Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.

Andrew Sacks

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema at the University of Michigan in 2003. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's research showed that women were more prone to ruminate, or dwell on the sources of problems rather than solutions, more than men.

Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.

Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men.

She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse.

“The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.”

Dr. Seligman added, “She was the leading figure in sex differences in depression of her generation.”

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote several books about her research for general readers, including “Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life.” These books described why rumination could be so corrosive — it is deeply distracting; it tends to highlight negative memories — and how such thoughts could be alleviated.

Susan Kay Nolen was born on May 22, 1959, in Springfield, Ill., to John and Catherine Nolen. Her father ran a construction business, where her mother was the office manager; Susan was the eldest of three children.

She entered Illinois State University before transferring to Yale. She graduated summa cum laude in 1982 with a degree in psychology.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the faculty at Stanford. She later moved to the University of Michigan, before returning to Yale in 2004.

Along the way she published scores of studies and a popular textbook. In 2003 she became the editor of the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, an influential journal.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema moved smoothly between academic work and articles and books for the general reader.

“I think part of what allowed her to move so easily between those two worlds was that she was an extremely clear thinker, and an extremely clear writer,” said Marcia K. Johnson, a psychology professor and colleague at Yale.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema lived in Bethany, Conn. In addition to her husband, a science writer, she is survived by a son, Michael; her brothers, Jeff and Steve; and her father, John.

“Over the past four decades women have experienced unprecedented growth in independence and opportunities,” Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in 2003, adding, “We have many reasons to be happy and confident.”

“Yet when there is any pause in our daily activities,” she continued, “many of us are flooded with worries, thoughts and emotions that swirl out of control, sucking our emotions and energy down, down, down. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Read More..

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.

Andrew Sacks

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema at the University of Michigan in 2003. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's research showed that women were more prone to ruminate, or dwell on the sources of problems rather than solutions, more than men.

Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.

Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men.

She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse.

“The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.”

Dr. Seligman added, “She was the leading figure in sex differences in depression of her generation.”

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote several books about her research for general readers, including “Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life.” These books described why rumination could be so corrosive — it is deeply distracting; it tends to highlight negative memories — and how such thoughts could be alleviated.

Susan Kay Nolen was born on May 22, 1959, in Springfield, Ill., to John and Catherine Nolen. Her father ran a construction business, where her mother was the office manager; Susan was the eldest of three children.

She entered Illinois State University before transferring to Yale. She graduated summa cum laude in 1982 with a degree in psychology.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the faculty at Stanford. She later moved to the University of Michigan, before returning to Yale in 2004.

Along the way she published scores of studies and a popular textbook. In 2003 she became the editor of the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, an influential journal.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema moved smoothly between academic work and articles and books for the general reader.

“I think part of what allowed her to move so easily between those two worlds was that she was an extremely clear thinker, and an extremely clear writer,” said Marcia K. Johnson, a psychology professor and colleague at Yale.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema lived in Bethany, Conn. In addition to her husband, a science writer, she is survived by a son, Michael; her brothers, Jeff and Steve; and her father, John.

“Over the past four decades women have experienced unprecedented growth in independence and opportunities,” Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in 2003, adding, “We have many reasons to be happy and confident.”

“Yet when there is any pause in our daily activities,” she continued, “many of us are flooded with worries, thoughts and emotions that swirl out of control, sucking our emotions and energy down, down, down. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Read More..

India Ink: Woman Raped by Seven Men in Punjab, India, Police Say

NEW DELHI — Police said Sunday that a  29-year-old woman had been raped by a bus driver, a bus conductor and five other men in the north Indian state of Punjab, in an incident that recalls the recent attack in Delhi that has caused widespread outrage.

The woman boarded a bus on Friday bound for Gurdaspur, to visit her in-laws, the police chief of Gurdaspur, Raj Jit Singh, said in a telephone interview. When she got off the bus, the driver offered her a ride on his motorcycle, perhaps to her in-laws village, the police said. Instead, he took her to a nearby village where he and six other men, including the bus conductor, raped her repeatedly through the night.

The next morning, the driver dropped her at her in-laws home, where the woman told her family members of the incident, and then reported it to the police, Mr. Singh said.

Six men, including the bus driver and conductor, have been arrested, he said. All of the men are their twenties.

Gurmesh Singh, the deputy superintendent of police for the  region, said it was unclear how or why the bus driver persuaded the woman to go with him on his motorcycle. She was in a state of distress during the bus ride, Mr. Singh said, and originally refused to get off of the bus when it reached its final destination.

The Press Trust of India reported that the bus driver did not stop at her stop when requested.

The gang-rape of a woman on a moving bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, and her subsequent death from injuries sustained during the rape, has sparked widespread protests and calls for increased policing and tougher laws against sexual assault in India.

The case against five of the men arrested in that rape is being heard this month in a special fast-track court created just for incidents of sexual assault.

Read More..

Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s had discovered the body.

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew, who had written in the past about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.

Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.

The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.

In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.

Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.

Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”

Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”

Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.”

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”

 “The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.

Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him: “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” Mr. Doctorow added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”

In a talk in 2007, Mr. Swartz described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career. He also wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness.

“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.”

When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.

Read More..

Treasury Will Not Mint $1 Trillion Coin to Raise Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.

“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.

The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.

“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.

The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.

The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.

By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.

Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.

The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”

The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.

Read More..

City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

Plenty of Theories, and Enemies, in Killing of 3 Kurds in Paris

Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The brother of Sakine Cansiz (on poster), one of three Kurdish activists found shot on Thursday, said his family was convinced that it was a professional assassination.

PARIS — With her signature long hennaed hair, fiery resolve and olive-green military fatigues, Sakine Cansiz was a feminist, guerrilla fighter and former political prisoner as adept at wielding a machine gun as organizing political protests from a jail cell.

One day after she and two other Kurdish activists were killed in the heart of Paris, speculation abounded regarding Ms. Cansiz, 55, and whether she had been the main target.

One of her brothers, Metin Cansiz, and activists interviewed Friday said her main role in recent years was to raise money and provide political support for the separatist group she helped found, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Ms. Cansiz may also still have been involved in providing arms for the rebels.

Echoing many analysts, Mr. Cansiz said the family was convinced that his sister had been the victim of a professional assassination. It was aimed, he said, at disrupting recently started peace talks that seek to end decades of bloody conflict between the Turkish government and the P.K.K., which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

Ms. Cansiz was a close ally of a crucial player in the talks with Turkey, the P.K.K.’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

“My sister supported the peace process, and she paid with her life,” Mr. Cansiz said as family members and hundreds of mourners gathered at a Kurdish cultural center not far from the locked, unlabeled office where Ms. Cansiz and the other two women, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, were found fatally shot early Thursday. “Whoever did this wanted to kill the process.” 

Many Kurdish rebels said they believed that Turkish nationalists were behind the killings. But there were competing suspicions. Some rebels speculated that Iran  sponsored the attack as a way to destabilize Turkey, which has taken a stand against an Iranian ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Friday that he believed that the killings bore the signs of an internal feud. In any case, the contours of Ms. Cansiz’s shortened life suggest that she would have had plenty of enemies.

Born to an Alevi Shiite family of eight brothers and sisters, Ms. Cansiz became politically active in her early 20s, her brother said. What she saw as the impoverishment and repression of the Kurdish community led her and a small group of revolutionaries to found the P.K.K. at a teahouse near Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

In 1980, after a coup in Turkey, she was arrested and imprisoned until 1991, enduring torture, according to Rusen Werdi, a Kurdish lawyer in Paris.

Her brother, who was imprisoned with her, recalled that she was one of the only prisoners to stand up to the authorities. Activists recalled that she spit in the face of the notorious prison director.

In interviews on Friday, activists said  Ms. Cansiz continued to organize demonstrations from behind bars. They said she had initially been attracted by the Marxist ideology of the Kurdish rights movement, which allowed women to escape from the tribal structures of Kurdish society and to take up arms alongside men.

Vahap Coskun, an expert on Kurdish movements at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, said that from its inception, the P.K.K. saw that Kurdish women could provide a powerful base for political organization and on the battlefield. Of the group’s 5,500 members, he said, about a quarter are women. In the mid-1990s, some joined suicide bombing attacks aimed at military and civilian targets, sometimes deflecting suspicion by dressing as though pregnant.

After Ms. Cansiz was released from prison, her brother said, she received military training, organized clandestine meetings, traveled to P.K.K. mountain outposts in southeastern Turkey and went underground to Germany to raise funds.

Ms. Cansiz spent time in Syria, where Mr. Ocalan was based, at the group’s training camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa region and in northern Iraq, Mr. Coskun said. She was eventually sent to Western Europe to work in logistics and fund-raising after the P.K.K. incurred losses in fighting with Turkish security forces, he said.

The German authorities questioned her in 2007 but turned down a Turkish request for her extradition, her friends and colleagues said. She then moved to Paris, and believed that she was under frequent surveillance, they said.

Her brother said that the two had recently celebrated the new year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and that Ms. Cansiz had betrayed no concerns about her safety. “She was never afraid,” he said. “She was happy.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the sect of Shiite Islam of which Sakine Cansiz was a member. She was an Alevi, not an Alawite. Among their differences, the Alevis are spread throughout Turkey, while most Alawites in Turkey live along the country’s border with Syria.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Why Pixel Counts Don't Count in Cameras

With the coming of the Consumer Electronics Show, camera manufacturers will be trotting out scads of new products, but many are unfortunately falling back on an old marketing strategy.

I have been seeing manufacturers offer ever larger pixel counts for their newer models. For instance Nikon’s D5100 is still in the lineup alongside the newer and less expensive D3200. The D5100 has 16.2 megapixel sensor, the D3200 has a 24.2 megapixel sensor (there are even newer models, but I don’t have them on hand to test).

Shouldn’t that make the D3200 the better camera? Logically maybe. But in fact it doesn’t, which serves to point out why you can’t shop for a camera based on the number of pixels. It’s largely meaningless when it comes to image quality.

In recent years, many manufacturers had stepped stepped away from pushing pixel counts as the primary selling point of a camera, but it’s a measure the public seems to respond to. Now it’s back in a big way.

To demonstrate why pixels are irrelevant, I have taken an ugly but illustrative image of a corner in a darkened room. Low light brings out “noise” in photographs. It’s a kind of grainy unevenness that is generally undesirable although some artists use it for effect. Both photos are taken with the same settings and lens. You can see the grain is more pronounced in the photo from the D3200, which has the higher pixel count.

Why is that? Because at a certain point you’re better off having a larger pixel, which captures better quality information about the light it sees, rather than additional pixels capturing lower quality data.

To be clear, I am not singling out Nikon, or either of these cameras. They are terrific products, and I consider the D5100 one of the better bargains in its price range partly because of its ability to capture quality images in low light.

The point here is that when you are shopping for a camera, concentrate on the type and physical dimensions of the sensor. In that case, larger is better because more surface area means more ability to capture light. And though CCD sensors used to be state-of-the-art, CMOS sensors have largely surpassed them.

If you only remember one thing when shopping for a new camera it’s this: don’t be seduced by a high pixel count.

Read More..

Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

Read More..