Recipes for Health: Apple Walnut Galette — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

A great rustic apple pie for Thanksgiving, this has very little butter in the pastry and a minimum of sweetening. It’s all about the apples.

1 dessert galette pastry (1/2 recipe)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 pounds slightly tart apples, like Braeburns, peeled, cored and cut in wedges (about 1/2 inch thick at the thickest point)

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

1/4 cup (50 grams) plus 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar or turbinado sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup lightly toasted walnuts, chopped

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (25 grams) almond powder

1 egg beaten with 1 teaspoon milk, for egg wash

1. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment. In a large bowl combine the lemon juice and apples and toss together.

2. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add the butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon of the cinnamon and the nutmeg, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the walnuts, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely.

3. Remove the pastry from the freezer and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Leave to thaw while the apples cool, but don’t keep it out of the freezer for too long. It’s easiest to handle if it’s cold and will thaw quickly. You just want it soft enough so that you can manipulate it.

4. Sprinkle the almond powder over the pastry, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border all around. Place the apples on top. Fold the edges of the dough in over the fruit, pleating the edges as you work your way around the fruit to form a free-form tart that is roughly 9 inches in diameter. Place in the freezer on the baking sheet for 45 minutes to an hour. This helps the galette maintain its shape.

5. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the galette from the freezer. Brush the exposed edge of the pastry with the egg wash. Combine the remaining tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and sprinkle over the fruit and the crust. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour, until the crust is nicely browned and the apples are sizzling. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 1 9-inch galette, serving 8

Advance preparation: You can assemble this through Step 4 and freeze it for up to a month. Once it is frozen, double-wrap it in plastic. You can also freeze the galette after baking. Thaw and warm in a 350-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes to recrisp the crust.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 11 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 50 milligrams cholesterol; 37 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 92 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Apple Walnut Galette — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

A great rustic apple pie for Thanksgiving, this has very little butter in the pastry and a minimum of sweetening. It’s all about the apples.

1 dessert galette pastry (1/2 recipe)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 pounds slightly tart apples, like Braeburns, peeled, cored and cut in wedges (about 1/2 inch thick at the thickest point)

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

1/4 cup (50 grams) plus 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar or turbinado sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup lightly toasted walnuts, chopped

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (25 grams) almond powder

1 egg beaten with 1 teaspoon milk, for egg wash

1. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment. In a large bowl combine the lemon juice and apples and toss together.

2. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add the butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon of the cinnamon and the nutmeg, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the walnuts, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely.

3. Remove the pastry from the freezer and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Leave to thaw while the apples cool, but don’t keep it out of the freezer for too long. It’s easiest to handle if it’s cold and will thaw quickly. You just want it soft enough so that you can manipulate it.

4. Sprinkle the almond powder over the pastry, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border all around. Place the apples on top. Fold the edges of the dough in over the fruit, pleating the edges as you work your way around the fruit to form a free-form tart that is roughly 9 inches in diameter. Place in the freezer on the baking sheet for 45 minutes to an hour. This helps the galette maintain its shape.

5. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the galette from the freezer. Brush the exposed edge of the pastry with the egg wash. Combine the remaining tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and sprinkle over the fruit and the crust. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour, until the crust is nicely browned and the apples are sizzling. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 1 9-inch galette, serving 8

Advance preparation: You can assemble this through Step 4 and freeze it for up to a month. Once it is frozen, double-wrap it in plastic. You can also freeze the galette after baking. Thaw and warm in a 350-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes to recrisp the crust.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 11 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 50 milligrams cholesterol; 37 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 92 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Election, Storm and Shaky Economy Affect Holiday Shopping

Many retailers have more than the usual riding on sales beginning this Thanksgiving weekend.

The presidential election pushed holiday shopping later than usual because some toy and game makers held off on their big introductions for maximum attention. The aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy have included logistics problems and merchandise delivery delays. And some retailers, trying to keep inventory lean during uncertain economic times, have given themselves little room for error: shipments of holiday toys, for instance, are down 13 percent this year, to the lowest level since 2007, according to the global trade research firm Panjiva.

All of that makes for a particularly strange holiday season, retailers and analysts say.

“The election sucks all of the oxygen out of the room in terms of attention,” said Eric Hirshberg, the chief executive of Activision Publishing, the video game company. “A lot of the best media inventory goes to the candidates. It gets more expensive because there’s this premium demand from the candidates.”

Hasbro is adding more shades of its Furby toy through the end of the year, and Mattel last week introduced a new Monster High video game. Last year, Activision introduced its big Call of Duty release in early November. This year, though, it did not release Call of Duty: Black Ops II until Nov. 13.

“We were also worried that if we released Call of Duty before the election, no one would show up to vote,” Mr. Hirshberg said. (He was speaking facetiously, but given that the game’s retail sales were more than $500 million in the first 24 hours after it made its debut, he may have a point.)

And while retailers were expecting the election to delay some shopping, they were not expecting a storm. RetailNext, which tracks shopper traffic, said that store visits and sales in the Northeast were down about 25 percent during the storm and afterward.

Major retailers have said the election and Hurricane Sandy affected sales. Saks and Target said the beginning of November was choppy, and Macy’s said that the storm seemed to have pushed sales later into the season.

“Some of it is lost, most is postponed,” Karen M. Hoguet, Macy’s chief financial officer, said of demand. “It’s a question of timing.” And Kohl’s chief executive, Kevin Mansell, said the company typically experienced sales slowdowns pre-election and postelection, “and then the business kind of accelerates.”

The late introductions and delayed shopping put toy companies, in particular, in a difficult position: they were under pressure to make hit toys, largely via preorders and layaway, months before people would actually be buying them. Retailers and toy companies started trying to gauge demand early, looking for preliminary data on which items were unpopular and which ones were stars.

Walmart started layaway a month earlier this year versus last year, and Toys “R” Us also started holiday layaway earlier, giving the stores a jump on things. Amazon and other e-commerce sites are promoting tools like preorders, wish lists and gift registries — anything that can give them a sense of what people will buy as the Christmas season churns on.

Preorders are “an important tool to gauge customer demand, and get some feedback from our customers earlier in the process,” said John Alteio, director of toys and games for Amazon. Product introductions later in the year “can be challenging in the toy industry, so we have to draw some comparisons when we can and make the best estimate.”

Paul Solomon, co-chief executive of Moose Toys, which makes Micro Chargers and The Trash Pack, said preorders and layaway were becoming increasingly important. “It’s giving us a good read, early, as to how things are performing, and it’s even more crucial now to make a lot of noise about the brand earlier than in previous years,” he said.

“Preorders are kind of a cottage industry for games like Call of Duty,” Mr. Hirshberg, the Activision chief, said. The company began promoting the game in March, when it ran spots during the NBA playoffs.

In May, it released an ad featuring Oliver North, the national security aide at the heart of the Iran-contra affair and a consultant on the game, talking about the future of warfare. It accepted preorders starting in May. Through the summer, Activision revealed different facets of the game at various conferences, and this month it began running international television, outdoor, digital and mobile ads.

“There’s not a clean math equation that says this many preorders equals this many sales, but it’s confidence-building for us in terms of orders, in terms of production,” Mr. Hirshberg said.

John Barbour, the chief executive of LeapFrog, learned the value of early promotion after last year, when the children’s tablet LeapPad1 became a surprise hit. “It was very hard for me to gauge how successful it would be. Everyone took their best shots,” he said. By November and December, the LeapPad was selling out, and Mr. Barbour had to pay a premium to source tablet screens, and paid for airplanes to fly in extra inventory.

This year, he focused on early promotions that would translate into preorders and layaway, so toy retailers could accurately adjust their orders in time for the holidays. A good response early on means not just bigger orders from retailers, he said, but also more promotional support and more shelf space: it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“For retailers, it’s phenomenal. It brings demand forward, and they get a better read on what they’re going to need,” he said. When the LeapPad2 became available for preorders in August, it sold as much in two days of preorders as it did in its first week on sale last year, Mr. Barbour said.

He is being careful not to get too jubilant, though. “The penalties for having too much inventory are greater than the penalties for being a little bit short,” he said.

Still, some brands were ignoring the strange events of this holiday season and proceeding as usual. Stephen Bebis, the chief executive of Brookstone, said some products were becoming available in the final months of the year, but that was because of production delays, not strategy.

“People are still going to have to buy gifts for Christmas no matter who’s the president,” he said.

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Gaza Clash Escalates With Deadliest Israeli Strike

Bernat Armangue/Associated Press

Smoke rose over Gaza City on Sunday, as Israel widened its range of targets to include buildings used by the news media.

CAIRO — Emboldened by the rising power of Islamists around the region, the Palestinian militant group Hamas demanded new Israeli concessions to its security and autonomy before it halts its rocket attacks on Israel, even as the conflict took an increasing toll on Sunday.

After five days of punishing Israeli airstrikes on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and no letup in the rocket fire in return, representatives of Israel and Hamas met separately with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Sunday for indirect talks about a truce.

The talks came as an Israeli bomb struck a house in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, killing 11 people, in the deadliest single strike since the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalated on Wednesday. The strike, along with several others that killed civilians across the Gaza Strip, signaled that Israel was broadening its range of targets on the fifth day of the campaign.

By the end of the day, Gaza health officials reported that 70 Palestinians had been killed in airstrikes since Wednesday, including 20 children, and that 600 had been wounded. Three Israelis have been killed and at least 79 wounded by unrelenting rocket fire out of Gaza into southern Israel and as far north as Tel Aviv.

Hamas, badly outgunned on the battlefield, appeared to be trying to exploit its increased political clout with its ideological allies in Egypt’s new Islamist-led government. The group’s leaders, rejecting Israel’s call for an immediate end to the rocket attacks, have instead laid down sweeping demands that would put Hamas in a stronger position than when the conflict began: an end to Israel’s five-year-old embargo of the Gaza Strip, a pledge by Israel not to attack again and multinational guarantees that Israel would abide by its commitments.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stuck to his demand that all rocket fire cease before the air campaign lets up, and Israeli tanks and troops remained lined up outside Gaza on Sunday. Tens of thousands of reserve troops had been called up. “The army is prepared to significantly expand the operation,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting.

Reda Fahmy, a member of Egypt’s upper house of Parliament and of the nation’s dominant Islamist party, who is following the talks, said Hamas’s position was just as unequivocal. “Hamas has one clear and specific demand: for the siege to be completely lifted from Gaza,” he said. “It’s not reasonable that every now and then Israel decides to level Gaza to the ground, and then we decide to sit down and talk about it after it is done. On the Israeli part, they want to stop the missiles from one side. How is that?”

He added: “If they stop the aircraft from shooting, Hamas will then stop its missiles. But violence couldn’t be stopped from one side.”

Hamas’s aggressive stance in the cease-fire talks is the first test of the group’s belief that the Arab Spring and the rise in Islamist influence around the region have strengthened its political hand, both against Israel and against Hamas’s Palestinian rivals, who now control the West Bank with Western backing.

It also puts intense new pressure on President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was known for his fiery speeches defending Hamas and denouncing Israel. Mr. Morsi must now balance the conflicting demands of an Egyptian public that is deeply sympathetic to Hamas and the Palestinian cause against Western pleadings to help broker a peace and Egypt’s need for regional stability to help revive its moribund economy.

Indeed, the Egyptian-led cease-fire talks illustrate the diverging paths of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the original Egyptian Islamist group. Hamas has evolved into a more militant insurgency and is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, while the Brotherhood has effectively become Egypt’s ruling party. Mr. Fahmy said in an interview in March that the Brotherhood’s new responsibilities required a step back from its ideological cousins in Hamas, and even a new push to persuade the group to compromise.

Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner, Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Peter Baker from Bangkok.

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Which Tablet to Buy Among Dozens Confuses Shoppers

Holiday shoppers with a tablet computer on their gift list this year might be forgiven for feeling a little panicked.

Look at the tablets available online or at a consumer electronics store and it can be dizzying to choose from among the dozens of slim rectangles with touch screens — each with various sizes, features, prices and applications.

Tablets were supposed to be a simple alternative to the bloated personal computer market. And when “tablet” was synonymous with “iPad,” that was true.

But this is the first holiday season in which the iPad faces competitors that have built up a solid footing in the market. Amazon and Google introduced tablets just in time for the shopping rush. As a result, many consumers and analysts say, the new market of keyboardless computers is quickly becoming as confusing as that of the old-school PC.

“What’s different about this holiday season is that consumers have not just more choice, but really good choices,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, who studies consumer computing trends at Forrester. “There have been many iPad wannabes but no real quality alternatives, and now there are several.”

While choice is a good thing for consumers, she said, it also makes shopping “confusing and complicated.”

For the companies that make tablets, the choice means everything. The stakes are much higher than the sale of individual devices. Each company is trying to snag lifelong customers for their other products — like music, apps, e-books, movies, Web search or word-processing software.

While Apple has dominated the market until now, selling more tablets than any other company, its perch is being threatened by the newcomers.

“Apple left a lot of room for rivals to grow,” said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst.

By keeping its tablet prices so high, he said, Apple could lose its place as the biggest tablet seller, just as it did with smartphones when it lost the first-place position to Samsung, which makes less expensive phones using Google’s Android software. The iPad still dominates the market with a 50 percent share, according to third-quarter figures from the research firm IDC, but that is down from 60 percent a year ago. Samsung is in second place with an 18 percent share, Amazon is third with 9 percent, and Asus, which makes Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in fourth with 8.6 percent of the market.

But Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue on Web ads, still lags in the tablet market, even though sales of its Nexus 7 tablet are approaching one million a month, according to Asus. About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company. Google would like more of that traffic, as well as more buyers for apps and media from its Google Play store, as would Amazon and Microsoft.

“The first decision you make is what ecosystem am I in, do I want the Android Play store and content or some other?” said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president for engineering for Android. “So the importance of the ecosystem can’t be overstated.”

But the decisions after that are still complex.

Say, for example, that you want a tablet that runs Google’s Android operating system. There is the Nexus 7, a seven-inch tablet made by Asus, and the Nexus 10, a 10-inch tablet made by Samsung. Then there are the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, a 5.5-inch smartphone). And that’s not to mention the dozens of Android tablets made by Lenovo, Toshiba and others.

This year, Microsoft also has a tablet, called Surface. Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, and Barnes & Noble has the Nook HD and HD+. Once shoppers choose one, they have more choices to make, like whether they want to pay $15 more for the privilege of not seeing ads on the Kindle Fire.

Even Apple, which has always prided itself on having simple product lines, now offers the new iPad, the older iPad 2 and the iPad Mini. If you factor in the various amounts of storage and the choice of cellular data or just Wi-Fi, there are essentially 14 iPad models to choose from.

Complicating the decision on hardware, different tablets connect to different online stores for apps, music and video. If you have built your music and app collection on Apple devices, an Android tablet may mean starting from scratch, and vice versa.

The proliferation of products is nothing new for a mature market, as anyone who has stood in front of a wall of televisions at Best Buy or in a parking lot of Priuses at a Toyota dealership knows.

But some consumer electronics companies that have given their customers too many options have run into trouble, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee. They include Motorola Mobility, which is trying to rescue its cellphone business by paring its lineup of 27 devices, and Research in Motion, which offers a perplexing matrix of BlackBerrys with confusing names, like the BlackBerry Torch 9810, 9850 and 9860.

Google in particular runs this risk, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner, because it gives away its Android operating system to any device manufacturer that wants to use it, resulting in an uncontrolled array of Android devices running different versions of the software. Some apps will work only with particular versions, making it difficult to know exactly what you are getting.

Google has tried to address this problem in recent months. It gave its line of Nexus products names corresponding to their screen size and began selling them in its Play store. (Google teams up with manufacturers to build the Nexus devices.) It began running ads for the tablets online, on billboards, in print and on television, which had been rare for the company, and assigned a public relations employee to focus on selling hardware to consumers.

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MaleSurvivor Conference Examines Sexual Abuse in Sports

It was the summer before high school, and Christopher Gavagan, then 13, was preparing to leave the safe familiarity of the friends he had known during his boyhood. With a plan to excel at ice hockey, he began training on inline skates, moving through his New York City neighborhood, up and down the streets until, he said, “I turned down the wrong street.”

Gavagan, now a filmmaker, was one of eight panelists who participated Friday in a discussion about young athletes who have been sexually assaulted or abused by their coaches. The panel was part of the MaleSurvivor 13th International Conference, held this year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The conference brought together men who have been sexually abused, as well as psychologists, social workers, academics and members of the legal community.

A dour procession of stories about sexual misconduct by coaches toward their male charges has come to light in recent months. Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was sentenced in October to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of child molesting. Sugar Ray Leonard wrote in his autobiography last year that he was sexually molested by an Olympic boxing coach. The N.H.L. players Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy were sexually abused as teenagers by their hockey coach Graham James.

The prevalence of sexual abuse among all boys 17 and under has been variously estimated to be as low as 5 percent and as high as 16 percent. For some of the millions of children who participate in sports nationwide, and their parents, sexual assault in a sports context has its own dynamic.

“Sports is a place where parents send their boys to learn skills, to learn how to be teammates and how to work together — to make boys stronger and healthier,” said Dr. Howard Fradkin, author of “Joining Forces,” a book about how men can heal from sexual abuse. “It’s the place where we send our boys to grow up. The betrayal that occurs when abuse occurs in sports is damaging because it destroys the whole intent of what they started out to do.”

When Gavagan, now 38, turned down that fateful street, and stepped briefly into the house of a man recommended as a hockey coach by a couple of female acquaintances, what greeted him, he said, was “a young boy’s dream come true.”

The dream Gavagan glimpsed was embodied in the trophy room of the house.

“It was everything I wanted to be right there,” recalled Gavagan, who is working on a feature-length documentary on sexual abuse in youth sports, in which he interviews other sexual-abuse victims and his own attacker, against whom he has never pressed charges. In addition to the shiny relics that seemed to give testimony to the man’s coaching prowess, Gavagan said, the trophy room had pictures of hockey teams the man had coached and workout equipment — the physical tools promising the chance to get bigger and stronger.

“To a skinny 13-year-old, it was like winning the lottery,” Gavagan said.

Christopher Anderson, the executive director of MaleSurvivor, said sexual abuse — basically nonconsensual touching or sexual language — is devastating under any circumstance, but coach and player often have a special relationship.

“Especially as you progress higher and higher, the coach can become just as important in some ways to an athlete as the relationship with his parents might have,” Anderson said. “In some cases, it’s a substitute for parents.”

He added: “There’s also a fundamentally different power dynamic. When you’re a young star, the coach can literally make or break your career as an athlete.”

But caution has to extend beyond coaches who guide future Olympians, Gavagan said, noting that his coach was not of that caliber.

“The entire grooming process was so subtle,” Gavagan said. “It’s not like when I first went into his house that he tried to grope me.”

First, Gavagan said, the coach said it was all right to curse in that house. On another visit it was fine to have a beer, which led on another day to Playboy magazine and on subsequent days to harder pornography and harder liquor. It was six months before the coach laid an explicitly sexual hand on him, Gavagan said.

“I didn’t feel like a sudden red line had been crossed — the line had been blurred,” Gavagan said, explaining that he avoided his parents when he returned home with liquor on his breath by telling them he was exhausted and going straight to his room. (Unlike many sexual-abuse victims, Gavagan said his parents, with whom the coach had ingratiated himself, were supportive of their son, and his was a loving family. He said that if he had approached them about the coach, they would have listened.)

Another aspect of sexual abuse in sports is the environment, which emphasizes a kind of macho ethic.

“What is most different about abuse is the sports culture itself,” Fradkin said. “It is a culture that promotes teamwork and teaches boys to shrug it off. When a boy or man is abused, he risks being thrown off the team if he should speak the truth because he’ll be seen as being disloyal — and weak.”

At 17, after four years with his coach, Gavagan said he “aged out” of his coach’s target age.

“At the time I had no idea of how it would impact my life, but the unhealthy lessons about relations, trust and the truth set a time bomb that would detonate my relationships for the next 10 years,” Gavagan said.

As a word of caution, Anderson said the lesson for parents should not be that sports are dangerous.

“It should be that there are sometimes dangerous people who gravitate to sporting organizations and our safeguards aren’t good enough yet to adequately protect our children,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should be pulling our kids from soccer and baseball and basketball. What it means is that parents need to be vigilant.”

He added: “They need to be proactive with athletic organizations to make sure that policies are in place — such as doing criminal background checks on staff and having a procedure where young athletes can complain about inappropriate behavior — that make sure children are protected.”

Read More..

MaleSurvivor Conference Examines Sexual Abuse in Sports

It was the summer before high school, and Christopher Gavagan, then 13, was preparing to leave the safe familiarity of the friends he had known during his boyhood. With a plan to excel at ice hockey, he began training on inline skates, moving through his New York City neighborhood, up and down the streets until, he said, “I turned down the wrong street.”

Gavagan, now a filmmaker, was one of eight panelists who participated Friday in a discussion about young athletes who have been sexually assaulted or abused by their coaches. The panel was part of the MaleSurvivor 13th International Conference, held this year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The conference brought together men who have been sexually abused, as well as psychologists, social workers, academics and members of the legal community.

A dour procession of stories about sexual misconduct by coaches toward their male charges has come to light in recent months. Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was sentenced in October to 30 to 60 years in prison on 45 counts of child molesting. Sugar Ray Leonard wrote in his autobiography last year that he was sexually molested by an Olympic boxing coach. The N.H.L. players Theo Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy were sexually abused as teenagers by their hockey coach Graham James.

The prevalence of sexual abuse among all boys 17 and under has been variously estimated to be as low as 5 percent and as high as 16 percent. For some of the millions of children who participate in sports nationwide, and their parents, sexual assault in a sports context has its own dynamic.

“Sports is a place where parents send their boys to learn skills, to learn how to be teammates and how to work together — to make boys stronger and healthier,” said Dr. Howard Fradkin, author of “Joining Forces,” a book about how men can heal from sexual abuse. “It’s the place where we send our boys to grow up. The betrayal that occurs when abuse occurs in sports is damaging because it destroys the whole intent of what they started out to do.”

When Gavagan, now 38, turned down that fateful street, and stepped briefly into the house of a man recommended as a hockey coach by a couple of female acquaintances, what greeted him, he said, was “a young boy’s dream come true.”

The dream Gavagan glimpsed was embodied in the trophy room of the house.

“It was everything I wanted to be right there,” recalled Gavagan, who is working on a feature-length documentary on sexual abuse in youth sports, in which he interviews other sexual-abuse victims and his own attacker, against whom he has never pressed charges. In addition to the shiny relics that seemed to give testimony to the man’s coaching prowess, Gavagan said, the trophy room had pictures of hockey teams the man had coached and workout equipment — the physical tools promising the chance to get bigger and stronger.

“To a skinny 13-year-old, it was like winning the lottery,” Gavagan said.

Christopher Anderson, the executive director of MaleSurvivor, said sexual abuse — basically nonconsensual touching or sexual language — is devastating under any circumstance, but coach and player often have a special relationship.

“Especially as you progress higher and higher, the coach can become just as important in some ways to an athlete as the relationship with his parents might have,” Anderson said. “In some cases, it’s a substitute for parents.”

He added: “There’s also a fundamentally different power dynamic. When you’re a young star, the coach can literally make or break your career as an athlete.”

But caution has to extend beyond coaches who guide future Olympians, Gavagan said, noting that his coach was not of that caliber.

“The entire grooming process was so subtle,” Gavagan said. “It’s not like when I first went into his house that he tried to grope me.”

First, Gavagan said, the coach said it was all right to curse in that house. On another visit it was fine to have a beer, which led on another day to Playboy magazine and on subsequent days to harder pornography and harder liquor. It was six months before the coach laid an explicitly sexual hand on him, Gavagan said.

“I didn’t feel like a sudden red line had been crossed — the line had been blurred,” Gavagan said, explaining that he avoided his parents when he returned home with liquor on his breath by telling them he was exhausted and going straight to his room. (Unlike many sexual-abuse victims, Gavagan said his parents, with whom the coach had ingratiated himself, were supportive of their son, and his was a loving family. He said that if he had approached them about the coach, they would have listened.)

Another aspect of sexual abuse in sports is the environment, which emphasizes a kind of macho ethic.

“What is most different about abuse is the sports culture itself,” Fradkin said. “It is a culture that promotes teamwork and teaches boys to shrug it off. When a boy or man is abused, he risks being thrown off the team if he should speak the truth because he’ll be seen as being disloyal — and weak.”

At 17, after four years with his coach, Gavagan said he “aged out” of his coach’s target age.

“At the time I had no idea of how it would impact my life, but the unhealthy lessons about relations, trust and the truth set a time bomb that would detonate my relationships for the next 10 years,” Gavagan said.

As a word of caution, Anderson said the lesson for parents should not be that sports are dangerous.

“It should be that there are sometimes dangerous people who gravitate to sporting organizations and our safeguards aren’t good enough yet to adequately protect our children,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should be pulling our kids from soccer and baseball and basketball. What it means is that parents need to be vigilant.”

He added: “They need to be proactive with athletic organizations to make sure that policies are in place — such as doing criminal background checks on staff and having a procedure where young athletes can complain about inappropriate behavior — that make sure children are protected.”

Read More..

Which Tablet to Buy Among Dozens Confuses Shoppers

Holiday shoppers with a tablet computer on their gift list this year might be forgiven for feeling a little panicked.

Look at the tablets available online or at a consumer electronics store and it can be dizzying to choose from among the dozens of slim rectangles with touch screens — each with various sizes, features, prices and applications.

Tablets were supposed to be a simple alternative to the bloated personal computer market. And when “tablet” was synonymous with “iPad,” that was true.

But this is the first holiday season in which the iPad faces competitors that have built up a solid footing in the market. Amazon and Google introduced tablets just in time for the shopping rush. As a result, many consumers and analysts say, the new market of keyboardless computers is quickly becoming as confusing as that of the old-school PC.

“What’s different about this holiday season is that consumers have not just more choice, but really good choices,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, who studies consumer computing trends at Forrester. “There have been many iPad wannabes but no real quality alternatives, and now there are several.”

While choice is a good thing for consumers, she said, it also makes shopping “confusing and complicated.”

For the companies that make tablets, the choice means everything. The stakes are much higher than the sale of individual devices. Each company is trying to snag lifelong customers for their other products — like music, apps, e-books, movies, Web search or word-processing software.

While Apple has dominated the market until now, selling more tablets than any other company, its perch is being threatened by the newcomers.

“Apple left a lot of room for rivals to grow,” said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst.

By keeping its tablet prices so high, he said, Apple could lose its place as the biggest tablet seller, just as it did with smartphones when it lost the first-place position to Samsung, which makes less expensive phones using Google’s Android software. The iPad still dominates the market with a 50 percent share, according to third-quarter figures from the research firm IDC, but that is down from 60 percent a year ago. Samsung is in second place with an 18 percent share, Amazon is third with 9 percent, and Asus, which makes Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in fourth with 8.6 percent of the market.

But Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue on Web ads, still lags in the tablet market, even though sales of its Nexus 7 tablet are approaching one million a month, according to Asus. About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company. Google would like more of that traffic, as well as more buyers for apps and media from its Google Play store, as would Amazon and Microsoft.

“The first decision you make is what ecosystem am I in, do I want the Android Play store and content or some other?” said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president for engineering for Android. “So the importance of the ecosystem can’t be overstated.”

But the decisions after that are still complex.

Say, for example, that you want a tablet that runs Google’s Android operating system. There is the Nexus 7, a seven-inch tablet made by Asus, and the Nexus 10, a 10-inch tablet made by Samsung. Then there are the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, a 5.5-inch smartphone). And that’s not to mention the dozens of Android tablets made by Lenovo, Toshiba and others.

This year, Microsoft also has a tablet, called Surface. Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, and Barnes & Noble has the Nook HD and HD+. Once shoppers choose one, they have more choices to make, like whether they want to pay $15 more for the privilege of not seeing ads on the Kindle Fire.

Even Apple, which has always prided itself on having simple product lines, now offers the new iPad, the older iPad 2 and the iPad Mini. If you factor in the various amounts of storage and the choice of cellular data or just Wi-Fi, there are essentially 14 iPad models to choose from.

Complicating the decision on hardware, different tablets connect to different online stores for apps, music and video. If you have built your music and app collection on Apple devices, an Android tablet may mean starting from scratch, and vice versa.

The proliferation of products is nothing new for a mature market, as anyone who has stood in front of a wall of televisions at Best Buy or in a parking lot of Priuses at a Toyota dealership knows.

But some consumer electronics companies that have given their customers too many options have run into trouble, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee. They include Motorola Mobility, which is trying to rescue its cellphone business by paring its lineup of 27 devices, and Research in Motion, which offers a perplexing matrix of BlackBerrys with confusing names, like the BlackBerry Torch 9810, 9850 and 9860.

Google in particular runs this risk, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner, because it gives away its Android operating system to any device manufacturer that wants to use it, resulting in an uncontrolled array of Android devices running different versions of the software. Some apps will work only with particular versions, making it difficult to know exactly what you are getting.

Google has tried to address this problem in recent months. It gave its line of Nexus products names corresponding to their screen size and began selling them in its Play store. (Google teams up with manufacturers to build the Nexus devices.) It began running ads for the tablets online, on billboards, in print and on television, which had been rare for the company, and assigned a public relations employee to focus on selling hardware to consumers.

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Russia Looks Askance at Corruption Drive

MOSCOW — Ripples of scandal are spreading in Russia’s Far East, where, auditors say, $472 million in construction financing was misallocated ahead of a government summit meeting. About $200 million in missing funds have led to firings in Russia’s space industry. And corruption in the Defense Ministry has figured prominently in Russia’s news cycles since Nov. 6, leaving the fate of its former minister uncertain.

In the past, President Vladimir V. Putin has always been reluctant to expel or prosecute high-level officials, despite widespread complaints about corruption. So the mushrooming scandals are unusual, raising questions about what has changed.

There is little doubt that the Kremlin has been battered by opposition campaigns highlighting official corruption. Political strategists, searching for ideas powerful enough to consolidate the country around Mr. Putin, may seize on fighting corruption as a Kremlin effort, and recent steps hint at a populist push to expose and punish guilty officials.

“A tough, uncompromising battle with corruption has begun,” announced Arkady Mamontov, a pro-government television host, in a much-hyped documentary titled “Corruption” that, though it was broadcast close to midnight on Tuesday, attracted nearly 20 percent of the television audience. “In the course of the next months, we will see many interesting things. The main thing is that we should not stand aside and watch what is happening, but take an active part in it.”

Political observers have watched the anticorruption drive curiously, debating where it might be headed, and especially whether, for the first time since Mr. Putin came to power, high-ranking officials would face prosecution. On Monday, the newspaper Vedomosti declared that Moscow was witnessing the beginning of a “cleansing of the elite” — a flushing out of a political system that lacks other mechanisms of renewal, like competitive elections. Others were skeptical that the effort would reach beyond midlevel officials.

“It cannot become an overall ideology, because Putin’s system is dependent on corruption — on corruption as a form of management and a guarantee of loyalty from officials,” said Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and anticorruption activist. “They will not kick out from under themselves the stool that they are standing on.”

Last week, it seemed the Kremlin had not decided how far to take its anticorruption drive. On Wednesday, Russian news agencies reported that the highest-level official to be implicated — the former defense minister Anatoly E. Serdyukov — had been offered a comfortable new job as an adviser to the director of Rostekhnologii, a company that produces and exports high-tech equipment.

The news prompted waves of angry commentary from those who had hoped Mr. Serdyukov would be prosecuted, including Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, who heads the Defense Committee in the lower house of Parliament.

“There is a signal in the navy that means ‘man overboard,’ ” he said. “We all thought the former minister had fallen overboard, and his fate would be sorrowful. But it turned out he was still inside the submarine.”

Others said it was more evidence that Mr. Putin does not give up his own. By way of commentary, the newspaper Kommersant posted a still from “The Godfather” in which the Mafia don embraced one of his lieutenants, along with a quotation: “Friendship is everything.”

Officials the next day denied that Mr. Serdyukov had been offered the job. Asked about the case at a news conference, Mr. Putin confirmed that, but said it would not be a problem if Mr. Serdyukov was given a new position, since he has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.

“There is a generally accepted practice that a person is innocent as long as a court has not proven his guilt,” he said. “If he wants to gain work anywhere, I don’t think that we should prevent that. He has the right to work.”

The Kremlin faces a dilemma in resolving Mr. Serdyukov’s case. Russians largely supported Mr. Serdyukov’s dismissal, and some speculated that the anticorruption effort was bolstering Mr. Putin’s approval ratings. The firing was particularly popular among prosperous urban males — a population that has turned away from Mr. Putin in recent years, and which he is no doubt eager to win back. But a prosecution would shine light on a deep and pervasive flaw of Mr. Putin’s system, with unpredictable consequences.

Mr. Navalny said he was “cautiously optimistic” that information about corruption had begun to emerge into public view, even if high-level officials were not punished.

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The iEconomy: As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Shawn and Stephanie Grimes’s efforts have cost $200,000 in lost income and savings, but their apps have earned less than $5,000 this year.

ROSEDALE, Md. — Shawn and Stephanie Grimes spent much of the last two years pursuing their dream of doing research and development for Apple, the world’s most successful corporation.

But they did not actually have jobs at Apple. It was freelance work that came with nothing in the way of a regular income, health insurance or retirement plan. Instead, the Grimeses tried to prepare by willingly, even eagerly, throwing overboard just about everything they could.

They sold one of their cars, gave some possessions to relatives and sold others in a yard sale, rented out their six-bedroom house and stayed with family for a while. They even cashed in Mr. Grimes’s 401(k).

“We didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Mr. Grimes, 32. “I’ll retire when I die.”

The couple’s chosen field is so new it did not even exist a few years ago: writing software applications for mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad. Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers.

Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago, apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering, organizing and controlling the world, spawning a multibillion-dollar industry virtually overnight. The iPhone and iPad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds.

Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be.

Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts. The Grimeses began their venture with high hopes, but their apps, most of them for toddlers, did not come quickly enough or sell fast enough.

And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their résumés, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.

One success story is Ethan Nicholas, who earned more than $1 million in 2009 after writing a game for the iPhone. But he says the app writing world has experienced tectonic shifts since then.

“Can someone drop everything and start writing apps? Sure,” said Mr. Nicholas, 34, who quit his job to write apps after iShoot, an artillery game, became a sensation. “Can they start writing good apps? Not often, no. I got lucky with iShoot, because back then a decent app could still be successful. But competition is fierce nowadays, and decent isn’t good enough.”

The boom in apps comes as economists are debating the changing nature of work, which technology is reshaping at an accelerating speed. The upheaval, in some ways echoing the mechanization of agriculture a century ago, began its latest turbulent phase with the migration of tech manufacturing to places like China. Now service and even white-collar jobs, like file clerks and data entry specialists or office support staff and mechanical drafters, are disappearing.

“Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business.

Still, the digital transition is creating enormous wealth and opportunity. Four of the most valuable American companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft and I.B.M. — are rooted in technology. And it was Apple, more than any other company, that set off the app revolution with the iPhone and iPad. Since Apple unleashed the world’s freelance coders to build applications four years ago, it has paid them more than $6.5 billion in royalties.

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