New Zealand Wants a Hollywood Put on Its Map

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Standing by his desk in New Zealand’s distinctive round Parliament building, known locally as the Beehive, Prime Minister John Key proudly brandished an ornately engraved sword. It was used, he said, by Frodo Baggins, the protagonist of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and in the films it possesses magical powers that cause it to glow blue in the presence of goblins.

“This was given to me by the president of the United States,” said Mr. Key, marveling that President Obama’s official gift to New Zealand was, after all, a New Zealand product.

In Mr. Key’s spare blond-wood office — with no goblins in sight — the sword looked decidedly unmagical. But it served as a reminder that in New Zealand, the business of running a country goes hand in hand with the business of making movies.

For better or worse, Mr. Key’s government has taken extreme measures that have linked its fortunes to some of Hollywood’s biggest pictures, making this country of 4.4 million people, slightly more than the city of Los Angeles, a grand experiment in the fusion of film and government.

That union has been on enthusiastic display here in recent weeks as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of three related movies by the director Peter Jackson, approached its world premiere on Wednesday in Wellington (and on Dec. 14 in the United States). Anticipation in New Zealand has been building, and there are signs everywhere of the film’s integration into Kiwi life — from the giant replica of the movie’s Gollum creature suspended over the waiting area at Wellington Airport to the gift shops that are expanding to meet anticipated demand for Hobbit merchandise (elf ears, $14).

But the path to this moment has been filled with controversy. Two years ago, when a dispute with unions threatened to derail the “Hobbit” movies — endangering several thousand jobs and a commitment of some $500 million by Warner Brothers — Mr. Key persuaded the Parliament to rewrite its national labor laws.

It was a breathtaking solution, even in a world accustomed to generous public support of movie projects, and a substantial incentive package was included: the government agreed to contribute $99 million in production costs and add $10 million to the studio’s marketing budget. And its tourism office will spend about $8 million in its current fiscal year, and probably more in the future, as part of a promotional campaign with Time Warner that is marketing the country as a film-friendly fantasyland.

For a tiny nation like New Zealand, where plans to cut $35 million from the education budget set off national outrage earlier this year (and a backtrack from the government), the “Hobbit” concessions were difficult for many to swallow, especially since the country had already provided some $150 million in support for the three “Lord of the Rings” movies.

Now, even amid the excitement of the “Hobbit” opening, skepticism about the government’s film-centric strategy remains. And recently it has become entangled with new suspicions: that Mr. Key’s government is taking cues from America’s powerful film industry in handling a request by United States officials for the extradition of Kim Dotcom, the mogul whose given name was Kim Schmitz, so he can face charges of pirating copyrighted material.

New Zealand’s political scene erupted in September, as Mr. Key publicly apologized to Mr. Dotcom for what turned out to be illegal spying on him by the country’s Government Communications Security Bureau. The Waikato Times, a provincial paper, taunted Mr. Key, accusing him of making New Zealand the “51st state,” while others suggested that a whirlwind trip by Mr. Key to Los Angeles in early October was somehow tied to the Dotcom case.

“No studio executive raised it with me,” Mr. Key said in an interview last month. He spoke the day after a private dinner where he lobbied executives from Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox and other companies for still more New Zealand film work, with Mr. Jackson, a New Zealander, joining by video link.

Mr. Key has been sharply criticized for cozying up to Mr. Jackson in what some consider unseemly ways. Last year, a month before elections in which he and his National Party were fighting to keep control of the government, Mr. Key skipped an appointment with Queen Elizabeth II in Australia to visit the Hobbiton set. He also interviewed Mr. Jackson on a radio show, prompting an outcry from the opposition.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

Read More..

Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power

CAIRO — Opponents of President Mohamed Morsi were reported to have set fire to his party’s offices in several Egyptian cities on Friday in a spasm of protest and clashes after he granted himself broad powers above any court declaring himself the guardian of Egypt‘s revolution, and used his new authority to order the retrial of Hosni Mubarak.

Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press

Egyptian protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and waved a national flag in Tahrir Square on Friday.

In the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party clashed with followers of Mr. Morsi, an Islamist, who won Western and regional plaudits only days ago for brokering a cease-fire to halt eight days of lethal exchanges between Israeli forces and militants in the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, portrayed his decree assuming the new powers as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. He said it was necessary to overcome gridlock and competing interests. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman.

“We are, God willing, moving forward, and no one stands in our way,” Reuters quoted Mr. Morsi as saying on Friday said in a suburban mosque here after Friday prayers.

“I fulfill my duties to please God and the nation and I take decisions after consulting with everyone,” he said. “Victory does not come without a clear plan and this is what I have.”

He spoke as state television reported that his party’s offices in the Suez Canal cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia had been burned as his foes rampaged. Thousands of people protesting Mr. Morsi’s power grab gathered in Tahrir Square here — the focal point of protests that, last year, swept away Mr. Mubarak. Elsewhere in the capital, the president’s supporters massed in even larger numbers outside the presidential palace where Mr. Morsi said his aim was “to achieve political, social and economic stability.”

“I am for all Egyptians. I will not be biased against any son of Egypt,” he said on a stage outside the presidential palace, Reuters, reported, adding he was working for social and economic stability. “Opposition in Egypt does not worry me, but it has to be real and strong,” he said.

Sounding defensive at times and employing some of the language favored by his autocratic predecessor, Mr. Morsi justified his power grab as necessary to move Egypt’s revolution forward.

“The people wanted me to be the guardian of these steps in this phase,” he said, reminding his audience that he was freely elected after a contest “that the whole world has witnessed.”

“I don’t like, and don’t want — and there is no need — to use exceptional measures,” he said. “But those who are trying to gnaw the bones of the nation,” he added, “must be held accountable.”

News reports said clashes spread from Alexandria to the southern city of Assyut. But the severity of the clashes was not immediately clear.

Mr. Morsi’s new powers prompted one prominent adversary, Mohamed ElBaradei, to say on Twitter: “Morsi today usurped all state powers & appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.”

“An absolute presidential tyranny,” Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of the dissolved Parliament and prominent political scientist, wrote in an online commentary. “Egypt is facing a horrifying coup against legitimacy and the rule of law and a complete assassination of the democratic transition.”

Mr. Morsi issued the decree on Thursday at a high point in his five-month-old presidency, when he was basking in praise from the White House and around the world for his central role in negotiating a cease-fire that the previous night had stopped the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

But his political opponents immediately called for demonstrations on Friday to protest his new powers. “Passing a revolutionary demand within a package of autocratic decisions is a setback for the revolution,” Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a more liberal former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a former presidential candidate, wrote online. And the chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court indicated that it did not accept the decree.

In Washington on Thursday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, released a statement saying: “The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns form many Egyptians and the international community,” and noting that “one of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in that hands of any one person or institution.” The statement called for resolution “through democratic dialogue.”

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported from Cairo and Alan Cowell from Paris. Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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State of the Art: Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC Windows Phone 8X Are Great, and Yet

Thanksgiving, is it? I’ll tell you what I’m thankful for: competition.

Because competition drives innovation. Innovation leads to improvement. Improvement begets happiness.

In the tech world, some companies do their most innovative work when their backs are against the wall — especially Microsoft. Last month, it took the wraps off Windows Phone 8, the most polished edition yet of its beautiful, crystal-clear software for touch-screen phones. (My review of Windows Phone 8 is at http://j.mp/Qqfz2F.)

Unfortunately, as a Microsoft product manager told me understatedly, “We have an awareness problem.” Translation: Nobody is buying Windows phones. And since nobody’s buying them, nobody’s writing apps for them. And since nobody’s writing apps — well, you can see where this is going.

Still, Microsoft isn’t giving up. This month, Windows Phone 8 arrives aboard two fascinating new phones: the Nokia Lumia 920 ($100 with a new AT&T contract) and the HTC Windows Phone 8X ($200 from AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile).

It’s funny about Nokia and HTC; they, too, are fallen giants. Nokia was the world’s largest cellphone maker for 14 years straight; not anymore. At the moment, it’s in seventh place among smartphone makers. It has shed tens of thousands of employees. HTC is struggling, too, having sold 36 percent fewer smartphones this year than last.

How intriguing, then, that HTC and Nokia have each chosen Microsoft as its savior, and vice versa. Loser + loser = winner?

Yes, actually. The two new phones have a lot in common — for one thing, they’re both awesome. For another, both have bigger, sharper screens than the iPhone’s famous Retina screen. (The HTC and Nokia phones have 4.3- and 4.5-inch screens. That’s 1,280 by 720 pixels, packed in 341 and 332 to the inch.)

Both have rounded backs and edges, which make them both exceptionally comfortable to hold. (The curve also makes it easy to pull them out of your pocket the right way.)

Both come in a choice of bright colors. Both phones have the same blazing fast processor. Both can get onto their respective carriers’ 4G LTE data networks (meaning very fast Internet), in the cities where those are available.

And get this — both of these phones can also charge without being plugged in. That’s right: magnetic charging is finally built right into phones. Come home at the end of the day, throw your keys in the bowl, set the phone down on the charging pad (a $50 option) — and a little chime tells you that it’s happily charging, even though no cable is in sight.

It’s pretty great. It will become even greater if this charging method (an industry standard called Qi, pronounced chee) catches on. Someday there may be charging surfaces at coffee shops, airports and hotel rooms. (Only the Verizon version of the HTC phone has this feature turned on — not the AT&T or T-Mobile versions.)

Both phones also have built-in NFC chips. These allow near-field communications, which means “this phone can do things when you tap it against another gadget.” The promise is that you’ll be able to tap on a cash-register terminal to pay for something; tap against an NFC-enabled bus shelter ad to download promotional goodies; tap two phones together to transfer a photo or address; and tap against a Bluetooth speaker to “pair” it with the phone.

In practice, there’s more to it than that. Unfortunately, the tap only introduces the phones; Bluetooth or some other technology is needed to complete the connection. And Microsoft’s coming tap-to-pay initiative is incompatible with the one Google has spent millions of dollars setting up at cash registers across the land. But we can always hope.

The HTC Windows Phone 8X is the smaller of the two new phones, but even so, it dwarfs the iPhone — it’s wider, taller, heavier and thicker. If you get the Verizon model, your Internet experience will be faster and better in more cities than on the Nokia phone, which is available only on AT&T.

The back panel is faintly textured, so you’re less likely to drop this phone than you are the shiny-backed Nokia. But the buttons — power, volume, camera — are skinny and utterly flush with the phone’s body; you practically need an ice pick to push them in.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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David Taub, Introducer of Pinot Grigio Wine, Dies at 72

When David Taub co-founded his wine importing company in 1977, most Americans knew about two kinds of Italian wine, and those mainly by their packaging: Chianti, for its straw-covered flask, and Soave Bolla, which came in a tall, elegant, rocket-shaped bottle.

Palm Bay International.¤

David S. Taub, a wine importer who helped introduce Pinot Grigio to the United States.

Mr. Taub expanded Americans’ palate for Italian wine (if not their choice in bottles) by introducing a simple white wine called Pinot Grigio. It became the top-selling Italian wine in the United States, part of an international surge in popularity that helped Italy surpass France in the 1980s as Europe’s largest wine exporter.

Mr. Taub, whose firm, Palm Bay International, is among the largest wine importers in the United States, died on Nov. 8 at 72. His son Marc said the cause was complications of kidney disease.

Soave Bolla was the most popular Italian white wine in America when Mr. Taub and his father, Martin, who were wine and liquor distributors, began to import a selection of varietals from the Trentino province of Italy, near the Italian Alps. The Taubs believed that one of those wines, Pinot Grigio, was the most likely to compete successfully with Soave.

It was crisper and more fruity than Soave, Mr. Taub said in a 2010 interview with Wine Spectator magazine: “more in the American style — easy to drink, customer-friendly.”

“The problem,” he added, “was, how do you take a wine that no one has heard of and introduce it into the marketplace?”

The Taubs first persuaded the vineyard that produced the wine to Anglicize its name. Cantina Viticoltori del Trentino, known as Ca’Vit (pronounced ca-VEET), became Cavit. The importers told their American distributors to pronounce it “like the talk-show host.”

Then, through someone who knew someone, the younger Taub contacted Dick Cavett himself, who agreed to lend his cosmopolitan aura to an ad campaign. “I’m the Cavett from Nebraska,” Mr. Cavett was quoted as saying, dressed in crisp talk-show attire and hoisting a glass in full-page ads that appeared in magazines and newspapers nationally. “But you should get to know the Cavit from the Italian Alps. The classic Cavit Pinot Grigio is assertively dry...” The tag line was “Ask for Cavit, as in Cavett.” Starting virtually from zero, within two years the Taubs were importing 500,000 cases of Cavit wines, most of it Pinot Grigio. By 2010, Mr. Taub told Wine Spectator, the number was three million. In an interview on Wednesday, Lucio Caputo, president of the Italian Wine and Food Institute, a New York-based trade association that works closely with the Italian government, called Mr. Taub “a pioneer in the expansion of the world” of Italian wine.

The portfolio of Palm Bay International, which is now led by Marc Taub, includes a vast variety of wines, in a wide price range, from Cavit as well as from other wineries in Italy, Spain, France, Chile, Argentina and Peru.

David Taub was born in Great Neck, N.Y., on Dec. 30, 1939, one of two children of Martin and Frances Taub. After graduating from Boston University in 1961 and serving in the military, he joined the family business, Gallo Wines Distributors of New York, where he worked until branching off to establish Palm Bay.

In addition to his son Marc, Mr. Taub, who still lived on Long Island, in Glen Head, is survived by his wife, Linda; two other sons, Andrew and Joshua; six grandchildren; and his brother, Richard, a professor of social science at the University of Chicago.

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Recipes for Health: Pear Clafoutis — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

If you don’t want to make a crust but want something tartlike for your Thanksgiving dessert, a clafoutis, which is something like a cross between a flan and a pancake, is a great choice. It’s a very easy dessert, yet it’s always impressive.

2 tablespoons pear eau-de-vie or liqueur (optional)

2 tablespoons mild-flavored honey, like clover

2 pounds ripe but firm pears, like Bartlett or Comice

3 large eggs

1 vanilla bean, scraped

1/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup sifted unbleached white flour

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1/2 cup milk

pinch of salt

1. Combine the pear eau-de-vie and the honey in a bowl. Peel, core and slice the pears and toss with the mixture. Let sit for 30 minutes.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10-inch ceramic tart pan or baking dish.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer or with a whisk, beat together the eggs, the seeds from the vanilla bean and the sugar. Pour off the marinade from the pears and add to the egg mixture. Gradually beat in the flour, then beat in the yogurt, milk and salt.

4. Arrange the pears in the baking dish. Pour on the batter. Place in the oven and bake 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is beginning to brown. Serve hot or warm.

Yield: 8 servings.

Advance preparation: Although this is best served warm, you can allow it to cool completely and serve it at room temperature. It will hold for several hours out of the refrigerator. Leftovers make a nice breakfast treat.

Nutritional information per serving: 195 calories; 2 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 71 milligrams cholesterol; 40 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 47 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Pear Clafoutis — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

If you don’t want to make a crust but want something tartlike for your Thanksgiving dessert, a clafoutis, which is something like a cross between a flan and a pancake, is a great choice. It’s a very easy dessert, yet it’s always impressive.

2 tablespoons pear eau-de-vie or liqueur (optional)

2 tablespoons mild-flavored honey, like clover

2 pounds ripe but firm pears, like Bartlett or Comice

3 large eggs

1 vanilla bean, scraped

1/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup sifted unbleached white flour

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1/2 cup milk

pinch of salt

1. Combine the pear eau-de-vie and the honey in a bowl. Peel, core and slice the pears and toss with the mixture. Let sit for 30 minutes.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10-inch ceramic tart pan or baking dish.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer or with a whisk, beat together the eggs, the seeds from the vanilla bean and the sugar. Pour off the marinade from the pears and add to the egg mixture. Gradually beat in the flour, then beat in the yogurt, milk and salt.

4. Arrange the pears in the baking dish. Pour on the batter. Place in the oven and bake 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is beginning to brown. Serve hot or warm.

Yield: 8 servings.

Advance preparation: Although this is best served warm, you can allow it to cool completely and serve it at room temperature. It will hold for several hours out of the refrigerator. Leftovers make a nice breakfast treat.

Nutritional information per serving: 195 calories; 2 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 71 milligrams cholesterol; 40 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 47 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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With Cease-Fire Joy in Gaza, Palestinian Factions Revive Unity Pledges

GAZA — A cease-fire that halted eight days of lethal conflict between Israel and Hamas brought jubilation to Gaza on Thursday as thousands of flag-waving residents poured into the streets and competing Palestinian factions sought to use the moment to revive their efforts to unify. In Israel, where the mood was more cynical and subdued, troops deployed to the border began pulling back.

The cease-fire agreement, which took effect on Wednesday night and seemed to be holding through Thursday, averted a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. It did not resolve the underlying issues between the antagonists but said they would be addressed later, in a vague process that would not begin until at least 24 hours of calm had elapsed.

The wording of the agreement, reached under strong Egyptian and American diplomatic pressure, allowed both sides to claim some measure of victory in the battle of aerial weaponry that had killed at least 150 Palestinians and five Israelis over the past week. A sixth Israeli, a soldier, died on Thursday from wounds received before the cease-fire.

Whether the agreement succeeds could provide an early test of how Egypt’s new Islamist government might influence the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the most intractable in the Middle East.

Gaza City roared back to life after more than a week of nonstop Israeli aerial assaults had left the streets vacant. Gazans carried flags not just in the signature green of Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, but also the yellow of its rival Fatah faction, the black of Islamic Jihad and the red of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“It’s the first time in 70 years I feel proud and my head held high,” said Mohamed Rajah, 71, a refugee from Haifa, Israel, who rushed to kiss four masked militants of the Islamic Jihad faction as they prepared for a news conference. “It’s a great victory for the people of Palestine. Nobody says it’s Hamas, nobody says it’s Islamic Jihad or Fatah — Palestine only.”

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister of Gaza who had largely remained in hiding after the initial Israeli assault on Nov. 14 that killed Ahmed al-Jabari, the head of the Hamas military wing, appeared at a unity rally alongside Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, a member of the Palestinian leadership that governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank and who has spent the past several days in Gaza. Mr. Barghouti said the leaders of all Palestinian factions would meet in Cairo in coming days to discuss reconciling their differences.

“The Palestinian people have won today,” Mr. Barghouti told hundreds outside the parliament building. “We must continue this victory by making our national unity.” Mr. Haniya, in a televised speech later, said “The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance.”

With Israeli forces still massed on the Gaza border, a tentative calm in the fighting descended after the agreement was announced. But the tens of thousands of Israeli reservists called up during the crisis began to withdraw from staging areas along the Gaza border, where the Israeli military had prepared for a possible invasion of Gaza for the second time in four years.

In southern Israel, the target of more than 1,500 rockets fired from Gaza over the past week, wary residents began to return to routine. But schools within a 25-mile radius of the Palestinian enclave remained closed.

A rocket alert sounded at the small village of Nativ Haasara near the border with Gaza on Thursday morning, sending residents running for shelter. The military said the alert had been a false alarm.

Israel Radio said a dozen rockets were fired from Gaza in the first few hours of the cease-fire, but Israeli forces did not respond. In the rival Twitter feeds that offered a cyberspace counterpoint to the exchanges of airstrikes and rockets, the Israel Defense Forces said they had achieved their objectives of severely damaging Hamas’s military capabilities.

At the same time, Israeli security forces said on Thursday that they had detained 55 Palestinian militants in the West Bank after confrontations. The army said the detentions were designed to “continue to maintain order” and to “prevent the infiltration of terrorists into Israeli communities.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: A Few More Must-Try Apps for iPad

App Smart this week recommended apps to help new iPad owners make the most of their tablet PCs, whether they have an iPad 4 or a Mini.

But there’s space to talk about only a certain number of apps, and Apple still leads its competition in the number it offers, including ones tailored for tablet screens.

If the column-based interface of the Jasmine YouTube app that I mentioned in App Smart doesn’t appeal to you, then you may prefer the free YouPlayer app. While not quite as full-featured, it does feel much more like accessing YouTube through a native interface. Plus it offers handy functions like lists of featured or popular video clips and even a “nearby” option, for clips shot near you.

For a completely different weather app experience, Weatherwise (free) does all the usual things like forecasting the next five days’ weather, or giving a detailed 24-hour prediction. But its main feature is that it demonstrates the weather with a custom animated picture instead of a boring icon. The image that comes free with the app is a stylized bonzai tree that reacts to night or day, wind, rain or sun and so on. If you like the premise of this app, you can buy more themes through its interface for a dollar each.

To demo the music-making powers of the iPad, try out the $2 app OscilloScoop. This app is a neat way to generate sounds through looped patterns. It uses a graphical input system that looks somewhat like the screen of an oscilloscope to let you craft some unique, and very catchy sounds.

Finally if you need a fun game suggestion, it’s hard to beat the nerdy joy of playing the first-person-shooter app Doom Classic on an iPad mini ($5 via iTunes). As you play, remember that this is an entire tablet PC that’s comparable in size to the box that the original PC game came in back in 1993.

Extra Quick Call

Owners of a Windows 8 or Windows RT tablet may be delighted to find that Barnes and Noble has released a version of its Nook e-reader app for this platform. It’s free in the app store, and has some graphical tricks to try to emulate real paper books.

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