Few articles I've had sitting around for a while.
one on the fact that apparently 20% of Americans don't use the internet.
Another on how CAPTCHA works, or doesn't.
One on an all-girl prom held by a high school with a high Muslim population
The prom countdown was nearly complete, the do-it-yourself Greek columns, pink and white tulle bows and plastic flutes with the “Once Upon a Dream” logo awaiting the evening of evenings.
But as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, her one-shoulder lavender gown matching the elaborate hijab that framed her face in a cascade of flowers - a style learned on YouTube - Tharima Ahmed knew that what lay ahead was more than simply a prom.
As organizer of Hamtramck High School’s first all-girl prom, which conforms to religious beliefs forbidding dating, dancing with boys or appearing without a head scarf in front of males, Tharima, 17, was forging a new rite of passage for every teenage Muslim girl who had ever spent prom night at home, wistfully watching the limousines roll by.
“Hi, guys - I mean girls!” Tharima, a Bangladeshi-American, exuded into the microphone as 100 girls - Yemeni-American, Polish-American, Palestinian-American, Bosnian-American and African-American - began pouring into the hall on Bangladesh Avenue.
This was prom, Hamtramck-style: the dense scrappy working-class city of 22,500 encircled by Detroit, once predominantly German and Polish, has become one of the most diverse small cities in America. Its new soul lay in the music playlist embedded in Rukeih Malik’s iPhone: Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship, the Belgrade-born singer Ana Kokic and The Bilz, a Canadian-South Asian band, singing “2 Step Bhangra.”
In this season of wobbly heels and cleavage, the bittersweet transformation of teenagers in jeans and T-shirts into elegant adults barely recognizable to their friends is an anticipated tradition.
But at the all-girl prom, there were double double-takes, as some of Tharima’s classmates, normally concealed in a chrysalis of hijab and abaya, the traditional Muslim cloak, literally let their hair down in public for the first time.
Eman Ashabi, a Yemeni-American who helped organize the event, arrived in a ruffled pink gown, her black hair falling in perfect waves, thanks to a curling iron. Like many here, she stunned her friends.
“It’s ‘Oh my god!’ ” said Simone Alhagri, a Yemeni-American junior who was wearing a tight shirred dress. “This is how you look underneath!”
The dance was the denouement of seven months of feverish planning in which a committee raised $2,500, mostly through bake sales. Ignoring the naysayers who could not imagine anyone coming to a prom without boys, Tharima and her friends approached their task systematically, taking a survey of all the girls at Hamtramck High. They found that 65 percent were not able to attend the coed prom because of cultural and religious beliefs. After discussion, the school supported the student-driven alternative.
In addition to Muslim girls (and alumnae who never got the opportunity), non-Muslim students wanted to go, too. “I want to support all my girls,” said Sylwia Stanko, who was born in Poland and whose friends are mostly Bengali-American or Arab-American. “I know how important it is to them.”
The prom promised “music all night, except during dinner and five minutes for prayer.” A former Knights of Columbus hall was transformed into princess-pink perfection.
Tharima placed a huge order for decorations with PromNite.com, including a light-up fountain to which the girls added pink food coloring.
Tharima had dreamed of prom night since her freshman year, squirreling away photographs of ballrooms and ads for tiaras.
As Tharima prepared for her big night, her mother, Roushanara Ahmed, recalled the fancy pink sari she wore to an all-girls party in what is now Bangladesh. “I was in high school,” she said, her voice low, eyes softening. “I know her feelings.”
Like the prom, the city of Hamtramck is a mixer of a different kind. Along Joseph Campau Street, a monumental statue of Pope John Paul II presides over Pope Park, with its festive mural of Krakow. A poster for the television program “Bosnian Idol” is displayed in the Albanian Euro Mini Mart, known for homemade yogurt and burek, traditional spinach and meat pies. During her English class, Tharima can hear the call to prayer over loudspeakers from the Islah Islamic Center a few blocks from school.
Diversity was hard-won: The mosque, one of five in the city, was the subject of controversy in 2004, when some people strenuously objected to the city’s decision to allow it to broadcast prayers five times a day; the city ultimately prevailed, regulating the hours when the call may be sounded.
In sharp contrast to earlier immigrants, drawn by the once-thriving auto industry, a quarter of the residents now live below the federal poverty level.
“People here have to work out their difficulties,” said Mayor Karen Majewski, an ethnic historian and Hungarian folk dancer. “There’s no opportunity to hide in your cul-de-sac.”
At Hamtramck High, which has 900 students, many non-Muslims respectfully tuck away their food and water bottles during Ramadan. The prom reflects a broad cultural shift. “Twenty years ago, parents used to pull fifth-grade girls out of school for arranged marriages,” said Chris Bindas, a library aide who brought chocolate-dipped cream puffs to the prom. “Now these same girls are going to college” - albeit a college close to home, where the girls will continue to live with their parents.
Tharima, who plans to work while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, has applied for 27 scholarships, saving all the rejection letters.
“These are my weaknesses,” she said of her financial struggles. “But they are also my strengths.”
On Saturday night, when the strobe lights started, throwing jewels of light around the room, the shy comments of “Oh, you look gorgeous!” and “Ooh, I love your shoes!” gave way to the sheer joy of music, the girls fist-pumping in unison, some discarding their heels and some hugging one another in disbelief.
Shortly before 8, it was time for prayer, the spaghetti straps and empire waists disappearing under hijabs and abayas, a prayer rug taking its place on the dance floor.
Afterward, when the prom royalty was announced, it was no surprise - except to her - that Tharima was pronounced the senior queen, a tiara ceremoniously placed atop her hijab. Amid whoops and shrieks, she struggled to maintain her composure. Her mascara was not so lucky.
Then the hall erupted with a song by the band 3alawah, and the girls performed a debka, a Middle Eastern circle dance. Everyone held hands, snaking around the dessert buffet and columns decorated with artificial wisteria.
The jubilant energy of 100 young women feeling victorious and beautiful filled the room.
And a quick one on the Permian extinction.
It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction - 252 million years ago - was by far the most catastrophic of the planet’s five known paroxysms of species loss.
No wonder it is called the Great Dying: Scientists calculate that about 95 percent of marine species, and an uncountable but probably comparable percentage of land species, went extinct in a geological heartbeat.
The cause or causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery. Among the hypotheses are a devastating asteroid strike, as in the Cretaceous extinction; a catastrophic volcanic eruption; and a welling-up of oxygen-depleted water from the depths of the oceans.
Now, painstaking analyses of fossils from the period point to a different way to think about the problem. And at the same time, they are providing startling new clues to the behavior of modern marine life and its future.
In two recent papers, scientists from Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz, adopted a cellular approach to what they called the “killing mechanism”: not what might have happened to the entire planet, but what happened within the cells of the animals to finish them off.
Their study of nearly 50,000 marine invertebrate fossils in 8,900 collections from the Permian period has allowed them to peer into the inner workings of the ancient creatures, giving them the ability to describe precisely how some died while others lived.
“Before, scientists were all over the map,” said one of the authors, Matthew E. Clapham, an earth scientist at Santa Cruz. “We thought maybe lots of things were going on.”
Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear.
Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate.
Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others.
That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.
Among the hardest hit were corals; many types, including the horn-shaped bottom-dwellers known as rugose corals, disappeared altogether. Sea sponges were also devastated, along with the shelled creatures that commanded the Permian reefs and sea. Every single species of the once common trilobites, with their helmetlike front shells, vanished for good.
No major group of marine invertebrates or protists, a group of mainly one-celled microorganisms, went unscathed. Instead, gastropods like snails and bivalves like clams and scallops became the dominant creatures after the Permian. And that shift led directly to the assemblage of life in today’s oceans. “Modern marine ecology is shaped by the extinction spasms of the past,” Dr. Clapham said.
So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a “perturbation of the global carbon cycle,” the scientists’ second paper concluded - a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean.
But neither an asteroid strike nor an upwelling of oxygen-deprived deep-ocean water would explain the selective pattern of death.
Instead, the scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years - the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water.
The surprise to Dr. Clapham was how closely the findings from the Great Dying matched today’s trends in ocean chemistry. High concentrations of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere are leading to warming, rapid acidification and low-oxygen dead zones in the oceans.
The idea that changes in ocean chemistry, particularly acidification, could be a factor in a mass extinction is a relatively new idea, said Andrew H. Knoll, a Harvard geologist who wrote a seminal paper in 1996 exploring the consequences of a rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the physiology of organisms.
“In terms of the overall pattern of change, what we’re seeing now and what is predicted in the next two centuries is riding a parallel track to what we think happened in the past,” he said.
Dr. Clapham noted that Permian and modern similarities are not exact. The Permian ocean was easier to acidify than today’s ocean because it had less deep-water calcium carbonate, which offsets the acid. But he said that corals are the most vulnerable creatures in the modern ocean for the same reason they were during the Permian extinction. They have little ability to govern their internal chemistry and they rely on calcium carbonate to build their reefs.
Chris Langdon, a University of Miami biologist who is a pioneer in ocean acidification research, said corals are undoubtedly in danger across the globe.
“Corals, I think, are going to take it on the chin,” he said.
In a recent study, Dr. Langdon examined the effects of naturally high acidification on coral reefs in Papua New Guinea. They showed drastic declines in coral cover at acidity levels likely to be present in the ocean by the end of this century, especially among branching corals that shelter fish.
Hans Pörtner, an animal ecophysiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, said his work showed that a warmer ocean with less dissolved oxygen and greater acidity had an array of negative physiological effects on modern marine animals.
The Permian extinction provides an archive of effects suggesting how modern marine creatures will fare as the carbon load in the atmosphere increases, he said.
Like Dr. Clapham, he cautioned that the trends between the two periods were not exactly comparable. Back in the Permian, the planet had a single supercontinent, Pangea, and ocean currents were different.
And he and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, “Today, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
Another on how CAPTCHA works, or doesn't.
One on an all-girl prom held by a high school with a high Muslim population
The prom countdown was nearly complete, the do-it-yourself Greek columns, pink and white tulle bows and plastic flutes with the “Once Upon a Dream” logo awaiting the evening of evenings.
But as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, her one-shoulder lavender gown matching the elaborate hijab that framed her face in a cascade of flowers - a style learned on YouTube - Tharima Ahmed knew that what lay ahead was more than simply a prom.
As organizer of Hamtramck High School’s first all-girl prom, which conforms to religious beliefs forbidding dating, dancing with boys or appearing without a head scarf in front of males, Tharima, 17, was forging a new rite of passage for every teenage Muslim girl who had ever spent prom night at home, wistfully watching the limousines roll by.
“Hi, guys - I mean girls!” Tharima, a Bangladeshi-American, exuded into the microphone as 100 girls - Yemeni-American, Polish-American, Palestinian-American, Bosnian-American and African-American - began pouring into the hall on Bangladesh Avenue.
This was prom, Hamtramck-style: the dense scrappy working-class city of 22,500 encircled by Detroit, once predominantly German and Polish, has become one of the most diverse small cities in America. Its new soul lay in the music playlist embedded in Rukeih Malik’s iPhone: Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship, the Belgrade-born singer Ana Kokic and The Bilz, a Canadian-South Asian band, singing “2 Step Bhangra.”
In this season of wobbly heels and cleavage, the bittersweet transformation of teenagers in jeans and T-shirts into elegant adults barely recognizable to their friends is an anticipated tradition.
But at the all-girl prom, there were double double-takes, as some of Tharima’s classmates, normally concealed in a chrysalis of hijab and abaya, the traditional Muslim cloak, literally let their hair down in public for the first time.
Eman Ashabi, a Yemeni-American who helped organize the event, arrived in a ruffled pink gown, her black hair falling in perfect waves, thanks to a curling iron. Like many here, she stunned her friends.
“It’s ‘Oh my god!’ ” said Simone Alhagri, a Yemeni-American junior who was wearing a tight shirred dress. “This is how you look underneath!”
The dance was the denouement of seven months of feverish planning in which a committee raised $2,500, mostly through bake sales. Ignoring the naysayers who could not imagine anyone coming to a prom without boys, Tharima and her friends approached their task systematically, taking a survey of all the girls at Hamtramck High. They found that 65 percent were not able to attend the coed prom because of cultural and religious beliefs. After discussion, the school supported the student-driven alternative.
In addition to Muslim girls (and alumnae who never got the opportunity), non-Muslim students wanted to go, too. “I want to support all my girls,” said Sylwia Stanko, who was born in Poland and whose friends are mostly Bengali-American or Arab-American. “I know how important it is to them.”
The prom promised “music all night, except during dinner and five minutes for prayer.” A former Knights of Columbus hall was transformed into princess-pink perfection.
Tharima placed a huge order for decorations with PromNite.com, including a light-up fountain to which the girls added pink food coloring.
Tharima had dreamed of prom night since her freshman year, squirreling away photographs of ballrooms and ads for tiaras.
As Tharima prepared for her big night, her mother, Roushanara Ahmed, recalled the fancy pink sari she wore to an all-girls party in what is now Bangladesh. “I was in high school,” she said, her voice low, eyes softening. “I know her feelings.”
Like the prom, the city of Hamtramck is a mixer of a different kind. Along Joseph Campau Street, a monumental statue of Pope John Paul II presides over Pope Park, with its festive mural of Krakow. A poster for the television program “Bosnian Idol” is displayed in the Albanian Euro Mini Mart, known for homemade yogurt and burek, traditional spinach and meat pies. During her English class, Tharima can hear the call to prayer over loudspeakers from the Islah Islamic Center a few blocks from school.
Diversity was hard-won: The mosque, one of five in the city, was the subject of controversy in 2004, when some people strenuously objected to the city’s decision to allow it to broadcast prayers five times a day; the city ultimately prevailed, regulating the hours when the call may be sounded.
In sharp contrast to earlier immigrants, drawn by the once-thriving auto industry, a quarter of the residents now live below the federal poverty level.
“People here have to work out their difficulties,” said Mayor Karen Majewski, an ethnic historian and Hungarian folk dancer. “There’s no opportunity to hide in your cul-de-sac.”
At Hamtramck High, which has 900 students, many non-Muslims respectfully tuck away their food and water bottles during Ramadan. The prom reflects a broad cultural shift. “Twenty years ago, parents used to pull fifth-grade girls out of school for arranged marriages,” said Chris Bindas, a library aide who brought chocolate-dipped cream puffs to the prom. “Now these same girls are going to college” - albeit a college close to home, where the girls will continue to live with their parents.
Tharima, who plans to work while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, has applied for 27 scholarships, saving all the rejection letters.
“These are my weaknesses,” she said of her financial struggles. “But they are also my strengths.”
On Saturday night, when the strobe lights started, throwing jewels of light around the room, the shy comments of “Oh, you look gorgeous!” and “Ooh, I love your shoes!” gave way to the sheer joy of music, the girls fist-pumping in unison, some discarding their heels and some hugging one another in disbelief.
Shortly before 8, it was time for prayer, the spaghetti straps and empire waists disappearing under hijabs and abayas, a prayer rug taking its place on the dance floor.
Afterward, when the prom royalty was announced, it was no surprise - except to her - that Tharima was pronounced the senior queen, a tiara ceremoniously placed atop her hijab. Amid whoops and shrieks, she struggled to maintain her composure. Her mascara was not so lucky.
Then the hall erupted with a song by the band 3alawah, and the girls performed a debka, a Middle Eastern circle dance. Everyone held hands, snaking around the dessert buffet and columns decorated with artificial wisteria.
The jubilant energy of 100 young women feeling victorious and beautiful filled the room.
And a quick one on the Permian extinction.
It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction - 252 million years ago - was by far the most catastrophic of the planet’s five known paroxysms of species loss.
No wonder it is called the Great Dying: Scientists calculate that about 95 percent of marine species, and an uncountable but probably comparable percentage of land species, went extinct in a geological heartbeat.
The cause or causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery. Among the hypotheses are a devastating asteroid strike, as in the Cretaceous extinction; a catastrophic volcanic eruption; and a welling-up of oxygen-depleted water from the depths of the oceans.
Now, painstaking analyses of fossils from the period point to a different way to think about the problem. And at the same time, they are providing startling new clues to the behavior of modern marine life and its future.
In two recent papers, scientists from Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz, adopted a cellular approach to what they called the “killing mechanism”: not what might have happened to the entire planet, but what happened within the cells of the animals to finish them off.
Their study of nearly 50,000 marine invertebrate fossils in 8,900 collections from the Permian period has allowed them to peer into the inner workings of the ancient creatures, giving them the ability to describe precisely how some died while others lived.
“Before, scientists were all over the map,” said one of the authors, Matthew E. Clapham, an earth scientist at Santa Cruz. “We thought maybe lots of things were going on.”
Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear.
Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate.
Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others.
That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.
Among the hardest hit were corals; many types, including the horn-shaped bottom-dwellers known as rugose corals, disappeared altogether. Sea sponges were also devastated, along with the shelled creatures that commanded the Permian reefs and sea. Every single species of the once common trilobites, with their helmetlike front shells, vanished for good.
No major group of marine invertebrates or protists, a group of mainly one-celled microorganisms, went unscathed. Instead, gastropods like snails and bivalves like clams and scallops became the dominant creatures after the Permian. And that shift led directly to the assemblage of life in today’s oceans. “Modern marine ecology is shaped by the extinction spasms of the past,” Dr. Clapham said.
So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a “perturbation of the global carbon cycle,” the scientists’ second paper concluded - a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean.
But neither an asteroid strike nor an upwelling of oxygen-deprived deep-ocean water would explain the selective pattern of death.
Instead, the scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years - the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water.
The surprise to Dr. Clapham was how closely the findings from the Great Dying matched today’s trends in ocean chemistry. High concentrations of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere are leading to warming, rapid acidification and low-oxygen dead zones in the oceans.
The idea that changes in ocean chemistry, particularly acidification, could be a factor in a mass extinction is a relatively new idea, said Andrew H. Knoll, a Harvard geologist who wrote a seminal paper in 1996 exploring the consequences of a rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the physiology of organisms.
“In terms of the overall pattern of change, what we’re seeing now and what is predicted in the next two centuries is riding a parallel track to what we think happened in the past,” he said.
Dr. Clapham noted that Permian and modern similarities are not exact. The Permian ocean was easier to acidify than today’s ocean because it had less deep-water calcium carbonate, which offsets the acid. But he said that corals are the most vulnerable creatures in the modern ocean for the same reason they were during the Permian extinction. They have little ability to govern their internal chemistry and they rely on calcium carbonate to build their reefs.
Chris Langdon, a University of Miami biologist who is a pioneer in ocean acidification research, said corals are undoubtedly in danger across the globe.
“Corals, I think, are going to take it on the chin,” he said.
In a recent study, Dr. Langdon examined the effects of naturally high acidification on coral reefs in Papua New Guinea. They showed drastic declines in coral cover at acidity levels likely to be present in the ocean by the end of this century, especially among branching corals that shelter fish.
Hans Pörtner, an animal ecophysiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, said his work showed that a warmer ocean with less dissolved oxygen and greater acidity had an array of negative physiological effects on modern marine animals.
The Permian extinction provides an archive of effects suggesting how modern marine creatures will fare as the carbon load in the atmosphere increases, he said.
Like Dr. Clapham, he cautioned that the trends between the two periods were not exactly comparable. Back in the Permian, the planet had a single supercontinent, Pangea, and ocean currents were different.
And he and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, “Today, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”