Pictures of the Day: Democratic Republic of Congo and Elsewhere

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Photos from Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey.

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The Fashionable Mr. Parks

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Today is the centennial of Gordon Parks's birth in Kansas. From humble roots, he taught himself photography and in turn taught America about the African-American experience. A man of many firsts - the first African-American staff photographer for Life, the first African-American to direct a major motion picture - he was as prolific as he was talented.

Deborah Willis, the chairwoman of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University, was inspired early on by Parks, whom she later befriended. In an essay for Lens, she looks back at an aspect of his career that some may find surprising - his work as a fashion photographer.

In the early 1960s, I sat in my mother's beauty shop in North Philadelphia reading Life magazine and discovered the photographs of Gordon Parks. I wasn't even a teenager, yet I still remember vividly the effect those photo essays had on my life: over the course of the next decade I read his autobiography, “A Choice of Weapons,” and devoured almost all of his stories in Life.

I was determined that I would also become a photographer.

In 1974, while I was studying photography at the Philadelphia College of Art, I finally met Parks. My first interview with him focused on his early years as a photographer - a career that began when he bought a Voigt länder Brillant and took pictures along the North Coast Limited rail line, where he worked as a waiter.

“How did you make it happen?” I asked.

I still recall his smile, and his embrace of my naïve question.

Over the course of 70 prolific years, Parks made many things happen - being a member of the Farm Security Administration's roster of documentary photographers, directing movies like “The Learning Tree” and “Shaft,” and being a co-founder of Essence magazine. In his last memoir, he recalled the lessons his father taught him, mere months before his 15th birthday and the death of his mother.

“Your heart will tell your feet which roads to take,” his father counseled. “There'll be signposts along the way giving out directions. You'll have the right to question them, but don't ignore them. Each one is meant for something.”

One of those signposts guided him to fashion photography. Early on, Parks was well aware of how fashion a nd design shaped ideas about femininity and desire. Vogue was among the magazines he read closely after passengers left copies behind in the rail cars along the route between Chicago and Seattle. Those magazines guided him as he taught himself to make photographs that engaged a wide variety of people.

With a clear understanding about how to “look” on city streets, in cafes and society balls, Parks's fashion photographs are about the experience of being dressed. He communicated beauty, vanity and pleasure in his photographs of fashionably dressed women, which began with his first assignment in St. Paul at Frank Murphy's Women's Clothing Store. His first wife, Sally, who was a designer and often modeled for him, also may have inspired his interest in fashion.

Gordon Parks, courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation Cuba, 1958

Even from the beginning, Parks challenged prevailing rules about how to photograph fashion, including objects, group poses and streetscapes that beckoned with the allure of a desired lifestyle or career. He devised both dramatic and subtle poses for the models, who wore suits, dresses, coats and hats from new collections. He placed them in the studio and on location in Chicago, Paris and New York, using realistic scenes and the city as backdrops.

His photographs suggested that he caught his subjects off guard and midaction, as if they were waiting for a bus, in the middle of a shopping trip or expecting a lunch date. Parks captured these casual moments with a sense of intimacy and awareness. The viewer imagined the moment, which was framed dramatically, as if part of a narrative.

Parks's models appear uninterested, but we know that they are aware of the came ra's eye and that they have been caught in the moment. He photographed them amid the activity of city life - walking, lunching and daydreaming - and all viewed from a relatively close distance. Parks was aware of societal dress codes and the designers' messages about the female body. The models' poses, though subtle, provoke ideas about desire and the idealized body.

When he looked back on his fashion assignments, Parks revealed a sharp eye not just for photography, but for the designer's craft, too.

“Chanel's clothes are comfortable and easy to move in, and her suits are classics,” he wrote in “Voices in the Mirror,” his autobiography. “Molyneux designs for elegance and grace, and his things are very fluid. Schiaparelli is famous for crazy buttons and shocking pinks, and loves to play with different colors. Dior's gowns are very feminine and he's well known for creating the New Look. Balenciaga works for perfection, whether it's an evening dress, suit or coat. … Jacques Fath is all discretion, but his things can be very witty and sexy. His evening dresses are extremely flirtatious.”

Parks's importance to fashion photography is now beyond question. He challenged the genre by inventing ways to enrich our ideas about style. Ultimately, his fashion photography and writings on fashion were simply informed by beauty.

He affectionately remembered those experiences - even with their unexpected contrasts - as he culled photographs for his 1997 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery, “Half Past Autumn,” which I curated with Philip Brookman. I remember looking through stacks of photographs as Parks shared stories from fashion to poverty.

“I had been given assignments I had never expected to earn,” Parks said. “Some proved to be as different as silk and iron. Once, crime and fashion was served to me on the same day. The color of a Dior gown I photographed one afternoon turned out to be the same color as the blood of a murdered gang member I had photographed earlier that morning up in Harlem.”

Gordon Parks, courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation Maximilian Alaska seal fur. New York, 1948.

A five-volume collection of Gordon Parks's work is forthcoming from Steidl.

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Pictures of the Day: Democratic Republic of Congo and Elsewhere

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Photos from Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Egypt and West Bank.

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Fighting Hopelessness Amid Ashes

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Taslima Akhter was overcome with emotion when she arrived at the Tazreen Fashions garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Sunday evening, four hours after fire tore through the building. She watched firefighters battle the blaze - which killed at least 112 people - as throngs of workers and family members waited to see if their l oved ones had survived.

She was overwhelmed, but not surprised. Ms. Akhter had photographed four other fires in Bangladeshi garment factories in which scores of workers, mostly women, had died. She has devoted her life - and her photography - to championing the rights of workers who toil under dangerous conditions.

“It's not an easy experience for me,” she said. “But I took photos because they work dawn to dusk for very little money and their lives are considered to be so cheap, worth nothing.”

On Sunday night, after taking photographs at the factory, Ms. Akhter went to the workers' barracks and houses next door, where she met Julekha Begum, who had lost her husband, Abdul Bari, a sewing machine operator.

“Julekha was crying and said that her husband called her when the fire broke out in the factory and said, ‘Pardon me, my dear, I am going to die,' ” Ms. Akhter said.

When Ms. Akhter entered the factory ruins the next morning, f irefighters were still hauling out corpses in white body bags. She could feel the heat of the fire as she passed the lone staircase in the nine-story building. She saw many broken windows, which workers tried to leap through to save their lives.

“I imagined how the workers passed the last moments of their life,” she said. “How did they feel? When the fire was crawling, when they tried, but found no way to save their life, what their feeling was? Many questions were haunting me and I felt so hopeless.”

She later went to a nearby school that had become a makeshift morgue, where more than a hundred victims were laid out in the corridors while thousands of desperate people searched for their relatives' remains.

Taslima Akhter Fire fighters fought a blaze Saturday that killed more than 100 workers.

“Many couldn't find them because most of the bodies were charred, like coal, or were only skeletons so they had nothing to recognize,” she said.

Ms. Akhter was featured on Lens in August 2011 after she received a Magnum Foundation scholarship that brought her to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to study photography and human rights. Previously, she had studied photojournalism at the Pathshala South Asian Media Academy in Dhaka and completed a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Dhaka.

Her involvement in human rights and labor issues led her to photography. Shahidul Alam, who started the Pathshala South Asian Media Academy as well as the Drik photo agency, said Ms. Akhter's work and concerns echoed that of Lewis Hine.

“She has the level of trust among the workers, and unequaled access that really allows her to be a fly on the wall,” Mr. Al am said.

Bangladesh is the world's second-largest exporter of clothing after China and has more than three million garment workers, most of them women. More than 500 people have died in factory fires since 2006, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an antisweatshop advocacy group.

Safety conditions are notoriously poor in Bangladeshi factories. Many have only one exit and, like the 1911 Triangle factory fire in New York, doors are often locked or blocked. The Tazreen Fashions factory was making apparel for several American and British companies including Walmart.

Ms. Akhter says that the responsibility for the work conditions extends to American businesses and ultimately the consumers, who enjoy cheap prices from equally cheap labor. In Bangladesh, she said, workers typically earn about $37 a month. Even the local factory owners' earnings pale in comparison to what the foreign companies reap.

“The story is all the same,” she said. “Workers wer e locked behind the iron gate and did not get any escape from the fire. Nobody knows the real number of victims. Many are still missing but their bodies not found. They were turned into ashes.”

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A Note to Readers

I'll be off the grid until the middle of next week as I take a few days to visit my daughter in Europe where she's spending a college semester. I know there are a lot of pressing topics out there, and I look forward to coming back to tackle some of them.

My assistant will continue to respond to reader e-mails in my absence at public@nytimes.com.

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Somalia.

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Problems With a Reporter\'s Facebook Posts, and a Possible Solution

Start with a reporter who likes to be responsive to readers, is spontaneous and impressionistic in her personal writing style, and not especially attuned to how casual comments may be received in a highly politicized setting.

Put that reporter in one of the most scrutinized and sensitive jobs in journalism â€" the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times.

Now add Facebook and Twitter, which allow reporters unfiltered, unedited publishing channels. Words go from nascent, half-formed thoughts to permanent pronouncements to the world at the touch of a key.

The result is very likely to be problematic. And for that bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, who moved to Israel from New York earlier this year, and her editors at The Times, it has been.

In terms of social media, Ms. Rudoren has had a rocky start in her new position.

Within a few days of taking the post, she had sent some Twitter messages that brought critici sm, and had people evaluating her politics before she had dug into the reporting work before her.

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic, summarized them: “She shmoozed-up Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian activist who argues for Israel's destruction; she also praised Peter Beinart's upcoming book (‘The Crisis of Zionism') as, ‘terrific: provocative, readable, full of reporting and reflection.' She also linked without comment to an article in a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper.” The headline on Mr. Goldberg's article was, “Twitterverse to New NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief: Stop Tweeting!”

More recently, during the Gaza conflict, she wrote one Facebook post in which she described Palestinians as “ho-hum” about the death of loved ones, wrote of their “limited lives” and, in another, said she shed her first tears in Gaza over a letter from an Israeli family. The comments came off as insensitive and the reaction was sharp, not only from media pundits, but also from dismayed readers.

Philip Weiss, the anti-Zionist Jewish-American journalist who writes about the Middle East for Mondoweiss, his Web site, wrote “she seems culturally bound inside the Israeli experience.”

Ms. Rudoren regrets some of the language she used, particularly the expression “ho-hum.”

“I should have talked about steadfastness or resiliency,” she told me by phone on Tuesday. “That was a ridiculous word to use.” In general, she said, “I just wasn't careful enough.”

Now The Times is taking steps to make sure that Ms. Rudoren's further social media efforts go more smoothly. The foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, is assigning an editor on the foreign desk in New York to work closely with Ms. Rudoren on her social media posts.

The idea is to capitalize on the promise of social media's engagement with readers while not exposing The Times to a reporter's unfiltered and unedited thoughts.

Given the spotlight t hat the Jerusalem bureau chief is bound to attract, and Ms. Rudoren's self-acknowledged missteps, this was a necessary step.

The alternative would be to say, “Let's forget about social media and just write stories.” As The Times fights for survival in the digital age, that alternative was not a good one.

There is, of course, a larger question here. Do Ms. Rudoren's personal musings, as they have seeped out in unfiltered social media posts (and, notably, have been criticized from both the right and the left), make her an unwise choice for this crucially important job?

On this, we should primarily judge her reporting work as it has appeared in the paper and online. During the recent Gaza conflict, she broke news, wrote with sophistication and nuance about what was happening, and endured difficult conditions.

Mr. Kahn described her reporting over the past month as “exemplary.”

Having taken on one of journalism's toughest challenges, Ms. Rudoren deserves every chance to continue to show readers that she is a reporter whose only interest is in telling the story engagingly and truthfully.

Hang Up and Shoot

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As the birthplace of photography, France occupies a storied place in the craft's history. For almost two centuries, its avenues, parks and cafes have inspired the likes of Eugène Atget, George Brassaï, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson … and Nadine Bénichou.

Like the better-known names, Ms. Bénichou's work has been exhibited in Paris. But unlike in past generations, her oeuvre is more portable: she takes pictures with her cellphone. She is among 18 photographers whose work was featured in a large show, “Mobile Photo Paris,” at the Bastille Design Center last week.

Photography has always been a dynamic medium, characterized by rapidly evolving tools and technology. Just think of the tectonic shifts it has undergone since the French inventors Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre were tinkering with heliographs and daguerreotypes. In the past 186 years, photography has evolved from tintypes to wet plate negatives to roll film to digital sensors.

Mobile photography has caught on even faster. No sooner did cellphones begin masquerading as cameras - or vice versa - than people began using them as a means of creative expression, a documentary tool and a way to share art. Today, smartphones are the most popular cameras on the market, and photo-sharing is the No. 1 use of social media.

“Up until now, most of what people have seen of mobile photography has been online,” said Catriona Donagh, an Australian artist whose work appeared in “Mobile Photo Paris.” “We thought it would be something different, a new direction for mobile photography in France.”

A new direction indeed. In a city that spawned some of the greatest photographers in the world, mobile artists like Ms. Bénichou and Ms. Donagh are relatively unknown. The photographers form an eclectic group - mostly French, with a few from the United States, Britain and Australia. Only two are professionals; the others are practicing lawyers, editors, scientists and architects.

What's more, not all of the artwork in the exhibition are simple photographs. Many are “photo creations,” amalgams of photography and digital arts, or photographs captured on a smartphone and edited using those whimsical mobile accessories called apps.

For many mobile photographers, said Ms. Donagh, 52, ta king a picture is just the beginning (below). Afterward, there are hundreds of apps available with which to process and manipulate images. Most cost less than $1 - they do everything from sharpening images, adjusting contrast, adding filters to stitching them together into panoramas. Cellphone cameras may owe their popularity to ease and convenience, but it is the apps that accompany them that have unleashed a flood of innovation and creativity.

Elena Shmagrinskaya From the series “Home ?…”

Nettie Edwards, a 53-year old British artist, is a prime example. The daughter of one of England's first blind photographers, Ms. Edwards grew up in her father's darkroom. She pursued a career in theater design and later dabbled in photograp hy and videography. Three years ago, Ms. Edwards (Slide 9) bought an iPhone.

“I got home and discovered the app store,” she said. “A lot of the work that I do is about memory and loss and sadness. I'm trying to squeeze as much emotion out of this little gadget as I can. With the apps I could start to take the kind of photographs that I could see inside my head.”

Ms. Bénichou uses upward of 100 apps to edit the images she takes with her iPhone (Slides 1, 6 and 11). “It's like a new world every time you open an app,” she said. “It widens your imagination and creativity to have these tools available.”

Of course there are limits to what a cellphone camera can do. But advocates of the mobile movement say the random nature of the pictures they produce using a camera with minimal controls is the perfect antidote to the minute refinements made possible by digital photography. “Because you know that the camera is not capable of sophisticated thing s,” Ms. Donagh said, “you can liberate yourself on an artistic level. It's a challenge to produce something good with a very simple tool.”

Then there is the social component of mobile photography, which can be as powerful as the medium itself. Rather than be tethered to a darkroom or a computer, mobile photographers can shoot, edit and upload images all while walking to work or perhaps during a lunch break. As a result, they are using photo-sharing sites like Instagram and Flickr - or social networking sites like Facebook - as never before, sending images around the world and receiving reactions at warp speed.

Catriona Donagh From the series “L'Anonymat dans la géométrie d'une ville.”

Granted, the mobile photo netwo rk has its critics. Some worry that an understanding of basic photographic principles like aperture or shutter speed is being lost among the new crop of photographers. Others think easy access to cheap photo technologies is resulting in a proliferation of amateur snapshots that destroys the integrity of professional work.

“It's obviously a new form of art and the French are very shy about it,” Ms. Bénichou said. “People don't like the fact that the images are edited because they say it's not reality.”

But photographers have always manipulated their pictures, first in darkrooms and then in Photoshop. Among the first to do so were the pictorialists, said Ms. Bénichou, 49. Responding to criticisms of the day - that photographs reproduced reality rather than interpreted it, as art did - photographers at the turn of the 20th century used lenses and printing processes to distort their images and make them look more like paintings.

Then there is the issu e of democratization.

“Everyone can use a phone,” Ms. Bénichou said. “It's not a real camera. Immediately it raises the question of who is an artist.”

But professional photographers have been grumbling about amateurs rendering their work obsolete since 1888, when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.”

“Because we're pushing photography to the limit more and more,” Ms. Bénichou said, “the old criticisms are coming back.”

Stéphane Mahé From the series “Un dimanche sur terre.”

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Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza and New York.

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Photo Caption Should Have Been Better. But \'Orwellian\'? No.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Girls at a Gaza school were stunned to find it closed. An emboldened Hamas may lead Israel to harden its stance.

The image is moving and emotional. As great photography does, it takes readers someplace, puts us at the scene.

In this case, the destination is Gaza City, where seven schoolgirls â€" clad in their backpacks and blue-striped uniforms with white-eyelet collars â€" have arrived at school only to find that it has been severely damaged by Israeli bombs and therefore closed. They look shocked â€" one girl's hand covers her mouth, another has her hand at her throat .

The photographer Tyler Hicks shot the picture on Saturday, and it appeared at the top of the front page of Sunday's New York Times. Like much of Mr. Hicks's photography, it is evocative, capturing circumstances memorably.

By Sunday afternoon, I had heard from a number of readers and media writers who were critical of the caption, which under a headline that read “Prospects Worsen for Mideast Peace Talks,” said “Girls at a Gaza school were stunned to find it closed. An emboldened Hamas may lead Israel to harden its stance. Page 12.”

Greg Mitchell, a media blogger for The Nation, went so far as to call the caption “Disgraceful, some might say Orwellian.”

“Why closed? You had to go to other photos way over at the NYT site to find out that the school was completely destroyed by an Israeli air strike. The caption might even suggest to some that Hamas had shut down a lightly damaged school. While pro minent placement of the photo might draw criticism from Israelis, the caption seemed aimed at softening that.”

The caption certainly could have been better. But after gathering information from the photographer and an assistant foreign editor, looking at the photographer's original description of the photograph, looking at other photographs from the same shoot and thinking about the caption's multiple purpose, I think that criticism is overstated.

Douglas Schorzman, an assistant foreign editor, told me that it wasn't clear to editors in New York how damaged the building was. “If it was leveled, we just should have said so,” he said. But “on deadline and in the moment, we may not have known that.” And in fact, it wasn't leveled, so it made sense to be cautious.

I exchanged e-mail messages with Mr. Hicks, who wrote that the school was not “completely destroyed.”

“The building was still standing but not safe or in any con dition to be occupied by students,” he said. His original written description, provided to editors on Saturday, said only that the school was damaged.

In addition, the brief caption was serving a second purpose â€" as a way to direct readers to an inside page where several articles were displayed, including one about the prospects for peace talks and the role of Hamas.

Meanwhile, some readers, including Jonathan Blank, saw a different problem with the photograph. They thought that choosing it for the front page showed anti-Israeli bias:

So once again, the Times has opted to editorialize against Israel and in favor of Hamas. I know many people and organizations have long told the Times of its anti-Israel stance, but nothing depicts this better than today's selection of Gazan girls over (Hamas leader Khaled) Meshaal's declaration of war. Perhaps you, as an independent Times insider, can explain to the public why the Times would side with Hamas - an inference that the picture of innocent Gazan girls certainly conveys - over Hamas' reiteration of its intention to destroy Israel.

I have two conclusions: 1.) The Times's coverage of this conflict cannot begin to be judged by the choice of one photo on one day. It has to be put in context over time. (I haven't done that kind of long-term study, though I am paying careful attention to the coverage.) I reject the idea that the choice of this photo indicates an anti-Israeli bias.

2.) The caption could have been clearer and more informative â€" even in a short space, and even with its multiple purpose in mind. It could have briefly described the damage to the school and how it happened. It could have avoided the confusing juxtaposition of the sentence about the school and the one about “emboldened Hamas.” But it was not disgraceful and it was not Orwellian.

A Reckoning at the Frontier

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Mexico's northern borderlands have a dry, rugged feel in Eros Hoagland's photographs - bathed in hot, pale light, with details emerging from the sepia-toned shadows. From quiet moments of mourning and foreboding to wide vistas of a landscape that has challenged generations, he purposely chose this arid palette to illustrate how the drug war has played out along the border.

He acknowledges that he was influenced by the look of the movie “Traffic.” But what he really wanted was the feel - in both his pictures and, more important, among viewers whose emotions have been numbed by the flood of graphic images from the lingering conflict.

“I wanted to develop my own desert look,” said Mr. Hoagland, 43. “I was unsure how the journalistic community would take it. It was a form of manipulation. They'd say, ‘That's not how things look.' But to me, the way things felt kind of trumped that concern.”

Those feelings - haunting, lonely and heartbreaking - suffuse the images in “Reckoning at the Frontier,” a result of his seven years of photographing in and around the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. He intends to publish a book of those images, financed through a Kickstarter campaign that ends this month. His work along the border is also the subject of “Witness: Juarez,” the ini tial installment of an HBO documentary series about conflict photography.

“These people and places are so familiar to us,” Mr. Hoagland said. “We have such an intercambio with Mexico. It's not some far-off exotic conflict in Africa, and yet people can't relate to it very well. It's on our doorstep. We share our country with them. We vacation there. I wanted to put a sense of place to the news headlines.”

Having started in photojournalism in 1993, he tried early on to do a border series, but whether it was because he was green or lacked a solid vision, the project never gelled. Professionally, he followed a path familiar to his generation, working in El Salvador, Colombia and Mexico, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He returned to Mexico in 2005, photographing whatever caught his attention within a mile of the border. He showed some of his initial work to Susan Meiselas, who encouraged him.

“I thought it was important for him to dig into o ne place that could be his own,” Ms. Meiselas said. “I think the danger for a lot of young photographers is they move around lots of places and don't get to know any place well. What I was feeling - not just seeing - was it was a place he had some real kinship to, rather than a place he just passes through.”

Eros Hoagland Members of a Juarez church group sometimes dress up like angels to protest the city's violence.

Over the period of his project, Mr. Hoagland's attention shifted from immigration and people-smuggling to out-of-control violence of the drug wars, where it is sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad. He made that conflict the focus of his project, though keeping the other visual elements that had draw n him to the region.

“It all felt pretty organic,” said Mr. Hoagland, who lives in Tijuana. “I was still interested in the land itself, the geography and how the geography plays into all the politics going on there. You're butting up against the U.S. There's something about this harsh land where over the generations people have somehow eked out a living.”

His palette - warm, desaturated and high contrast - was one way he tried to convey the gritty and unforgiving emotional feel. So, too, was the distance he kept in some shots. It reflected the emotional distance he encountered among his subjects, who were cautious, if not paranoid, and for good reason.

“One of the themes running through my head is everyone is scared, no one knows who anybody is,” he said. “I wanted to convey that with the actual physical distance. Like you're not supposed to be there. Like I'm not supposed to be there.”

There is a searing moment in “Witness: Juarez† in which that sentiment resounds stunningly. Mr. Hoagland and a Mexican colleague respond to the scene of a triple homicide, where a mother sobs for her dead son. A man in the crowd urges him to leave the woman alone.

“Respect the pain, my friend,” the man says. “Would you like your kids to be killed also?”

“I know what it feels like,” Mr. Hoagland replies. As he walks off into the night and back to his car, he mutters to himself. “Don't tell me I don't know what it feels like. … There were cameras all over my dad's funeral, too.”

His father was John Hoagland, a photojournalist who was killed in 1984 while covering the civil war in El Salvador for Newsweek. His son recalled in the documentary the counsel his mother, Nancy, gave him when his father's death drew international news media attention.

“Don't get mad, Son,” he recalled her saying. “They're just doing their job, just like your dad did.”

Doing that job has bec ome increasingly difficult in places like Mexico, where journalists face terrifying levels of violence and intimidation. He credits Mexican colleagues like Julian Cardona with helping him learn how to read - and feel - a crime scene, knowing when it's O.K. to shoot or better to leave.

To some extent, Mr. Hoagland knew that already from his father's fate.

“I realized how quickly you can get zapped out there,” he said. “It made me really cautious. I don't run into things. I walk in and figure things out.”

That back story informs his images, said David Frankham, the co-executive producer of “Witness” with Michael Mann.

“He relates on a human level,” Mr. Frankham said. “He's not just there taking pictures, for the visuals. He relates to the struggle and to the pain. It's visual information and also emotion. It's both. It's the external and the internal. He's very strong and holds a lot in. But you feel it in his work.”

Although h e said his own loss could never compare with what others in El Salvador or Mexico have endured, Mr. Hoagland said it gave him a bond of sorts with his subjects.

“I've found this common ground trying to deal with people's pain because I've been dealing with the pain for years,” he said. “It helps me not to get too sentimental or caught up in death. My mom for years was a hospice nurse, and I talked to her about these things. It's always been there in my life, dealing with death. That's the way of things. People die. It can be sad and heartbreaking. And life goes on.”

Eros Hoagland An altar's shadow near a highway that is often used to ship drugs to and from Tijuana, Mexico.

Follow Eros Hoagland, handle @GueroFantasma , David Gonzalez - @dgbxny - and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

Pictures of the Day: Democratic Republic of Congo and Elsewhere

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Photos from Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Gaza and Bangladesh.

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Sunday Column: Reviews by Times Critics with \'All Guns Blazing\'

Reviews With ‘All Guns Blazing'

THE Times's culture editor, Jonathan Landman, calls them “exuberant pans” - reviews so energetically negative that they seem to achieve liftoff. They blast into the media world with cosmic force. Everyone wants to talk about them in a “did you see that?” way. Sometimes, they become instant classics. And, it goes almost without saying, the critic's fun is inversely proportional to how it feels on the receiving end.

The most recent example at The Times is the now-famous skewering of the Times Square restaurant recently opened by Guy Fieri, a Food Network star. The review, by Pete Wells, took an all-question approach, beginning: “Guy Fieri, have you eaten in your new restaurant in Times Square?”

He also asked: “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?” and “When we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?” and “Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?”

As the review was going viral, I spoke with Mr. Wells, who told me that he had set out hoping to enjoy Guy's American Kitchen & Bar. Although he knew it was not a sophisticated destination, “I would have liked to write the ‘man-bites-dog' review” - he wanted to be pleasantly surprised. Despite four visits, that was not to be. Of course, it's not just restaurants that can end up as the unlucky targets of a critic's ire. So can plays, albums, actors, art exhibits and movies.

And sometimes a critic's dismissal becomes immortal. Who can forget Dorothy Parker's judgment that Katharine Hepburn could run “the gamut of emotions from A to B,” or Pauline Kael's vaporization of the director Paul Schrader's “Hardcore”: “For Schrader to call himself a whore would be vanity; he doesn't know how to turn a trick.”

From Mr. Landman's point of view, the “all-guns-blazing takedown” shouldn't happen often. “There are a thousand ticks between the greatest and the worst,” he said, “and a great critic is unerringly accurate in picking the right place on that scale.”

Still, there are times when it is only right to wield a sharp knife. And those with the greatest verbal gifts do it memorably. Consider, for example, a 2006 review by Garrison Keillor of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” by Bernard-Henri Levy, a book meant to update another Frenchman's view of the New World. Mr. Keillor took aim at the pomposity: Monsieur Levy “is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book.”

When he was done, you could practically see him blowing the smoke from the mouth of his six-shooter before nonchalantly replacing it in its holster. Or think of Jon Pareles's demolition of the band Coldplay as it released its long-awaited “X&Y” album. I mentioned this review a few days ago to a 24-year-old journalist friend, and he surprised me by immediately reciting its key phrase verbatim. He was in high school when it was published in The Times in 2005.

Pareles began: “There's nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.”

And only then does he deliver the solar-plexus punch: “But put them all together and they add up to Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.”

Or recall two theater reviews last year, both by Ben Brantley, of “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” - one while the troubled show was in its endless previews, the second after it was supposedly fixed. In the second review, he wrote: “This singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It's just a bore.”

The Times film critic Manohla Dargis told me that, for critics, this is not the norm. (Mr. Landman, though, recalls her wickedly funny pan of “The Cat in the Hat” for The Los Angeles Times in 2003 - written in Seussian rhyme.) “Most movies are middling,” she said. “They're fine, but they're not transporting you.”

Ms. Dargis is acutely aware of how a bad review can hurt - not only feelings, but also commercial success. This is especially true for critics at The Times; a great deal rides on the judgment of the paper of record. Some blockbuster movies, though, are “practically critic-proof,” she said. When the subject is vulnerable, one solution may be to not review at all. But sometimes that's not practical. The Times can pass on reviewing, for example, an independent filmmaker's fledgling effort or an art exhibit in a small gallery, but it is committed to reviewing major concerts, films and theater productions, whatever their quality.

Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture? I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic's quiver, but reached for only rarely.

As for Mr. Fieri, he responded as do many who have been similarly stung. He blamed the messenger. On NBC's “Today,” he accused Mr. Wells of an agenda: “It's a great way to make a name for yourself - go after a celebrity chef who is not a New Yorker.” My sense is that Mr. Wells's heart was pure, but that the material was irresistible - even if the cuisine, awash in Donkey Sauce, was not.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 25, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Reviews With ‘All Guns Blazing'.

The Times Should Explain Marginal Tax Rates - Repeatedly, if Necessary

Now that Thanksgiving is over, isn't it time to turn our attention from turkey, parades and football to, well, marginal tax rates?

A number of Times readers think it's high time.

They were disturbed last week when a Business Day story quoted â€" and didn't challenge the thinking of - small-business owners who didn't seem to understand how marginal tax rates work. Under a headline that read, “Investors Rush to Beat Threat of Higher Taxes,” the article quoted a chiropractor in McLean, Va., saying that she and her husband planned to monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing a threshold for higher taxes. She appeared to believe that if the income went over “the cutoff line,” that all of their income would be taxed at a higher rate. That's not the case. Only the amount over the limit is taxed at the higher rate.

The Times, these readers say, shouldn't let inaccurate thinking go unchallenged - any time it appears.

Le n Charlap, a reader from Princeton, N.J., put it this way: “You know what marginal rates are. It is your obligation to explain this your readers, many of whom do not or forget to apply that knowledge.”

And The Times took a hit from Jason Linkins in The Huffington Post. He called it “the sort of innumeracy that spreads casually, in minor articles such as this piece in The Times, where this aggravating ignorance somehow manages to find its way into the copy.” The misunderstanding, he claimed, “could spread like a supervirus.”

“There are not ‘two sides' to this issue,” Mr. Linkins summed up. “You either understand how marginal tax rates work or you do not, and reporters are absolutely allowed to point out who is right and who is wrong.”

Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor of The Times, called this complaint “a fair point.” He said that The Times should do a better job of making clear how marginal tax rates work. “We'll keep that in mind going forward.”

There is a need to be precise, he said. But the broader point of the article, and others like it, “that some people may change their economic behavior based on tax policies is a reasonable one to write about, even if some people think that it won't because it adheres to their political leanings.”

He noted that an article the following day explained marginal tax rates and their consequences.

I've written in the past about fact-checking, and the growing desire by readers to have The Times, and other news organizations, clearly state established truths, even when there is a countervailing opinion. That principle applies to this subject, too.

When someone gets it wrong, The Times has an obligation to set the record straight, right then and there.

The iPad Mini vs. the iPad Biggie

There's trouble in Pixeltown.

The reviewers, non-reviewers, and Mac pundits are embroiled in an intense debate: is the Apple iPad Mini better than the regular Apple iPad?

The iPad Mini is a perfect form-factor, they all agree. The iPad Biggie, the larger version with the retina display, is the perfect screen resolution. But is it better to wait for the Mini to get the screen of the Biggie? That, dear reader, is the question.

It's O.K. Take a deep breath, we'll get through this together.

Dave Winer, who has been covering the tech business since before devices began with the letter “i,” argued on Gizmodo that the Apple Mini is a failure - a travesty, if you will. He thinks that the screen, with its low resolution pixel density, signifies one thing: Apple's decline.

“I believe it's not only not a winner, but it signals a new Apple that's no longer beyond compare,” Mr. Winer wrote.

But others disagree. (Go figure.)

John Gruber , the author of the Apple blog Daring Fireball, unsurprisingly loves his iPad Mini more than chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles on top.

“I completely stand behind mine, and still have barely even used the iPad 4 I have on loan from Apple,” Mr. Gruber wrote. “In the meantime, we have to choose: big iPad with sharp retina display, or small iPad with a fuzzy one. I've gone small and fuzzy.”

So what do mere mortals decide in a debate worthy of Revenge of the Nerds?

I've used them both and I have to say, the iPad Mini, although fuzzier than the retina display variety, is incomparable to the larger iPad. Picking them both up together feels like picking up a feather and a dumbbell. And as any geek who hasn't been to the gym in a while knows, lighter is usually better.

I never felt like the original iPad was a portable device. Its size was too close to the Macbook Air to be different. Frankly, it was just too heavy to tote around.

The iPad Mi ni, which now fits in my jacket pockets, is the perfect size. Sure, it doesn't have a screen that allows me to zoom into see a grain of sand, or a pimple, but the weight and shape instantly negate that. 

I've gone warm and fuzzy, too.

Leaked Report on Sri Lanka Critical of U.N.

“Sri Lanka's Killing Fields,” a documentary broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 News in 2011.

An internal review of how the United Nations handled the bloody final months of Sri Lanka's civil war in 2009, when as many as 40,000 civilians were killed, has concluded that the response was “a grave failure of the U.N.,” according to a leaked draft of the report.

The investigative panel, led by Charles Petrie, a former United Nations official, criticized what it called “a sustained and institutionalized reluctance” by staff members in Sri Lanka at the time “to stand up for the rights of the people they were mandated to assist.” In blunt language, the report's executive summary states that “many senior U.N. staff simply did not perceive the prevention of killing of civilians as their responsibility.”

The report, copies of which were given to the BBC and The New York Times, also found fault with the way the crisis was dealt with by senior United Nations officials in New York. “Decision-making across the U.N. was dominated by a culture of trade-offs â€" from the ground to U.N. headquarters,” the draft report states. Officials chose “not to speak up” about “broken commitments and violations of international law” by both the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tiger rebels because that “was seen as the only way to increase U.N. humanitarian access” to victims of the conflict.

The report does note that “the last phase of the conflict in Sri Lanka presented a major challenge” to the international body.

The U.N. struggled to exert influence on the Government which, with the effective acquiescence of a post-9/11 world order, was determined to defeat militarily an or ganization designated as terrorist. Some have argued that many deaths could have been averted had the Security Council and the Secretariat, backed by the U.N. country team, spoken out loudly early on, notably by publicizing the casualty numbers. Others say that the question is less whether the U.N. should assume responsibility for the tragedy, but more whether it did everything it could to assist the victims.

The internal review panel was established by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. A spokesman for Mr. Ban refused to comment on the leaked draft on Tuesday, but told reporters that the secretary general planned to meet Mr. Petrie on Wednesday morning and that the final version of the report would be made public soon.

Lyse Doucet, the chief international correspondent for BBC News who obtained the leaked draft, reported on Tuesday that United Nations sources said that the “brief executive summary, which sets out the panel's conclu sions in stark terms, has been removed,” from the final report.

Brazil\'s Banknotes Still Praise God, For Now

A close view of the Portuguese words for “God Be Praised” on Brazil's currency.

A federal prosecutor in Brazil is seeking a court order to force the country's central bank to replace the nation's entire supply of paper currency with bills that do not display the phrase “God Be Praised,” the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported on Monday.

The prosecutor, Jefferson Aparecido Dias, whose office defends the rights of citizens in the city of São Paulo, said that he had received a complaint last year about the use of the phrase. He argued in a 17-page motion filed on Monday that the words “Deus Seja Louvado,” which have ap peared on notes of the Brazilian real since 1986, violate the rights of non-Christians and non-believers.

Although he acknowledged that most Brazilians are Christian, the prosecutor wrote, “the Brazilian state is secular and, as such, should be completely detached from any religious manifestation.” To make his case that the phrase was inappropriate, he asked the court to consider the reaction of Christians if the nation's currency included calls to worship figures revered by Muslims, Buddhists, observers of Candomblé or Hindus - or a statement endorsing atheism. “Let's imagine if the real note had any of these phrases on it: ‘Praise Allah,' ‘Praise Buddha,' ‘Hail Oxossi,' ‘Hail Lord Ganesh,' or ‘God does not exist.'”

Writing on Twitter, the Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal Odilo Scherer, wondered if anyone even noticed the phrase, which is rendered in tiny letters on the notes.

Você já percebeu que as notas Real tem uma rederência a Deus? Há alguém querendo tirar. Que v. Acha?

- Dom Odilo Scherer (@DomOdiloScherer) 12 Nov 12

The cardinal also said in a statement, “The phrase should make no difference to those who do not believe in God. But it is meaningful for all those who do believe in God. And those who believe in God also pay taxes and are most of the population.”

Brazil's central bank had previously replied to the complaint by arguing that the religious reference was valid because the preamble to the Brazilian constitution explicitly states that the democracy was formed “under the protection of God.” The bank's response to the prosecutor added that the state, “not being atheist, anti-clerical or anti-religious, can legitimately make a reference to the existence of a higher being, a divinity, as long as, in doing so, it does not make an allusion to a specific religious doctrine.”

CareZone, an Anti-Facebook

Social media is about sharing ever more information about ourselves with an ever larger crowd. But some of the most valuable information, about things like health and children, needs to be kept close. Now there is a social too for that, too, and it comes from a well-known name in technology.

Jonathan Schwartz, the former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, is cofounder of CareZone, a service that enables families to organize care of their loved ones. CareZone provides secure storage of patient information like medical records and prescriptions, plus critical phone numbers and digitized documents associated with care, like insurance information. There is also a journal feature, for keeping notes on things patent conditions and future appointments.

“It's a biological reality that we are all going to take care of somebody,” says Mr. Schwartz, who oversaw the sale of Sun to Oracle in 2009. “You need a safe place to keep information about things like doctors , care and medicines. You need to be able to share that with your spouse, your immediate family and trusted neighbors.”

The service debuted last February with little notice, and while Mr. Schwartz would not say how many subscribers he has attracted, he says it is growing. On Tuesday, Mr. Schwartz added voice broadcast and calendar features designed to make it both more functional and more accessible to larger groups of people.

The calendar enables subscribers to assign tasks, like picking up medication or taking someone for an examination. The broadcast service enables messages of up to 10 minutes to be sent to the phones of up to 100 people at a time. Formerly a Web-based service, the company is adding a mobile application.

CareZone is not taking the usual social media route of targeted advertising, since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, closely guards how closely medical information must be shared. “Advertisin g and HIPAA are oil and water,” Mr. Schwartz says, adding that CareZone will have an overt policy of “no ads, no data mining.”

It is an interesting reflection of changing times. During the early days of the Internet, Scott McNealy, Sun's cofounder and Mr. Schwartz's onetime mentor, was known for saying that “privacy is dead, get over it.” Now that we are under even more corporate surveillance, Mr. Schwartz calls privacy “something people will pay for. There is a lot of value in the data that only you have.”

The trick is to keep things private, but widen the circle of trust to include larger organizations that participate in care, and also pay. The new features are intended to make CareZone an attractive tool for home care workers, outpatient hospitals, and church groups trying to establish food and care services for a parishioner.

While the main application is free for up to five individuals under care, from January 1 it will cost $5 a month or $49 a year to use CareZone for five to 10 people. From 10 to 100 individuals, CareZone charges $25 a month. There may be additional charges for above 100 people. CareZone will also add other paid features, like charging for lots of data storage.He figures that professional caregivers will pay for the service because it will help them manage patients.

“My bet is that a year from now hospitals will be a revenue stream,” says Mr. Schwartz. “Pharmacies and hospitals are looking to communicate with you in a secure way.”

RIM\'s Chief Is Confident of BlackBerry 10 Success

Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research In Motion, visited The New York Times readily tells his employees, developers and customers, BlackBerry 10, the name for the new phones and the software platform running it, is a very big bet for RIM. If it catches on, he has saved the company.

In a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters, he expressed his confidence. “I don't expect things to get much worse,” he said.

It was clear from the presentation that the final versions of the phone, which will debut Jan. 30, won't introduce any significant hardware innovations. It has the rectangular slab look of smartphones already on the market.

The hardware varies in the absence of a home button and the inclusion of a red LED light that flashes when a message comes in. According to earlier announcements by Mr. Heins, RIM is also making a model with a physical keyboard.

On Monday, Mr. Heins focused on the integration of the usability of the software. A home button is needed on iPhones and phones using Google's Android operating system, he said, because those operating systems require users to repeatedly switch between applications to perform different tasks. In contrast, BlackBerry 10 will consolidate bits of information and capabilities that are distributed through separate apps on current smart phones. BlackBerry 10's messaging center, for example, can display Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages, texts and Twitter posts along with e-mails. In turn, BlackBerry 10 users will be able use that hub to reply to, as an example, Facebook messages without opening their phones' Facebook app.

And he says it can be done with a flick of the thumb.

Similarly, the BlackBerry 10 address book can display all recent e-mails from any contact and even pull news stories and other information related to his or her company from the web.

“It is stress relief, it doesn't make you look at all your applications al l the time,” Mr. Heins said. “This is going to catch on with a lot of people.”

First, of course, RIM will have to show consumers how BlackBerry 10 differs and then persuade them that its features are indeed an advance.

On Monday, it look the RIM group just over 30 minutes to demonstrate only some of the new phone's features. But Mr. Heins said that the new phones' advantages will be so apparent to customers that it will only take “a one-minute sales pitch in a shop” to win them over.

It was clear from RIM's presentation, however, that the company is banking on it really catching on with corporate information technology departments. Frank Boulben, RIM's chief marketing officer, who was also at the interview, said that he believes that only about half of companies allow employees to choose their own smart phones. Unlike many other industry observers, Mr. Boulben also predicted that some companies may return to selecting their employees phones to reduce technology support costs.

To that end, BlackBerry 10 will allow corporations to segregate corporate data and apps from a user's personal material. As a result, Mr. Heins said, information technology departments will be able to wipe out all of a company's data on a phone when an employee quits while leaving the former worker's data, including photos, untouched.

Despite the dismal failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, Mr. Heins has grand ambitions for the BlackBerry 10 phone in the corporate workplace. He said that RIM is pitching the new phone to corporations as a replacement for desktop and laptop computers in the offices over time. He sketched out a scenario where BlackBerry 10 phones will act as a building passes for employees who, once at their desks, will connect their BlackBerry to a keyboard and display.

“Whenever you enter an office you don't have your laptop with you, you have your mobile computer power exactly here,” Mr. Heins said patting a BlackBerry 10 phone sitting in a holster on his hip. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years.”

Nokia to Offer Its Maps for iPhones and Android Phones

Nokia still hasn't found its way to a successful comeback in the smartphone market. But the company is hoping to get its tentacles into competitors' phones through mapping applications, a move it hopes will help it improve its maps.

The company said on Tuesday that in the coming weeks it would release a maps app called Here in Apple's App Store. It will be a free download for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch owners. Nokia also said it would release a toolkit for programmers to make Nokia-powered mapping apps for Android phones. And it is forming a partnership with Mozilla, the browser company, to develop location features for its new operating system, called Firefox OS.

Nokia has emphasized the power and thoroughness of its mapping database, which has information on 200 countries, in an effort to distinguish its new Lumia smartphones from the competition. For instance, when Apple's new maps system turned out to have some embarrassing lapses, Nokia published a b log post that compared its maps with Apple's and Google's and, of course, concluded the Nokia maps were better.

But Nokia's Lumia smartphones haven't sold very well. So why give away its secret sauce to rivals?

Stephen Elop, chief executive of Nokia, said in an interview that in order to ensure that its mapping platform stays competitive, it needs lots of users. The more people who look up directions or search for locations on its maps, the smarter the system gets. And Nokia can still build exclusive location features into its Lumia phones, he said.

“For the location platform to be at the highest quality, one needs scale, and you need as many different people contributing as possible,” Mr. Elop said. “Of course, Nokia will build apps, some of them unique to Lumia devices, that gain a competitive advantage for Nokia.”

He said that, for instance, current Lumia phones use an app called City Lens that enables users to point the camera at real-wor ld objects and see data overlaid on top of them on the screen. Pointing the camera at a restaurant pulls up online reviews for it. That feature will not be available in the apps for other phones.

If Nokia's mapping app for the iPhone is released soon, it could beat Google to the punch. Apple's maps app previously used Google's mapping data, and now Google is reportedly developing its own iOS maps app.

Nokia's Here app for iOS includes voice-guided walking navigation and public transportation directions - features that Apple's maps app lacks. And Mr. Elop noted that a particular feature that iPhone owners using the Now app might enjoy is offline support. A person can specify that he spends most of his time in New York, for example, and download the maps in advance so that location searches can be done more quickly, or even in areas with no cellphone reception, like in a subway tunnel.

“Many people have stared at their map waiting for their tiles to downlo ad for some time,” he said. “We're able to put that computational mapping data onto the devices, so that's a significant improvement.”

Nokia also announced that it had agreed to acquire Earthmine, a mapping company based in Berkeley, Calif., that specializes in three-dimensional maps showing street views. It said it expected the deal to close by the end of the year. Doug Dawson, a Nokia spokesman, declined to say how much the company was paying for Earthmine.

Dropbox Passes 100 Million Users

Dropbox, the online storage company, said Tuesday that it had surpassed 100 million users.

The company said it quadrupled its user base in the last year, and it attributed its rapid growth to more consumers and small businesses porting their personal and professional files to the Internet.

“Even 100 million is still at a single dot percentage of the people we could reach,” said Drew Houston, one of the founders of the company, in an interview.

The milestone is an important one for the start-up, which is aiming to stay neck-and-neck with technology juggernauts like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft that are ramping up their own cloud storage offerings. Apple alone said recently that it has 190 million users of its online storage service, iCloud.

But Mr. Houston said the company was not worried about the competition.

“Those companies are busy trying to build something we had four years ago,” he said. “We're out front. We're already out there and building smaller features and things. All those other companies have turf to protect, and they're fighting a battle on a totally different front.”

Dropbox's main goal, he said, was to offer people a service that lets them save any file from anywhere, regardless of “the logo on the back of the computer or device,” and access it from anywhere, whenever they need it.

Dropbox has had several security skirmishes in the last year, including a breach that caused some users to received spammy messages. But Mr. Houston said the company had added features to prevent future discrepancies and insisted that the glitches had not deterred people from signing up or storing their personal files with the service.

“If anything, people are only putting more in there than they were six months ago,” he said. Each day, Dropbox users store more than 1 billion items in its service, said Mr. Houston.

“That's more tweets than are on Twitter,” he said . “We're talking Libraries of Congress every day.”

Last year, the company raised a staggering $250 million in venture capital, which lifted the company's valuation to $4 billion, making it one of the hotter properties in Silicon Valley, along with Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb and Square.

Why Sinofsky Left: A Web Round-up

The announcement of Steven Sinofsky's ouster from Microsoft came late on Monday, so the story has only begun to be reported. Here is what various news organizations and bloggers are saying:

Ashlee Vance at BusinessWeek wrote:

The big knock on Sinofsky was his often-prickly nature. He wasn't seen as a team player within Microsoft and was instead known for protecting his fiefdom. That approach doesn't go over well at today's Microsoft, which needs to prove that Windows is just one piece of a larger collective that includes phone software, online services, and entertainment products delivered via the Xbox. Sinofsky also proved reticent to speak with the press and was barely heard from as Windows 8 hit the market late last month.

Mary Jo Foley, one of the wisest Microsoft watchers, wrote at ZDNet:

Windows 8 launched commercially just about three weeks ago; it's too soon to judge if the latest Windows release and the Microsoft Surface tablet will be deemed successes or failures. And still months before anyone will be sacrificed if internal projections are unmet.

I give more credence to the politics theory.

She referred readers to a recent article on Mr. Sinofsky by Jay Greene of CNet. Then she noted:

Remember that word: collaboration. It can mean anything from being willing to use other teams' code, to not standing in the way when another division launches its product on a competitive platform.

Sinofsky is known inside and outside the company as a guy who got things done and done his way. Rumors regularly reappeared about Sinofsky angling to take over more business units. And until recently, it seemed like Microsoft's own senior leadership team, as well as Ballmer himself, had capitulated, allowing Sinofsky to make whatever management decisions he deemed fit. Those who disagreed left or were shown the door (and probably won't be back, though never say never).

But more recently, something seemingly changed, including the rhetoric.

Kara Swisher, at AllThingsD, concurred, writing:

In the case of the seemingly sudden departure of Windows head Steve Sinofsky yesterday, several high-level sources at the company said that it came down to former C.E.O. and co-founder Bill Gates's backing of current C.E.O. Steve Ballmer in the controversial decision to part ways with the powerful exec.

The goal? To better allow various units work together more closely going forward.

An industry blog, Tim Anderson's ITWriting, said:

One line of thought is that Windows 8 and Surface RT are failing because users do not like the dramatic changes, with the new tiled personality and disappeared Start menu, and therefore its architect is departing.

I do not believe this for several reasons. One is that the promoted Julie Larson-Green is a key c reator and proponent of the new design (call it Metro if you like). She worked with Sinofsky on the Office Ribbon way back, a project that has some parallels with Windows 8: take a critically important product and revamp its user interface in ways that customers are not requesting or expecting.

And then there was Twitter silliness. Charles Cooper of CNet captured a lot of it â€" ties to the Petreaus Affair and Scott Forestall's recent departure from Apple.

Daily Report: Facebook Confronts the Problem of Fakery

Fakery is all over the Internet, but it is a particular problem for Facebook because it calls into question the social network's basic premise, Somini Sengupta reports in The New York Times.

Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and the service has been used to spread false information, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.

But Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It's pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook. But Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company's user base, now in excess of one billion, was false, duplicate or undesirable.

The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process of going public. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members who use machine learning and human skills to w eed out fraud.

Daily Report: Facebook Confronts the Problem of Fakery

Fakery is all over the Internet, but it is a particular problem for Facebook because it calls into question the social network's basic premise, Somini Sengupta reports in The New York Times.

Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and the service has been used to spread false information, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.

But Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It's pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook. But Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company's user base, now in excess of one billion, was false, duplicate or undesirable.

The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process of going public. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members who use machine learning and human skills to w eed out fraud.

The Leader of Windows Exits Microsoft

SEATTLE - Microsoft has unexpectedly parted ways with Steven Sinofsky, the leader of its lucrative Windows division and an executive often mentioned as a possible successor to the company's current chief executive.

In a surprise announcement made late Monday evening, Microsoft said that Mr. Sinofsky, the president of its Windows division, would leave the company immediately after a 23-year career there. His departure was a mutual decision by Mr. Sinofsky and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, according to a person briefed on the situation who was not authorized to speak on the matter.

His departure comes just weeks after Microsoft released Windows 8, the company's biggest overhaul to its flagship software product in years. The move raises questions about how Microsoft, one of the giants in the technology business, will prepare itself for a new generation of leadership.

In an e-mail sent to all Microsoft employees Monday evening, Mr. Ballmer said the departure of Mr. Sinofsky, which he described as Mr. Sinofsky's decision, comes at the start of a “new era” at Microsoft with the release of a wave of new products like Windows 8.

“I am grateful for the work that Steven has delivered in his time at our company,” Mr. Ballmer said in the e-mail. Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, said Mr. Sinofsky was not available for an interview. In a statement announcing his departure, Mr. Sinofsky, 47, said, “I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.”

Mr. Sinofsky was seen as one of the most competent managers within Microsoft and earned high marks for helping to improve the quality of its software after the company released Windows Vista, a widely criticized version of the operating system. A former technical assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, he was known to be a big admirer of Apple's attention to detail in its products.

His name was often floated by people speculating about a possible successor to Mr. Ballmer, who has not announced any plans to retire from the company.

But Mr. Sinofsky was also a polarizing figure who alienated many other members of Microsoft's senior leadership team. For that reason, he was viewed by many insiders as an unlikely replacement for Mr. Ballmer, one whose elevation to the top job would have created waves of dissent within the company.

By his detractors, Mr. Sinofsky was seen as territorial and often unwilling to cooperate with other divisions. In an internal review of his job performance last year, Mr. Sinofsky was faulted for failing to make sure that Microsoft lived up to a 2009 agreement with European regulators to offer users an easy way to install competitive Web browsers in Windows, according to a filing with securities regulators.

Mr. Sinofsky was also faulted for a 3 percent decline in the revenue of Microsoft's Windows business, long one of its most profitable divisions and the foundation for its strength in the personal computing market. As a result of those failings, Mr. Sinofsky received 60 percent of the bonus he was to receive last year.

Windows 8, the product Mr. Sinofsky most recently oversaw, has received mixed reviews so far. The product has a drastically different look than previous versions, and Microsoft tailored the new operating system for use with tablets and other devices with touch-sensing screens.

Mr. Sinofsky also oversaw Microsoft's decision to get into the computer hardware business with Surface, a tablet computer that has also earned mixed reviews.

Julie Larson-Green, another longtime Microsoft employee in its Windows division, will take over the leadership of all engineering responsibilities related to Windows. Tami Reller, the chief financial officer of the Windows division, will run business and marketing for the group.

More Companies Are Tracking Online Data

The number of trackers collecting data on users' activities on the most popular Web sites in the United States has significantly increased in the last five months, according to new research from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Called the “Web Privacy Census,” the Berkeley project aims to measure online privacy by conducting periodic web crawls and comparing the number of cookies and other types of tracking technology found over time on the most visited sites.

During a Web crawl conducted on Oct. 24th, researchers, using a list of the 100 most popular sites compiled by Quantcast, an analytics and audience targeting firm, found cookies on every site.

On those top 100 sites, researchers found 6,485 standard cookies last month compared to 5,795 cookies in mid-May. In both months, third party trackers, not the Web sites themselves, set a majority of those cookies, the report said.

In both October and last May, cookies placed by DoubleClick, Google's ad technology service, appeared on the most sites on the top 100 list. ScorecardResearch, an analytics unit of comScore, was the second-most prevalent tracker, researchers reported.

The number of cookies on the top 1,000 and 25,000 web sites also increased significantly, researchers said.

“More popular sites are using more cookies,” the report said.

The Berkeley study comes at a time of fierce debate between federal regulators, advertising associations and consumer advocates over how to best regulate online tracking. Marketers advocate self-regulation, allowing consumers who wish to opt out of receiving ads based on data-mining to use an already-established industry program. Some consumer advocates are pushing for federal regulation as well as a “Do Not Track” mechanism that would allow Internet users to control tracking through settings on their own computer browsers.

Chris Hoofnagle, the director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley center and the co-author of the study, said he hoped the data would set a baseline, providing all sides in the debate with empirical information as to the optimum method to regulate tracking.

“I'm hoping that it will inform which approach is the best,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “We are not going to be well-served unless we measure these trends more rigorously.”

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Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

3:21 p.m. | Updated

Adding text-messaging statistics among corporate customers.

In countries around the world, text-message traffic has been shrinking because Internet-powered alternatives are becoming so widely used. American carriers have fought off the decline - until now.

For the first time, the American wireless market saw a decline in the total number of messages sent by each customer each month, according to a report published Monday by Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst who is a consultant for wireless carriers. In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter.

Though that's a small dip, the change is noteworthy because for several years, text messaging had been steadily growing in the United States. Mr. Sharma said it was too early to tell whether the decline here would continue, but he noted that Internet-based messaging services, like Facebook messaging and Apple's iMessage, had been chomping away at SMS usage. He said the decline would become more pronounced as more people buy smartphones. A bit more than 50 percent of cellphone owners here have smartphones.

The downward trend in text messaging is also evident among American businesses who offer cellphones to their employees. Tero Kuittinen, vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps people manage cellphone costs, said that employees at 10 of its corporate clients were sending 5 to 10 percent fewer text messages than a year ago.

Nonetheless, the seemingly imminent decline of text messaging, which is highly lucrative for carriers, doesn't mean they need to lose much sleep. Big carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless are still posting healthy profits, largely because of revenue from mobile data plans, the fees people pay to use the Internet over their networks. Among the top three carriers, mobile data accounts for about 45 percent of the average amount of money made from each customer, Mr. Sharma said.

Voting for U.N. Rights Council Puts Focus on Records of Panel\'s Member States

Those who criticize the United Nations as a toothless and dysfunctional organization often point to the membership of the Human Rights Council to make their case. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Russia currently hold seats. The body has been a vocal and reliable critic of Israel, but has been lenient on countries like Sri Lanka, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Even the United States refused to participate in the council, until the Obama administration reversed a Bush-era policy and ran successfully for a seat in 2009. On Monday, the U.S. won re-election to the body for another three-year term.

Today 18 new states will gain seats and activists have mobilized once again to denounce each potential member's human rights record. “We need better ingredients in the soup,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said about members on Friday at an event at the United Nations.

UN Watch and the Human Rights Foundation invited activists fro m Venezuela, Pakistan and Kazakhstan to speak about human rights violations. The three countries are likely to gain council membership today, even as the two groups consider them “not qualified” to serve, based on an examination of their domestic rights protections and their voting record at the United Nations.

“It would be immoral to let Venezuela join if it doesn't improve its behavior,” said the Venezuelan businessman Eligio Cedeño, who supported opposition politicians before being arrested and charged with circumventing currency controls.

As my colleague Simon Romero reported in 2010, a judge, María Lourdes Afiuni, freed Mr. Cedeño after a U.N. legal panel said his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law. The ruling by Judge Afiuni angered President Hugo Chávez, who, while contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret police to arrest her. She was senten ced to 30 years and is currently under house arrest. Mr. Cedeño fled to the United States.

U.N. Watch and the Human Rights Foundation also criticized Pakistan for failing “to meet the minimal standards of a free democracy.” A major point of international scrutiny and condemnation has been Pakistan's blasphemy law.

Sajid Christopher, a Christian activist, denounced the law as an instrument of intimidation against religious minorities. “The law requires neither proof of intent nor evidence to be presented after allegations are made, and includes no penalties for false allegations,” said Mr. Christopher, the head of a group called Human Friends Organization International.

He mentioned the case of Rimsha Masih. My colleagues Declan Walsh and Salman Masood reported in August that Rimshah, a 14-year-old Christian girl living outside Islamabad, was detained for weeks after being accused of burning pages from a religious textbook. Some reports said she had Down syndrome. Her case unleashed a public furor that showed the deep polarization in Pakistani society over the blasphemy law.

Igor Vinyavsky, a newspaper editor from Kazakhstan, denounced harassment and persecution against independent media outlets. In its latest press freedom index, Reporters Without Borders ranked Kazakhstan 154th out of 179 countries. Mr. Vinyavsky was detained in January and held for two months, accused of distributing leaflets calling for an insurrection, a charge he has denied. He was arrested after a raid on his Almaty-based newspaper, Vzglyad, in which the security forces confiscated all reporting equipment, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported.

“To elect Kazakhstan would be a baffling and shameful act,” Mr. Vinyavsky said Friday through a translator.

With each speaker, frustration about Venezuela, Pakistan and Kazakhstan joining the Human Rights Council became more palpable. But some, like Thor Halvorssen, the presi dent of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, remained hopeful that the system could be reformed.
“It is up to the news media and civil society groups to point out the contradictions within the Human Rights Council,” Mr. Halvorssen said.

But some think reform it's a lost cause. Critics of the council say the election system is flawed, giving equal say to all countries in the General Assembly, regardless of their record. “That's the problem with using the U.N. to address human-rights problems,” wrote Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford and former foreign correspondent for The Times, in an op-ed in July. “Every single state in the world, even the most reprehensible, is an equal member.”

Once they gain membership, repressive states use the council to craft Orwellian resolutions that seek to protect their political control under the banners of national sovereignty and international respect.

“The council is irredeemable ,” Mr. Brinkley wrote. “It's time the U.S. dropped out.”

Mr. Halvorssen, however, keeps trying. He founded the Human Rights Foundation after his mother was shot during a 2004 protest in Venezuela. In June, he was cut off by the delegation of Cuba in Geneva while delivering a fiery speech against Venezuela's human rights record.

Among the speakers on Friday was Marcel Granier, the president of RCTV, one of Venezuela's oldest television stations and a frequent government critic. The station went off the air after losing its license in 2007, in a move widely seen as political retaliation. Mr. Chávez accused RCTV and other private broadcasters of supporting a coup that briefly ousted him in 2002.

Mr. Granier lives in Venezuela and considers speaking up the only way forward. “I receive threats against my life almost everyday,” he said matter-of-factly as attendees to the lunch event overlooking the East River ate their chocolate desserts. “I'm used to it.”

How Cellphones Complicate Polling

With this election, math once again messed with the magic* in a media stalwart. Television pundits, usually with the authority left over from past political victories, turned out to be inferior seers compared to fast-moving analysts armed with a raft of polling data. The Times' own Nate Silver appears to be the biggest winner of all.

But other math, abetted by technology, could mean trouble down the line for our prognosticating overlords. Traditional polling is getting more expensive and less reliable. The emerging online alternatives are promising, but have problems of their own. Problems with the polls may also mean problems for the people who read them. (Nate Silver made a comparison of polling accuracy last week.)

The fundamental difficulty has to do with changes in phone technology and human habits. Much of the polling data you see comes from phone calls. Caller identification has made it easier to ignore calls from polling outfits. Cell phones have call er i.d., and people are likely to be using them from any number of places, where they don't want to be disturbed.

Last May, the Pew Research Center published a report which said that the number of households responding to phone polls has fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent today. If this trend continues, at some point response rates will be too low to show good representation.

Even if pollsters do get through, and convince people to cooperate with an in-depth poll, taking these kind of surveys to an increasingly mobile population is more expensive. A 1996 Federal law states that calls to cell phones have to be hand-dialed, not generated by computer. That increases the time in getting the answers.

A study published last spring looked at an effort by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to survey rents. It found that the cost of obtaining one completed survey ranged from $77.18 for a call to a landline phone to $277.19 for a call to a cell phone.

While it is not clear that this study is a perfect match for the costs a political poll, it is clear that calling the mobile population is expensive. That makes follow-up and in depth polls, which are more valuable, less attractive.

“The ultimate question is, how representative are you of the population?” says Michael McDonald, a professor of statistics at George Mason University who studies polling. “I tend to trust organizations that go the extra mile, with personal interviews, calls, and multiple call backs. Fast polls are a strategy if you want to make news, but they aren't as good.”

One alternative is to rely more on Internet-based surveys, something the pollsters at Rasmussen Reports and other outfits already do. Prof. McDonald says using Internet data, however, “trades one set of biases for another. We don't have full Internet coverage, and not everyone uses computers.”

Still, as more people get online, the Internet-based pol ls get much better. SurveyMonkey, which sells tools for all kinds of collective voting, carried out over several months an online presidential poll that had 96 percent accuracy, compared with the actual results of the vote.

“We looked at nine battleground states over 11 weeks,” says Philip Garland, vice president of methodology at SurveyMonkey. “On the day before election day alone, 60,000 people took the survey.”

The cost per person was negligible, he says, and the results may be more illuminating. “We got twice as many ‘don't knows' compared with phone or personal surveys,” says Mr. Garland. “When people are asked questions by a person, they feel like they should make a choice.” Still, like other pollsters, the online service was surprised at the turnout by Latino and African-American voters, indicating the survey isn't perfectly capturing the national population.

SurveyMonkey, which didn't make money off this poll, plans to continue the work for the 2014 midterm elections, and will make its data available to the public. “We expect to get a lot of interest from political organizations,” says Mr. Garland.

Just in case you thought this election thing was over.

*Note: A saltier version of the phrase “messed with the magic” was supposedly uttered by an old-media bigshot when he first toured Google, and learned how its algorithms could make advertising both cheaper and more efficient.