Labadie Journal: In Haiti, Class Comes With a Peek at Lush Life

For years, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the cruise line corporation based in Miami, has run a private resort on a sandy promontory nearby — a playground of lounge chairs, bars and even an alpine coaster that shoots guests though the forest.

The company has leased the 260 beachfront acres, about 90 miles north of the nation’s capital, from the government since 1986. Several times a week, up to 7,000 people descend for the day when mega ships make berth here on a newly completed $34 million pier, offering a dizzying contrast to the poverty beyond the gates.

But in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the capital, the cruise line evoked harsh criticism when it resumed docking pleasure ships at the resort for frolicking vacationers — just six days after the quake killed as many as 300,000 people, according to Haitian officials, and rendered more than a million homeless.

Then the company opened the cheery citrus-colored school complex just outside the resort’s heavily guarded chain-link fences in October, a move Royal Caribbean representatives said it was considering before the disaster and the scathing press it received afterward.

“We’ve been there for a long time and of course the problems in Haiti are enormous, and it’s hard for anyone to really make a significant dent in them,” said Richard D. Fain, the company’s chairman and chief executive. “We thought one of the places to start was with education.”

Still, the assistance was “modest,” he added. “We are a business. We’re not a charitable organization.”

Other projects include a water distribution system in the village of Labadie, said John Weis, an associate vice president. After the quake, the company donated around $2 million in aid and helped import relief supplies.

“I’m not saying we do this because it’s a completely altruistic motivation,” Mr. Weis said, “but I think that our management feels that we have a responsibility to make a difference down here.”

While residents seem to agree that the school is a boon to the community, the praise is tempered by doubts. Its mountainous location is far from the towns it serves, and its failure to provide any meals — leaving many children hungry throughout the day — has critics wondering why the company has not done more.

The World Food Program provided some food, but the company discontinued lunch a few months ago, citing sanitary concerns in preparation. A kitchen is being planned, but for now only a handful of parents can afford to provide lunch for their children, several teachers said.

The vast majority of the 200 or so students do not eat anything from early morning until they get home after school, teachers said. Some students fall asleep at their desks from fatigue.

“The school was built for underprivileged kids, but the way the school is functioning, it is for the bourgeois,” said Paul Herns, 29, who teaches fifth grade. He echoed a common sentiment: gratitude mixed with the feeling that the company, which had revenues of $6.8 billion last year, could do a lot better.

“Royal promised a school that was to be different from other ones in Haiti, similar to schools abroad,” Mr. Herns said. “Where children are fed and have access to sporting activities and taught some English skills to speak to foreigners; where they can surf the Web. These services have not yet been provided.”

Mr. Weis said meals were not promised.

The school itself is stunning and serene, a clean-swept haven from the several surrounding towns from which the students hail, where streets are choked with trash and the smoke of plastic bottles burning. It houses kindergarten through fifth grade and is run by a nonprofit group founded and led by Maryse Pénette-Kedar, a former minister of tourism and president of Royal Caribbean’s operations in Haiti.

Students are chosen by lottery, and around 20 percent are children of the company’s local employees.

 

An Ode to Spring, Whenever It Comes

Béatrice de Géa for The New York TimesBASKING Kinga Jutkiewicz, 21, at East River Park in Brooklyn.

ACCORDING to the calendar, it’s been spring for the past five weeks. But you could have fooled me. Since the vernal equinox on March 20, the official start of the season, we’ve had nearly two weeks’ worth of days on which the temperature has not yet reached above 50 degrees. On average, this spring is two and a half degrees colder than usual. And it has rained almost 20 of those days, making the season thus far 27 percent wetter than in most years (not to mention March 24, the day that shall live in infamy, when there was measurable snowfall).

A new category, Spring Fever, highlighting the best places to enjoy the warm weather outside, joins this insider’s guide to what to eat, drink and do in New York from the staff of The New York Times.

LOUNGING An exercise in relaxation on 10th Avenue in Manhattan.?

Still, dotted amid the gloomy days and the dreary ones have been a few bright, balmy afternoons — fool’s gold, or so they’ve seemed. One of those rare warm days had me remembering another like it, when I made my way to a bench by the Hudson River — the winter’s chill barely chased from its wooden slats by the wan early spring rays — and threw myself across a patch of sunlight. There amid the roar of the West Side Highway and a gentle but slightly fetid breeze, I completed the purpose of my crosstown journey: I spent several hours savoring the memory of a kiss and its giver.

As it turned out, my love wasn’t worth the musing, but I remember that afternoon so vividly, it might have been yesterday. When I call to mind that bench, I can even feel the sun on my belly. The love was real, but I was confused about its object. What I was really in love with was spring.

“We do seem to be hardwired to associate warmth with pleasurable sensations,” said David J. Linden, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of “The Compass of Pleasure,” a book on why certain things feel good. “So when you’re out on a nice day and you’re feeling your skin gently warmed by the sun, you are activating that subset of your cortex that is involved in processing positive emotional responses.”

Come the warm weather, New Yorkers become pleasure seekers; we’re an outdoorsy bunch — at least when the weather’s nice. In the snow-blasted February of 2010, the last year for which data are available, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority tallied nearly 168 million trips on subways and buses combined. In March that year, when the weather broke, we took 37 million more trips outside of our homes.

We’re resourceful sun seekers, and in a city overshadowed by skyscrapers, we have to be. Suburban children may hang out in their friends’ backyards, but the equivalent for native New York teenagers is “stooping” — finding a good, sunny brownstone or other stoop to perch on for the afternoon. When I was growing up, the top-rated stoop was downtown, perpetually staked out by my best friend, Eden, and her classmates at Elisabeth Irwin High School before, after and sometimes during class. That Charlton Street brownstone stood out because the owner would pop up almost daily to chase away the urban Dennis the Menaces, much to their delight. The part of Mr. Wilson was played by Matthew Broderick.

But the stoop of all stoops is the grand, body-dotted staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as much a draw for some as the Temple of Dendur. During my junior year of high school, I spent most of the sleepless night before the spring rite of the SATs on that giant stoop with my friend Jenny, lobbing vocabulary words at each other. We were “recumbent” on the steps, feeling “sesquipedalian,” unafraid of the warm night under the watchful gaze of a phalanx of Fifth Avenue doormen.?

New Yorkers rarely depend on the equinox to decree when our spring begins. We have other ways of measuring the season. In the West Village, spring is here when you spot shivering shoulders under strappy sundresses. In Central Park, it’s when the track around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir gets packed diamond-hard under a tumult of new sneakers. In Brooklyn, springtime is when you can mistake the catwalk of Bedford Avenue for a Ray-Bans photo shoot. And across the five boroughs, it’s when lunchtime for office workers becomes a mad dash for alfresco real estate.

Like the Tree of Heaven in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a species capable of growing out of cement or lacing through sewer grates, New Yorkers find ways toward the sun.? In Morningside Park, the turtles in the pond seem to materialize from thin air to bask. The park, once destined to be a Joni Mitchell lyric — “they paved paradise to put up a parking lot” — and razed for a Columbia University gym until student riots in 1968 quashed the plan, is home to upward of 50 red-eared sliders and other turtles, many of them former pets, that loll under the pond’s waterfall as numerous as cereal flakes in a bowl of milk.?

For the turtles, which, like many New Yorkers, spent the winter in hibernation (“brumation” is the official word), sunshine isn’t a luxury; it powers their metabolic functioning, said Sarah Aucoin, director of the Urban Park Rangers. It also just feels good. “As far as I know, they don’t have seasonal affective disorder,” Ms. Aucoin said, adding, however, “I can’t think it’s all that much fun for them to be buried in mud for four months.”

A patch of parkland in spring is hotter real estate than an apartment in the Dakota. When the clouds first break, Sheep Meadow in Central Park becomes a sea of bodies. So, too, does Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, where people lounge unfazed by the fact that under their picnic panniers are the remains of thousands of Revolutionary War victims, entombed under the hill.

But, frankly, we’ll splay anywhere there is sun, and nothing proves this more than a walk along Broadway. Yes, there are the mayor’s ever-expanding carless zones in Times Square, but the benches installed in the median islands along the avenue predate them. As a college student on the Upper West Side, I used to burrow into my course books on a bench at 114th Street, my hair tossed around by the breeze kicked up by onrushing traffic. I don’t remember ever being disturbed by the noise.

Take a casual stroll through the meatpacking district this time of year and it seems as if half the city kicks up their Manolos at jam-packed sidewalk cafes. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times in 2007, New Yorkers “insist on restaurants with sidewalk cafes, apparently believing that nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”

?At the time of that article, there were 900 sidewalk cafes; today there are 1,110 and counting, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs. I’ve taken it a step further: the first day the temperature hit 70 degrees this year, I left the office to have an arugula salad while perched on a fire hydrant. No one looked twice.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a brownstone owned by Matthew Broderick where teenagers gathered on the front stoop. It was on Charlton Street, not Charles Street. In addition, a slide show that appeared on the home page of NYTimes.com with this article gave a partly incorrect name for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, referring to it as the Brooklyn Botanical garden.

 

Hertz launches hourly EV rentals in London, self-satisfaction comes free

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。
By Terrence O'Brien posted Apr 15th 2011 1:01AM Contract-free cellphones, declining marriage rates and car-sharing services all tell us you're a bunch of commitmentphobes. Lucky for you the world is willing to oblige your wishy-washy ways, and for those who also happen to have a bit of a green streak, Connect by Hertz offers hourly rentals on electric cars. After launching its EV rental program here in New York last year, Hertz promised to expand to several other cities and countries by the end of 2011, with London being the next to go online this Friday. British urbanites averse to car ownership will be able to pick from a fleet of vehicles including the the iMieV, Nissan LEAF and Renault Kangoo, range anxiety diminished thanks to the city's 16 charging stations. It's not exactly the Jetsons, but if this is the future of transportation, we're ok with that -- we're thinking Mother Earth is too.

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Trexa's EV platform comes out of its shell, reveals its true torque-tube nature

Los Angeles, April 11, 2011--Trexa LLC, the electric drive vehicle platform manufacturer,
announced today the filing of a U.S. patent application for its Enertube? tubular energy
storage technology in connection with the unveiling of the TREXA? production
prototype. The first TREXA vehicle platforms will be shipped to customers for evaluation
in May.

While the TREXA concept vehicle platform introduced early last year featured an iconic "skateboard" form, the production platform is pure function. Driving this design is the Enertube, which is an energy storage system that doubles as the main load-bearing structure for a variety of vehicles. This proven concept of using a so-called "torque tube" or "backbone" chassis dates to the 1960?s. Differentiating the TREXA platform are interchangeable parts on all four suspension corners, which keeps parts count low, makes platform integration fast, and makes maintenance easy for end-users. All the major mechanical subsystems, including the transaxle, are manufactured by TREXA in the USA with support from Tier 1 automotive suppliers.

Vehicle applications mount to the TREXA vehicle platform by way of several hard points located on the front and rear suspension subframes. The subframes are attached to the Enertube. A pushrod suspension and 2WD or dual-motor 4WD options enables broad adjustability for both on and off-road applications. After a vehicle application is mated to
these subframes, the Enertube is able to be removed for maintenance or future upgrade of the modular battery. The current generation Enertube utilizes thermally stable lithium iron phosphate cells and a proprietary third-generation BMS (battery management system), which have been extensively tested and proven since the TREXA engineering team developed EDrive, the first commercially demonstrated li-ion PHEV, in 2006.

Central to the TREXA patent application is scalability of the battery system. The nine inch diameter Enertube utilized on the 96" wheelbase prototype contains 7 kWh of energy storage capacity, suitable as a platform for a local use plug-in vehicle or small series PHEV. However, small increases in tube diameter dramatically increase energy storage capacity. For example, an increase in diameter from nine inches to twelve yields a twofold increase in energy capacity. TREXA plans to offer Enertube-based platforms in a range of diameters and lengths, representing energy storage capacities to over 100 kWh. As a result, TREXA platforms could be the basis for electric drive vehicles ranging from golf carts to Class 8 trucks.

TREXA has formed an alliance with a large publicly-traded specialty vehicle manufacturer to commercialize the platform and Enertube technology. TREXA is also exploring electric racing in connection with a major auto racing league. In addition, the company is working with the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute to develop advanced functionality platforms for government and agricultural applications. The company plans to make specific announcements about its developer and supplier relationships in the coming months.

"TREXA is both a learning and a teaching company," said CEO Seth Seaberg. "We have spent a great deal of time in the past few years understanding what our developers need so we can educate them about, and provide them with, the appropriate and scalable battery technology. The Enertube is the culmination of that considerable effort."

Although initially it will work with established vehicle manufacturers and automotive R&D divisions, TREXA does have future plans to offer systems to independent, kit and custom car builders. "The DIY market has incredible potential, and there is no question that the re-emergence of electric drive is a result of grassroots efforts," said Seaberg. "So we are exploring how and when we might offer platforms, development guidelines, and support to the general public."

TREXA is funded in part by Crunch Energy LLC, a firm dedicated to developing innovative new technologies that help the world use less energy. TREXA expects to close its next round of funding this summer.

For more information, visit the company?s web site, www.trexa.com email info@trexa.com.