The Events page lists our monthly coffees and movies, dinners and social occasions. Thank you Rob for your excellent work. Readers can run their mouse over the indicated word on the Events page and – voila – our calendar appears.

The first question in our Puzzles section is difficult. No more Mr Nice Guy in this e-zine. The second is less of a challenge, but try it without pencil and paper.

Our Articles begin with a forthright examination of safety in the Gulf of Mexico. It appears that safety was deliberately flouted in the stampede for profit. And yet the blame can’t be leveled at any person or company. We’ve devised a system, call it a market economy, which places the individual and community behind money in importance. BP and Transocean share our values. They are doing what most of us do from day to day, trying to make a buck and taking chances.

Next is a study of why Johnny can’t read. You know the type of article we mean. They’ve appeared in scholarly journals and the popular press for decades. We dumb down education and then we’re surprised why graduates can’t perform the simplest task, let alone function at the cutting edge of science. Schools must become harder, not easier, if Johnny is to prosper. But we feel pity for poor Johnny. It’s not his fault that he can’t spell or read or think. And we wonder at the decay of standards. Or is all this a misconception caused by boomers grown belatedly cynical? You decide.

We look at oilsands pollution and the conspiracy of silence between government and industry. Whoa, we don’t mean overt and deliberate conspiracy. Rather we’re talking about the same needs that drive government regulators to rely on industry for information and expertise. We’re penny-pinchers, we taxpayers. We applaud when governments cut the civil service. Not enough people to draft regulations? No problem; the old regs will do till next year or the next. Not enough inspectors? Let the companies do the work and report to government offices that everything is under control. And when regulators find shoddy workmanship, we think they’re pettifogging purse-lipped idiots. We urge our leaders to ignore the experts. What competent scientist would want to work for our government in such circumstances? We get the inspection regime we deserve. Be reasonable, we say, let companies drill for oil and handle safety. Let exploitation of the oilsands proceed, until a crisis occurs or an accident, when we turn like wolves on our handlers and demand to know why we lack up-to-date procedures or why they weren’t implemented. No, it’s not the companies that are to blame. It’s ourselves.

As for the wealthy elite who manipulate the Republicans among our neighbours to the south, see our fourth feature. The tea party is more than a gathering of little guys in rebellion against the forces of evil. The hands that pull the strings belong to the richest in the nation. From which we can infer that it’s business as usual in the realm of politics. Aie de me!

2) Create a sequence starting with any two random numbers. Add them together to create the third number in the sequence. Add the third and second to create the fourth. Add the fourth and third to create the fifth. And so on. The ratio of consecutive numbers in the sequence (ie the second to the first – whatever they may be – the third to the second, fourth to the third, etc) converges; how quickly can you determine the number to which the ratio converges?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Start with any number X containing two or more digits. Multiply all of X’s digits together. Take the result and multiply its digits together. Continue until your result is a single digit. The amount of times you have to multiply X’s digits to get down to a single digit is the “persistence” of X. Our question this month touches on persistence. The key to our sequence is that 10 is the smallest number with persistence one, while 25 is the smallest with persistence two, and so forth. Ten is the first term, because it’s the smallest number (of two digits or more), which reduces to one digit in one step. 25 is the second term, because it reduces to 10, which reduces to 0. Therefore 25 is the smallest number that reduces to a single digit in two steps. 39 is the third term, because it’s the smallest number that reduces to one digit in three steps (39 becomes 27 which becomes 14 which becomes 4). 77 reduces to one digit in four steps. And so on. The next number after 6788 is 68889 (it’s the seventh term and smallest number that reduces to one digit in seven steps). [from Here’s Looking at Euclid, by Alex Bellos, based on work by Neil Sloane]

2) They converge on the golden mean, phi, which is 1.618…[ from Here’s Looking at Euclid, by Alex Bellos]

In response to “a series of serious accidents and near-hits within the global organization,” Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, commissioned the risk management company Lloyd’s Register to investigate its Houston headquarters and three other gulf rigs besides the Deepwater Horizon to assess its safety culture.

The confidential internal reports, obtained by The New York Times, offer an unusually candid view of safety and maintenance concerns within the world’s largest offshore drilling company, and they indicate that the problems highlighted in earlier reports provided to The Times about the Deepwater Horizon were not limited to that rig, which exploded on April 20, leading to an oil spill that is estimated to have poured at least four million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Transocean has 14 rigs now operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and 139 worldwide, and these documents raise concerns about locations beyond Deepwater Horizon, especially the three additional gulf rigs that were recently investigated. In fact, one of those rigs is being leased by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon site.

The new documents also shed light on one of the lingering mysteries of the disaster: why the rig sank. They indicate that there were problems with the Deepwater Horizon’s ballast system that was responsible for keeping the rig afloat and stable. If the rig had not sunk, the leak might not have occurred. Federal investigators have questioned whether deferred maintenance and other factors had played a role in the sinking of the rig.

A previous set of worker-safety reports provided to The Times were specific to the Deepwater Horizon. The new documents draw from analyses of three other rigs in the gulf and attempt to provide an overview for the entire North American division of the Transocean fleet.

The safety concerns cited in the company’s assessment of its North American division are supplemented by newly released internal reports concerning the Deepwater Horizon’s equipment. These equipment reports identify dozens of deficiencies, including some relating to the rig’s blowout preventer, and some that are categorized as “critical equipment items that may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

“Without a doubt, previous incidents and near-hits experienced throughout the organization were as a result of multiple causes and many contributory factors,” said the summary report, which gave an overview of the company’s North American Division and draws from investigations of Transocean’s Marianas, Discoverer Clear Leader, GSF Development Driller II and Deepwater Horizon drilling rigs.

This is not the first report of the Deepwater Horizon experiencing problems with its ballast system. In May 2008, Transocean was forced to evacuate more than 70 workers after problems with the ballast system flooded part of the rig, causing it to list to its side, federal records show.

A lack of hands-on experience for workers and managers has contributed to safety concerns at the company, and a stifling bureaucracy imposed by onshore management has led to widespread resentment among rig workers, the investigators found.

Nearly 40 percent of workers interviewed on the four rigs said that past problems were typically investigated by company officials strictly to attribute blame.

“It ticks me off when someone fails or has an incident; they focus on the paper rather than the process that was gone through,” said a worker from the Discoverer Clear Leader.

Another worker on Transocean’s Marianas rig said that the safety manual seemed to be “written for the courtroom, not the oil field.”

The reports are likely to broaden the discussion of blame for the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers. BP, which was leasing the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean at the time of the explosion, has been under the harshest glare for its role, but the Justice Department has said that its criminal investigation of the disaster will look at the role of the many companies involved.

About 43 percent of workers on the four rigs expressed fears of reprisals for reporting problems, the documents said. About 54 percent of Deepwater Horizon workers cited these fears, while about 61 percent of workers on the Marianas did so.

Some workers said the company was systematically deferring maintenance to save money.

“This rig is getting $550,000 per day; unless it’s a sink that needs fixing it isn’t getting fixed,” said a worker from the Marianas about the maintenance concerns. “They won’t send the rig to the shipyard for major refurb that is required in certain areas.”

The investigators who visited the four rigs in March concluded that many crew members and front-line supervisors were too readily promoted without sufficient on-the-job experience to appreciate the hazards. “Front-line crews are potentially working with a mind-set that they believe they are fully aware of all the hazards when it is highly likely that they are not,” the investigators said, adding that the workload, and thus the risks, on the rigs was increasing.

After reviewing the new documents, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, voiced concern.

“These documents are more evidence that despite the growing count of worker deaths and safety violations, the oil and gas industry still just doesn’t get it,” she said. “They need to change their worker-safety culture, and I am pretty sure we can’t count on them to do it by themselves.”

She added, “The oil and gas industry is not the same as a mom-and-pop grocery, and they can’t be treated the same.”

Lou Colasuonno, a spokesman for Transocean, wrote in an e-mail that the company was committed to safety and maintenance and that it proactively commissioned independent employee surveys and rig condition assessments.

“Reading the complete reports makes it abundantly clear that that both studies were positive and were designed specifically to identify strengths and weaknesses — a critical step in evaluating performance,” he wrote.

“Overall maintenance on the Deepwater Horizon met or exceeded regulatory and industry standards, and the company’s proactive review process helped the Deepwater Horizon log seven consecutive years without a single lost time incident or major environmental event prior to this incident.”

He declined to specify the series of “serious accidents and near-hits” that motivated the safety investigations.

The safety reports cite a variety of positive findings about Transocean. “Despite several rig management changes on board the rigs visited, rig leadership was generally praised by the work force,” one said.

Almost 87 percent of workers said they believed that there was enough time to do their work according to rules and procedures.

“Rig management and supervisors were generally seen as approachable, set a good example of the company commitment to safety, and were generally highly visible,” the investigators said.

But their praise often came with a certain ambivalence.

“Generally, the work force thought there was a sufficient number of staff to manage safety,” one report concluded before adding, “There were, however, some questions surrounding the retention of skilled personnel, competency levels for some personnel, and of processes in place for competency development and assurance.”

Although high levels of trust were reported at the rig level, “there was a significant level of mistrust between the rigs and the beach,” the report said, referring to onshore management.

Around 46 percent of workers on the four rigs said that some of the work force was uncomfortable with calling a “time out for safety.” Deepwater Horizon workers polled at about the same rate on this issue.

Transocean’s equipment documents reveal for the first time the severity of the maintenance issues that plagued the Deepwater Horizon, and they indicate that the company was aware of the consequences of the problems.

These new documents refer to at least 36 pieces of equipment in ill repair on the Deepwater Horizon that “may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

The new equipment documents indicate that an inspection of the Deepwater Horizon rig conducted just days before the April 20 accident found various problems with hydraulic relays that controlled the rig’s watertight doors, two of which had to be opened and closed by hand.

Of the four rigs investigated, the Development Driller II is now being used by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon. The Marianas was the original rig that was drilling BP’s Macondo well before being damaged in a hurricane. Despite having been built in 2009, the Discoverer Clear Leader had “a few notable safety related incidents on the rig during its relatively short operational history.” It is now being used by BP for oil containment at the Deepwater Horizon site.

It was not clear where the other rigs cited in the safety reports are operating now.

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, 4August2010)

Exactly.

The way the Mount Olive school district sees it, its students should not be getting by with D’s on their report cards, either. This fall, there will no longer be any D’s, only A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s.

“D’s are simply not useful in society,” said Larrie Reynolds, the Mount Olive superintendent, who led the campaign against D’s as a way to raise the bar and motivate students to work harder. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”

The no-D policy, which was adopted by the school board last week, has led to a flurry of Facebook messages from students calling it the worst idea ever, and has been debated on soccer fields and around swimming pools in this suburban township in northwestern New Jersey. Even some teachers have expressed concerns that it may result in more students failing.

“I really don’t like it,” said Chris Radler, 13, who is entering ninth grade; he said it was unfair and would increase the pressure on students. “If you’re a little bit less than a C, but not quite an F, you’re still going to fail. Some kids aren’t at that level yet. They aren’t able to get that upper grade.”

But parents like Christine Priest, a mother of six, applaud the new policy for reinforcing a message that they have long taught at home: D’s are not good enough. “With my kids, we always told them a D is an F,” she said. “D just wasn’t enough of an effort.”

Under the old system, students could pass with a 65 — 389 of the 1,500 students at Mount Olive High had a “D” on their final report cards in June — but now anything lower than a 70 will be considered failure.

While few high schools have banned D’s outright as Mount Olive has, some have sought to tamp down grade inflation by quietly tightening their standards over the years. Several New Jersey high schools, for instance, have raised the minimum for D’s to 70, which is traditionally the C-minus range, with anything below deemed an F.

Mount Olive, an above-average school in a middle-class community, is developing a support system to help students meet the tougher grading standard. When students receive a failing grade on a test, a paper or a homework assignment in the future, they will have three days to repeat the work for a C, and their parents will be notified by phone or e-mail.

Students who continue to fail will be placed on a “watch list” to receive extra-help classes, as well as tutoring from other students. If they need to make up a failed course, they will be given the option of attending an evening school, known as “Sunset Academy,” that will charge a fee of $150 per class.

The total cost of these support efforts to the district is expected to be less than $10,000, school officials said.

Max Werner, 17, an A-student whose father, Mark, is president of the school board, said he and his friends liked the no-D policy because no one should be satisfied with such a low mark. “People are going to have to try harder,” he said. “It’s not like a nice college is going to see all D’s on a report card and want to accept that student.”

Dr. Reynolds said he used a similar grading policy — “A, B, or do it over” — when teaching college classes in Wichita, Kan., in the late 1990s. About half of his students in those classes had to rewrite their initial papers, he recalled, but eventually nearly everyone was turning in work that merited an A or B. “I have never given less than a B,” he said.

In summer school last week, 79 Mount Olive High students were repeating classes they had failed during the year. Mark Fiedorczyk, the summer school principal, said he expected to see an increase next summer because of the no-D policy.

Still, Mr. Fiedorczyk, who teaches seventh-grade science during the year, said the higher standard was just what some students needed. In June, he handed out D’s to a half-dozen students, all of whom, he said, were capable of C’s if they had tried harder. Instead, they had skipped homework and projects, and showed up unprepared for tests.

“I have kids who walk the borderline,” he said. “They know it. They admit it. They calculate what they need to get the D.”

At which, another teacher joked: “Then they’ll turn around and say they can’t do math.”

For Aphrodite Georgakopoulos, 16, the no-D policy means she will have to work a lot harder to avoid summer school again. She is repeating world history and Algebra 2 after getting lazy about assignments or just giving up in frustration, she said.

“It’s not like I can’t do it; it’s just that I won’t push myself,” she said. “I don’t know why. I need someone to be constantly on top of me, making sure I do everything.”

Down the hallway, Sean Robinson, 17, who is retaking Spanish, said he hoped that students would feel better about themselves in a D-free school, and that Mount Olive’s higher standard would raise its profile in the region.

“Normally, I just wouldn’t try, but I feel like if I did badly, I’d bring down my school’s G.P.A.,” he said. “My mom will be happy.”

(Michael Appleton, New York Times, 8August2010)

High levels of toxic pollutants in Alberta’s Athabasca River system are linked to oilsands mining, researchers have found.

The findings counter the reports by a joint industry-government panel that the pollutant levels are due to natural sources rather than human development.

Mercury, thallium and other pollutants accumulated in higher concentrations in snowpacks and waterways near and downstream from oilsands development than in more remote areas, said a study to be published Monday afternoon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Upstream and undeveloped sites exposed directly to the McMurray Geologic Formation, the natural source of the oilsands, did not show high levels of pollutants.

The study led by Erin Kelly and David Schindler of the University of Alberta also found that levels of the pollutants cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and zinc exceeded federal and provincial guidelines for the protection of aquatic life in melted snow or water collected near or downstream from oilsands mining.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and Juneau, Alaska-based Oceana, a non-profit group focused on water quality issues, also contributed to the report. The study was funded by the Tides Foundation and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, two non-profit groups with an interest in environmental projects.

Residents downstream from the oilsands have expressed concerns that pollution in the river may be causing increased cancer rates.

However, the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, a joint industry-government environmental body that monitors water in the Athabasca River and its tributaries, has reported the pollutant levels occur naturally due to erosion of the natural geologic formation that contains the oilsands and are not caused by human activity.

Goal to test claims of monitoring program

The authors of Monday’s study said they wanted to test those claims.

The Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program’s findings had been questioned in the past, but critics did not have any data from independent studies to compare to the program’s data, the paper said.

The new findings confirm “the serious defects” of the monitoring program, the study concluded. It added that detailed monitoring, including the ability to distinguish the sources of the contaminants, is “essential” to control the potential impact of pollutants on human health.

The researchers collected water from more than 35 sites in February and June 2008 along the Athabasca River, its tributaries, the Athabasca Delta and Lake Athabasca. They accumulated winter snowpack from 31 other sites in the region in March 2008.

The researchers chose sampling sites upstream and downstream from oilsands mining, with both within 50 kilometres of oilsands developments and near undeveloped oilsands sites.

They then tested the samples for levels of 13 elements listed as priority pollutants under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act.

(CBC, 30August2010)

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

(Frank Rich, New York Times, 28August2010)

But then, that’s the beauty of language. It can change the way you see things without actually altering anything in the physical realm. It turns good into bad and bad into good and back again without anyone lifting a finger.

Take “fun-size” chocolate bars. They’re tiny. Gone in a single bite. They don’t last as long as a regular chocolate bar. Being individually wrapped, they’re fiddly and environmentally unfriendly. And pound for pound, they’re more expensive than their standard counterparts. But, back in the mists of time, some genius decided to label them “fun-size”. And it worked. As a kid, the mere sight of a bag of fun-size Mars bars could work me into a flurry of excitement. These were dinky novelties you could eat! Hooray for fun-size!

But the magic of language didn’t end there. As well as instantly transforming each and every shortcoming of these miniscule snacks into a thrilling bonus, the sly association of the word “fun” with the concept of “small helpings” had the side-effect of making regular-size chocolate bars seem less decadent, less naughty by comparison. If little ones were fun, regular ones were pedestrian slabs of edible workload.

Some time later, of course, king-size Mars bars hit the market, thus imbuing an act of calorific gluttony with an unwarranted air of imperial glamour. This was an imposing, statesmanlike snack to be reckoned with; a nougat mothership; the Mars bar of royalty. Language had worked its magic once again.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I’ve been thinking some more about the “Ground Zero mosque” debate. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the horrible brilliance of the opponents’ endlessly parroted, emotionally charged phrase “Ground Zero mosque”, used to describe something which – at the risk of regurgitating last week’s column – isn’t at Ground Zero and isn’t a mosque.

Conservatives, generally, are far more adept at politically reframing concepts by giving them snappy-but-misleading nicknames than liberals. “Loony left”. “Boom-and-bust”. “Flip-flop”. “Ground Zero mosque”. All simplifications or outright lies – but they worked. Like advertisers, the right seems breezily unconcerned about the truth of the slogan, provided it rings up a sale. They slap the words “fun-size” on the packaging and wait for the public to buy it.

The left, meanwhile, tends to respond by flinging back tired old insults. Bastards! Fascists! Racists! This is wrong on several counts. For one thing, it’s counter-productive. Nothing riles an anti-mosque demonstrator more than being called a bigot. It’s a grotesque, misleading smear on a diverse group of individuals – a bit like claiming all Muslims are terrorists (which, coincidentally, the guy beside them is currently doing through a loudhailer). But worse than being insulting, it’s just plain unimaginative. At least the right bothers to invent a new buzzword each time it wants to fart some monstrous new lie into the ecosystem. And they’re often infuriatingly well-crafted buzzwords – combining impact with audacious disingenuousness. There must be an evil Don Draper tucked away somewhere coining these things, these catchy fibs, these deceptive jingles.

Have you tried doing it yourself? It’s not easy. I was hoping to illustrate this article with some self-created buzzwords for leftwingers to use. The first one I came up with was “molehill mountaineer”, a pejorative term to describe the sort of perpetually furious rightwing weevil who spends their life calculatedly conflating issues such as the “Ground Zero mosque” into gigantic media crapgasms. But then I realised that “molehill mountaineer” could equally be applied to many on the left too. So that’s no good.

Then I tried to invent a shorthand term to describe the sort of perpetually furious rightwing weevil who claims to be a patriot, not a bigot, then immediately muddies the water by saying lots of bigoted things. It’s possible to be a patriot without being a bigot, just as it’s possible to be a weather forecaster without being a stripper, but if a weather forecaster took her clothes off halfway through a forecast, its fair to say the striptease element of her performance would greatly overshadow any meteorological merit. Still, a lot of people erroneously believe that saying “I’m a patriot” automatically absolves them from any and all charges of bigotry. And the best word I could come up with to describe these people was “Patrigot”. I quite like it, but it won’t catch on. Too clumsy.

Which is a pity. Because in today’s 2,000mph technological freefall, he who coins the catchiest buzzword generally wins the debate by default. Few people have the time to delve beyond the ticker-tape headline, to discover the reality behind a misleading brandname such as “Ground Zero mosque”. There’s a famous propaganda technique known as “the big lie”: the bigger the lie you tell, the more the public will believe it. But today’s audience is too distracted to digest big lies. Now the trick is to cram as much misleading information as possible into a succession of tiny verbal snacks, inaccurate but memorable.

In other words: Lies aren’t big any more. They’re fun-sized.

(Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, 30August2010)

And here is a list of the best fitness applets:
http://lifehacker.com/5607322/five-best-mobile-fitness-apps?skyline=true&s=i

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Visualization is the challenge in our Puzzles section. Don’t hesitate to stretch your skills.

The Articles begin with a French analysis of buck-passing in the BP disaster. I mean the PR disaster as well as the “black wave” as Paris expresses it. Would it surprise us to see titanic struggles in court one day, as BP sues Transocean, Halliburton and Cameron International? Other companies can’t wait to join the litigation nightmare to come. We’ve heard soft noises from BP thus far, but these are as the velvet glove that conceals an iron fist. Stay tuned, sports fans.

Next is a study of the cost-cutting and unreality that pervaded and financed BP’s growth. Prudence was not BP’s mission, caution not its practice. Near-misses and errors seem the rule. But BP still takes on projects that other companies view as too risky, and BP then tries to make the projects ever more profitable. The combination of increasing risk and decreasing caution is volatile. BP hasn’t learned. Or is it governments that never learn to moderate promises, or we voters who keep electing them and expecting the impossible?

We also see another article in the Why Johnny Can’t Read series, that now has stretched through a generation. Tests have become easier because of politicians who want to brag about scores and who make financing contingent on test results. Well, frankly, what else could a rational person expect? The focus here is on New York, which allows us to watch the Big Apple squirm as we feel superior. It can’t happen here, right?

2) Starting with a cube, consider how to create an object that is invisible and has infinite surface.

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The first shape is a parallelogram. The second is a rectangle. The third is a square.

2) One answer is the Menger sponge. Imagine that our cube has been notionally divided into 27 subcubes of equal size. Remove the subcube at the centre of each face and the subcube at the heart of the original cube. We’re left with a cube that has three square holes right through it. There are 20 subcubes remaining. Treat each of the remaining subcubes as we treated the original, and repeat the process again and again. The surface area keeps multiplying as the volume shrinks. At the limit of infinity, the surface area approaches infinity while the volume approaches zero. [from Here’s Looking at Euclid, by Alex Bellos]

BP, qui a déjà dépensé 2,49 milliards d’euros pour la marée noire, était l’actionnaire principal de Deepwater Horizon (65 %) aux côtés de la compagnie pétrolière américaine Anadarko (25 %) et du conglomérat japonais Mitsui (10 %). Société américaine basée en Suisse, Transocean était propriétaire, opérateur et responsable de la sécurité de la structure métallique. Le groupe américain de services Halliburton avait cimenté les appareils de sondages, la petite société texane Cameron International avait fourni les obturateurs anti-éruptions destinés à protéger les équipements contre l’énorme pression à grandes profondeurs.

Le cours en Bourse de ces entités a d’abord souffert de l’inquiétude des marchés face aux poursuites éventuelles de BP contre ses partenaires. En effet, dans la semaine ayant suivi la destruction de la plate-forme, le 20 avril, le groupe britannique avait affirmé que Transocean serait obligée de prendre en charge l’essentiel de la facture, avant de faire marche arrière.

Les milieux financiers se sont rangés aux arguments des partenaires de BP. Pour Transocean, “la production de gaz et de pétrole commence et finit avec l’opérateur ultime, BP”. Anadarko et Mitsui ont eu beau jeu de souligner que leur rôle se limitait à l’apport de fonds. Pour sa part, Halliburton a souligné qu’il avait suivi à la lettre le cahier des charges fixé par BP. Enfin, plus que centenaire, Cameron a mis en avant sa longue expérience et son bilan irréprochable en matière de sécurité.

Casting d’enfer

Le recul de ces groupes à la corbeille n’est pas dû à leurs rapports avec BP, mais à la défiance envers l’ensemble du secteur pétrolier (baisse attendue des commandes, hausse du coût des mesures de sécurité et de protection de l’environnement à venir…). Pour le reste, si BP a été contraint de renoncer au versement d’un dividende, Transocean a choyé ses actionnaires en leur distribuant 1 milliard de dollars ! A l’inverse de BP, entité britannique mais de facto américaine, ses associés ont bénéficié du réseau d’influence politique au casting d’enfer bâti par les pétroliers américain. L’administration Obama a concentré ses attaques sur BP, épargnant les autres entreprises.

Pour les deux partenaires du britannique, l’essentiel est de se dégager de toute responsabilité. Ils ont certes participé à l’élaboration du budget, du design du puit et de l’échéancier, et ils ont été informés des progrès de l’exploration. En vertu de l’accord d’association, Anadarko et Mitsui sont responsables à hauteur de leur participation, sauf à démontrer l’acte de négligence de la part du chef de file. Pour n’avoir rien à payer, ces dernières ont délibérément chargé BP. Par ailleurs, les obligations contractuelles des autres sous-traitants, juridiquement bien définies, diffèrent selon les projets et la culture d’entreprise du client.

En attendant le colmatage de la fuite, les concurrents de BP profitent de ses déboires. Ainsi, dans le grand projet d’exploration de la mer de Chine méridionale, la société britannique a dû accepter de laisser à son associé Chevron la direction des opérations.

(Marc Roche, Le Monde, 5July2010)

Towering 15 stories above the water’s surface, Thunder Horse was meant to be the company’s crowning glory, the embodiment of its bold gamble to outpace its competitors in finding and exploiting the vast reserves of oil beneath the waters of the gulf.

Instead, the rig, which was supposed to produce about 20 percent of the gulf’s oil output, became a symbol of BP’s hubris. A valve installed backward had caused the vessel to flood during the hurricane, jeopardizing the project before any oil had even been pumped. Other problems, discovered later, included a welding job so shoddy that it left underwater pipelines brittle and full of cracks.

“It could have been catastrophic,” said Gordon A. Aaker Jr., a senior engineering consultant on the project. “You would have lost a lot of oil a mile down before you would have even known. It could have been a helluva spill — much like the Deepwater Horizon.”

The problems at Thunder Horse were not an anomaly, but a warning that BP was taking too many risks and cutting corners in pursuit of growth and profits, according to analysts, competitors and former employees. Despite a catalog of crises and near misses in recent years, BP has been chronically unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes, an examination of its record shows.

“They were very arrogant and proud and in denial,” said Steve Arendt, a safety specialist who assisted the panel appointed by BP to investigate the company’s refineries after a deadly 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Tex., facility. “It is possible they were fooled by their success.”

Indeed, there was a great deal of success to admire. In little more than a decade, BP grew from a middleweight into the industry’s second-largest company, behind only Exxon Mobil, with soaring profits, fat dividends and a share price to match.

From its base in London, the company struck bold deals in politically volatile areas like Angola and Azerbaijan and pushed technology to the limit in the remotest reaches of Alaska and the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico — “the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” as its chief executive, Tony Hayward, once put it.

The company also led an industry wave of cost-cutting and consolidation. It took over American competitors like Amoco and Atlantic Richfield and eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in several rounds, streamlining management but forcing the company to rely more heavily on outside contractors.

For a long time, BP’s strategy seemed to pay off. But on April 20, the nightmare situation occurred: the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and sending millions of gallons of oil gushing from BP’s Macondo well like so much black poison.

Although the accident is still under investigation, preliminary findings by Congressional investigators indicate that BP made a series of decisions that compounded the chances of disaster.

BP declined to make Mr. Hayward or other executives available for this article. But in an interview last month, Robert Dudley, the BP board member now in charge of the gulf spill response, denied that the accident reflected a corporate disregard for safety.

“I think we will find that this was an incredibly complicated set of events with individual decisions and equipment failures that led to a very complicated industrial accident,” he said.

BP is hardly the only oil company that has taken on difficult projects with a shaky safety net. But the company’s attitude toward risk stands in contrast to that of its competitors, most notably Exxon Mobil, whose searing experience with the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 spurred a wholesale change in its approach to safety.

“You can have the best intentions in the world, you can have the best equipment in the world, but it’s a combination of intentions, equipment and judgment that keeps accidents out of the workplace,” said Joseph H. Bryant, who ran BP’s operations in Angola from 2000 to 2004 and who is now chief executive of Cobalt International Energy. “If you are going to ask people to innovate, you’d better make sure that they know that any risks they take are manageable.”

A Focus on the Basics

When Tony Hayward became BP’s chief executive in May 2007, he promised to get the company back to basics.

One of his first moves was to remove the modern art adorning the company’s swanky London headquarters, including an endless video of gently waving corn projected onto one wall. In its place went prosaic photographs of BP service stations, platforms and pipelines.

A plain-spoken geologist and longtime company man, Mr. Hayward dispensed with the limousine used by his socially prominent predecessor, John Browne, and closed the concierge desk in the lobby that had helped employees with dry cleaning and theater tickets.

“BP makes its money by someone, somewhere, every day putting on boots, coveralls, a hard hat and glasses, and going out and turning valves,” Mr. Hayward said in a speech at Stanford Business School last year. “And we’d sort of lost track of that.”

Mr. Hayward also pledged to fix the safety problems that contributed to the downfall of his predecessor. Though the company would continue doing the “tough stuff,” he declared, it would make safety its “No. 1 priority.”

In the realm of personal safety, Mr. Hayward expanded on Mr. Browne’s initiatives. Visitors today see signs at company offices exhorting workers not to walk and carry hot coffee at the same time, to stick to marked walkways in parking lots and to grasp banisters while climbing the stairs. Employees with company cars must take defensive driving courses.

Mr. Hayward also set up a new companywide management system to evaluate risks, standardize safety practices and improve decision-making.

In a memorandum to employees on Friday, he noted that before Deepwater Horizon, the company’s safety record had been improving. “This accident has been a terrible exception to that trend and we must learn the lessons from it,” he wrote. “But at the same time, it does not invalidate all the hard work you have put in to improve our safety standards around the world. Safety is our first priority. It will remain so.”

But American regulators and some members of Congress say that despite such talk, the company continues its risky behavior.

“The way safety is measured is generally around worker injuries and days away from work, and that measure of safety is irrelevant when you are looking at the likelihood that a facility like an oil refinery could explode,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. “This is comparable to saying that an airline is safe because the pilots and mechanics haven’t been injured.”

A Story Begun in Persia

BP was born in 1908 when a rich Englishman named William Knox D’Arcy struck oil in Iran and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Treating the locals as little more than imperial subjects, the company, partly owned by the British government, expanded across the region, its fortunes intertwined with those of the British Empire.

But as oil-rich countries around the world began nationalizing their oil fields, British Petroleum, as it later became known, was forced to retreat and find new strategies along with the rest of the industry.

In 1995, the British government sold the last of its stake in the company and the charismatic Mr. Browne took over.

A highly visible supporter of the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Browne transformed the company into a global behemoth, boldly acquiring properties around the world and rechristening it BP.

Unlike some of his more cautious competitors, Mr. Browne ignored small projects and went after the riskiest, most expensive and potentially most lucrative ventures — “elephants,” in industry jargon. Under him, BP’s share price more than doubled and its cash dividend tripled, making it a darling of investors.

But even as he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords, Mr. Browne was ruthlessly slashing costs. He outsourced many operations and fired tens of thousands of employees, including many engineers.

Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years.

Mr. Browne, now advising Britain’s coalition government on its cost-cutting campaign, declined to comment for this article. In his new autobiography, “Beyond Business,” he said, “I transformed a company, challenged a sector, and prompted political and business leaders to change.”

Mr. Browne resigned under pressure in 2007, his reputation tarnished by a lie he told in court papers about his relationship with a male companion.

However, Mr. Browne’s fall from grace really began on March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City.

A Troubled Workplace

Acquired by BP in the Amoco purchase, the Texas City plant was America’s second-largest refinery, turning 460,000 barrels of crude oil a day into gasoline. But the facility, built in 1934, was poorly maintained and long starved of capital investment.

“We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real,” the Telos Group, a consulting firm hired to examine conditions at the plant, said in a report two months before the accident.

The explosion occurred when a 170-foot tower was being filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Because of poor communication among several workers who had been on 12-hour shifts for more than a month straight, no one noticed that the tower was filled too high.

A 20-foot geyser of unstable chemicals shot into the sky, and the vapor ignited when a contractor, trying to get away, repeatedly tried to start the engine on his stalling pickup truck.

The subsequent investigations were scathing. The explosion was “caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP,” the United States Chemical Safety Board concluded in one report.

The government ultimately found more than 300 safety violations, and BP agreed to pay a then record $21 million in fines.

A year later, there was a new calamity: 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

It was the worst spill ever on the North Slope, and once again, the cause was preventable. Investigators found widespread corrosion in several miles of under-maintained and poorly inspected pipes. BP eventually paid more than $20 million in fines and restitution.

While these two accidents drew most public attention, serious problems were also brewing offshore, at BP’s Thunder Horse platform.

Mr. Aaker, the engineering consultant who worked on it, said BP’s bosses rushed construction of the intricately designed vessel, moving it to the gulf before it was ready to “demonstrate to their shareholders that the project was on time and on schedule.”

Once the rig was at sea, several hundred people at a time frantically worked to complete it, sleeping in cramped, chaotic conditions on board a temporary encampment of ships.

“It was like having the plumbers, the electricians and the bricklayers come to a construction site at the same time as they are laying the concrete,” said Mr. Aaker, who is now assisting the House Energy and Commerce Committee in its investigation of Deepwater Horizon. “This was not methodical.”

Nor was it safe.

The near sinking of Thunder Horse in 2005 was caused by a shockingly simple mistake: a check valve had been installed backward, and that caused water to flood into, rather than out of, the rig when it heated up during the hurricane.

After costly repairs to fix that damage, BP discovered a more significant problem: rudimentary mistakes in the welding of pipes in the underwater manifold, which connects dozens of wells and helps carry the oil back to the platform, had caused dangerous cracks and breaks.

Had the well been active, the damaged pipes would have caused a major oil spill. As it was, the company had to remotely rip out, retrieve and fix dozens of complex and heavy pieces of equipment lying on the sea floor, some weighing more than 400 tons.

Altogether, the blunders cost BP and its minority partner, Exxon Mobil, hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and set back production, today at 300,000 barrels of oil and oil equivalents a day, by three years.

Although the Deepwater Horizon accident involved an exploration rig, not a production platform, a similar carelessness and disregard for safety was evident in BP’s decisions there, according to preliminary findings by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk,” wrote Henry A. Waxman, the committee chairman, and Bart Stupak, chairman of its subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

BP took a different sort of risk in Russia, forming a 50-50 joint venture in 2003 with that nation’s unpredictable oligarchs to gain access to the vast resources beneath the Siberian taiga.

The deal, which accounted for about one-quarter of BP’s global oil reserves, nearly collapsed in 2008, when the Russian government sought tighter control over its energy sector. After a nasty public fight, BP was forced to hand over operational control of the venture to its Russian partners, although it continues to reap vast profits from it.

BP stepped into another tricky political situation last year, when Iraq offered foreign companies $2 a barrel to help it increase production from its oil fields, which had suffered from years of war and neglect. BP’s competitors blanched at the low price, but Mr. Hayward teamed up with a Chinese state-owned company and accepted the deal.

The chairman of a rival company was so enraged that he called Mr. Hayward and demanded: “Tony, have you gone mad?” BP’s move forced other companies to agree to similar terms. As one analyst noted, it was “disastrous to profitability” for the industry.

Old Habits Die Hard

Time and again, BP has insisted that it has learned how to balance risk and safety, efficiency and profit. Yet the evidence suggests that fundamental change has been elusive.

Revisiting Texas City in 2009, inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 safety violations and proposed a record fine of $87.4 million — topping the earlier record set by BP in the 2005 accident. Most of the penalties, the agency said, were because BP had failed to live up to the previous settlement fully.

In March of this year, OSHA found 62 violations at BP’s Ohio refinery, proposing $3 million more in penalties.

“Senior management told us they are very serious about safety, but we observed that they haven’t translated their words into safe working procedures and practices, and they have difficulty applying the lessons learned from refinery to refinery or even from within refineries,” said Mr. Michaels, the OSHA administrator.

BP is contesting OSHA’s allegations, saying it has made substantial improvements at both facilities.

Accidents have also continued to plague BP’s pipelines in Alaska. Most recently, on May 25, a power failure led to a leak that overwhelmed a storage tank and spilled about 200,000 gallons of oil — the third-largest spill on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

Mr. Dudley, the BP executive overseeing the gulf response, said it was unfair to blame cultural failings at BP for the string of accidents.

“Everyone realized we had to operate safely and reliably, particularly in the U.S., to restore a reputation that was damaged by the accident at Texas City,” he said. “So I don’t accept, and have not witnessed, this cutting of corners and the sacrifice of safety to drive results.”

Mr. Waxman, whose committee is investigating the Deepwater Horizon accident, has a very different view. When Mr. Hayward testified a month ago, the representative upbraided him: “There is a complete contradiction between BP’s words and deeds. You were brought in to make safety the top priority of BP. But under your leadership, BP has taken the most extreme risks.”

“BP cut corner after corner to save a million dollars here and a few hours there,” Mr. Waxman said. “And now the whole Gulf Coast is paying the price.”

(reported by Sarah Lyall, Clifford Krauss and Jad Mouawad and written by Sarah Lyall, New York Times, 12July2010)

The results were in stark contrast to successes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had heralded in recent years. When he ran for re-election in 2009, he boasted of state test scores that showed two-thirds of city students were passing English and 82 percent were passing math.

But state education officials said that performance was misleading because those scores were inflated by tests that had become easier to pass. The scores released on Wednesday were the first attempt to establish what the officials considered a more trustworthy measure of students’ abilities.

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

“Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently,” she said. “These results will finally provide real, unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability.”

The falloff in passing rates occurred statewide. This year, 61 percent of state students were deemed passing, or at grade level, in math, compared with 86 percent last year. Students also performed dismally on the English tests, with 53 percent passing, down from 77 percent.

The scoring adjustment could raise questions about the precision of educational testing, even as policy makers across the country, including President Obama, are relying on tests to determine teachers’ pay and whether a school should be shut. In New York City, scores on state tests have been used to assign grades A through F to each school, as well as to determine principal and teacher bonuses.

And the results could cast doubts on the city’s improvements over the past several years; both the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have used increases in state test scores as evidence that schools have improved.

“It certainly complicates the Bloomberg administration message, because the state test is completely unreliable,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher with the Fordham Institute, a Washington-based research group.

New York State said the tests had become too easy, with some questions varying little from year to year, making it simple for teachers to prepare students because each test is made publicly available after it is given. So this year, the state made the questions less predictable and raised the number of correct answers needed to pass the tests, which are given to every student from the third through the eighth grades.

Last year, for example, a fourth grader had to get 37 out of 70 possible points on the math test to reach Level 3 (out of 4), or grade level. This year, a fourth grader needed to earn 51 out of 70 points to reach that level.

New York City officials said that if previous scores were adjusted to the new standards, the city would still show substantial progress over the past decade, and they noted that students had improved somewhat on federal tests in recent years.

“This doesn’t mean the kids did any worse — quite the contrary,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “What this is simply saying is that we’ve redefined what our objectives are for the kids.”

“Whether the new expectations will instigate all of us to try harder,” he added, “one can only hope.”

By last year’s standard of proficiency, students in New York City did improve slightly in math this year, but dropped a bit in English.

The mayor’s explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents of students who once were considered proficient and now are deemed behind. Scores for districts and schools were released on Wednesday, with student scores available for parents next month.

The Bloomberg administration has relied on the exams to carry out one of its most contentious policies: requiring every student who scores at Level 1, the lowest, to attend summer school and pass a retest or repeat the grade.

This year, anticipating a drop in passing rates, the city sent more struggling students, about 27,000, to summer school. But the test results indicated that about 8,500 more should have been enrolled, the mayor said.

Mr. Bloomberg said that next year, education officials will tell principals to “keep an eye on these kids” to provide extra help. He dismissed a question about whether students in the past few years had been promoted before they were prepared for the next grade.

“You can make the case that we should have held back everybody,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s a standard where you should say, ‘We’re satisfied.’ ”

The city has made plans to assign grades to schools on a curve this year. But the grades are likely to fluctuate wildly — in many schools the percentage of students passing dropped by more than 50 percentage points.

At Public School 179 in the Bronx, for example, the percentage of third graders proficient in math plummeted to 21 percent, from 91 percent last year.

“We had to take several deep breaths,” said Sherry Font Williams, the principal.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to show “adequate yearly progress” on tests or face being shut down. Testing experts say that has led many states to progressively make their tests easier.

Because of the drop-off, New York State is in danger of having far more schools labeled as failing, but has asked the federal Department of Education for an exception this year.

The drop-offs were most drastic for black and Latino students, as well as those with disabilities and those still learning English, primarily because many of the students had been just above the minimum proficiency rates under the old standards.

While the test scores paint a bleak portrait in New York City, urban districts upstate fared worse. In Rochester, just 25 percent of all students were at grade level in reading, compared with 56 percent last year. In Buffalo, 26 percent of eighth-grade students met the state’s standards in math, although 58 percent did so last year.

“It’s devastating how they presented it and how they are doing it,” said James A. Williams, the Buffalo superintendent. “This is moving the goal line. While we were running for a touchdown and we were at the 10-yard line, they moved the goal post 20 yards forward.”

(Jennifer Medina, New York Times, 28July2010)

If, at around 10pm, Ellis did slip quietly into the basement of Concrete, a former industrial space reclaimed for the pleasure of the hedonistic twenty- and thirtysomethings who throng to London’s Shoreditch on a nightly basis, he might not have immediately recognised the spectacle before him as a bookish sort of gathering. Literary Death Match was reaching its climax. In the couple of hours before, four writers – Milly McMahon, Clare Pollard, Lee Rourke and Nikesh Shukla – had read their work in strictly timed seven-minute segments, and found themselves the subject of an instant critique from a panel of judges. Among the highlights had been a somewhat painful account of a virginity long in the losing and, from Shukla’s forthcoming novel Coconut Unlimited, which tells the story of a group of teenage Asian wannabe rappers in Harrow, the author’s crowd-delighting version of Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype”.

Now Rourke and Pollard were slugging it out to claim the title; but that involved neither earnest declarations of literary intention nor intricate comparisons of imagery. Instead, in what amounted to a gameshow finale, audience members flung themselves at the stage to the tune of 80s pop songs to declare their allegiance. By the time Rourke, author of the novel The Canal, finally won through, the scene resembled something like Mike Reid’s Runaround mashed up with The Late Review. “I usually read in little bookshops in front of about 20 people,” Rourke told me. “I guess LDM brings literature to those who wouldn’t necessarily step into a little bookshop to hear an author read.”

But if the face that Literary Death Match presents to the public is determinedly chaotic and endearingly amateurish, then its rise demonstrates a rather steelier business acumen. Launched in 2006 in New York, it has now enjoyed 97 outings in 23 cities, spreading from Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco and Dallas to London, Oxford and Paris, where Zuniga now lives. In August, it will take to the Edinburgh stage for the first time, and make a return visit to Beijing’s Bookworm bookshop, the scene of the first international Death Match last year. It’s no surprise to hear that Zuniga, who originally saw it as a way to promote Opium, now envisages it attracting corporate sponsorship.

Any potential literary angels, however, may note that they are arriving in a bustling marketplace. Up and down the country, particularly in the previously unfashionable areas of densely populated cities, in the spare spaces of pubs, clubs and restaurants, in arts centres and at micro-festivals, a new breed of literary event is flourishing. Often influenced by trends wafting in from the other side of the Atlantic, for example, celebrated New York storytelling event the Moth, and drawing heavily on the relaxed, interactive ethos of comedy nights and bring-your-ukelele music sessions, they are youthful, energetic, imaginative and defiantly lo-fi – and a world away from their rather more strait-laced cousin, the book reading. Just as literary festivals have begun to tend towards the small and to become tailored to their surroundings – the inaugural Stoke Newington Literary Festival, this May, was designed by organiser Liz Vater to pay tribute to the north London enclave’s history of radical thinking and included a powerful audience with Tony Benn – so too have standalone events started to reflect the preference for spontaneity and ad hoc amusement of their audiences.

During the course of my evening at Literary Death Match, I was told of at least half a dozen other literary performance series that are currently thriving; indeed, Damian Barr’s Shoreditch House Literary Salon was in full flow next door at exactly the same time. Perhaps the quirkiest event mentioned, organised by the poet Tim Wells, involves (self-declared) Fat Men Reading Poetry, with a pair of scales on the stage dictating the running order. Shukla, a fan of the Death Match’s “silliness, bonhomie and good nature”, himself runs a literary pub quiz called the Complete Works, because “I have this secret desire to be a quizmaster and because I want people to enjoy themselves. Also, the competitive element means you get people coming along for the quiz and then seeing readings by ace writers like Stuart Evers or Gavin Bower and going out and finding their work.” One of his favourite evenings, he adds, is Book Club Boutique, created by Salena Godden and Rachel Rayner, which now has a monthly residency at the House of St Barnabas in Soho. Shukla explains: “It has a stellar network of writers, poets and musicians who are all thick as thieves . . . It’s great when the performers look like they’re having fun. And the audience is definitely having fun.”

The Book Club Boutique provides an interesting glimpse into the phenomenon of the new literary event. Describing itself as revolving around “books, booze and boogie-woogie”, as “London’s hippest literary salon” and as a book event that takes place in “a speakeasy environment”, it blends the traditional reading with cabaret, featuring a house band and frequent trips to carefully selected festivals such as Latitude, Camp Bestival, Port Eliot and the Standon Calling music festival in Hertfordshire. It makes collaborations with campaigning organisations such as Burlesque Against Breast Cancer, UK Feminista and First Story, the charity founded by the writer William Fiennes, and produces a fanzine called Yours Generally. In short, it is a perfect example of the new wave of artistic cottage industry: participatory events with a homespun feel that owe their success not only to the enthusiasm of their creators but also to their committed use of social networking tools. Contributing recently to a BBC World Service item about the influence of the new media on the world of literature and publishing, Godden noted that, when she performed her first gig 20 years ago, publicity consisted of photocopying fliers and sticking them together with Sellotape; now it means ensuring a constant flow of new and tantalising information on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Literary Death Match, the Book Club Boutique and other series – most notably Homework, a “Night of Literary Miscellany” that takes place in the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in east London, and To Hell With the Lighthouse, the live offshoot of independent press To Hell With Publishing, which also produces limited editions, new fiction and a literary journal – have doubtless flourished because of a perception of them as clever outsiders: witty, iconoclastic and unfettered from the constraints of the traditional, and largely corporate, publishing agenda. If they are beneath the radar of the capital’s mainstream live arts offering, then that is where they want to be. In Homework’s case, it started out as an improvised night organised by writing collective Aisle 16, designed to encourage its members to produce new work and share it with others. Over time, explains poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, one of Aisle 16’s key members, the night grew in popularity and they began to invite special guests, among them Jon Ronson, Kate Nash and Kevin Eldon. Sometimes, particular nights went down so well that Aisle 16 developed them into touring shows – for example, Found in Translation, a piece about the group’s quest to join the experimental French writing movement Oulipo. The appeal to the audience, says Dunthorne, is that “they get to see (for a fiver) a live literature show that can take in poetry, video, songs, stories, animation, comedy, ‘multi-vox’, slide shows, mini-lectures, performed by writers who are great at writing, but also great at communicating their work.”

It’s easy to identify the advantages to the performers at these sorts of events: a chance to put their work before the public, to foster word-of-mouth recommendations, to boost, by however small a margin, book sales, and an opportunity to hook up with other writers and take a night off from staring at the computer screen. But what, precisely, has made audiences so receptive right now? Inundated with entertainment opportunities, probably already in possession of a number of books on their “to read” pile, able to access recommendations, reviews and footage of live performances in the comfort of their own homes, what attracts them to a literary cabaret?

One answer lies, perhaps, in the unexpectedly widespread rise of the do-it-yourself book club. One minute, you had heard a distant rumour of a few friends-of-friends who met over a glass of wine and a frittata in a knocked-through sitting room to mull over the finer points of the new Colm Tóibín or Margaret Atwood; the next, you were no one if you weren’t part of one. Publishers started producing reading guides to help proceedings along; people either swotted furiously for them or conceded that they were largely a genteel cover for a good old-fashioned knees-up; and suddenly they were both a mainstay of a certain kind of British life and an invaluable asset to the precarious business of selling books. When Richard & Judy got in on the act in 2004, and sent the sales figures of writers such as Joseph O’Connor, Alice Sebold and Jodi Picoult sky-high, book clubs also underwent a social expansion. They were no longer the preserve of the chattering classes; they were for everybody who enjoyed a good story and wanted to talk about it.

Add to that the more general democratisation of cultural criticism, and a picture begins to emerge. Conventional book readings – still the backbone of large, established venues, literary festivals and bookshops – have maintained their popularity, providing readers with a familiar setting in which to come face to face with a favourite author, ask questions, have a book signed. At the Southbank Centre, for example, the London Literature Festival has recently run to packed houses for 18 days; its programme also included a live StorySlam, dramatisations of classic texts and a “Litweeter” Festival, curated by the Southbank Centre and Shukla. But readings still carry with them the stamp of a cultural hierarchy: the author, occupying a privileged space before his or her appreciative audience, usually with an intermediary asking the questions on the readers’ behalf; the respectful queue at the book-signing table; the rapid disappearance of the central figure after the last copy has been signed. For audiences eager to experience closer and less formal contact with a writer and – perhaps even more importantly – to feel part of a literary moment, that isn’t quite enough.

And book readings don’t usually place the same emphasis on fun. At their best, they can be magical events, affording a unique insight into a writer’s work and craft and prompting the reader to return to their books renewed, informed and inspired. But when they are not quite at their best, they can also tend towards the dry. In those circumstances, it’s unsurprising that the audience feels there is little chance for escape or diversion. Rosie Boycott, the journalist and writer who earlier this year launched a series of storytelling events called 5×15, told me that the idea came to her when she found herself stuck in a less than scintillating talk that lasted for over an hour. As a riposte, she devised an evening in which the reading is banned. Instead, five writers give a quarter-of-an-hour talk based on their work. At first, notes weren’t allowed, but Boycott and her team relented; however, performers who exceed the time limit will find themselves yanked from the stage mid-flow, no matter whether they are in sight of their punchline or not.

At the event I attended earlier this summer at the Tabernacle, a former evangelical church in west London that is now a community arts centre, Boycott’s decision to programme without a specific agenda in mind was much in evidence: Fatima Bhutto, Andrew O’Hagan, Yotam Ottolenghi, Frances Stonor Saunders and Maureen Lipman – a memoirist, a novelist, a chef, a historian and a comic actor – shared the bill, with a musical interlude of “politically incorrect” songs from the writer Terence Blacker. Given its location – Holland Park and Notting Hill are barely a stone’s throw away – it’s perhaps unsurprising that the audience was a slightly older and better-heeled group than the punters most likely to attend a Literary Death Match or make their way to the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. Indeed, when 5×15 ventured beyond these shores in June, it landed in Paris, as part of bookshop Shakespeare & Co’s summer festival. “This gig,” as Lipman remarked during the 15 minutes that she spent telling jokes and performing one of a series of comic monologues that she’s currently writing, “is like a cross between the Comedy Store and the Women’s Institute.” If the assembled company, packed in like sardines, tucking into plates of antipasti and sipping dry white wine, took that as a slur on their credentials as sophisticated cultural consumers, they weren’t letting on.

A week or so later, I returned to the Tabernacle for a far more long-established event. The novelist Patrick Neate’s Bookslam, a combination of “high-end literature and low-end pop reggae” and “the first/best/only literary nightclub”, was one of the first events to try to expand the brief for writers in performance. Over the six years that it’s been running, with Angela Robertson and Elliot Jack joining Neate, it’s grown from an intimate gathering of a hundred or so to a consistently well-subscribed organisation that now spins off podcasts, has its own YouTube channel and this year hosted a celebratory summer barbecue. Performers have included William Boyd, AL Kennedy, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Nick Hornby and, most recently, Zadie Smith. What’s noticeable is that, despite its familial feel – Neate takes to the stage to compère without feeling the need to introduce himself or indulge in scene-setting formalities – it steers clear of some of the more pyrotechnic inventions of newer arrivals. In other words, even though readings are shortish and punctuated by live music, they are still essentially readings. It’s just that they are readings during which the audience, seated around tables rather than in serried ranks, feel as though they won’t be shot if they nip to the bar.

For some, though, even more participation is the order of the day. Storyteller Mary J Lockwood, who is about to take her show, Mary’s Extraordinary Story Club, to Edinburgh, began the Story Slam in her home town of Lancaster a year ago, subsequently running a regular event in London. One of her first moves was to make contact with Bill Hillmann, who started Chicago’s Windy City Story Slam at the beginning of 2008 and has now seen attendances grow from an initial crowd of seven to 900. Recently, Lockwood invited Hillmann to bring a team over for an International Story Slam, in which two teams of five storytellers, one American and one British, would do battle; amusingly enough, they were playing by British rules, which demand that randomly selected members of the public rate each performer by holding up a scorecard, rather than, as in Chicago, simply going by the decibel level. In other words, the vibe is more Strictly Come Dancing than Spartacus: Blood and Sand. For those inspired by what they saw, there was the promise of an open-mic slot to finish.

Lockwood is keen to promote a supportive atmosphere, and even includes tips for slammers on her website (including having your last line in your head to avoid meandering and not fretting if you leave something out). When people ask her what demographic she’s aiming for, she says she can’t narrow it down because everyone, she believes, loves stories. Slammers’ ages have ranged from 16 to 80. At the International Slam, I think I’ve hit on something when I note how heavily biased the audience is towards women; in fact, the men are just waiting until the last moment to unveil themselves. Unsurprisingly, the performances – given that the storytellers are not allowed to use notes – tend towards the raw and unstructured; they also occasionally blur the distinction between oral literature and stand-up comedy. But they are also fresh, free-wheeling and enthusiastically delivered as part of an ensemble evening of light-hearted and unpretentious entertainment.

And entertainment is where it’s at – and the more inclusive, the better. The perception of literature and literary life as a citadel with the public kept firmly behind the gates is not merely passé, it’s positively antithetical to a new generation of readers aware of the power that their interest represents to a medium in danger of cultural marginalisation. Craig Taylor, editor of the online literary magazine Five Dials, has even identified that emblem of closed-door literary life, the launch party, as a forum for involving his readers, inviting subscribers along to an event – from Paris to Montreal – each time he’s ready to press the “send” button. “At Five Dials we want to invite as many people as possible into the tent for the launches,” he explains, “then have fun and send out the issue and have faith that subscribers and attendees will read the magazine later when they’re sitting in a comfortable chair. People seem increasingly to want to be at these livelier literary events because they like the kind of people who attend. They don’t want to hear hours of readings. They want to drink and dance and flirt and talk and listen to short, interesting readings and then go back to the other stuff. It’s fine if you’re going to have a debate or a reading or a long discussion with two writers sitting in two chairs, but please, please, please remember there has to be some element of theatre.”

There is one problem posed by the increased focus on a writer’s capacity for performance. What of the writers who can’t, or don’t want to? Those for whom the words on the page are the thing, not their talent for doing a turn? In the past few years, the incursions into what writers might have optimistically thought of as their private space have multiplied, with publishing’s shakier finances dictating that authors find themselves on the road, or in front of a class of creative writing students, rather more frequently than before. If, in addition, we’d like them to become fully fledged variety acts, we may have to take the consequences in the quality of the prose on offer – and we might have to search all the harder for those who prefer to stay in their studies.

Yet my experiences in the salons and at the stand-up recitals of the new literary scene suggest that, despite the occasional piece of irritating modishness, the hyperbole with which some events are trumpeted and the odd ropy performance, there is an energy and invention on offer that the established scene and its practitioners might do well to allow to rub off on them. Which is not to say that readers won’t continue to enjoy the hushed reverence of a traditional reading, nor its still unparalleled ability to focus the audience on a text; they just might like to see a flash of ankle as well.

(Alex Clark, The Guardian, 31July2010)

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Capitalism in Crisis? Here’s a fun look at how we do things:

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The puzzles this month involve number theory. Give them a try.

Our articles start with an analysis of control on the Deepwater Horizon before the blowout. Was the well owner in charge, the rig owner, or the rig captain? The captain says everybody knew, but the facts don’t seem to support that view. These facts include the hodgepodge of government agencies that supervised the operation and granted exemption after exemption to the safety regulations that govern offshore drilling. Above all else, this pattern of exemptions makes our Prime Minister’s claim that It Can’t Happen Here a frightening toxin for those who live near the Beaufort Sea and other regions where drilling will occur. Why frightening? Because regulations don’t keep pace with technology. They adjust by becoming inapplicable. They also have to be re-interpreted. And the people who determine what is inapplicable or what re-interpretations to choose can’t hold hearings and conduct debates. Decisions must be taken quickly. Mistakes are inevitable. Moreover, the regulators must come from the oil industry and return there after a period with government, if government and industry are to know what they’re doing. This can’t allow for the disinterested and informed decision-making we need to protect our shores. It’s impossible for Regulations to protect Canada. But neither the Conservatives nor Liberals are prepared to bite the bullet and make the tough decisions to prevent a similar disaster from taking place in Canadian waters.

The second article describes how freedoms are curtailed once government steps into a crisis. The natural instinct of politicians is to manage news, and this requires constraints on what reporters are allowed to see. The Deepwater Horizon blowout is a study in managed news, first by BP, then by government.

Our other articles discuss blatant bribery by Japan to influence whaling, a list of recent environmental catastrophes that make it difficult to choose the “worst”, and the complexity of economic issues in the next target of stock market bears: Spain.

2) This is an appropriate place to repeat an old challenge. Start with a needle. Draw lines on a sheet of paper, which are exactly the length of the needle apart. Drop needles on the paper at random. If you multiply the number of drops by two, and divide by the number of times a needle touches or straddles a line, what is the result?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The answer raises the bizarre nature of the number which we traditionally designate “e”, namely 2.71828… It crops up in the strangest places. The answer to the question is indeed “e”.

2) The answer, of course, is our old friend pi (3.14159…). For one analysis of the problem, see http://mste.illinois.edu/reese/buffon/buffon.html#intro

The six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials pressed for answers about what occurred on the rig on April 20 before it exploded. They wanted to know who was in charge, and heard conflicting answers.

They pushed for more insight into an argument on the rig that day between a manager for BP, the well’s owner, and one for Transocean, the rig’s owner, and asked Curt R. Kuchta, the rig’s captain, how the crew knew who was in charge.

“It’s pretty well understood amongst the crew who’s in charge,” he said.

“How do they know that?” a Coast Guard investigator asked.

“I guess, I don’t know,” Captain Kuchta said. “But it’s pretty well — everyone knows.”

Looking annoyed, Capt. Hung Nguyen of the Coast Guard, one of the chief federal investigators, shook his head. The exchange confirmed an observation he had made earlier in the day at the hearing.

“A lot of activities seem not very tightly coordinated in the way that would make me comfortable,” he said. “Maybe that’s just the way of business out there.”

Investigators have focused on the minute-to-minute decisions and breakdowns to understand what led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 people and setting off the largest oil spill in United States history and an environmental disaster. But the lack of coordination was not limited to the day of the explosion.

New government and BP documents, interviews with experts and testimony by witnesses provide the clearest indication to date that a hodgepodge of oversight agencies granted exceptions to rules, allowed risks to accumulate and made a disaster more likely on the rig, particularly with a mix of different companies operating on the Deepwater whose interests were not always in sync.

And in the aftermath, arguments about who is in charge of the cleanup — often a signal that no one is in charge — have led to delays, distractions and disagreements over how to cap the well and defend the coastline. As a result, with oil continuing to gush a mile below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, the laws of physics are largely in control, creating the daunting challenge of trying to plug a hole at depths where equipment is straining under more than a ton of pressure per square inch.

Tad W. Patzek, chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas, Austin, has analyzed reports of what led to the explosion. “It’s a very complex operation in which the human element has not been aligned with the complexity of the system,” he said in an interview last week.

His conclusion could also apply to what occurred long before the disaster.

Exceptions Are the Rule

Deepwater oil production in the gulf, which started in 1979 but expanded much faster in the mid-1990s with new technology and federal incentives, is governed as much by exceptions to rules as by the rules themselves.

Under a process called “alternative compliance,” much of the technology used on deepwater rigs has been approved piecemeal, with regulators cooperating with industry groups to make small adjustments to guidelines that were drawn up decades ago for shallow-water drilling.

Of roughly 3,500 drilling rigs and production platforms in the gulf, fewer than 50 are in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. But the risks and challenges associated with this deeper water are much greater.

“The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations,” Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom of the Coast Guard, who inspects the rigs, said last month at a hearing.

As a result, deepwater rigs operate under an ad hoc system of exceptions. The deeper the water, the further the exceptions stretch, not just from federal guidelines but also often from company policy.

So, for example, when BP officials first set their sights on extracting the oily riches under what is known as Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico, they asked for and received permission from federal regulators to exempt the drilling project from federal law that requires a rigorous type of environmental review, internal documents and federal records indicate.

As BP engineers planned to set certain pipes and casings for lining the well in place in the ocean floor, they had to get permission from company managers to use riskier equipment because that equipment deviated from the company’s own design and safety policies, according to internal BP documents obtained by The New York Times.

And when company officials wanted to test the blowout preventer, a crucial fail-safe mechanism on the pipe near the ocean floor, at a lower pressure than was federally required, regulators granted an exception, documents released last week show.

Regulators granted yet another exception when BP sought to delay mandatory testing of that blowout preventer because they had lost “well control,” weeks before the rig exploded, BP e-mail messages show.

The Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, went along with these requests partly because the agency has for years had a dual role of both fostering and policing the industry — collecting royalty payments from the drilling companies while also levying fines on them for violations of law.

Its safety inspections usually consist of helicopter visits to offshore rigs to sift through company reports of self-administered tests.

Even Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, who oversees the minerals agency, has said that oil companies have a history of “running the show” at the agency, a problem he has vowed to correct.

The minerals agency shares responsibility for oversight of drilling in the gulf with many others. The Environmental Protection Agency and others review offshore drilling for potential damage to wildlife and the environment. The Coast Guard inspects vessels for seaworthiness and licenses crew members to work on the rigs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors dangerous weather conditions over deep seas.

And regulatory duties extend even past the federal government. Foreign countries, or “flag states,” where many oil rigs are registered, have their own sets of safety requirements and inspections.

Regulations have not kept up with the risks that deepwater drilling poses.

On the Deepwater Horizon, for example, the minerals agency approved a drilling plan for BP that cited the “worst case” for a blowout as one that might produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day, federal records show. But the agency did not require the rig to create a response plan for such a situation.

If a blowout were to occur, BP said in its plan, the first choice would be to use a containment dome to capture the leaking oil. But regulators did not require that a containment dome be kept on the rig to speed the response to a spill. After the rig explosion, BP took two weeks to build one on shore and three days to ship it out to sea before it was lowered over the gushing pipe on May 7. It did not work.

(The rig’s “spill response plan,” provided to The Times, includes a Web link for a contractor that goes to an Asian shopping Web site and also mentions the importance of protecting walruses, seals and sea lions, none of which inhabit the area of drilling. The agency approved the plan.)

More broadly, regulators have not required technology and strategies for dealing with deepwater spills to be improved.

Engineers trying to control the blowout are using the same tactics they used in 1979 when the Ixtoc I well blew up in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico. In the earlier blowout, they first tried lowering a containment dome over the leak. When that failed, they unsuccessfully tried to inject golf balls and other material in a move called a junk shot, which was also tried and abandoned for the Deepwater Horizon.

Questions of oversight also came up in the New Orleans hearings last month. For example, Michael J. Saucier, an official with the Minerals Management Service, said that his agency “highly encouraged” — but did not require — companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

“Highly encourage?” Captain Nguyen of the Coast Guard asked. “How does that translate to enforcement?”

“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier answered.

Problems Early On

In some ways it was jinxed from the start.

As early as June 2009, BP engineers had expressed concerns in internal documents about using certain casings for the well because they violated the company’s safety and design guidelines. But they proceeded with those casings.

More than five weeks before disaster, the rig was hit by several sudden pulsations of gas called “kicks” and a pipe had become stuck in the well. The blowout preventer, designed to seal the well in an emergency, had been discovered to be leaking fluids at least three times.

Dealing with these problems required teamwork, a challenge to the throng of different companies with responsibilities on the rig. Of the 126 people present on the day of the explosion, only eight were employees of BP. The interests of the workers did not always align.

In testimony to government investigators, rig workers repeatedly described a “natural conflict” between BP, which can make more money by completing drilling jobs quickly, and Transocean, which receives a leasing fee from BP every day that it continues drilling.

Halliburton was also on hand to provide cementing services, while a subsidiary monitored various drilling fluids. A different company provided drilling fluid systems, another provided technicians to operate the remote-control vehicles that are they eyes of the rig crew deep underwater, and yet another provided the well casing.

Amid this tangle of overlapping authority and competing interests, no one was solely responsible for ensuring the rig’s safety, and communication was a constant challenge.

“I don’t have a feeling that there is somebody who has a handle on the coordination of all the activities on this vessel, going from routine to crisis,” Captain Nguyen said during one hearing. “BP is in charge of certain things, Transocean is in charge of certain things.”

Financial concerns added pressures on the rig.

BP had fallen behind schedule and over budget, paying roughly $500,000 a day to lease the rig from Transocean. The rig was 43 days late for starting a new drilling job for BP by the day of the explosion, a delay that had already cost the company more than $21 million.

With the clock ticking, bad decisions went unchecked, warning signs went unheeded and small lapses compounded.

On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP’s use of cement “was against our best practices.”

An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a “severe” gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.

Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing.

Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer.

An initial investigation by BP points to a range of missteps.

Tests shortly before the well blew out found a buildup of pressure that was an “indicator of a very large abnormality,” BP concluded and disclosed to Congress in a preliminary report last month. Yet, the rig team was satisfied after another test was deemed successful, and it proceeded.

About 10 hours before the explosion, the challenges of trying to keep the pressure in the well under control led to an argument among the workers about how best to finish the well and move the rig to the next site.

Douglas Brown, a Transocean mechanic on the rig, told investigators that an unnamed BP official whom he called “the company man” had instructed rig workers to execute a new plan for removing the riser and sealing the well. Mr. Brown testified that workers thought the plan was too risky. But he could not hear details of the argument that ensued.

“The company man was basically saying, ‘Well, this is how it’s going to be,’ ” Mr. Brown told investigators at a hearing on May 26 near New Orleans, adding that the Transocean rig workers “reluctantly agreed.”

When the explosion occurred around 9:50 p.m. on April 20, there was pandemonium on the rig. Most workers headed for lifeboats. Others rescued shipmates trapped under equipment. On the bridge, Captain Kuchta gathered with at least eight other managers and crew members to decide on an emergency plan.

Steve Bertone, the chief engineer for Transocean, wrote in his witness statement that he ran up to the bridge where he heard Captain Kuchta screaming at a worker, Andrea Fleytas, because she had pressed the distress button without authorization.

Mr. Bertone turned to another worker and asked him if he had called to shore for help but was told he did not have permission to do so. Another manager tried to give the go-ahead, the testimony said, but someone else said the order needed to come from the rig’s offshore installation manager.

A Strained Partnership

After the spill, the government and BP were supposed to cooperate, partly a consequence of laws written after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill that were intended to make polluters more accountable for cleaning up their own messes.

One example of what was supposed to be a unified front was the Joint Information Center. Housed in a Shell-owned training and conference center in Robert, La., the center includes roughly 65 employees, 10 of whom work for BP. Together, they write and issue news releases and coordinate posts on a Web site, Facebook and Twitter.

But the partnership between BP and the government has strained along with the failure of efforts to plug the well. Mr. Salazar, for example, assured the public on May 2 that the administration was keeping its “boot on the neck” of BP. Next he was being publicly chastised by President Obama for using antagonistic language.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, told reporters at one point that the spill was “relatively tiny.” Federal officials soon released estimates indicating that the spill had far outpaced the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Under intense media scrutiny, at least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response, making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.

In one stark example of government disputes, internal e-mail messages from the minerals agency obtained by The Times reveal a heated debate over whether to ignore some federal environmental laws about gas emissions in an effort to speed the drilling of relief wells.

One agency official, Michael Tolbert, warned colleagues on April 24 that emissions of nitrous oxide from the well were “pretty far over the exemption level,” an issue that his colleague Tommy Broussard said could result in “BP wasting time” on environmental safeguards in a way that would be “completely stupid.”

But a third colleague, Elizabeth Peuler, intervened to demand that the agency take “no shortcuts.”

“Not even for this one,” she said. “Perhaps even especially for this one.”

Debates over the speed — or lack thereof — of the government response have also played out in Louisiana, where state officials spent much of May repeatedly seeking permission from the federal government to construct up to 90 miles of sand barriers to prevent oil from reaching the wetlands.

For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore, officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach.

They ultimately approved the use of only one barrier, called a berm, to be paid for by BP.

Comparing the federal government’s response to “telling a drowning man to wait,” Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana asked: If one berm is safe, then why not the 23 others that he had requested? Slowly, the federal government approved more berms.

From the start, BP had played down the extent of the problem in miscalculating the rate of the leak and in denying the existence of underwater oil plumes. By deferring to the company, federal officials underestimated the problem they were facing and thus what was needed to respond to it.

It took more than a week after the explosion for the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, to declare, on April 29, “a spill of national significance” a legal categorization that was needed before certain federal assistance could be authorized.

Because of such delays, critics have charged, more coastline will be hit, more animals will die, more habitats will be ruined and more money will be lost in tourism, fishing and real estate.

And yet, the administration is limited in its ability to divorce itself from BP, because federal officials rely on the company for technology, personnel and financing for the cleanup. The relationship reached a turning point last week when the administration said the national incident commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, would start giving solo briefings. He will no longer share a podium with BP, which will offer its own briefings.

That move, however, does not resolve the matter of who is actually in charge in the gulf — of ensuring safety and regulating the dangerous extraction of vast riches under the deepest waters there, as well as of handling the continuing emergency.

The question is proving equally vexing as investigators try to place blame for events on the rig the day of the explosion— as was clear on Tuesday when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had begun a criminal investigation.

Citing “a wide range of possible violations,” Mr. Holder declined to specify the target of the investigation, because, he said, the authorities were still not clear on “who should ultimately be held liable.”

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, 5June2010)

The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’”

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.

“I think they’ve been trying to limit access,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. “It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.”

Officials at BP and the government entities coordinating the response said instances of denying news media access have been anomalies, and they pointed out that the company and the government have gone to great lengths to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have traveled to the gulf to cover the story. The F.A.A., responding to criticism following the incident with Southern Seaplane, has revised its flight restrictions over the gulf to allow for news media flights on a case-by-case basis.

“Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill,” said David H. Nicholas, a BP spokesman, “has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.”

Anomalies or not, reporters and photographers continue to be blocked from covering aspects of the spill.

Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.

“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.

Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator’s office said.

Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that about a week into the cleanup response, the Coast Guard started enforcing a policy that prohibits news media from accompanying candidates for public office on visits to government facilities, “to help manage the large number of requests for media embeds and visits by elected officials.”

In a separate incident last week, a reporter and photographer from The Daily News of New York were told by a BP contractor they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, La., one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach.

BP did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.

“For the police to tell me I needed to sign paperwork with BP to go to a public beach?” Mr. Lysiak said. “It’s just irrational.”

In the first few weeks after the oil rig explosion, BP kept a tight lid on images of the oil leaking into the gulf. Even when it released the first video of the spewing oil on May 12, it provided only a 30-second clip. The most detailed images did not become public until two weeks ago when BP gave members of Congress access to internal video feeds from its underwater rovers. Without BP’s permission, some members of Congress displayed the video for news networks like CNN, which carried them live.

For journalists on the ground, particularly photographers who hire their own planes, one of the major sources of frustration has been the flight restrictions over the water, where access is off limits in a vast area from the Louisiana bayous to Pensacola, Fla. Each time they fly in the area, they have to be granted permission from the F.A.A.

“Although there’s a tremendous amount of oil, finding out exactly where it’s washing ashore or where booming is going on is very difficult,” said John McCusker, a photographer with The Times-Picayune. “At 3,000 feet you’re shooting through clouds, and it’s difficult to tell the difference between an oil slick and a shadow from a cloud.”

A spokeswoman for the agency, Laura J. Brown, said the flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian air traffic from interfering with aircraft assisting the response effort.

Ms. Brown also said the Coast Guard-F.A.A. command center that turned away Southern Seaplane was enforcing the essential-flights-only policy in place at the time; and she said the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the F.A.A. operations center is in one of BP’s buildings.

“That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace,” Ms. Brown said.

But the incident with Southern Seaplane is not the only example of journalists being told they cannot go somewhere simply because they are journalists. CBS News reported last month that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore. The Coast Guard said later that it was disappointed to learn of the incident.

Media access in disaster situations is always an issue. But the situation in the gulf is especially nettlesome because journalists have to depend on the government and BP to gain access to so much of the affected area.

Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. “There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,” Mr. Oreskes said. “And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it’s still a problem because it’s still access obtained through the government.”

(Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times, 9June2010)

The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands of whales, including endangered species, begins this month in Morocco.

Japan denies buying the votes of IWC members. However, The Sunday Times filmed officials from pro-whaling governments admitting:

- They voted with the whalers because of the large amounts of aid from Japan. One said he was not sure if his country had any whales in its territorial waters. Others are landlocked.

— They receive cash payments in envelopes at IWC meetings from Japanese officials who pay their travel and hotel bills.

- One disclosed that call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings.

Barry Gardiner, an MP and former Labour biodiversity minister, said the investigation revealed “disgraceful, shady practice”, which is “effectively buying votes”.

The reporters, posing as representatives of a billionaire conservationist, approached officials from pro-whaling countries and offered them an aid package to change their vote.

The governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast all entered negotiations to sell their votes in return for aid.

The top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings.

He said three Japanese organisations were used to channel the payments to his country: the fisheries agency, the aid agency and the Overseas Fisheries Co-operation Foundation.

Japan has recruited some of the world’s smallest countries on to the IWC to bolster its support. A senior fisheries official for the Marshall Islands said: “We support Japan because of what they give us.”

A Kiribati fisheries official said his country’s vote was determined by the “benefit” it received in aid. He, too, said Japan gave delegates expenses and spending money.

The IWC commissioner for Tanzania said “good girls” were made available at the hotels for ministers and senior fisheries civil servants during all-expenses paid trips to Japan.

(The Sunday Times, 13June2010)

The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away.

But is the description accurate?

Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.

“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.

The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.

Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.

“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.

Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.

Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.

By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.

However, the Dust Bowl lasted a decade, and that raises an issue. What exactly should be defined as an environmental disaster? How long should an event take to play out, and how many people have to be harmed before it deserves that epithet?

Among sudden events, the Johnstown Flood might be a candidate for worst environmental disaster. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused a poorly maintained dam to burst in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a wall of water 14 miles downriver to the town of Johnstown. About 2,200 people were killed in one of the worst tolls in the nation’s history.

At the time it happened, that event was understood as a failure of engineering and maintenance, and that is how it has come down in history. Perhaps a one-day flood is simply too short-term to count as an environmental disaster.

On the other hand, if events that played out over many decades are included, the field of candidates expands sharply.

Perhaps the destruction of the native forests of North America, which took hundreds of years, should be counted as the nation’s largest environmental calamity. The slaughtering of millions of bison on the Great Plains might qualify.

Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, nominates “the human overhaul of the Mississippi River Valley,” which destroyed many thousands of acres of wetlands and made the region more vulnerable to later events like Hurricane Katrina.

However, those activities were not seen as disasters at the time, at least by the people who carried them out. They were viewed as desirable alterations of the landscape. It is only in retrospect that people have come to understand what was lost, so maybe those do not belong on a disaster list.

Oil spills, too, seem to be judged more by their effect on people than on the environment. Consider the Lakeview Gusher, which was almost certainly a worse oil spill, by volume, than the one continuing in the gulf.

In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.

It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.

The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.

The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.

That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.

Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?

“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”

(Justin Gillis, New York Times, 18June2010)

Greece may be Ground Zero of the eurozone crisis, but Spain, with an economy four times the size, matters far more. The real fear that drove Germany to pull together a €750 billion bailout last month was that Spain would default on its debt. That could bring down banks across Europe — in Britain, too — and cause the euro currency to unravel. That prospect prompted President Obama to add his personal exhortations to the German-led efforts, and China’s leaders to put off an interest rate rise.

Spain is also the best test of whether, despite the bailout, Europe will be hit by a second crisis. The drama has paused, as Greece and others have vowed to reform. But as scepticism about Hungary showed this month, many fear governments have promised cuts they cannot deliver.

Zapatero has promised a lot. He has taken a tilt at laws that have given gold-plated security to those in long-term work and in the public sector. No easy task: those laws, embedded in the 1978 Constitution, codify some of the most far-reaching social rights in Europe. They represent a rejection of the dictatorship of General Franco, who banned unions and strikes, and reflect the strength of the Communist Party during the transition to democracy. They have been one of Spain’s proudest possessions, but now they are strangling its growth.

Those rules have cut the country in half, creating a parallel economy of temporary, low-paid jobs with few rights. In the past decade, as Spain revelled in a property boom, construction created millions of contract jobs. Those have vanished; the white concrete skeletons of half-finished coastal apartment blocks are testimony to the sudden collapse. A fifth of the workforce is unemployed.

The new rules would allow a struggling company to negotiate down wages and conditions below the level set by unions in collective bargaining pacts that stretch across industries. At the moment, they can do so only if unions agree, which they rarely do. The reforms would cut the cost of firing permanent workers from severance pay of 45 days per year worked, one of the highest rates in Europe, to 33 days. They would make it harder for employers to roll over short contracts repeatedly to avoid hiring workers permanently.

Zapatero has already cut public sector pay and frozen pensions, getting that Bill through parliament by just one vote. His Socialist party is in a minority, and he might have to make more concessions to the regions to succeed. But even though his new laws potentially represent some the most profound cultural changes since the aftermath of Franco, if there is any sign that he cannot deliver, the euro, with reason, is likely to suffer further.

(Bronwen Maddox, The Times, 17June2010)