Google’s Ad Campaign Uses Emotions, Not Search Terms

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AppId is over the quota

The search giant made its first push into advertising with a Super Bowl ad in 2010 about a young couple falling in love. But through last year it began a more focused national television campaign, as well as taking on other efforts, like hosting Google-themed conferences in an effort to represent its online brand in the offline world.

“This past year has really been a remarkable transformation for Google,” said Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, a firm that evaluates TV and video ads.

Though Google is a household name, it needs to tell its story now for a few reasons. It needs new businesses like the Chrome browser and the Google Plus social network to succeed if it is going to find sources of revenue beyond search ads.

The ads are also part of Google’s mission, led by Larry Page, its co-founder and chief executive, to pare down its product offering and make Google products more attractive, intuitive and integrated with one another.

Lorraine Twohill, Google’s vice president for global marketing, would not disclose how much the company had increased its advertising spending, but said there had been a shift in strategy.

“As we got bigger, we had more competition, more products, more messages to consumers, so we needed to do a bit more to communicate what these products are and how you can use them,” she said.

Also as Google comes under attack from antitrust regulators, it can’t hurt to tell heartwarming stories about Google to wide audiences.

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Some viewers may be hard-pressed to keep their eyes dry after watching “Dear Sophie,” Google’s ad for Chrome in which a father sends multimedia messages to his baby daughter, or to hold back a smile watching grandmothers and children dancing to Lady Gaga.

But that is not to say that Google, where data is religion, does not back up sentimental branding efforts with cold, hard data.

Before showing the Super Bowl ad, Google tested a dozen versions on YouTube and chose to broadcast the one that received the most views.

And Google events, which also fall under the marketing division, require immense spreadsheets, like one to choose a location for Google Zeitgeist, its annual conference for wooing its biggest advertisers. The spreadsheet charted 140 hotels from Manhattan to Phoenix, with color-coded tabs and columns for ballroom size, room rates and the number of layovers to fly there.

The winner was Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Google’s event planner, Lorin Pollack, brought the company headquarters’ preschool motif to the desert.

“Google’s an online brand,” Ms. Pollack said. “You can’t experience the brand except for typing keys. It’s a huge responsibility to actually bring that brand to life outside of the computer.”

The lanterns lining the steps at the nighttime parties were Google colors — red, yellow, blue and green — and oversized stuffed ottomans mimicked the office’s beanbags, where engineers sit with laptops perched on their knees. Attendees could climb on the giant tricycle that Google Street View engineers ride to take photos or design their own Android robot T-shirts. A vending machine dispensed primary-colored juggling balls, bought by swiping Android cellphones.

Even the tablecloths had to evoke Google, which meant no billowy linen, Ms. Pollack said.

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’?”

Google broke the recent trend of 15-second television ads to tell stories in a minute or two.

An ad for Google Plus shows the arc of a couple’s courtship without spoken words. The man places the woman in a social circle titled “love of my life,” but he starts out in her circle called “creepers.” Over time, though, he graduates to “book club,” “ski house” and eventually “keepers.”

Another, which was broadcast just before Christmas, shows the Muppets in a Google Plus Hangout video chat singing along to Queen and David Bowie. A newspaper ad for Google Plus featured the Dalai Lama joining Desmond Tutu by Hangout after he was denied a visa to visit South Africa.

Google is also advertising its search engine, even though, with two-thirds market share in the United States, it is hardly an unknown brand to anyone.

“I still think it’s important to remind people why Google matters, how it’s had an impact on people’s lives, what life was like before this,” Ms. Twohill said. An added incentive is that Google’s main rival, Microsoft’s Bing, also has a new ad campaign.

One search ad shows a surfer finding the perfect wave, a teenager becoming the youngest person to discover a supernova and a man installing solar panels.

“We’re all searching for a different thing, even if we’re all trying to get to the same endpoint,” a voice says.

Google’s strategy has connected with viewers, Mr. Daboll said, because they would rather view a story than have products pushed at them. Google ads took five of the top 10 spots on Ace Metrix’s list of the most effective TV ads for Web sites last year.

“Google has been so dominant in its usefulness,” he said. “Now they want to make you feel something about search, as opposed to just relying on it as a useful tool.”

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DealBook: Despite RIM Takeover Talk, Hurdles Would Be High

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AppId is over the quota
Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesA selection of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry phones.

OTTAWA — For beleaguered investors in Research in Motion, the drastic collapse of the company’s share price through 2011 eventually became a cause for optimism. In December, shares of the BlackBerry maker spiked on reports that several technology titans could be suitors.

But the optimism has been fleeting; the company has grappled with service failures, weak product introductions and dwindling market share. Shares of RIM have dropped by 75 percent since February.

As the troubles mount and the stock drops, RIM is looking like a strong takeover candidate without suitable prospects.

“Before you talk about a buyer, you have to ask: do you have a seller?” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners in New York. “That is the overarching question.”

Any potential suitors would most likely face stiff resistance from Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executives. Collectively they own more than 10 percent, which makes them among the largest shareholders.

Eric Risberg/Associated PressMike Lazaridis, a co-chief executive of Research in Motion, co-founded the company in 1984.

RIM is also a point of pride for the Canadian government, which has been increasingly reluctant to let foreign companies buy major domestic corporations. In a recent news conference, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, offered a note of support for RIM, saying “we all know this is an important Canadian company.”

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it does not comment on “rumors and speculation” as a matter of policy.

Despite the company’s well-publicized problems, RIM remains an attractive target. Even as its market share erodes in North America, the company continues to expand its customer base overseas and now reports almost 75 million users worldwide. And the BlackBerry brand is the first choice for security-conscious users like law enforcement agencies and financial services companies. In the first nine months of the year, RIM reported earnings of $1.29 billion.

At Wednesday’s close of $14.87, the price is also appealing. Alkesh Shah, an analyst at Evercore Partners, estimated that the company was worth closer to $22.50 a share, even assuming that the handset business is essentially worthless. Mr. Shah said that RIM’s network, which carries global traffic worldwide and generates monthly subscription fees, was worth about $12.50 a share, while he valued the company’s patents at roughly $7.50 a share. The company also has $2.50 a share in cash, he estimated.

Still, RIM is a large acquisition to swallow, limiting the pool of buyers.

“You have to remember that this would take $10 billion, $12 billion, $13 billion,” said Mr. Gillis of BGC. “That’s a lot of cash. There’s not a lot of people willing to spend that kind of money.”

The most obvious suitor for RIM would be a Chinese cellphone manufacturer. Such companies, which typically act as contract manufacturers for prominent brands, lack a significant presence outside of Asia. ZTE, for example, is small, low-end player in North America and Europe. But it is the fourth-largest handset maker in the world, according to IDC, a company that tracks technology markets.

With RIM, ZTE would add a recognized brand to its portfolio, reflecting its global ambitions. This year, the Chinese company announced plans to produce high-end phones under its own name, focusing in part on Western markets.

But the regulatory hurdles would be high for a Chinese company. In recent years, Canada has been quick to block acquisitions under its foreign ownership laws. In 2010, the Conservative government stopped BHP Billiton, the Australian mining company, from buying Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. At the time, some politicians cited a foreign takeover of RIM as a worst-case outcome.

The American government could also scuttle a RIM deal. The country’s military personnel, law enforcement officers and White House officials rely on BlackBerry devices, making Chinese ownership difficult under the technology control restrictions in the United States. This year, Huawei Technologies backed away from acquiring technology assets from 3Leaf Systems, a server company, after the federal government raised concerns about the relatively small transaction.

A ZTE spokeswoman declined to comment.

Other potential RIM suitors have been rebuffed. Microsoft, which had previously tried to persuade RIM to adopt its mobile operating system, initiated deal talks this summer, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The American technology company viewed RIM’s corporate business as a good distribution platform for its software. But discussions withered, as RIM pursued an independent course. Microsoft declined to comment.

Amazon also reportedly explored a RIM acquisition. Peter Misek, an analyst in New York with Jefferies and Company, said such a deal would allow Amazon to add phones to its Kindle line of tablet computers. While no deal materialized, he said that it remained possible that RIM might license its BlackBerry software.

Facebook is a dark horse candidate. Given that Google uses Android to promote its online services, Mr. Misek said that it was likely Facebook would introduce a rival mobile operating system, and RIM would offer Facebook a quick way into the business.

But even that situation is a long shot. RIM is struggling with its latest operating system, BlackBerry 10. An RIM acquisition would also be a costly way for Facebook to gain entry into a new area.

“For $10 billion they could subsidize a lot of Android phones,” Mr. Gillis said of Facebook.

Few deals are likely to pass muster with RIM’s chiefs. Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have remained steadfast in their strategy to reverse the company’s fortunes. The executives are focused on a new line of phone and operating system, which are not expected to be introduced until the end of 2012.

Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst with Berenberg Bank in London, said the pair seemed to have developed “founders’ syndrome,” a condition that makes them inflexible about taking their company in new directions and unwilling to yield control.

Both have reputations for being combative when challenged. In the middle of the last decade, the chiefs vigorously fought a patent case brought by NTP — actions that almost prompted a shutdown of BlackBerry service. RIM settled the matter for $612.5 million, a significantly larger sum than would have been necessary earlier.

While no major shareholder has spoken publicly about RIM’s management, some dissidents have privately expressed reservations. Big investors seem willing, for now, to see how the new operating system, BlackBerry 10, performs. Two top shareholders, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, rely heavily on domestic retail business and would be unlikely to push RIM to seek a foreign buyer — if only for public relations purposes.

In late December, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis made it clear that they intended to remain in control of RIM, even after announcing another delay in the new operating system.

“It is important for you to know that Mike and I, as two of RIM’s largest shareholders, understand investor sentiment, and we are more committed than ever to addressing the issues at hand,” Mr. Balsillie said before announcing that, as a good will gesture, they had cut their salaries to $1 a year.

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Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone

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AppId is over the quota
Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Last week, I drove to Pacifica, a beach community just south of San Francisco, where I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?

What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.

Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”

Hence my New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.

I made this resolution out of a sense that I habitually reached for the iPhone even when I really didn’t need to, when I might have just enjoyed an experience, like the sunset, without any technology. And after talking to people who do research on subjects like this, I realized that there were some good reasons to give up a little tech.

For example, I was worried that if I did not capture that beautiful sunset and stuff it into my phone, I’d forget it.

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Sch?nberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

Constantly interacting with our mobile devices has other drawbacks too. There are more pictures in my iPhone of that 45-minute hike at Pacifica than most families would have taken on a two-week vacation before the advent of digital cameras.

As a result, I had no time to daydream on that hike, and daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.

“Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has focused his research on daydreaming, put it this way: “Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”

I don’t intend to give up my technology entirely, but I want to find a better balance. For me, it’s that 30 minutes a day for daydreaming.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and tell my Twitter followers about my New Year’s resolution.

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Workstation: For Multitaskers, 2012 May Be a Year of Revenge

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AppId is over the quota

DEVICE BACKLASH As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.

More devices also harbor more vortexes of distraction, like Facebook, shopping sites and cute animal videos. Maintaining focus may well be one of the biggest daily challenges that workers will face this year, now that smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous.

More workers will probably revolt against the idea that they must be “on” all the time, recognizing that both their work and personal lives will improve if they create stricter boundaries. Sometimes this expectation is self-imposed; at other times, it’s part of the corporate culture. Look for more companies to address the issue directly. Last month, for example, Volkswagen agreed with labor representatives in Germany to limit work-related e-mails on BlackBerrys during off-hours.

THE TRAINING ADVANTAGE More technology necessitates more training. During the recession, too many workers learned new technology imperfectly, on the fly, or not at all. Fortunately, corporate spending on training rose in 2011 over the previous year, according to a report in Training magazine.

The pace at which new technology emerges and becomes paramount is quickening as never before. Last year, HTML 5 for the Web was the hottest skill that a job seeker could have; now it’s a knowledge of apps, said Alison Doyle, a job search specialist for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

Both the employed and the unemployed cannot be complacent about their skills, and must be assertive about keeping up with the latest computer languages and applications, she said.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT WORKER Both by necessity and choice, more workers are deciding to go it alone as consultants, contractors, freelancers and other independent operators. Look for that trend to intensify this year.

Thanks to technology, it’s easier than ever for “people to find projects and projects to find people,” and they aren’t restricted by geography, said Gene Zaino, president and chief executive of MBO Partners, which deals with issues surrounding independent consultants.

That’s great for people who seek flexibility and autonomy. But working alone can be lonely, and a lack of structure can slow productivity. That’s why the phenomenon of co-working — where independent workers in a range of fields gather in one room to conduct business and drink lots of coffee or tea — is likely to spread.

Of course, not everyone chooses to be independent. Many people have been forced into becoming contractors as more companies with limited budgets hire on a project basis, Mr. Zaino said. Often, these workers’ pay is lower than it would be if they were full-time employees, and benefits are nonexistent.

Now enter the federal government, which doesn’t like how these fuzzy arrangements affect tax collection. Expect a big government push to classify contract workers as employees, Mr. Zaino said.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT DIVIDE The overall unemployment rate is 8.6 percent, but break down the number by educational attainment and the picture looks different. Those with college degrees are the lucky ones: the jobless rate for them is 4.4 percent. That compares with 8.8 percent for those with only a high school diploma and 13.2 percent for those with no diploma at all.

Consider, too, that less than 30 percent of the United States population age 25 or older has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Large groups of Americans will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available.

Another disadvantaged group is the long-term unemployed, who are having trouble rejoining the work force as employers show a preference for hiring people who currently hold jobs or have been laid off only recently.

More than 30 percent of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more, according to federal data. Congress will continue to wrestle with their plight, and their benefits, this year. Without help, this group risks falling so far behind that it can’t catch up.

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Hacker Attacks Like Stratfor’s Require Fast Response

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AppId is over the quota

In the film “Pulp Fiction,” Harvey Keitel plays the Wolf, a fast-talking and meticulous man who is called in to deal with the aftermath of an accidental shooting.

In the messy world of computer security breaches, Kevin Mandia is something like the Wolf. Mr. Mandia has spent his entire career cleaning up problems much like the recent breach at Stratfor, the security group based in Austin, Tex., that was hacked over the Christmas weekend.

Hackers claiming to be members of the collective known as Anonymous defaced Stratfor’s Web site and published over 50,000 of its customers’ credit card numbers online. They have threatened to release more card details and a trove of 3.3 million e-mails between Stratfor and its clients, which include Goldman Sachs, the Defense Department, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

That means Stratfor is in the position of trying to recover from a potentially devastating attack without knowing whether the worst is over.

“They’re in a bad place,” said Mr. Mandia, who is not involved in the Stratfor case. “If the attacker is going to release their e-mails, there’s no way to shut them down.”

Stratfor joins a list of other hapless prominent organizations that have recently been breached by so-called hacktivists — hackers whose goal is to embarrass and expose them. Among its predecessors are Sony, the security company HBGary and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Unlike extortion cases, in which hackers typically demand a fee for not disclosing specific proprietary information, attacks by hacktivists put companies in a potentially more precarious and vulnerable waiting mode. The companies do not know precisely what has been stolen, how destructive its disclosure will be, when it will be dumped online or even whether the hackers are still roaming through their internal networks. All the while, they must reassure anxious clients and try to minimize the inevitable public relations fallout.

“We call it a three-alarm fire,” said Jamie May, chief investigator at Debix, the identity protection company that was hired by Sony after its breach earlier this year.

“It’s easy for companies to get ahead of themselves and rush into bad decisions that make a situation worse,” she said, “which is why it is often helpful to work with a company that has done this before.”

The breach at Stratfor, which markets its security expertise, could be particularly embarrassing if hackers can prove their claims that they were able to gain access to the company’s sensitive data because it was not encrypted — a basic first step in data protection.

Stratfor has not clarified whether its data was encrypted, and did not respond to requests for comment. With its Web site still down, the company has been using its Facebook page to share updates about matters like its offer of identity-theft protection for customers. But some customers have left comments on the page complaining that they did not hear directly from Stratfor about the breach, and found out that their card information was compromised only when their banks notified them of unauthorized charges.

Mr. Mandia’s computer security and forensics firm, Mandiant, has responded to breaches, extortion attacks and economic espionage campaigns at 22 companies in the Fortune 100 in the last two years alone, Mr. Mandia said. He calls the first hour he spends with companies “upchuck hour.”

“I need to get as much data as I can get. I come in and say ‘Get me your firewall logs. Give me your Web logs. Tell me what you know so far. Who do you think might have done this? Give me your e-mails,’?” he said. “Everybody’s vomiting information on a table. It’s never pretty and it’s always unstructured.”

Time is of the essence. “Every minute you take to figure this out, you could be losing more e-mails and more credit data,” he said. The goal is to determine quickly the “fingerprint” of the intrusion and its scope, Mr. Mandia said: “How did the guy break in? What did he take? When did he break in? And, how do I stop this?”

The first thing a forensics team will do is try to get the hackers off the company’s network, which entails simultaneously plugging any security holes, removing any back doors into the company’s network that the intruders might have installed, and changing all the company’s passwords.

“This is something most people fail at,” Mr. Mandia said. “It’s like removing cancer. You have to remove it all at once. If you only remove the cancer in your leg, but you have it in your arm, you might as well have not had the operation on your leg.”

Likewise, if a company misses one back door or one compromised password, the intruders can immediately come back in.

Once the network has been secured, a forensics team will comb through a company’s data to determine the impact of the breach, so it can begin notifying affected customers, determine its liability and try to get ahead of the news cycle.

But in a hacktivist case like Stratfor’s, in which hackers are threatening to disburse more credit card details and sensitive correspondence, Mr. Mandia said there comes a point when “you just have to sit back and hope.”

“If anybody was any good at preventing leaks, we would have never seen WikiLeaks,” Mr. Mandia said. “The U.S. government would have stopped it and that data would never have been dumped.”

Meanwhile, Stratfor’s hackers have taken to Twitter to announce that they plan to release more Stratfor data over the next several days.

That may offer at least one possible silver lining. In the world of computer security, experts say, the most dangerous breaches are the quiet ones — the ones in which hackers make off with a company’s intellectual property and leave no trace.

“The hacks that do the most damage,” Mr. Mandia said, “don’t have Twitter feeds.”

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Gadgetwise: Publishing Your Own E-Book

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AppId is over the quota

I want to publish my own e-book and sell it online on a major Web site. Where do I start?

Writing, editing and proofreading your book manuscript is the first step. Once you have finished your book, perhaps one of the easiest ways to get it out there for sale is to use publishing tools from the major online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Amazon has a Kindle Direct Publishing service that lets you self-publish your own e-books and sell them in its online Kindle store. The site has tutorials for properly formatting and uploading your book file to make it compatible with the Kindle, Amazon’s own e-reader hardware. You need an account to use the service, but you can use your existing Amazon.com account if you already buy things from the site. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Help page has the information you need to get started, including an explanation of the royalties you can earn and Amazon’s share of the profits.

Barnes and Noble has its own publishing platform called PubIt that can be used to upload and distribute e-books in its Nook online bookstore. The PubIt site accepts files in the ePub format, but it also has tools that convert Microsoft Word, RTF files, HTML documents and plain-text files into ePub. It doesn’t cost anything to use PubIt, but you do need an account, and Barnes and Noble takes a percentage of your book’s list price in exchange for selling your work. The PubIt Support page has information on prices, percentages and using the service.

If you do not want to use a publishing tool dedicated to a specific online store, an e-book distribution service like Smashwords can help you get your work out to a variety of online bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and the Sony Reader store.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Keeping Your Reading List in Sync

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AppId is over the quota

How do you sync the Safari Reading List? I have iCloud turned on, but I don’t see a setting for syncing my Reading List stories between copies of the Safari browser running on my iPad, Windows 7 PC, and Mac OS X Lion.

Apple’s Safari Reading List, which lets you save stories for later perusal, is basically an area for temporary bookmarks. While it does not have its own switch to turn on or off in the iCloud settings, you can keep your Reading List in sync across devices by turning on the iCloud option to sync Bookmarks.

You get to this on the iPad (or other iOS 5 device like an iPhone or iPod Touch) by tapping the Settings icon on the Home screen and tapping the iCloud icon. On the iCloud settings screen, make sure you are logged into your iCloud account and tap the button next to Bookmarks to On before closing the screen.

On the Windows PC, (which needs to have the iCloud Control Panel for Windows installed ahead of time), go to the Start menu and choose Control Panel. On the Control Panel screen, click on Network and Internet and click on the iCloud Control Panel. Log into your iCloud account with the same user name and password used on the iPad and put a check in the box next to Bookmarks to sync them between devices. (If the box indicates that iCloud is set to sync with Internet Explorer bookmarks instead of Safari, click the Options button and choose Safari instead.) Click the Close button then finished.

On the Mac, go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences, or just click the System Preferences icon in the Mac’s Dock.
On the System Preferences screen under Internet and Wireless, click the iCloud icon. Again, make sure you are logged in with the same iCloud user name and password that you used on the iPad and Windows computer and then put a check in the box next to Bookmarks. Close the iCloud preferences box when you are done.

Once you have properly set up all your participating computers and iOS devices, the stories you add to your Safari Reading List should sync up within a few seconds; try closing and reopening the Reading List if you do not see the new additions. If you are having other issues with iCloud, Apple has a general iCloud support page that may help with the troubleshooting.

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DealBook: Ahead of I.P.O., S.E.C. Pressed Groupon On Accounting, Disclosures

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AppId is over the quota

Ahead of Groupon‘s highly anticipated initial public offering in November, the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly pressed the daily deals giant to defend its business model and its accounting measures, according to comment letters recently disclosed.

The letters, sent by the S.E.C. from June 29 to Oct. 3, provide an interesting window into the back-and-forth discussions between the Internet company and its regulators in the months leading up to its I.P.O. In the letters, the S.E.C. seemed somewhat skeptical of Groupon’s business model and called on the company to balance its bullish statements with additional disclosures. Regulators also asked Groupon to address comments made by executives during the so-called quiet period, which seemed to defy S.E.C. rules.

Shares of Groupon slipped nearly 2 percent on Wednesday to close at $22.62 per share.

In the first letter, dated June 29, the S.E.C. outlines 73 comments, spanning 14 pages. Among the comments, regulators called on Groupon to list specific risk factors for its international operations, provide additional data on consumer attrition and repeat merchants and temper certain statements about the company’s growth prospects. In one section, for instance, the regulators advise the company to reframe a comment made by its chief executive, Andrew Mason, who had said in a filing that “Groupon is better positioned than any company in history to reshape local commerce,” to include the company’s “net losses and competitive landscape.”

In response to another statement made by Mr. Mason, that “our customers and merchants are all we care about,” the regulator reminded Groupon of its responsibility to its investors:

“Please balance the statements regarding the premise that your customers and merchants are all you care about with a discussion of your fiduciary duty to shareholders.”

As evident in the letters, the S.E.C. spent a lot of time parsing the statements of Groupon’s executives on and off the prospectus. In its first comment letter, regulators called on the company to address a Bloomberg News interview, during which Groupon’s co-founder, Eric P. Lefkofsky, said the not-yet-profitable Groupon was going to be “wildly profitable.” Several months later, the S.E.C. also asked the company to provide the full text of an internal e-mail sent by Mr. Mason, which was somehow leaked to the media.

Notably, the S.E.C. was particularly clear about its reservations on Acsoi, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income, an uncommon financial yardstick Groupon introduced in its first filing. In the June 29 letter, the S.E.C. said Acsoi — which is essentially operating profit stripped of marketing and acquisition costs — was somewhat misleading to prospective investors:

It appears that online marketing expense is a normal, recurring operating cash expenditure of the company. Your removal of this item from your results of operations creates a non-GAAP measure that is potentially misleading to readers. Please revise your non-GAAP measure accordingly.

The exchange between the S.E.C and Groupon, reveal the company’s initial resistance. In a July 14 letter to the S.E.C., the company tried to defend its math, arguing that Acsoi does include some expenses related to marketing for existing subscribers. The S.E.C. was not swayed, and in a subsequent letter, simply asked for its removal. On Oct. 10, Groupon complied in a revised filing.

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Letter That Led to Downfall of Hewlett Chief Surfaces

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AppId is over the quota

A Delaware court ruled Wednesday that the letter, from the lawyer Gloria Allred to Mr. Hurd, who at the time was chief executive of H.P., may be made public. The letter set in motion internal investigations at the company that led to Mr. Hurd’s resignation on Aug. 6, 2010.

Running eight pages, the letter accuses Mr. Hurd of sexual harassment, saying he repeatedly pressed Ms. Allred’s client, Jodie Fisher, a former actress in pornographic movies and reality show contestant, for sex. It also claims that he boasted about his wealth and knowledge of business deals.

Mr. Hurd, now a president of the Oracle Corporation, had fought to keep the letter private, asserting California’s privacy laws. But the court found that the letter, while “mildly embarrassing,” was not protected in the same way as trade secrets and certain financial information.

In Oct. 2007, the letter says, Mr. Hurd met Ms. Fisher, who was working as a contract employee for H.P., in Atlanta. On the pretext of showing her some documents for China’s vice premier, the letter says, Mr. Hurd invited Ms. Fisher to his room at the Ritz-Carlton, where Mr. Hurd propositioned her.

“Ms. Fisher was horrified,” the letter says, and after an hour of refusals, she eventually left. “You told her that no one had ever rejected you before and were clearly miffed.” After describing several such encounters in detail, the letter says that Ms. Fisher’s employment with H.P. ended.

A source briefed on the case, however, says that an outside counsel for H.P. prepared a timeline of e-mails that Ms. Fisher sent around the time of the events recorded in the letter. An e-mail sent soon after the Atlanta event had the subject line “great to see you” and talked about how she was looking forward to seeing Mr. Hurd again.

Ms. Fisher settled with Mr. Hurd two days before his resignation from H.P. In a letter following the settlement, she stated that the letter from Ms. Allred contained many inaccuracies.

“The letter was recanted by Ms. Fisher,” said Ken Glueck, a senior vice president at Oracle. “She admitted it was full of inaccuracies.” A spokeswoman for H.P. declined to comment.

An H.P shareholder, Ernesto Espinoza, had filed a lawsuit against H.P. and sought a copy of the letter in court to investigate corporate wrongdoing and waste associated with the relationship and Mr. Hurd’s resignation. The Delaware court did not release the letter on Thursday, but the documents were obtained by The New York Times from sources close to the case.

Soon after receiving the letter from Ms. Allred, Mr. Hurd turned it over to H.P.’s corporate counsel, Michael Holston. Mr. Holston, acting on behalf of the company, began an internal investigation of Mr. Hurd’s behavior.

While the letter from Ms. Allred was mostly a narrative of a powerful man’s pursuit of a woman for sex (after the settlement Ms. Fisher also stated that she and Mr. Hurd never had sexual relations), it also states that in March 2008, Mr. Hurd told Ms. Fisher that he was working on a deal to purchase Electronic Data Systems. H.P. announced in May 2008 that it would buy E.D.S. for $13.9 billion.

If these accusations are true, Mr. Hurd could be found guilty of leaking insider information. Sources close to the H.P. board, however, say that its internal investigation did not prove any such transgression. Tension emerged between Mr. Hurd and the board, they say, over his changing explanations about his relationship with Ms. Fisher and discrepancies in his expense reporting.

A spokeswoman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing commission policy, would not comment on whether the agency looked into the charge. Given the time that has elapsed since the letter was known to several corporate lawyers and the government, it seems unlikely that there was sufficient evidence for a case.

In an e-mail to employees a few days after Mr. Hurd resigned in 2010, the company’s interim chief, Cathie Lesjak, said Mr. Hurd resigned over “inappropriate behavior in which he engaged that violated H.P.’s standards of business conduct and undermined his ability to continue to lead the company.”

Since Mr. Hurd’s departure, Hewlett-Packard has struggled to regain its bearings. He was first replaced as chief by Léo Apotheker, who himself was ousted on Sept. 22. Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, is now H.P.’s chief.

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The Lives They Lived: Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941

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Link by Link: An Ad Blocker Opens the Gate, Ever So Slightly

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In December, however, Adblock Plus introduced a new concept, the “acceptable ad” — that is, an ad so inoffensive that it shouldn’t necessarily be blocked by the software. And nothing has been quite so simple since.

Under a new default setting for all users of Adblock Plus, these online ads will appear. (A user can still opt out with a couple of clicks and block all ads as before.)

For purists among the community of users and programmers who support the open-source project, “acceptable ad” has the ring of doublespeak, as in, “all ads are equal, but some ads are more equal than others.”

They have raged on online forums, including those hosted by the Adblock Plus project itself, and in comment areas at tech Web sites like Slashdot. While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “?‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.

Adblock Plus’s lead developer, Wladimir Palant, has tried to quell the anger, replying personally to the disappointed commenters and explaining that the introduction of “acceptable ads” is true to his vision for the ad-blocking project. The project was never meant to rid the Internet of all advertising, he says, but of annoying advertising.

“We feel that the original ‘kill all’ approach isn’t productive here; we need to start differentiating between ads and giving people better ways to allow some of them,” Mr. Palant, who lives in Cologne, Germany, wrote in an e-mail.

Last August, he created a company, Eyeo, with the backing of an unnamed private investor, and a managing director, Till Faida, who also lives in Cologne. The company pays Mr. Faida and Mr. Palant’s salaries, along with the salary of another programmer based in Moscow. (For years, Mr. Palant had worked on the project on the side.)

Eyeo, whose only product is Adblock Plus, has a motto that alludes to its bigger aspirations: “We want to make the Internet better for everyone. Purging bad ads is a good way to start.”

Mr. Faida has left open the possibility that some big Web sites will pay his start-up as part of the new service; small sites will never be charged, he said. In an e-mail, he wrote: “In the long term, we of course have to think about how to make our movement sustainable — including larger Web sites that will increase their revenues by partnering with us in the costs of maintaining the project seems to be a way that will work.”

In an interview, Mr. Faida focused on the plight of those smaller Web sites that had suffered collateral damage from ad-blocking programs. While the programs can seem like niche products, they can really affect the revenue for Web sites, he said. He estimated that in the United States 3.5 percent of all Internet users have Adblock Plus installed; in Germany, where use of the Firefox browser is higher, it is 12 percent.

“I just talked to a tech Web site here in Germany, they have seven employees and 40 percent of their users have ad-blockers,” he said. “There was a tech convention in America, and they couldn’t afford to send more than one journalist because so many of their ads are being blocked.”

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Gadgetwise Blog: Jildy App Sorts Your Facebook Friends for You

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You’re in line for coffee. You really want to check your family’s Facebook posts to see if there’s anything you need to know about, but they’re lost among status updates from friends. You never did spend the time to create a group of just your relatives, so there you are, thumbing through your iPhone’s entire news feed.

You don’t have to live this way. A new app called Jildy, released for the iPhone last week and under development for Android phones, sorts your Facebook friends into lists of those who interact with one another, so you can read or post to just those people quickly.

There was an app called Katango that did this. But after a high-profile debut last July, Katango was bought by Google in November, and the app is no longer available in Apple’s App Store. Jildy also does a few things Katango didn’t.

Using Jildy is easy. Download it from the App Store and fire it up. The first time you start it, flick the switch to turn Facebook access from Off to On. If you already have Facebook’s app on your phone, you won’t even need to log in. You will be presented with a familiar screen that prompts you to grant permission for Jildy to access some of your Facebook information, just like any other Facebook app. Click Allow, and Jildy will spend a few seconds loading your friend lists and sorting them.

To read or post to Jildy’s lists, tap the Lists icon in the app’s lower left corner. The automatic grouping is surprisingly accurate, since most Facebook users tend to post or comment to one another in isolated groups. To fine-tune a list, tap it. Jildy will switch to a screen with icons of the most frequent recent posters. In the upper right corner is an arrow key. Tap that, and choose the List Info option. There, you can edit the name and membership of the group. That same arrow icon also lets you post an update or share a photo with just the members of the group.

An Internet pundit, Clay Shirky, has said that the problem with services like Facebook is not information overload, it’s filter failure. Jildy Inc.’s chief executive, Mark Drummond, who previously created the unsuccessful but technically impressive Wowd social search engine, says Jildy’s developers aim to solve Mr. Shirky’s problem by whittling down your Facebook feeds into chunks you will find usable on a mobile phone, where your attention span and screen size are much smaller than they are on a laptop or at a desk.

When you look at a list, Jildy presents screens of who is posting the most in the last 12 hours, and what words or phrases are appearing most. Are the gang from San Francisco talking about Burning Man in January? Maybe something is up that you need to check. Tap the on-screen box labeled “burning man,” and Jildy will show you the group’s posts on the topic, which it has already searched. It digs back more than a few days, so you can catch up on conversation topics you may have missed during the holidays.

Jildy also has a feature called PSI (it stands for “personal social intelligence”) that creates cutesy charts of the statistical distribution of your Facebook friends by age, gender, relationship status, and astrological sign. I was surprised to learn that the majority of my friends are married, and 40 percent of them are women. There are other ways I could have figured this out, but Jildy did it for me in a few seconds while I was poking through lists on my phone. That’s the idea: to present the information you probably want, ready to go on your phone. Until Google figures out what it’s going to do with Katango, Jildy is well worth a test drive.

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Questions About Organic Produce and Sustainability

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Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

Many growers and even environmental groups in Mexico defend the export-driven organic farming, even as they acknowledge that more than a third of the aquifers in southern Baja are categorized as overexploited by the Mexican water authority. With sophisticated irrigation systems and shade houses, they say, farmers are becoming more skilled at conserving water. They are focusing new farms in “microclimates” near underexploited aquifers, such as in the shadow of a mountain, said Fernando Frías, a water specialist with the environmental group Pronatura Noroeste.

They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession.

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Experts agree that in general organic farms tend to be less damaging to the environment than conventional farms. In the past, however, “organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case,” said Michael Bomford, a scientist at Kentucky State University who specializes in sustainable agriculture. He added that intense organic agriculture had also put stress on aquifers in California.

Some organic standard setters are beginning to refine their criteria so that organic products better match their natural ideals. Krav, a major Swedish organic certification program, allows produce grown in greenhouses to carry its “organic” label only if the buildings use at least 80 percent renewable fuel, for example. And last year the Agriculture Department’s National Organic Standards Board revised its rules to require that for an “organic milk” label, cows had to be at least partly fed by grazing in open pastures rather than standing full time in feedlots.

But each decision to narrow the definition of “organic” involves an inevitable tug-of-war among farmers, food producers, supermarkets and environmentalists. While the United States’ regulations for organic certification require that growers use practices that protect water resources, it is hard to define a specific sustainable level of water use for a single farm “because aquifer depletion is the result of many farmers’ overutilizing the resource,” said Miles McEvoy, head of the National Organic Program at the Agriculture Department.

While the original organic ideal was to eat only local, seasonal produce, shoppers who buy their organics at supermarkets, from Whole Foods to Walmart, expect to find tomatoes in December and are very sensitive to price. Both factors stoke the demand for imports. Few areas in the United States can farm organic produce in the winter without resorting to energy-guzzling hothouses. In addition, American labor costs are high. Day laborers who come to pick tomatoes in this part of Baja make about $10 a day, nearly twice the local minimum wage. Tomato pickers in Florida may earn $80 a day in high season.

Manuel Verdugo, 42, began organic tomato farming on desert land in San José del Cabo five years ago and now owns 30 acres in several locations. Each week he sends two and a half tons of cherry, plum and beefsteak tomatoes to the United States under the brand name Tiky Cabo.

He has invested in irrigation systems that drip water directly onto plants’ roots rather than channeling it through open canals. He is building large shade houses that cover his crops to keep out pests and minimize evaporation. Even so, he cannot farm 10 acres in the nearby hamlet of La Cuenca because the wells there are dry.

At another five-year-old organic farm, Rosario Castillo says he can cultivate only 19 acres of the 100 he has earmarked for organic production, although he dug a well seven months ago to gain better access to the aquifer. The authorities ration pumping and have not granted him permission to clear native cactuses. “We have very little water here, and you have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to get it,” Mr. Castillo said.

Many growers blame tourist development — hotels and golf courses — for the water scarcity, and this has been a major problem in coastal areas. But farming can also be a significant drain. According to one study in an area of northern Baja called Ojos Negros, a boom in the planting of green onions for export a decade ago lowered the water table by about 16 inches a year. “They were pumping a lot of groundwater, and that was making some people rich on both sides of the border at the expense of the environment,” said Victor Miguel Ponce, a professor of hydrology at San Diego State University.

The logistics of getting water and transporting large volumes of perishable produce favors bigger producers. Some of the largest are American-owned, like Sue?o Tropical, a vast farm with rows of shade houses lined up in the desert that caters exclusively to the American market.

While traditional organic farmers saw a blemish or odd shape simply as nature’s variations, workers at Sue?o Tropical are instructed to cull tomatoes that do not meet the uniform shape, size and cosmetic requirement of clients like Whole Foods. Those “seconds” are sold locally.

Yet the connection to the United States has brought other kinds of benefits. Del Cabo Cooperative, which serves as a broker for hundreds of local farmers, provides seeds for its Mexican growers and hires roving agronomists and entomologists to assist them in tending their crops without chemicals. As the American market expands, said John Graham, a coordinator of operations at Del Cabo, he is always looking to bring new growers into his network — especially those whose farms draw on distant aquifers where water is still abundant.

David Agren contributed reporting.

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18 and Under: The Joy of Feeding, Without All the Parental Angst

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It’s a primal impulse to worry about an infant’s growth. But experts on child nutrition, mostly enlisted nowadays in the battle against childhood obesity, point out that some of our standard infant feeding practices and attitudes may need revising, including some of those encouraged by pediatricians like me. My grandmother’s attitude — stuff food into the baby, be proud of a “good eater” — may not make sense in an environment of abundant food and rising obesity.

But it gets medically controversial, and emotionally sticky, when doctors start talking about obesity in babies. Is there an epidemic of infant obesity? Are fat babies at greater risk of turning into fat children at higher risk for medical consequences later on in life? And what can doctors advise parents about feeding a baby — which ought, after all, to be one of the basic joys of parenthood?

The answers to those questions aren’t always clear. Scientists do know that the number of obese children has been on the increase. But not the proportion of those under age 2 whose weight-for-length curve is at the 95th percentile or above — that has held pretty steady since 1999.

Perhaps more important, no one wants to see babies on diets, no one wants to see hungry babies not given food. Dr. Elsie M. Taveras, a pediatrician on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and a leading expert on obesity risk factors in children, says that the evidence indicates that when parents too severely restrict a child’s food intake, that child is at higher risk for obesity.

“When we are overly controlling, either overly restrictive or we overly pressure a child to eat, that doesn’t allow the child to respond to their own hunger and satiety,” she said.

Satiety cues (spitting out the bottle or the breast, turning the head away, closing the mouth) are the signals that infants send when they’ve had enough to eat. One promising line of research involves helping parents recognize babies’ hunger signals (rooting, putting a hand to the mouth, sucking mouth movements) and when they’re saying that they’ve had enough.

Decades ago, “we really were more worried, and needed to be more worried, about failure to thrive,” said Leann L. Birch, director of the Center for Childhood Obesity Research at Penn State. “Overfeeding seems to be more dangerous these days.”

Dr. Birch and Dr. Ian M. Paul, a professor of pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine, are testing a multipronged intervention aimed at helping parents learn healthier feeding habits. This includes strategies for helping babies sleep longer — in part by responding to night waking with something other than food — and learning to identify those hunger and satiety cues. In addition, parents are counseled on how and when to introduce solid foods, and how to help babies enjoy new offerings.

In their pilot study, published earlier this year in the journal Obesity, the babies of parents who received this training were lower in weight-for-length percentiles — so the strategies seemed to work. But there are many unanswered questions, as pointed out in an accompanying editorial by Dr. Jack Yanovski, a pediatric endocrinologist and head of the growth and obesity section of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“This pilot study was a great beginning,” he told me. “The concerns all of us have is that we do it in a way that’s going to be effective and not too burdensome for families.” An obesity prevention intervention should work for children who are being overfed, but without slowing the healthy growth of other children.

For a long time, breastfeeding was thought to be protective against later obesity. That connection is now being questioned; other differences in social situation and behavior may account for some of the pattern. And in recent studies in other countries — Belarus and Brazil — breastfeeding infants did not seem to protect against later obesity.

And in any case, there need to be helpful strategies for mothers who choose to bottle feed.

“I don’t know that we as pediatricians do as good a job promoting responsiveness as we do promoting breastfeeding,” Dr. Taveras said.

Responsiveness is a helpful watchword. It’s easier for doctors to offer feeding advice to parents if we do it as a way to help them enjoy all the pleasures of tending their babies — holding them, cuddling them, singing and talking and reading to them, playing with them. We have to avoid scaring parents into restrictive patterns, subtracting pleasure from mealtimes, and casting blame.

Dr. Paul suggests that pediatricians also should explain those growth charts more carefully. It’s true that the charts now on my screen look so familiar and basic to me that I may not always take the trouble to discuss the nuances. Several studies show that parents from a variety of backgrounds and social classes all prefer to see their children growing at the high percentiles.

Dr. Paul recalled two educated parents whose child he had cared for. “They’re both small people, but when their daughter weighed between the 5th and the 10th percentile, they felt they were doing something wrong,” he said. “Percentiles on a growth chart are very different from percentiles in academic achievement, but almost all parents want their children to be above the 50th percentile on the growth chart.”

But of course, except in Lake Wobegon, it doesn’t work that way.

“Half the population should be below the 50th percentile, 10 percent of the population should be below the 10th percentile,” Dr. Paul said. “In most cases that’s healthy growth, and I think we do a disservice to the family by not explaining this clearly.”

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New Jersey Dining | Health Club Cafes: Cafes at Health Clubs Stress Eating Right

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Following is a sampling of such cafes in New Jersey; all are open to nonmembers.

At the sprawling, two-year-old Life Time Athletic club in Berkeley Heights, which includes a spa, a rock-climbing wall and an outdoor water park, “everything we put out meets our ‘healthy way of life’ standard,” said Brian Wilkes, 25, the department head of the Life Cafe, the restaurant at the front of the club. A dietitian at Life Time Fitness, the national chain, based in Minnesota, that owns the club, helped develop the menu for the cafe.

The wood-and-earth-toned space has about a dozen granite-topped tables. Customers order at the counter, where the menu includes a hummus wrap with avocado, spinach and romaine lettuce on a whole-wheat tortilla ($6.59) and a tossed salad topped with grilled salmon drizzled with a rémoulade sauce ($8.29), for example, as well as quesadillas and pizzas.

All meals are “smart-sized,” Mr. Wilkes said, meaning they fall roughly in the 400- to 600-calorie range, and everything is available to go; there are also sandwiches and salads packaged for take-out. The menu also lists the carbohydrate, fat and fiber content of dishes, which are prepared in the open kitchen.

In Scotch Plains, the Muscle Maker Grill in the RWJ Rahway Fitness and Wellness Center turns out salads and snacks like edamame ($3.79), as well as more substantial fare like whole-wheat penne with reduced-fat vodka sauce and chicken ($9.99), turkey burger wraps ($7.99) and protein shakes and bars. Meals can be eaten at one of several tables in the cafe, which is tucked inside the entrance to the center and decorated in the chain’s signature red-and-black style; there are more than three dozen Muscle Maker Grill locations in the state. A pamphlet available at the counter lists information like which entrees are vegetarian, gluten-free or low in carbohydrates.

The 55,000-square-foot fitness club, affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Rahway, has abundant cardio machines and an aquatic center; there are also rehabilitation services, including physical therapy.

“You get a lot of opportunity to introduce people to healthy eating,” said Patrick Nardone, 50, who opened this branch of the Muscle Maker Grill in 2009. “Most people come here to work out, but if you diet and eat properly, it helps with your goal, whatever that is.”

At the Café at the Atlantic Club in Manasquan, the menu is not entirely geared to the post-workout set.

“We went at one point to a very healthy menu, but we got some pushback from people who wanted their French fries,” said Jan Vasys, 52, the controller and head of the food and beverage department at the club.

Still, alongside the burgers and fries there are options like vegan hummus flatbread ($5.95) and seared tuna steak ($10.95), along with salads and freshly squeezed juices.

When the club, which sits on 48 acres and offers facilities including 18 all-weather tennis courts and a spa, opened in the late 1970s, the cafe was more like a snack bar, Ms. Vasys said. Now it is a full-service restaurant with modern décor next to the airy atrium on the ground level of the club and seating up to 120 people. It also serves beer and wine.

At the Healthy Choice Cafe at Can Do Fitness in Princeton, which opened for dining in late October, the owners, Michael Naidrich and Chris and Amy Woods, “wanted to strike a middle ground,” Mr. Naidrich said. Members of the club with no previous restaurant experience, they didn’t want to run a place that was “too fancy,” he said, and they didn’t want to focus on supplements and shakes, as some gym cafes do. Previous restaurants in the fitness center have included a high-end place and a Muscle Maker Grill location.

“Here’s what we stress: high quality and healthy,” Mr. Naidrich said on a recent day at the casual counter-service spot, which is near the club’s main desk, drawing a lot of foot traffic. Food can be taken to go (packaged options are available) or eaten at one of the tables and booths, which seat a total of 40; televisions overhead and WiFi provide entertainment.

The menu has options like spinach salad with turkey bacon and light honey mustard dressing ($8.50) and the cafe’s version of a sloppy Joe with turkey, low-fat Swiss cheese, coleslaw and homemade light Thousand Island dressing ($8), as well as breakfast sandwiches, soups, muffins and the like.

Mr. Naidrich said the owners were working with a nutritionist to make the menu compatible with the Weight Watchers system for calorie-conscious customers. They also hope to offer seminars on health-related topics.

“We’re trying to educate in a lifestyle we promote,” Mr. Naidrich said.

Not for Members Only

BERKELEY HEIGHTS Life Cafe at the Life Time Athletic Club, 25 Connell Drive; lifetimefitness.com or (908) 665-5911. Open Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

MANASQUAN The Café at the Atlantic Club, 1904 Atlantic Avenue; (732) 223-2100 or theatlanticclub.com. Open Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

PRINCETON Healthy Choice Cafe located at Can Do Fitness, 121 Main Street, Princeton Forrestal Village; (609) 452-8400. Open Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

SCOTCH PLAINS Muscle Maker Grill at RWJ Rahway Fitness and Wellness Center, 2120 Lamberts Mill Road; musclemakergrill.com; (908) 232-5810. Open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

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New York Schools Fail to Get Medicaid Money for Special-Needs Services

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State Health Department data from 2006 to 2010 show that education-related claims by the city were 60 percent lower last year than they were five years ago. And virtually all of the $302 million in Medicaid reimbursements the city did receive during that period were for administrative claims that, under the rules that took effect in September 2009, are no longer eligible for reimbursement.

New York, where more than two-thirds of the 168,000 special-needs students are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, has lagged far behind the state’s other large school districts in filing claims. In fact, the city’s Education Department filed no claims related to nursing services, occupational and physical therapy, psychological counseling, audiological evaluations or transportation between 2006 and 2010; meanwhile, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers — where the combined special education populations are less than 10 percent of New York City’s — were reimbursed $77 million for such services.

The city’s Education Department did not try to file thousands of claims in the 16 months immediately after the new rules were announced, the state records show. A spokeswoman said it was because the department lacked the staff and the training to handle the more demanding requirements. (Data for 2011 was not available.) Claims can be filed for up to 24 months after the service is provided, but much of the required material cannot be retroactively documented.

“The Medicaid reimbursement process has become increasingly cumbersome,” the spokeswoman, Barbara Morgan, said.

Ms. Morgan said a city analysis found that the Education Department did not have proper documentation for all but 9,000 students during the 2007-8 and 2008-9 school years, a period covered retroactively by the new rules. The analysis shows, however, that even for those students, almost 20 percent of the $10 million in claims filed were rejected for not meeting the new criteria.

In September, for the first time since 1988, when Congress allowed school districts to file for Medicaid reimbursements, the city put a manager in charge of handling the claims exclusively, one of several recent changes intended to improve collections.

“We aggressively pursue reimbursements,” Ms. Morgan said, “and are working towards a long-term, streamlined solution that will allow us to receive money available to our students.”

The new rules are part of a settlement in which New York City agreed to repay the federal government $100 million — and the state $332 million — after a 2005 audit unearthed myriad irregularities in its claims. They require school districts to file claims much as medical clinics do. For example, doctor’s orders must accompany individual claims, and districts must use specific codes for the types of services they provide. In addition, therapists are now required to hold higher levels of certification — levels which half of New York City’s speech teachers lack — and districts must provide annual training, and hire compliance officers.

Other school districts are also struggling. Since counseling sessions led by guidance counselors and social workers are no longer eligible for reimbursement, Syracuse recently hired two licensed therapists, at a cost of $250,000. Even so, the district has been able to file only about one-quarter of the claims it once did, its chief financial officer, Suzanne Slack, said.

“The new regulations nearly crippled us,” Ms. Slack said.

But at a time of tight budgets and grim economic forecasts, many districts and states — each with its own set of filing rules — have invested heavily in compliance. Bruce Hunter, associate executive director for policy at the American Association of School Administrators, said the reimbursements, generally from 50 percent to 70 percent of the cost of a service, had become “an enormous help to school districts” across the country.

In New Jersey, where the state treasury retains 65 percent of the reimbursements, filing the claims has been mandatory since 2008, and the state has set precise goals for its districts, including a 90 percent return rate on forms giving parental permission for schools to file on a child’s behalf. In Washington, Mayor Vincent C. Gray asked the accounting firm Deloitte in February to suggest, among other things, ways to improve the system used by local schools to apply for reimbursements.

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Basics: Now We Are Six: The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood

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Said to begin around 5 or 6, when toddlerhood has ended and even the most protractedly breast-fed children have been weaned, and to end when the teen years commence, middle childhood certainly lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.

Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service — on forging, organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.

Subsidizing the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche (a-DREN-ar-kee), when the adrenal glands that sit like tricornered hats atop the kidneys begin pumping out powerful hormones known to affect the brain, most notably the androgen dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood every bit as important as the more familiar gonadal reveille that follows a few years later.

Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future.

Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practicing so-called terror management, of accepting one’s inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.

Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analyzed attitudes toward middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognizes middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency and start taking their place in the wider world.

Much of the new work on middle childhood was described in a recent special issue of the journal Human Nature. As a research topic, “middle childhood has been very much overlooked until recently,” said David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State University and a contributor to the special issue. “Which makes it all the more exciting to participate in the field today.”

The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood, and though there is a mild growth spurt at age 6 or 7, as well as a bit of chubbying up during the so-called adiposity rebound of middle childhood, much of the remaining skeletal growth awaits the superspurt of puberty.

“Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,” said Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn’t finish growing until about the age of 18.”

The 18-year time frame of human juvenility far exceeds that seen in any other great ape, Dr. Thompson said. Chimpanzees, for example, are fully formed by age 12. With her colleague Andrew J. Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Thompson analyzed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.

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Personal Health: The Twice-Victimized of Sexual Assault

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Yet few told anyone about it at the time, or reported it to the police.

I have clear memories of three such episodes from my childhood, one of which involved a man who owned a store in my neighborhood. Not knowing at age 11 anything about reproduction (in 1952, expectant teachers had to take leave when they “showed”), I was terrified that I could become pregnant from having been forced to touch his penis.

I had trouble sleeping, and I avoided the block where the store was. Yet, fearing that the assault was somehow my fault, I said nothing to my parents.

Experts on sexual assault and rape report that even today, despite improvements in early sex education and widespread publicity about sexual assaults, the overwhelming majority of both felony and misdemeanor cases never come to public or legal attention.

It is all too easy to see why. More often than not, women who bring charges of sexual assault are victims twice over, treated by the legal system and sometimes by the news media as lying until proved truthful.

“There is no other crime I can think of where the victim is more victimized,” said Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University who for 20 years has been studying what happens legally and medically to women who are raped. “The victim is always on trial. Rape is treated very differently than other felonies.”

So, too, are the victims of lesser sexual assaults. In 1991, when Anita Hill, a lawyer and academic, told Congress that the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her repeatedly when she worked for him, Ms. Hill was vilified as a character assassin and liar acting on behalf of abortion-rights advocates.

Credibility became the issue, too, for Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant chambermaid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of forcing her to perform fellatio in a Manhattan hotel room. Prosecutors eventually dropped the case after concluding that Ms. Diallo had lied on her immigration form and about other matters, though not directly about the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

When four women, two of whom identified themselves publicly, said they had been sexually harassed by Herman Cain, the Republican presidential hopeful, they, too, were called liars, perhaps hired by his opponents.

Charges of sexual harassment often boil down to “she said-he said” with no tangible evidence of what really took place. But even when there is DNA evidence of a completed sexual act, as there was in the Strauss-Kahn case, the accused commonly claim that the sex was consensual, not a crime.

“DNA technology has not made a dramatic change in how victims are treated,” Dr. Campbell said in an interview. “We write off a lot of cases that could be successfully prosecuted. It’s bunk that these cases are too hard to prosecute.”

Victims must be better supported with better forensics, investigations and prosecutions, Dr. Campbell said. “This is a public safety issue. Most rapists are serial rapists, and they must be held accountable.”

In one study, published in 1987 in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 126 admitted rapists had committed 907 rapes involving 882 different victims.

Rapists are not the only serial sexual offenders. Witness the all-too-frequent revelations of sexual abuse of children involving multiple victims and persisting for decades even when others in positions of authority knew it was going on.

In the latest such scandal, an assistant football coach at Penn State University stands accused of molesting 10 boys. The charges led to the firing of a revered head coach, Joe Paterno, and forced the resignation of the university president for failing to take more immediate action.

The Risks

Last year, according to the Department of Justice, 188,280 Americans were victims of sexual violence.

Among female victims, nearly three-quarters are assaulted by men they know — friends, acquaintances or intimate partners, according to federal statistics.

But fewer than 40 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police. Underreporting is more common among male victims and women raped by acquaintances or domestic partners. Only one-quarter of rapes are committed by strangers.

The result of underreporting and poor prosecution: 15 of 16 rapists will never spend a day in jail, according to the network. Dr. Judith A. Linden, associate professor of emergency medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in September that in the United States, “fewer than half of rape cases are successfully prosecuted.”

Victims may be reluctant to report a rape because they are embarrassed, fear reprisals and public disclosure, or think they won’t be believed. “Victims often think they somehow brought it on themselves,” said Callie Rennison, a criminologist at the University of Colorado in Denver. “Rape is the only crime in which victims have to explain that they didn’t want to be victimized.”

These feelings are especially common among college women who may have been drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs when raped by a date or acquaintance.

Victims may not realize that any form of sexual behavior that is not consented to and that causes discomfort, fear or intimidation is considered sexual assault in most jurisdictions. That includes indecent exposure, unwanted physical contact (including kissing and fondling) and lascivious acts, as well as oral and anal sex and vaginal rape, whether with a body part or an instrument.

A minor — in general, 16 or 17, depending on the state — can legally consent to sexual activity. A person of any age who is forced or threatened, developmentally disabled, chronically mentally ill, incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, unconscious or preparing to undergo a medical procedure cannot legally consent to sexual activity.

Among young children, girls and boys are equally at risk of being sexually abused. But as they age, girls increasingly become targets; among adults, women represent about 90 percent of cases.

Experts have long debated whether rape should be seen as an act of aggression and control or the product of an irresistible sexual urge. To the victim, the distinction is moot.

The consequences can include pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease; feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and low self-esteem; self-blame and depression; substance abuse and eating disorders; fears of intimacy; numbness; post-traumatic stress disorder (nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety attacks, difficulty functioning); borderline personality disorder; unexplained physical problems; and even suicide.

Thus, even if rape victims choose not to report the attacks, prompt medical attention and psychological counseling can be critically important to their long-term well-being.

Next week: care for victims of sexual assault.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 15, 2011

The Personal Health column on Tuesday, about factors that stifle the reporting of sexual assault, described the law on sexual activity involving minors incorrectly. The legal age of consent in many states is 16 or 17, so it is not the case that “a minor cannot legally consent to sexual activity.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2011

The Personal Health column on Tuesday , about factors that stifle the reporting of sexual assault, using outdated information from an advocacy group’s Web site, misstated the number of Americans who were victims of sexual violence last year, according to the Department of Justice. It is 188,830 — not 272,350, the corresponding figure from 2006. (The error was repeated on Thursday in an article about a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on sexual violence and domestic abuse.)

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China Says Man Dies From Bird Flu

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The death came about a week after two dead birds tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus in nearby Hong Kong, causing the government to cull thousands of birds.

Saturday’s victim, a 39-year-old bus driver, died from multiple organ failure at a hospital in the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, according to the Xinhua news agency, citing the local Health Department. The department said that the man began developing symptoms on Dec. 21 and was hospitalized last Sunday with pneumonia; he subsequently tested positive for the virus.

Reuters, citing the newspaper The Southern Daily, reported that 120 people who had had contact with the man had developed no signs of sickness. In the month before developing symptoms, the man appeared to have had no direct contact with poultry and had not traveled outside Shenzhen, a city of more than 10 million just north of Hong Kong.

The H5N1 virus passes easily among birds and becomes more active during cooler periods of the year. It rarely infects humans, but when it does, the virus has a 60 percent mortality rate, scientists say. Hong Kong experienced the world’s first major outbreak of avian flu among humans in 1997, when six people died.

The World Health Organization says 573 people have been infected worldwide with H5N1 since 2003, and 336 have died.

On Dec. 21, Hong Kong health workers slaughtered more than 17,000 chickens after a carcass infected with bird flu was found at a poultry market. The government here also imposed a 21-day ban on the sale and import of live poultry. About a week ago, a second dead bird in Hong Kong was determined to have been infected with H5N1.

China’s last reported human death from H5N1 was in June 2010, when a pregnant 22-year-old woman in central Hubei Province died from exposure to infected poultry.

The death on Saturday came a day after the W.H.O. expressed concern about how research on the virus was being conducted. In December, the National Institutes of Health asked scientists at universities in Wisconsin and the Netherlands not to publish complete details on how to make the H5N1 virus more easily transmissible between humans.

In August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned of a possible major resurgence of the H5N1 virus in the coming months, saying migratory birds appeared to be carrying it and infecting birds in more countries.

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Recipes for Health: Soba With Black-Eyed Peas and Spinach — Recipes for Health

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1 cup (6 ounces) black-eyed peas, rinsed

1 quart water

1 onion, cut in half

3 garlic cloves, minced

A bouquet garni made with a bay leaf, a Parmesan rind and a sprig each of parsley and thyme

Salt to taste

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 red bell pepper, cut in small (1/4-inch) dice

1 12-ounce bunch spinach, stemmed and washed, or a 6-ounce bag of baby spinach

Freshly ground pepper

8 ounces soba

Freshly grated Parmesan

1. Combine the black-eyed peas and water in a large saucepan or soup pot and bring to a gentle boil over medium-high heat. Skim off any foam, then add the onion, 2 of the minced garlic cloves, the bouquet garni and salt to taste. Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer 40 minutes, or until the beans are thoroughly tender but intact. Taste the broth and adjust salt. Remove the onion and bouquet garni and discard.

2. Fill a large pot two-thirds of the way full with water (soba will bubble up, and if you fill the pot too full the foamy water will overflow) and bring to a boil.

3. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the red pepper. Cook, stirring often, until it is just tender, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until it is fragrant, 30 seconds to a minute. Add the beans with their liquid to the pan and bring to a boil. Boil over medium-high heat until the broth reduces a bit, and stir in the spinach. Stir just until it is wilted, and remove the pan from the heat. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

4. When the soba water comes to a boil, add salt to taste and the soba. Let the water bubble up until it is just about to reach the top of the pot, then turn the heat down to low so that the water retreats. Turn the heat up again and let the water come back up, then turn the heat back down. Repeat one more time. The soba should be cooked by the end of the third round. If it is not, repeat one more time. Drain and toss with the bean and spinach mixture, either in the pan or in a wide bowl. Serve with freshly grated Parmesan.

Yield: 4 servings.

Advance preparation: The black-eyed peas can be cooked ahead through Step 1 up to 4 days ahead and stored in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving (4 servings): 410 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 71 grams carbohydrates; 12 grams dietary fiber; 124 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 19 grams protein

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

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Recipes for Health: Albacore Roasted in a Bed of Lettuce — Recipes for Health

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1 1/2 pounds albacore steaks, the thicker the better

4 anchovy fillets, rinsed and cut in 1/4-inch pieces (optional)

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 large onion, cut in half lengthwise, then sliced thinly across the grain

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 14-ounce can chopped tomatoes

Pinch of saffron (optional)

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

2 heads soft green lettuce, like bibb or green oak leaf, leaves separated and washed

1 large or 2 small lemons, sliced very thin

3/4 cup dry white wine

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Make small slits in the tuna steaks with the tip of a paring knife and slide the anchovy pieces into the slits. Season the steaks with salt and pepper and set aside. Measure the thickness of the tuna steaks; this will determine the roasting time.

2. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet or saucepan and add the onions. Cook, stirring, until onion is tender, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, stir until it is fragrant, 30 seconds to a minute, and stir in the tomatoes, optional saffron, salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring often, until the tomatoes have cooked down slightly and smell fragrant, about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning.

3. Heat a large, heavy ovenproof casserole over high heat and add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. Season the tuna steaks on both sides with salt and pepper and sear for 30 seconds on both sides (make sure the pot is hot when you add them or they will stick). Transfer to a plate. Stir in half the tomato sauce, scraping the bottom of the pan to deglaze, and remove from the heat.

4. Lay half the lettuce leaves over the tomato sauce and place the tuna steaks on top of the lettuce leaves in a single layer. Cover the steaks with the lemon slices, and spoon on the remaining tomato sauce. If there are any more lemon slices, lay them over the tomato sauce. Top with the remaining lettuce leaves. Pour the wine into the pot.

5. Cover tightly and place in the oven. Bake 1 1/2-inch thick steaks for 15 minutes, 2-inch thick steaks for 20 minutes.

6. To serve, remove the lettuce to a cutting board and slice in thin strips. Transfer the tuna to a warm platter. Remove the lemon slices and discard if desired. Bring the sauce in the pan to a simmer over high heat and reduce for about 5 minutes. Stir the sauce, and spoon over the tuna. Garnish with the lettuce, or serve it separately in a bowl. You can also discard it, but I like the taste and texture. Slice the fish across the grain and serve.

Yield: 4 servings.

Advance preparation: You can prepare the tomato and onion sauce through Step 1 several hours ahead.

Nutritional information per serving (4 servings): 427 calories; 4 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 65 milligrams cholesterol; 12 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 252 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 46 grams protein

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

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Pressure to Link Drugs and ‘Companion Diagnostics’

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The Food and Drug Administration last year rejected the company’s drug to treat a subset of leukemia patients whose tumors had a particular genetic mutation. The main problem was not the drug itself, the agency said. Rather, ChemGenex had not specified a companion test that could reliably detect the mutation so that the drug could be given to the patients it is intended to help.

These days, it is often not enough for pharmaceutical companies simply to bring a drug to market. Regulators and insurers are also prodding the companies to develop tests to pinpoint which patients are most likely to benefit from a drug, thereby sparing other patients from needless side effects and expense.

The pressure has thrust drug and diagnostics companies into sometimes awkward partnerships aimed at developing such tests, which are called companion diagnostics. There were at least 25 such deals in 2010 and 15 in the first half of 2011, up from only seven in 2008, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consulting firm.

“The tests are becoming almost gatekeepers to the drug,” said M. Trevor Page, director of business development at Dako, a Danish diagnostics company.

The F.D.A. issued guidance to the industry on companion diagnostics in July, including its preference for having the test ready for approval at the same time as the drug. The following month, as if to show how it should be done, it approved two drugs and their accompanying tests.

One of the drugs, Pfizer’s Xalkori for lung cancer, works wonders — but only for the roughly 5 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular chromosomal abnormality, as determined by a test from Abbott Laboratories.

The other drug, Zelboraf, from Roche and Plexxikon, can also produce remarkable improvements, but only for the roughly half of melanoma patients whose tumors have a particular mutation. The F.D.A. approved a test from Roche’s diagnostics division to detect that mutation.

But the simultaneous approval of new drugs and tests is still rare. Before August, the only other dual approval was of Genentech’s breast cancer drug Herceptin and Dako’s test for the related HER2 protein in 1998. There are more than 70 other tests that guide drug use in some way, according to the Personalized Medicine Coalition, but they are rarely required and often developed well after the drug reaches the market.

There are numerous economic, scientific and regulatory obstacles to developing companion diagnostics, executives and analysts say.

Often, scientists simply do not know what to test for to predict a drug’s effectiveness, or they don’t find out until near the end of the drug’s clinical trials. And coordinating development and approval of a drug and a test — by two separate companies reviewed by two F.D.A. divisions — can raise the cost of drug development if not done well.

“This is like trying to choreograph a dance,” said Dr. Mace L. Rothenberg, who runs cancer clinical trials for Pfizer.

Moreover, it is often a dance between a giant and a pixie, locked in an embrace but with a tendency to move in opposite directions.

Pharmaceutical companies can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug, then can reap billions of dollars a year in sales with high profit margins. Diagnostic companies typically spend several million dollars to develop a test, with annual revenues also around that level, and low profit margins.

“You are really trying to get two very disparate industries to understand each other,” said Mollie Roth, chief operating officer of Diaceutics, a consulting firm specializing in companion diagnostics.

For pharmaceutical companies, the risk is that a test can lower sales of their drugs by restricting use to a fraction of potential patients.

An often cited example of such a problem involved Selzentry, a Pfizer drug approved in 2007 to treat people with a certain subtype of H.I.V.

The test of a patient’s virus, offered by Monogram Biosciences, cost about $2,000, and all samples had to be sent to Monogram’s laboratory in California. Analysts say the cost and inconvenience of the testing deterred use of Selzentry, especially since it was competing with drugs that could be used by all patients, with no need for testing.

“Top management still sees companion diagnostics as an obstacle between their product and the market,” said Jorge Leon, a consultant to both drug and diagnostic companies.

Still, drug companies are embracing companion diagnostics because of pressures to control health spending. Also, in the rare cases where a test is available early in the drug’s development, as was the case with Xalkori and Zelboraf, clinical trials can be made smaller and less costly by restricting them to patients most likely to benefit from the drug.

For diagnostic companies, there is a risk of developing a test in advance for a drug that may never reach the market.

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