Magazine Preview: Iceland’s Big Thaw

  Lars Tunbjork for The New York TimesFish Entrepreneur Armann Olafsson, a former member of Parliament and advertising executive, now sells fish products. More Photos ?

If you want to understand what happened in Iceland — the whole story of the crash, the banks failing, the recent signs of recovery — start at the prime minister’s office in downtown Reykjavik and continue east for a bit until you ascend a steep bluff overlooking the icy waters of Faxafloi Bay. There you will arrive at a used-car lot. Ask for the owner of this establishment, who is a short, 61-year-old man with extremely thick glasses named Gudfinnur S. Halldorsson — he goes by the name Guffi (pronounced Goofy) — and have him to tell you the story of the Porsche that kept on giving.

Viking Ethos The "strongmen" of Reykjavik, who claim that Icelanders are predisposed to risk taking. More Photos ?

During Iceland’s boom years, which lasted from 2003 until 2008, a customer showed up at Guffi’s dealership wanting to buy a Porsche on credit, no money down. Guffi didn’t inquire about the man’s line of work; in fact, he didn’t care if the man paid back the loan — that was the bank’s problem, not his. Guffi sold the Porsche, and the customer drove it for a month or so until the first payment was due. The man had no interest in making the payment, and so Guffi, who always aimed to please, helped the man resell the vehicle for a profit. Guffi did the same thing a month later, and again a month after that; all told, Guffi sold the same car five times in six months, amazingly charging a higher price on each successive sale.

To understand how this strategy was even possible, it helps to know a little about banking in Iceland. In 2001, the Icelandic government began relinquishing control of the banking sector to allow for privatization. One consequence, says Gylfi Zoega, a professor of economics at the University of Iceland, was that “ownership of the banks went to a few wealthy businessmen.” These businessmen, Zoega says, hired local bankers, who had very limited experience in international banking, to run things; they issued bonds on the international market, where institutional investors were only too happy to buy them. After all, this wasn’t Argentina — this was Iceland, a Scandinavian country whose national banks had no history of defaulting on their loans. “It appeared to be a sound investment,” Zoega says. Money poured into the country, and the economy boomed. With the help of the banks, investors went on spending sprees, buying large stakes in foreign and domestic businesses; the prices of everything from houses to used cars soared; Iceland’s stock market spiked, rising 900 percent between 2002 and 2008; and, of course, money flowed into the hands of all sorts of Icelanders, like Guffi.

Guffi sold a lot of cars during the boom, but he didn’t save much. When I asked him what he spent his money on, he replied that he traveled widely, skied often and entertained a number of girlfriends from abroad. “Take a look at the beautiful girls from Ukraine and Switzerland,” he told me wistfully. “You’re like a kid in a toy store. Several times, I’ve brought them home so that they can have a vacation here. Then I show them Iceland.” He added, thoughtfully: “What I was doing was good for the tourism business.”

At first, it was all going splendidly for Guffi as he Rollerbladed down Laugavegur Street with voluptuous girlfriends and sold and resold the same luxury cars. Then he became tired — exhausted, really. He was working 13-hour days. “Do you know how much time it takes to bring all those papers to the bank every time someone takes out a loan for a car?” he asked me. The girlfriends also proved enervating. “I found girls on the Internet; that’s heavy work. You’re reading all these stupid letters that they send.” By the time the crash hit, in late 2008, Guffi was relieved. Nowadays he sells fewer cars; he no longer regularly earns more money each time he sells the same car, but he still gets a commission, and his lifestyle is simpler. “I do nothing stupid, and then I have no stress,” he explained happily. “I have no more Ukrainian or Swiss girlfriends. I have an Icelandic woman now.”

Jake Halpern (jakehalpern@yahoo.com) is the author of “Fame Junkies.” His last article for the magazine was about freegans in Buffalo. Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-maggroup@nytimes.com).

 

Magazine Preview: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

  Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.

“The tumor was exactly in the pattern of the antenna,” Reynard told King. In 1989, Susan Elen Reynard, then 31, was told she had a malignant astrocytoma, a brain cancer that occurs in about 6,000 adults in America each year. To David Reynard, the shape and size of Susan’s tumor — a hazy line swerving from the left side of her midbrain to the hindbrain — uncannily resembled a malignant shadow of the phone (but tumors, like clouds, can assume the shapes of our imaginations). Suzy, as she was known, held her phone at precisely that angle against her left ear, her husband said. Reynard underwent surgery for her cancer but to little effect. She died in 1992, just short of her 34th birthday. David was convinced that high doses of radiation from the cellphone was the cause.

Reynard v. NEC — the first tort suit in the United States to claim a link between phone radiation and brain cancer — illustrated one of the most complex conceptual problems in cancer epidemiology. In principle, a risk factor and cancer can intersect in three ways. The first is arguably the simplest. When a rare form of cancer is associated with a rare exposure, the link between the risk and the cancer stands out starkly. The juxtaposition of the rare on the rare is like a statistical lunar eclipse, and the association can often be discerned accurately by observation alone. The discipline of cancer epidemiology originated in one such a confluence: in 1775, a London surgeon, Sir Percivall Pott, discovered that scrotal cancer was much more common in chimney sweeps than in the general population. The link between an unusual malignancy and an uncommon profession was so striking that Pott did not even need statistics to prove the association. Pott thus discovered one of the first clear links between an environmental substance — a “carcinogen” — and a particular subtype of cancer.

The opposite phenomenon occurs when a common exposure is associated with a common form of cancer: the association, rather than popping out, disappears into the background, like white noise. This peculiar form of a statistical vanishing act occurred famously with tobacco smoking and lung cancer. In the mid-1930s, smoking was becoming so common and lung cancer so prevalent that it was often impossible to definitively discern a statistical link between the two. Researchers wondered whether the intersection of the two phenomena was causal or accidental. Asked about the strikingly concomitant increases in lung cancer and smoking rates in the 1930s, Evarts Graham, a surgeon, countered dismissively that “the sale of nylon stockings” had also increased. Tobacco thus became the nylon stockings of cancer epidemiology — invisible as a carcinogen to many researchers, until it was later identified as a major cause of cancer through careful clinical studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the most complex and most publicly contentious intersection between a risk factor and cancer often occurs in the third instance, when a common exposure is associated with a rare form of cancer. This is cancer epidemiology’s toughest conundrum. The rarity of the cancer provokes a desperate and often corrosive search for a cause (“why, of all people, did I get an astrocytoma?” Susan Reynard must have asked herself). And when patients with brain tumors happen to share a common exposure — in this case, cellphones — the line between cause and coincidence begins to blur. The association does not stand out nor does it disappear into statistical white noise. Instead, it remains suspended, like some sort of peculiar optical illusion that is blurry to some and all too clear to others. (A similarly corrosive intersection of a rare illness, a common exposure and the desperate search for a cause occurred recently in the saga of autism and vaccination. Vaccines are nearly universal, and autism is relatively rare — and many parents, searching to explain why their children became autistic, lunged toward a common culprit: childhood vaccination. An avalanche of panic ensued. It took years of carefully performed clinical trials to finally disprove the link.)

The Florida Circuit Court that heard Reynard v. NEC was quick to discern these complexities. It empathized with David Reynard’s search for a tangible cause for his wife’s cancer. But it acknowledged that too little was known about such cases; “the uncertainty of the evidence . . . the speculative scientific hypotheses and [incomplete] epidemiological studies” made it impossible to untangle cause from coincidence. David Reynard’s claim was rejected in the spring of 1995, three years after it was originally filed. What was needed, the court said, was much deeper and more comprehensive knowledge about cellphones, brain cancer and of the possible intersection of the two.

Allow, then, a thought experiment: what if Susan Reynard was given a diagnosis of astrocytoma in 2011 — but this time, we armed her with the most omniscient of lawyers, the most cutting--edge epidemiological information, the most powerful scientific evidence? Nineteen years and several billion cellphone users later, if Reynard were to reappear in court, what would we now know about a possible link between cellphones and her cancer?

To answer these questions, we need to begin with a more fundamental question: How do we know that anything causes cancer?

The crudest method to capture a carcinogen’s imprint in a real human population is a large-scale population survey. If a cancer-causing agent increases the incidence of a particular cancer in a population, say tobacco smoking and lung cancer, then the overall incidence of that cancer will rise. That statement sounds simple enough — to find a carcinogen’s shadow, follow the trend in cancer incidence — but there are some fundamental factors that make the task complicated.

Siddhartha Mukherjee (smukherj2011@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of medical oncology at Columbia University. He is the author of “Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

 

Camp KDE Preview: All About Mobile

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

Q: Camp KDE is co-located this year with The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. Can you tell us about what attendees should expect at Hotel Kabuki?

Jeff: Co-locating with the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit gives us a great opportunity to engage with the attendees of the Collaboration Summit and in return, for our attendees to become part of a broader Linux event. As one of the largest open source communities in the world, collaboration, both internally and externally, is an important part of the KDE community experience. As a result, many of our attendees are looking forward to discussing collaboration techniques and technologies with the larger attendee base of the Collaboration Summit.

Q: What do you expect to be the hot topics at Camp KDE this year and what can attendees look forward to at the event?

Jeff: One of the hot topics this year is KDE on Mobile. KDE is very interested in the mobile space; in particular, Plasma as a technology is well suited to creating interfaces for devices with small and disparately-sized screens. The Plasma Netbook workspace is a great example of this. Qt is now available on the leading mobile platform (Android), and is also available on WebOS, Symbian and MeeGo. This is quite a large number of devices for KDE technology to target.

The other hot topic this year is Education. On Tuesday, Carol Smith from Google's Open Source Program Office will be giving a keynote discussing KDE and Education, especially in terms of Google Summer of Code (KDE has for many years been the largest organization in GSoC). Later that day there will be a moderated panel on KDE in Education with Carol Smith, Knut Yrvin and Aleix Pol.

Q: Jim Zemlin will open up the Collaboration Summit with the "State of the Linux Union." Can you describe for us your take on the state of the desktop? What's critical in the year ahead to see progress in this area? What is KDE doing to help that progress?

Jeff: The vast majority of computer users these days are able to do nearly anything they could want to do within a web browser and are often not even in front of a computer thanks to the advances in smart phones and other mobile technology. This presents a major challenge for anyone writing software for the desktop. In order to remain relevant, communities such as KDE need to embrace the capabilities of the web while finding ways to enhance the user experience beyond what the browser can offer.

KDE is uniquely positioned to achieve this thanks to the huge amount of effort our community has put into the "KDE Development Platform," which is the base of libraries and services used to power KDE applications. With this infrastructure it becomes easy for developers to create applications that integrate seamlessly with each other to provide an immersive experience not possible in a web browser.

There has also been much effort invested in the area of creating a more semantically oriented desktop experience. Technologies like Nepomuk will allow users to leave conventional desktop searching behind by allowing them to tag their files with meaningful metadata, making it much easier to find later on.

KDE also acknowledges that today's computer users often have many devices that they use throughout the course of their day. With this in mind, applications such as ownCloud are being developed to allow them to create their own personal cloud without having to rely on third party corporations to store their data. This way, it doesn't matter if they are on their desktop, laptop, or mobile devices as their data will always be accessible in a secure, private manner.

Finally, the Plasma Desktop and many other KDE applications are preparing for a future where computing exists outside the traditional desktop environment. ?We have recently added new Plasma Workspaces targeted at netbook/tablet interfaces, and much of our software is actively being modified to support utilization on mobile phones so that you can be free to use KDE even when you're away from your desktop computer.

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