said Angel Pérez, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Pitzer. “I think there is this new consciousness. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

Given the Your Money team’s long-standing endorsement of raising the financial consciousness of the younger set, we wanted to see these writings for ourselves. So we’re asking high school seniors who are applying for college this year to send us application essays that have anything at all to do with money, working, class, the economy and affluence (or lack thereof). We’ll read them all and publish the best on our Bucks personal finance blog.

There is more on our editorial criteria and the logistics down below, but if you’re trying to figure out what counts as a money essay, think broadly, as many applicants have in recent years. “An essay ought to try to fill in the gaps, to tell us things that we don’t know about you,” said Erica Sanders, managing director of the office of undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan.

Your guidance counselor and teachers who are writing letters of support for your application may not know about or think to write about your family’s financial status, good or bad. “Maybe a parent had to move out of town for work, and the student writes about taking on more responsibility, that it allowed them to take on more leadership and to contribute to their family in a way that they didn’t even know was possible,” she added, echoing essays she’s read in recent years.

Even if your family has not struggled or become fabulously wealthy, an essay about your part-time job certainly qualifies. “Many of our engineering students will talk about building something and the costs of putting it together,” Ms. Sanders said.

Aside from the Madoff essay, Mr. Perez has read other Pitzer applicant essays and had other conversations with applicants about money and the economy in recent years that have stuck with him. “One student last year was very affected by the whole conversation about the 1 percent,” he said. “He sent us his proposal for the tax code. The committee thought that this is someone who is clearly thinking about this in a critical way, is informed about what is going on the world and has done some dissecting of the information, and that’s the kind of student we’re looking for.”

The college essay is always a bit of a high-wire act. Harry Bauld, the author of “On Writing the College Application Essay,” which I credit with helping me get into college, paints a visceral, frightening picture of haggard admissions officers reading dozens of essays each day. Then, he asks readers to imagine that their application is 38th in the pile. How are you going to excite that person?

Writing about money can offer a bit of voyeuristic thrill in this regard, but it also poses its own particular challenges. “Most of my students are absolutely brilliant,” said Mr. Bauld, a high school English teacher at Horace Mann in New York and a former admissions officer at Columbia and Brown. “But they cannot see their own relationship to economic culture. It’s not comprehensible.”

The more affluent ones, if they do understand it, struggle further when trying to put it into words. “When it becomes visible, it comes accompanied with a U-Haul full of guilt that they’re towing behind them,” he said. “Then, it forces them into various clichés.”

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Scant Proof Is Found to Back Up Claims by Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.

Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.

The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.

Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.

Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.

“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.

Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.

Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.

On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.

But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.

Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

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Scant Proof Is Found to Back Up Claims by Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.

Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.

The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.

Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.

Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.

“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.

Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.

Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.

On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.

But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.

Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

Read More..