John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

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Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA


John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.







A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?




And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?


For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.


By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.


But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.


It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.


“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.


In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.


The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.


Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.


A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.


“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”


Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.


John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.


He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.


Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.


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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Label:

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA


John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.







A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?




And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?


For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.


By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.


But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.


It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.


“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.


In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.


The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.


Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.


A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.


“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”


Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.


John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.


He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.


Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.


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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

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At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.




The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.


Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.


A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.


Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.


No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.


Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.


Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.


While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.


Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.


Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”


In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.


Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.


“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.


About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.


Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.


Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”


Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”


Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.



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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

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At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.




The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.


Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.


A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.


Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.


No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.


Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.


Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.


While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.


Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.


Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”


In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.


Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.


“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.


About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.


Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.


Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”


Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”


Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.



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The Lede: Social Media Images From Tunisia, as an Opposition Leader Is Buried

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Video of Friday’s funeral for Chokri Belaid, a Tunisian opposition leader assassinated two days ago, from the independent news site Nawaat.

Last Updated, 3:44 p.m. Activists, bloggers and journalists in Tunisia posted a stream of images on social networks Friday, showing thousands of mourners packed into the largest cemetery in the capital, Tunis, for the funeral of Chokri Belaid, a leading opposition figure whose assassination two days ago triggered a wave of street protests against the Islamist ruling party.

Among those uploading images of the funeral — which took place as the police fired tear gas at protesters and cars were set alight during clashes outside the graveyard — were my Times colleagues Kareem Fahim and Tara Todras-Whitehill, Thierry Brésillon of the French news site Rue 89, and Tunisian activists including Selim Kharrat of the rights organization Al Bawsala.

In video streamed live during the funeral by the activist blogger Slim Amamou, the 2011 revolutionary chant calling for the downfall of the regime could be heard echoing around the graveyard.

A photograph in a set uploaded to Facebook by the blogger Mon Massir appeared to show that even the late opposition leader’s young daughter was forced to shield her face from the tear gas fired by the police.

After the funeral, as photographs uploaded by Mr. Amamou and the rights activist Amira Yahyaoui showed, the security forces enforced a ban on gathering on the main Avenue Habib Bourguiba in central Tunis.

Emna Chebâane, who also works with the rights organization Al Bawsala, posted video on Facebook showing how the police moved in to clear a small number of protesters from the avenue.

It was not hard to imagine what the kind of protest the authorities were concerned about might look like. Two days earlier, when an ambulance carrying Mr. Belaid’s body to the morgue had passed through the same street, thousands of protesters swarmed around the vehicle. Video posted on YouTube late Wednesday by Jadal, a Tunisian news site, showed that scene.

Video recorded on Wednesday in Tunis as protesters gathered around an ambulance carrying the body of Chokri Belaid, a murdered opposition leader.

There were reports of protests in other parts of Tunisia on Friday, as many workers observed calls for a nationwide strike.

Video uploaded to YouTube by a blogger who said he was in the town of Sousse appeared to show the security forces, and officers in plain clothes, firing tear gas and dragging protesters away from a traffic circle pictured in a Wikipedia entry on the old town.

Video uploaded to YouTube on Friday, said to show the police cracking down on protesters in the Tunisian town of Sousse.

Two clips posted online earlier Friday by the same blogger appeared to show the divisions in Sousse, between supporters and opponents of the new government, which have emerged nationwide. One clip showed a loud march in favor of Ennahda, the Islamist party that now rules Tunisia; in another, a second group of protesters declared that they were committed to “bringing down the regime and avenging the death of Chokri Belaid.”

Video said to show supporters of Tunisia’s Islamist ruling party, marching in Sousse on Friday.

Video of antigovernment protesters, said to have been recorded in the Tunisian city of Sousse on Friday.

Video shot by bloggers for the independent news site Nawaat showed what they described as a demonstration in the city of Bizerte in honor of Mr. Belaid, outside the local headquarters of Ennahda. According to a description on Nawaat’s French-language live blog, the video shows an Islamist calling for calm and telling the demonstrators that the nation’s secularists have lost the struggle for power.

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DealBook: Einhorn Sues Apple Over Plan to Discard Preferred Stock

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9:02 p.m. | Updated

Wall Street has had a long romance with Apple. Now one of the company’s best-known investors is saying: I love you, but you need to change.

The surprising declaration by the billionaire hedge fund manager David Einhorn adds to the growing dissatisfaction with Apple and its once soaring stock.

On Thursday, Mr. Einhorn urged his fellow shareholders to block a plan by Apple to scrap a certain class of stock. He says that the move limits the company’s ability to use its enormous war chest — some $137 billion in cash — to reward investors.

The campaign is an unusually aggressive one for Mr. Einhorn, who came to fame betting against Lehman Brothers. To thwart the proposal, Mr. Einhorn is suing Apple in Federal District Court in Manhattan, claiming that it violated securities rules by tying the plan with two other initiatives that he sees as good corporate governance.

The standoff sets up an unusual clash between two sides who can each claim a huge following on Wall Street. In one corner is Apple, whose stock’s almost unearthly growth has bewitched investors across the globe — at least until recently. In the other is Mr. Einhorn, widely regarded as an intelligent investor whose moves inspire legions of copycats. His merely asking a few questions on an earnings call for Herbalife, a nutritional supplement company, last May prompted a plunge in its shares.

So far, each side has remained cordial. Mr. Einhorn called Apple “phenomenal” and contended that his campaign had nothing to do with its recent stock decline. His firm, Greenlight Capital, currently holds 1.3 million shares, now worth nearly $609 million.

“We own more Apple today than we ever have before,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’re optimistic about the company’s prospects, and think too much bad news has been priced in.”

In a response, Apple said that it “welcomes” Mr. Einhorn’s views and added that its management and its board were actively discussing how to return more cash to shareholders.

But the spat underlines recent hand-wringing over Apple, whose stock has proved vulnerable in recent weeks. Over the decade that ended in late September, its share price soared an astounding 18,749 percent, to more than $700. Scores of hedge funds bought into the stock, riding its coat tails to bolster their own returns.

Since about Sept. 21, however, Apple’s stock price has tumbled almost 33 percent, closing on Thursday at $468.22. (Even so, its market capitalization stands at $439.7 billion, making Apple the most valuable public company in the world.)

As the shares have fallen, the volume of criticism has risen.

“Because the stock has sold off from its high, and because Apple’s earnings have declined for the first time in a decade, you’ll hear people become more vocal,” said Walter Piecyk Jr., an analyst at BTIG Research.

Since at least 2005, no shareholder has conducted a formal campaign against an Apple management proposal, according to the data provider FactSet.

Mr. Einhorn’s main concern is Apple’s cash hoard, which is bigger than Intel’s entire market value. Shareholders have long complained that the cash, invested in the likes of Treasury bonds, is increasingly a drag on the stock price and should either be invested in new opportunities for growth or returned to them.

Last spring, the company announced a plan to return $45 billion to shareholders over three years, in the form of share buybacks and a dividend for its common stock. But that will hardly make a dent in a cash pile that swelled by $117 million a day during its most recent quarter.

Mr. Einhorn on Thursday compared Apple to his grandmother, whose experience surviving the Great Depression molded her into an extreme saver who did not leave voice mail messages for fear of using extra cellphone minutes. The company’s own near-death experience in 1997, he said, left a similarly profound scar on its corporate psyche.

As an alternative, he has been proposing since last May what he calls a “win-win” for Apple and its investors. The company, he says, could issue $50 billion in preferred shares to existing shareholders, which would carry a roughly 4 percent annual dividend. Over time, Apple could issue more preferred stock and increase its overall payouts.

The idea, which Mr. Einhorn said had been discussed within his firm for some time, would reward shareholders while ensuring that Apple would spend that additional cash over time. He raised the idea with company executives, including Apple’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, over several months, but was rebuffed.

Mr. Einhorn became more aggressive after seeing Apple’s proposal to eliminate so-called blank check preferred stock from its corporate charter. The move would prohibit it from issuing preferred stock without shareholder approval. To Mr. Einhorn, that would sharply limit options for “unlocking value.”

He was further irked by Apple’s tying the plan with two others that he said he would ordinarily support.

In its statement, Apple said that its proposal was actually aimed at making itself more responsive to investors. It added that the plan would not prevent the introduction of precisely the kind of initiative that Mr. Einhorn had discussed.

At least one major investor has sided with Apple. Calpers, the giant California public employee pension fund that is the company’s 43rd-biggest shareholder, said in a statement that the proposal “significantly strengthens share owner rights and deserves full support.”

For his part, Mr. Einhorn said he planned on trying to persuade other shareholders. And he has reconciled himself to Apple’s days of meteoric growth now lying in the past.

“It’s not going to grow 80 percent a year,” he said of the company, “but that doesn’t mean it’s going to go bankrupt.”

David Einhorn's Lawsuit Against Apple by

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/08/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Investor Sues Apple Over Plan For Stocks.
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European Leaders Struggle to Bridge Budget Gaps

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BRUSSELS — European Union leaders on Friday morning edged closer to agreeing a budget worth nearly €1 trillion, or $1.3 trillion, to support farming, transportation and other infrastructure, as well as big research projects for the 27-nation bloc.


But after 15 hours of talks, the leaders were still seeking unanimity while also attempting to satisfy the wide array of national interests demanding attention.


The budget is negotiated every seven years and involves furious horse-trading as leaders focus on getting the best deal for their own countries’ citizens, rather than emphasizing pan-European considerations.


The marathon session was the second attempt to reach a deal on the funding package, which should run from 2014 to 2020, after the first attempt collapsed in November.


Another failure to strike a deal on a sum of money that represents only about 1 percent of the Union’s Gross Domestic Product would be a severe embarrassment for the leaders, who already have spent years bickering over how to save the euro.


The European Commission, the bloc’s policymaking arm, had sought an increase in the overall budget of around 5 percent to more than €1 trillion.


Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, which represents E.U. leaders, pruned that sum to about €973 billion at the previous summit in November.


On Friday morning, Mr. Van Rompuy presented further revisions lowering the overall sum to about €960 billion but holding down the amount of cash governments pay up-front to around €908 billion.


That formula was designed, in part, to satisfy countries like Britain and the Netherlands that pay more into the budget than they receive, while also accommodating the demands of countries like France and Italy that want to maintain generous payments for agriculture and infrastructure.


Some of the deepest cuts would be made to pan-European projects to improve transport, energy, and digital services that are overseen by the commission. About €1 billion in cuts would be made to the part of the budget used to employ 55,000 people, including 6,000 translators, most of them in Brussels, who run the Union’s day-to-day affairs.


Expert national advisors were reviewing the proposals on Friday morning, and leaders were expected to reconvene for further talks.


Leaders also were wrestling over demands by some countries to renew a system of rebates that raises the costs for other countries.


One of the complications in the current round of negotiations has been the call for budgetary rigor from leaders like David Cameron, the British prime minister, who says the Union should tighten its belt at a time when many European governments have been compelled to impose stringent budget cuts.


Mr. Cameron, in particular, has earned the enmity of some European leaders by demanding a renegotiation of Britain’s treaty with the Union and promised a referendum on his nation’s membership in 2017.


Reflecting growing irritation with Britain among a number of European leaders, Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, told a news conference late on Thursday night that leaders should not go out of their way to appease Mr. Cameron.


Because Britain could be outside the bloc by later this decade, there was little need to make concessions to Mr. Cameron that potentially jeopardized “the security of our financial planning,” Mr. Schulz suggested.


Mr. Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, had intended to start the session during the mid-afternoon on Thursday to force leaders to make their complaints clear in a roundtable session rather than being allowed to break into small groups.


But his plan was derailed, and the first roundtable session was delayed until late in the evening, as leaders formed the kind of pre-summit huddles that he seemingly wanted to avoid.


President François Hollande of France was an hour late to a meeting during the afternoon with Mr. Cameron, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Mr. Van Rompuy.


Mr. Hollande’s lateness was a sign of French displeasure with British demands that included strict limits on agriculture spending cherished by French farmers, according to an E.U. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.


Even if leaders eventually agree to a deal, it faces still more hurdles before it becomes law at the European Parliament, which has the power to veto the budget.


Some of the most influential figures in Parliament have already signaled that they are prepared to reject a budget that foresees spending less on Europe in the years ahead.


Guy Verhofstadt, the head of the alliance of liberals in the Parliament, called on Thursday for a full-revision clause to be inserted into the budget, so that it could be increased after three years if economic conditions improved.


Mr. Schulz, the president of the Parliament, said on Thursday that he would not approve a budget that ended up widening the overall gap between the amount of cash paid up-front by governments and the somewhat higher amounts known as commitments, which make up the overall budget.


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Well: Old Age and Motorcycles Are a Dangerous Mix

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If you’re over 40 and planning to hop on a motorcycle, take care. Compared with younger riders, the odds of being seriously injured are high.

That is the message of a new study, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention, which found that older bikers are three times as likely to be severely injured in a crash as younger riders.

The percentage of older bikers on the road is quickly rising, and their involvement in accidents is a growing concern. Nationwide, from 1990 to 2003, the percentage of motorcyclists over age 50 soared from roughly 1 in 10 to about 1 in 4. At the same time, the average age of riders involved in motorcycle crashes has also been climbing. Injury rates among those 65 and older jumped 145 percent from 2000 to 2006 alone.

Because of the increase in motorcycle ridership among older Americans, the researchers, led by Tracy Jackson, a graduate student in the epidemiology department at Brown University, wanted a closer look at their injury patterns. So she and her colleagues combed through a federal database of motorcycle crashes that were serious enough to require emergency medical care. That yielded about 1.5 million incidents involving motorcyclists 20 or older from 2001 to 2008.

The researchers then split them into groups: those in their 20s and 30s, another group between 40 and 59, and those 60 and older.

Over all, the study showed that injury rates for all three groups were on the rise. But the rise was steepest for the oldest riders. Compared with the youngest motorcyclists, those who were 60 and older were two and a half times as likely to end up with serious injuries, and three times as likely to be admitted to a hospital. The riders who were middle age were twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be hospitalized.

For older riders, the consequences of a collision were also especially alarming. Older and middle-aged bikers were more likely to sustain fractures and dislocations, and they had a far greater chance of ending up with injuries to internal organs, including brain damage.

The researchers speculated that it was very likely that a number of factors played a role in older riders’ higher injury rates. For one, declines in vision and reaction time may make older riders more prone to mistakes that end up in collisions. Another theory is that older riders tend to ride bigger bikes, “which may be more likely to roll or turn over,” Ms. Jackson said.

Then there is the greater fragility that comes with age. Older riders may be involved in the same types of accidents as younger riders, Ms. Jackson said, but in some cases, a collision that a 20-year-old would walk away from might send a 65-year-old to the hospital.

“Your bones become more brittle, and you lose muscle mass as you get older,” she said. “It could just be a matter of aging and the body being less durable.”

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Well: Old Age and Motorcycles Are a Dangerous Mix

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If you’re over 40 and planning to hop on a motorcycle, take care. Compared with younger riders, the odds of being seriously injured are high.

That is the message of a new study, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention, which found that older bikers are three times as likely to be severely injured in a crash as younger riders.

The percentage of older bikers on the road is quickly rising, and their involvement in accidents is a growing concern. Nationwide, from 1990 to 2003, the percentage of motorcyclists over age 50 soared from roughly 1 in 10 to about 1 in 4. At the same time, the average age of riders involved in motorcycle crashes has also been climbing. Injury rates among those 65 and older jumped 145 percent from 2000 to 2006 alone.

Because of the increase in motorcycle ridership among older Americans, the researchers, led by Tracy Jackson, a graduate student in the epidemiology department at Brown University, wanted a closer look at their injury patterns. So she and her colleagues combed through a federal database of motorcycle crashes that were serious enough to require emergency medical care. That yielded about 1.5 million incidents involving motorcyclists 20 or older from 2001 to 2008.

The researchers then split them into groups: those in their 20s and 30s, another group between 40 and 59, and those 60 and older.

Over all, the study showed that injury rates for all three groups were on the rise. But the rise was steepest for the oldest riders. Compared with the youngest motorcyclists, those who were 60 and older were two and a half times as likely to end up with serious injuries, and three times as likely to be admitted to a hospital. The riders who were middle age were twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be hospitalized.

For older riders, the consequences of a collision were also especially alarming. Older and middle-aged bikers were more likely to sustain fractures and dislocations, and they had a far greater chance of ending up with injuries to internal organs, including brain damage.

The researchers speculated that it was very likely that a number of factors played a role in older riders’ higher injury rates. For one, declines in vision and reaction time may make older riders more prone to mistakes that end up in collisions. Another theory is that older riders tend to ride bigger bikes, “which may be more likely to roll or turn over,” Ms. Jackson said.

Then there is the greater fragility that comes with age. Older riders may be involved in the same types of accidents as younger riders, Ms. Jackson said, but in some cases, a collision that a 20-year-old would walk away from might send a 65-year-old to the hospital.

“Your bones become more brittle, and you lose muscle mass as you get older,” she said. “It could just be a matter of aging and the body being less durable.”

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At War Blog: U.S. and Allies Conduct Drills in Persian Gulf, a Signal to Iran

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Deterring Iran is a delicate balance of diplomacy, sanctions and military muscle-flexing, all intended to send a strong signal – without proving so provocative that the region is pushed toward war. One piece of the effort – halting the proliferation of illicit weapons – got a practice run in the Persian Gulf this week.

Although the exercise did not explicitly name an adversary, geography certainly pointed to Iran, as well as to militants of Al Qaeda still operating in the region. The exercise, which ended Thursday, included a headquarters simulation to test the policy-making and coordination among the American military and two dozen nations that joined, as well as an extensive component of military drills at sea, in the air and on land.

Pentagon officials do not hide the fact that halting suspected smugglers, and boarding their vessels and inspecting them, is in some ways easier than knitting together a coalition of countries to operate under the decade-old Proliferation Security Initiative.

While there may be quiet agreement that Iran is a threat to regional stability, many nations – especially Iran’s neighbors – want to avoid any appearance of belligerence that might make relations even worse. In fact, several of the countries in this week’s exercise declined to officially confirm their participation.

That alliance cohesion problem is not new. When the Proliferation Security Initiative was begun by the administration of President George W. Bush, South Korea initially refused to join, for fear of angering North Korea. The government in Seoul eventually reversed the decision, and South Korea is among the nonproliferation program’s current members, a number that has expanded to 102 nations from the original 11.

Separate from this current multinational exercise, American and Yemeni officials disclosed last week that a joint operation had interdicted a boat carrying a large load of explosives and weapons, including shoulder-launched antiaircraft weapons. Intelligence indicated that the shipment came from Iran and was destined for Houthi insurgent militants inside Yemen.

Even before the proliferation exercise ended this week, the American military’s Central Command announced the scheduling of another exercise to practice mine countermeasures and maritime security in waters of the Middle East. Those skills would be necessary if Iran tried to close the Strait of Hormuz. More than 20 nations will participate in the exercise, set to begin in May.

But budget difficulties in Washington may make sustaining a large American military presence in the region more difficult. The Pentagon announced this week that, temporarily at least, there would be only one aircraft carrier strike group on patrol in the region, down from the usual two. The reason: the Defense Department needs to save money.

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