In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises
It comes with an interactive graphic of some sort, haven't looked at it.

Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

But his design also reflects the gated-community mentality that has been spreading like a cancer around the globe for decades. Its utopian purity, and its isolation from the life of the real city next door, are grounded in the belief — accepted by most people today, it seems — that the only way to create a truly harmonious community, green or otherwise, is to cut it off from the world at large.

Mr. Foster is the right man for this kind of job. A lifelong tech buff who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller, he talks about architecture in terms of high performance, as if his buildings were sports cars. And to some extent his single-minded focus on the craft of architecture — its technological and material aspects — has been a convenient way of avoiding trickier discussions about its social impact. (It’s hard to imagine Mr. Foster embroiled in the kind of public battles over modern architecture that his former partner, Richard Rogers, has fought with the traditionalist Prince Charles in London.)

Not that Mr. Foster doesn’t have ideals. At Masdar, one aim was to create an alternative to the ugliness and inefficiency of the sort of development — suburban villas slathered in superficial Islamic-style décor, gargantuan air-conditioned malls — that has been eating away the fabric of Middle Eastern cities for decades.

He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century. “The point,” he said in an interview in New York, “was to go back and understand the fundamentals,” how these communities had been made livable in a region where the air can feel as hot as 150 degrees.

Among the findings his office made was that settlements were often built on high ground, not only for defensive reasons but also to take advantage of the stronger winds. Some also used tall, hollow “wind towers” to funnel air down to street level. And the narrowness of the streets — which were almost always at an angle to the sun’s east-west trajectory, to maximize shade — accelerated airflow through the city.

With the help of environmental consultants, Mr. Foster’s team estimated that by combining such approaches, they could make Masdar feel as much as 70 degrees cooler. In so doing, they could more than halve the amount of electricity needed to run the city. Of the power that is used, 90 percent is expected to be solar, and the rest generated by incinerating waste (which produces far less carbon than piling it up in dumps). The city itself will be treated as a kind of continuing experiment, with researchers and engineers regularly analyzing its performance, fine-tuning as they go along.

But Mr. Foster’s most radical move was the way he dealt with one of the most vexing urban design challenges of the past century: what to do with the car. Not only did he close Masdar entirely to combustion-engine vehicles, he buried their replacement — his network of electric cars — underneath the city. Then, to further reinforce the purity of his vision, he located almost all of the heavy-duty service functions — a 54-acre photovoltaic field and incineration and water treatment plants — outside the city.

The result, Mr. Foster acknowledged, feels a bit like Disneyland. “Disneyland is attractive because all the service is below ground,” he said. “We do the same here — it is literally a walled city. Traditional cars are stopped at the edges.”

Driving from downtown Abu Dhabi, 20 miles away, you follow a narrow road past an oil refinery and through desolate patches of desert before reaching the blank concrete wall of Masdar and find the city looming overhead. (Mr. Foster plans to camouflage the periphery behind fountains and flora.) From there a road tunnels through the base to a garage just underneath the city’s edge.

Stepping out of this space into one of the “Personal Rapid Transit” stations brings to mind the sets designed by Harry Lange for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” You are in a large, dark hall facing a row of white, pod-shaped cars lined up in rectangular glass bays. (The cars’ design was based on Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for a compact urban vehicle, the D-45, which helps explain their softly contoured, timelessly futuristic silhouettes.) Daylight spills down a rough concrete wall behind them, hinting at the life above.

The first 13 cars of a proposed fleet of hundreds were being tested the day I visited, but as soon as the system is up, within a few weeks, a user will be able to step into a car and choose a destination on an LCD screen. The car will then silently pull into traffic, seeming to drive itself. (There are no cables or rails.)

It’s only as people arrive at their destination that they will become aware of the degree to which everything has been engineered for high-function, low-consumption performance. The station’s elevators have been tucked discreetly out of sight to encourage use of a concrete staircase that corkscrews to the surface. And on reaching the streets — which were pretty breezy the day I visited — the only way to get around is on foot. (This is not only a matter of sustainability; Mr. Foster’s on-site partner, Austin Relton, told me that obesity has become a significant health issue in this part of the Arab world, largely because almost everyone drives to avoid the heat.)

The buildings that have gone up so far come in two contrasting styles. Laboratories devoted to developing new forms of sustainable energy and affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are housed in big concrete structures that are clad in pillowlike panels of ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene, a super-strong translucent plastic that has become fashionable in contemporary architecture circles for its sleek look and durability. Inside, big open floor slabs are designed for maximum flexibility.

The residential buildings, which for now will mostly house professors, students and their families, use a more traditional architectural vocabulary. To conform to Middle Eastern standards of privacy, Mr. Foster came up with an undulating facade of concrete latticework based on the mashrabiya screens common in the region. The latticework blocks direct sunlight and screens interiors from view, while the curves make for angled views to the outside, so that apartment dwellers never look directly into the windows of facing buildings. Such concerns are also reflected in the layout of the neighborhood. Like many Middle Eastern university campuses, it is segregated by sex, with women and families living at one end and single men at the other. Each end has a small public plaza, which acts as its social heart.

Still, one wonders, despite the technical brilliance and the sensitivity to local norms, how a project like Masdar can ever attain the richness and texture of a real city. Eventually, a light-rail system will connect it to Abu Dhabi, and street life will undoubtedly get livelier as the daytime population grows to a projected 90,000. (Although construction on a second, larger phase has already begun, the government-run developer, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, refuses to give a completion date for the city, saying only that it will grow at its own pace.)

But the decision of who gets to live and work in Masdar, as in any large-scale development, will be outside the architect’s control. That will be decided by the landlord, in this case, the government.

And even if it were to become a perfect little urban melting pot, Masdar would have only limited relevance to the world most people live in. Mr. Foster’s inspired synthesis of ancient and new technologies could well have applications elsewhere; it should be looked at closely by other architects. But no one would argue that a city of a few million or more can be organized with such precision, and his fantasy world is only possible as a meticulously planned community, built from the ground up and of modest size.

What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.

That’s obviously not how Mr. Foster sees it. He said the city was intended to house a cross-section of society, from students to service workers. “It is not about social exclusion,” he added.

And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.

Egypt and Thirsty Neighbors Are at Odds Over Nile

One place to begin to understand why this parched country has nearly ruptured relations with its upstream neighbors on the Nile is ankle-deep in mud in the cotton and maize fields of Mohammed Abdallah Sharkawi. The price he pays for the precious resource flooding his farm? Nothing.

“Thanks be to God,” Mr. Sharkawi said of the Nile River water. He raised his hands to the sky, then gestured toward a state functionary visiting his farm. “Everything is from God, and from the ministry.”

But perhaps not for much longer. Upstream countries, looking to right what they say are historic wrongs, have joined in an attempt to break Egypt and Sudan’s near-monopoly on the water, threatening a crisis that Egyptian experts said could, at its most extreme, lead to war.

“Not only is Egypt the gift of the Nile, this is a country that is almost completely dependent on Nile water resources,” said a spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Hossam Zaki. “We have a growing population and growing needs. There is no way we can accept this kind of threat.”

Ever since civilization first sprang forth here, Egyptians have clustered along the Nile’s silt-rich banks. Almost all of the country’s 80 million people live within a few miles of the river, and farmers like Mr. Sharkawi have hardly changed their farming methods in four millenniums. Egypt’s population is growing briskly, however, and by the year 2017 at current rates of usage the Nile’s water will barely meet Egypt’s basic needs, according to the Ministry of Irrigation.

And that is assuming that the river’s flow is undiminished. Under British colonial rule, a 1929 treaty reserved 80 percent of the Nile’s entire flow for Egypt and Sudan, then ruled as a single country. That treaty was reaffirmed in 1959. Usually upstream countries dominate control of a river, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which are much reduced by the time they flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. The case of the Nile is reversed because the British colonials who controlled the region wanted to guarantee water for Egyptian agriculture.

The seven upstream countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda — say the treaty is an unfair vestige of colonialism, while Egypt says those countries are awash in water resources, unlike arid Egypt, which depends on just one.

Today’s confrontation has unfolded in slow motion. In April, negotiations between the nine Nile countries broke down after Egypt and Sudan refused to give ground. The upstream countries quickly got together and in May came up with a formula that would free them to build their own irrigation projects and dams, reducing the flow to Lake Nasser, the vast man-made reservoir that straddles Egypt and Sudan.

So far Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda have signed the new Nile basin accord, which would require only a simple majority of member countries to approve new projects. Egypt wants to retain veto power over projects in any country, and with Sudan argues that the main provisions of the colonial-era treaty should be preserved.

Congo and Burundi have not yet taken sides. Egypt and Sudan have until May 2011 to resume negotiations, or else the upstream countries will activate the new agreement.

The threat of losing Nile water has animated Egypt, which until recently had virtually ignored the upstream countries. And Cairo received another jolt this spring, when Ethiopia inaugurated a $520 million hydroelectric dam on a Nile tributary, part of a decade-long project to create a modern electricity infrastructure. Italy, Ethiopia and the European Investment Bank financed the project, according to Ethiopian media reports.

Adding urgency, say diplomats and water experts in Egypt, investors from China and the Persian Gulf region have expressed interest in underwriting enormous agriculture projects in Uganda and Ethiopia, which would use Nile water.

Currently, several upstream nations, including Ethiopia and Uganda, are planning hydroelectric dams. If the upstream countries move slowly and fill the reservoirs over a period of 5 to 15 years, however, Egyptian officials concede that the hydroelectric plants will not significantly hurt Egyptian consumption.

Egyptian officials are also confident that the World Bank, the traditional donor for dams, would not approve them over Cairo’s objections, even if the officials remain concerned that governments and private investors might feel free to lend the money.

But agricultural projects, potentially far more damaging to Egypt, are another matter. Not only would they permanently reduce the amount of water that reaches Egypt’s border, but they have also already attracted the interest of wealthy Arab nations and the Chinese, who see an enormous profit potential in them.

Egyptian water experts said that the upstream countries wasted colossal amounts of water that run off unused into swamps. The upstream countries point to Egypt’s own wasteful practices, saying that 75 percent of Egypt’s water is used for agriculture, most of it wasted by inefficient, old-fashioned practices.

“I feel that we are all mad,” said Diaa el-Quosy, an American-trained water expert who advises Egypt’s irrigation minister. “Everyone wants to take his own share and then more.” He said that once political tensions cooled, the nine Nile basin countries could find “creative solutions” to manage the river’s flow effectively. “There is water enough for everyone,” he said.

In Egypt, however, decades of bellicose rhetoric about the Nile have made the river’s water an explosive issue. “Violating Egypt’s quota of Nile water is a genocidal war against 80 million people,” an Egyptian commentator, Hazem el-Beblawi, wrote this year in Al Masry Al Youm, an Egyptian daily.

Water experts say that Egypt has done little to curtail its own misuse of water.

Despite periodic government efforts to promote less wasteful practices, irrigation water still flows largely through dirt channels often choked with weeds. Much of it leaches into the ground before reaching crops. “Egypt doesn’t act like a country dying of thirst,” said Dan Morrison, author of “The Black Nile,” in which he chronicled his journey from the river’s origins to its mouth at the Mediterranean, and encountered the most pronounced waste in Egypt. So long as water is free for farmers, Mr. Morrison said, there is little incentive to conserve.

One solution Mr. Morrison proposed would entail Egypt’s importing food staples from upstream nations that can farm more efficiently with Nile water.

Isam Abdurahman, a Ministry of Agriculture farm supervisor, said the government was taking steps to try to conserve water, including paving some irrigation canals and managing farmers more strictly. This year, for instance, because of low river levels, rice cultivation was banned entirely in some areas, while the cotton quota was severely restricted. Mr. Sharkawi was permitted to plant only one field with cotton, rather than four.

And in a few desert areas like Toshka, near the Sudanese border, Egypt has experimented with large-scale modern drip irrigation. The vast majority of its farmers, however, are small land holders like Mr. Sharkawi, who cultivates maize, cotton and alfalfa in the Nile Delta.

He cannot afford to invest in drip irrigation or sprinkler systems that would lose less water to evaporation. Furthermore, like most Egyptian family farmers, he favors the most water-hogging crops, like rice, maize and cotton, rather than lower-intensity fruits and vegetables.

Upstream leaders like Ethiopia’s prime minister caution that Nile water use is “not a zero-sum game,” but in Egypt’s Delta that’s exactly how millions of farmers view it. If he had to pay for his water, Mr. Sharkawi said, he simply would lose his land. “Since the time of the ancient Egyptians,” he said, “we’ve always lived like this. It is the same for me, and it will be the same for my children.”

Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning

A once-unthinkable day is looming on the Colorado River.

Barring a sudden end to the Southwest’s 11-year drought, the distribution of the river’s dwindling bounty is likely to be reordered as early as next year because the flow of water cannot keep pace with the region’s demands.

For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet.

If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced.

This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected.

But the operating plan also lays out a proposal to prevent Lake Mead from dropping below the trigger point. It allows water managers to send 40 percent more water than usual downstream to Lake Mead from Lake Powell in Utah, the river’s other big reservoir, which now contains about 50 percent more water than Lake Mead.

In that case, the shortage declaration would be avoided and Lake Mead’s levels restored to 1,100 feet or so.

Lake Powell, fed by rain and snowmelt that create the Colorado and tributaries, has risen more than 60 feet from a 2004 low because the upper basin states, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, do not use their full allocations. The upper basin provides a minimum annual flow of 8.23 million acre feet to Arizona, Nevada and California. (An acre-foot of water is generally considered the amount two families of four use annually.)

In its August report the Bureau of Reclamation said the extra replenishment from Lake Powell was the likeliest outcome. Nonetheless, said Terry Fulp, the bureau’s deputy regional director for the Lower Colorado Region, it is the first time ever that the bureau has judged a critical shortage to be remotely possible in the near future.

“We’re approaching the magical line that would trigger shortage,” Mr. Fulp said. “We have the lowest 11-year average in the 100-year-plus recorded history of flows on the basin.”

The reservoir is now less than 15 inches above the all-time low of 1,083.2 feet set in 1956.

But back then, while the demand from California farmland was similar, if not greater, the population was far smaller. Perhaps 9.5 million people in the three states in the lower Colorado River basin depended on the supply in the late 1950s; today more than 28 million people do.

The impact of the declining water level is visible in the alkaline bathtub rings on the reservoir’s walls and the warning lights for mariners high on its rocky outcroppings. National Park Service employees have repeatedly moved marinas, chasing the receding waterline.

Adding to water managers’ unease, scientists predict that prolonged droughts will be more frequent in decades to come as the Southwest’s climate warms. As Lake Mead’s level drops, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity, which, like the Colorado River water, is sent around the Southwest, diminishes with it. If Lake Mead levels fall to 1,050 feet, it may be impossible to use the dam’s turbines, and the flow of electricity could cease.

The fretting that dominates today’s discussions about the river contrasts with the old-style optimism about the Colorado’s plenitude that has usually prevailed since Hoover Dam — then called Boulder Dam — was completed 75 years ago, impounding the water from Lake Mead.

The worries have provoked action: cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have undertaken extensive conservation programs. Between 2000 and 2009, Phoenix’s average per-capita daily household use has dropped almost 20 percent; Las Vegas’s has dropped 21.3 percent.

Nonetheless, “if the river flow continues downward and we can’t build back up supply, Las Vegas is in big trouble,” Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said in an interview.

While Las Vegas is one of the Colorado River’s smaller clients — it consumes 2 percent of the river’s allocated deliveries— the city relies on Lake Mead for 90 percent of its water supply. From 2002 to 2009, the metropolitan area’s population mushroomed by nearly 40 percent, to 1.9 million from 1.37 million.

In response to the population boom and the drought, which began in 1999, the authority began an aggressive effort to encourage water conservation in 2002.

Now it is expanding its options: it is tunneling under the bottom of Lake Mead to install a third intake valve that could continue operating until lake levels dropped below 1,000 feet.

Saddle Island, the construction staging site on the reservoir, looks like an abstract painting, its dusty russet ground covered with interlacing segments of the 2,500 concrete rings that will make up the three-mile-long pipe.

Ms. Mulroy has also pushed aggressively for pipelines to carry distant groundwater to the Las Vegas area; most contentious is a planned 285-mile pipeline that would cross the state diagonally and take groundwater from the Snake Valley, on the Nevada-Utah border, to Las Vegas.

The authority has also spent about $147 million on a program to encourage homeowners and businesses to eliminate their lawns in favor of the rock, grass and cactus landscaping known as xeriscaping. More than 70 percent of household water usage is attributed to outdoor use, Ms. Mulroy said.

Residents can now water their yards only three days a week, before 11 a.m. and after 7 p.m., and the restrictions are to tighten this winter.

Dolores Cormier, 82, who lives on Monterrey Avenue on the southern side of Las Vegas, reconfigured her front and side lawns, installing a rocky cover and drip irrigation. Under a water authority program known as Water Smart Landscapes (colloquially, Cash for Grass), she has received $2,689 in utility subsidies that will offset the $5,600 or so she said the xeriscaping cost her.

She is pleased with the new look but said her average monthly water bill of $45 or so has yet to decline, perhaps because she still tends grass in her small backyard. “I need some lawn,” she confessed.

If the 1,075 level is broken at Lake Mead next year, more drastic conservation measures will be needed, officials warn.

“We have a very finite resource and demand which increases and enlarges every day,” said John A. Zebre, a Wyoming lawyer and the president of the Colorado River Water Users Association.

“The problem is always going to be there,” he said. “Everything is driven by that problem.”

Web Tastes Freedom Inside Syria, and It’s Bitter

Earlier this month, a graphic video of teachers beating their young students appeared on Facebook. Although Facebook is officially banned here, the video quickly went viral, with Syrian bloggers stoking public anger until the story was picked up by the pan-Arab media.

Finally, the Education Ministry issued a statement saying the teachers had been reassigned to desk jobs. The episode was a rare example of the way Syrians using Facebook and blogs can win a tenuous measure of freedom within the country’s tightly controlled media scene, where any criticism of the government, however oblique, can lead to years in prison.

“We have a little bit of freedom,” said Khaled al-Ekhetyar, a 29-year-old journalist for a Web site whose business card shows a face with hands covering up the eyes and mouth. “We can say things that can’t be said in print.”

But that slim margin is threatened by an ever present fog of fear and intimidation, and some journalists fear that it could soon be snuffed out. A draft law regulating online media would clamp down on Syrian bloggers and other journalists, forcing them to register as syndicate members and submit their writing for review. Other Arab countries regularly jail journalists who express dissident views, but Syria may be the most restrictive of all.

Most of the Syrian media is still owned by the state. Privately owned media outlets became legal in 2001, as the socialist economy slowly began to liberalize following the accession of President Bashar al-Assad. But much of the sector is owned by members of the Syrian “oligarchy” — relatives of Mr. Assad and other top government officials. All of it is subject to intimidation and heavy-handed control.

“The first level is censorship,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, the founder of All4Syria.info, the independent Web site where Mr. Ekhetyar works. “The second level is when they send you statements and force you to publish them.” Like many other journalists and dissidents, Mr. Abdel Nour has left the country and now lives abroad.

The basic “red lines” are well known: no criticism of the president and his family or the security services, no touching delicate issues like Syria’s Kurdish minority or the Alawites, a religious minority to which Mr. Assad belongs. Foreign journalists who violate these rules are regularly banned from the country (a fact that constrains coverage of Syria in this and other newspapers).

But the exact extent of what is forbidden is left deliberately unclear, and that vagueness encourages fear and self-censorship, many journalists here say. A 19-year-old female high school student and blogger, Tal al-Mallohi, was arrested late last year and remains in prison. Her blog had encouraged the Syrian government to do more for the Palestinians, but it scarcely amounted to real criticism, and the authorities have not given any reason for her detention. A number of bloggers have been arrested for expressing views deemed critical of the Syrian government or even other Arab governments, under longstanding laws that criminalize “weakening national sentiment” and other broadly defined offenses.

Others have been jailed for jokes. One blogger, Osama Kario, wrote a parody in 2007 of the famous “three Arab No’s” refusing any concession to Israel (no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel). His version: “No electricity, no water, no Internet.” He was jailed for 28 days, and when he emerged he stopped blogging and would not speak to fellow journalists about his experience.

Television and radio journalists have made some tentative efforts to push the limits in the past few years, with mixed success. D.J.’s like Honey Sayed, who hosts a popular show called “Good Morning Syria” on Madina FM, often explore sensitive social issues like homosexuality and child abuse. Last year Orient TV, a new station owned by an independent Syrian businessman, began broadcasting from Dubai and quickly gained a large audience with its imaginative documentaries. But a few months later the station’s Damascus office was abruptly shut down, with no explanation given.

One Web site, All4Syria.info, has managed to survive since 2004 with a revolving staff of about half a dozen writers based in Syria. Earlier this year it published an interview with three political dissidents on their release from prison, something no other Syrian outlet dared to do.

“The Internet in Syria is a bit like the samizdat publications were under the Soviet Union,” said Mohammad Ali Abdallah, whose brother Omar Ali Abdallah was sentenced to five years in prison in 2006 for contributing to an Internet forum that was deemed seditious by the authorities.

Last year, some of Syria’s new, privately owned radio stations joined bloggers in criticizing a proposed revision of Syria’s personal status law that would have made it legal for men to marry girls as young as 13 years old. Under pressure, lawmakers abandoned the proposal.

But individual successes do not always make for broader progress, because of fear.

“Even when someone successfully crosses a line, everyone is still afraid, they don’t build on it,” Mr. Ekhetyar said. “They think maybe it was a coincidence.”

Many online journalists use pseudonyms, he added, a practice that may be safer but erodes their credibility and leaves them in a fearful solitude where they cannot develop professional standards. Facebook has been an important outlet for political and social frustrations, but it, too, is often used with furtive anonymity.

And it is impossible to tell how many Syrians are paying attention. Asked who his audience was, Mr. Ekhetyar paused and said with a weary smile, “My friends and the secret police.”

That may be why the Syrian authorities, despite the official ban on Facebook, YouTube, and many other Internet venues, do not seem too frightened of them. Most Syrian government officials, including the president, have their own Facebook pages. Walk into almost any of the many Internet cafes in Damascus, and the manager will show you how to log on to Facebook or other banned sites. Foreign proxy server numbers are traded among young people like baseball cards.

On a recent evening in the tumultuous Bab Touma section of Damascus’s Old City, 26-year-old Berj Agop was among a crowd of young people at the SpotNet Internet Cafe, many of them casually surfing sites that are officially banned.

“I saw the video of the teacher beating the student,” he said. “It’s a victory for sure; without Facebook no one would have known about that incident.”

But nearby, another young man who gave his name only as Taym offered a different view.

“The Internet is like a baby’s lollipop for the young,” he said. “It entertains him and makes him forget his problems, it’s like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ — I dream of such a world, a better world.”

In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.

That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.

There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.

“The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed,” one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. “Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure.”

So a calling card in the code could be part of a mind game, or sloppiness or whimsy from the coders.

The malicious code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. But there are tantalizing hints that Iran’s nuclear program was the primary target. Officials in both the United States and Israel have made no secret of the fact that undermining the computer systems that control Iran’s huge enrichment plant at Natanz is a high priority. (The Iranians know it, too: They have never let international inspectors into the control room of the plant, the inspectors report, presumably to keep secret what kind of equipment they are using.)

The fact that Stuxnet appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants, may be telling. Just last year officials in Dubai seized a large shipment of those controllers — known as the Simatic S-7 — after Western intelligence agencies warned that the shipment was bound for Iran and would likely be used in its nuclear program.

“What we were told by many sources,” said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, “was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment.”

Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium — and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.

Yet something — perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians — is indeed slowing Iran’s advance.

The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)

Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.

These events add up to a mass of suspicions, not proof. Moreover, the difficulty experts have had in figuring out the origin of Stuxnet points to both the appeal and the danger of computer attacks in a new age of cyberwar.

For intelligence agencies they are an almost irresistible weapon, free of fingerprints. Israel has poured huge resources into Unit 8200, its secretive cyberwar operation, and the United States has built its capacity inside the National Security Agency and inside the military, which just opened a Cyber Command.

But the near impossibility of figuring out where they came from makes deterrence a huge problem — and explains why many have warned against the use of cyberweapons. No country, President Obama was warned even before he took office, is more vulnerable to cyberattack than the United States.

For now, it is hard to determine if the worm has infected centrifuge controllers at Natanz. While the S-7 industrial controller is used widely in Iran, and many other countries, even Siemens says it does not know where it is being used. Alexander Machowetz, a spokesman in Germany for Siemens, said the company did no business with Iran’s nuclear program. “It could be that there is equipment,” he said in a telephone interview. “But we never delivered it to Natanz.”

But Siemens industrial controllers are unregulated commodities that are sold and resold all over the world — the controllers intercepted in Dubai traveled through China, according to officials familiar with the seizure.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been “weaponized” and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.

“It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys,” he said, “and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer.”

There are many reasons to suspect Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.

He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.

“They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,” he said.

Then there is the allusion to myrtus — which may be telling, or may be a red herring.

Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.

It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.

“If you read the Bible you can make a guess,” said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.

Carol Newsom, an Old Testament scholar at Emory University, confirmed the linguistic connection between the plant family and the Old Testament figure, noting that Queen Esther’s original name in Hebrew was Hadassah, which is similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle. Perhaps, she said, “someone was making a learned cross-linguistic wordplay.”

But other Israeli experts said they doubted Israel’s involvement. Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”

“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”

Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work.

The Pen That Never Forgets

In the spring, Cincia Dervishaj was struggling with a take-home math quiz. It was testing her knowledge of exponential notation — translating numbers like “3.87 x 10²” into a regular form. Dervishaj is a 13-year-old student at St. John’s Lutheran School in Staten Island, and like many students grappling with exponents, she got confused about where to place the decimal point. “I didn’t get them at all,” Dervishaj told me in June when I visited her math class, which was crowded with four-year-old Dell computers, plastic posters of geometry formulas and a big bowl of Lego bricks.

To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: she had copied several sample problems but hadn’t written a clear explanation of how exponents work.

She didn’t need to. Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said.

Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream. Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.

LIKE MOST PIECES of classroom technology, the pens cause plenty of digital-age hassles. They can crash. The software for loading students’ notes onto their computers or from there onto the Web can be finicky. And the pens work only with special notepaper that enables the pen to track where it’s writing; regular paper doesn’t work. (Most students buy notepads from Livescribe, though it’s possible to print the paper on a color printer.) There are also some unusual social side-effects. The presence of so many recording devices in the classroom creates a sort of panopticon — or panaudiocon, as it were. Dervishaj has found herself whispering to her seatmate, only to realize the pen was on, “so we’re like, whoa!” — their gossip has been recorded alongside her notes. Although you can pause a recording, there’s currently no way to selectively delete a few seconds of audio from the pen, so she’s forced to make a decision: Delete all the audio for that lesson, or keep it in and hope nobody else ever hears her private chatter. She usually deletes.

Nonetheless, Licata is a convert. As the students started working quietly on review problems, their pens making tiny “boop” noises as the students began or paused their recording, Licata pulled me aside to say the pens had “transformed” his class. Compact and bristling with energy, Licata is a self-professed geek; in his 10 years of teaching, he has seen plenty of classroom gadgets come and go, from Web-based collaboration software to pricey whiteboards that let children play with geometric figures the way they’d manipulate an iPhone screen. Most of these gewgaws don’t impress him. “Two or three times a year teachers whip out some new technology and use it, but it doesn’t do anything better and it’s never seen again,” he said.

But this time, he said, was different. This is because the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. Livescribe first released the pen in 2008; Licata encountered it when a colleague brought his own to work. Intrigued, he persuaded Livescribe to donate 20 pens to the school to outfit his entire class. (The pens sell for around $129.) “I’ve made more gains with this class this year than I’ve made with any class,” he told me. In his evenings, Licata is pursuing a master’s degree in education; separately, he intends to study how the smart pens might affect the way students learn, write and think. “Two years ago I would have told you that note-taking is a lost art, that handwriting was a lost art,” he said. “But now I think handwriting is crucial.”

TAKING NOTES HAS long posed a challenge in education. Decades of research has found a strong correlation between good notes and good grades: the more detailed and accurate your notes, the better you do in school. That’s partly because the act of taking notes forces you to pay closer attention. But what’s more important, according to some researchers, is that good notes provide a record: most of the benefits from notes come not from taking them but from reviewing them, because no matter how closely we pay attention, we forget things soon after we leave class. “We have feeble memories,” says Ken Kiewra, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska and one of the world’s leading researchers into note-taking.

Yet most students are very bad at taking notes. Kiewra’s research has found that students record about a third of the critical information they hear in class. Why? Because note-taking is a surprisingly complex mental activity. It heavily taxes our “working memory” — the volume of information we can consciously hold in our heads and manipulate. Note-taking requires a student to listen to a teacher, pick out the most important points and summarize and record them, while trying not to lose the overall drift of the lecture. (The very best students do even more mental work: they blend what they’re hearing with material they already know and reframe the concepts in their own words.) Given how jampacked this task is, “transcription fluency” matters: the less you have to think about the way you’re recording notes, the better. When you’re taking notes, you want to be as fast and as automatic as possible.

All note-taking methods have downsides. Handwriting is the most common and easiest, but a lecturer speaks at 150 to 200 words per minute, while even the speediest high-school students write no more than 40 words per minute. The more you struggle to keep up, the more you’re focusing on the act of writing, not the act of paying attention.

Typing can be much faster. A skilled typist can manage 60 words a minute or more. And notes typed into a computer have other advantages: they can be quickly searched (unlike regular handwritten notes) and backed up or shared online with other students. They’re also neater and thus easier to review. But they come with other problems, not least of which is that typing can’t capture the diagrammatic notes that classes in math, engineering or biology often require. What’s more, while personal computers and laptops may be common in college, that isn’t the case in cash-strapped high schools. Laptops in class also bring a host of distractions — from Facebook to Twitter — that teachers loathe. And students today are rarely taught touch typing; some note-taking studies have found that students can be even slower at typing than at handwriting.

One of the most complete ways to document what is said in class is to make an audio record: all 150-plus words a minute can be captured with no mental effort on the part of the student. Kiewra’s research has found that audio can have a powerful effect on learning. In a 1991 experiment, he had four groups of students listen to a lecture. One group was allowed to listen once, another twice, the third three times and the fourth was free to scroll back and forth through the recording at will, listening to whatever snippets the students wanted to review. Those who relistened were increasingly likely to write down crucial “secondary” ideas — concepts in a lecture that add nuance to the main points but that we tend to miss when we’re focused on writing down the core ideas. And the students who were able to move in and out of the audio stream performed as well as those who listened to the lecture three times in a row. (Students who recorded more secondary ideas also scored higher in a later quiz.) But as anyone who has tried to scroll back and forth through an audio file has discovered, reviewing audio is frustrating and clumsy. Audio may be richer in detail, but it is not, like writing and typescript, skimmable.

JIM MARGGRAFF, the 52-year-old inventor of the Livescribe pen, has a particular knack for blending audio and text. In the ’90s, appalled by Americans’ poor grasp of geography, he invented a globe that would speak the name of any city or country when you touched the location with a pen. In 1998, his firm was absorbed by Leapfrog, the educational-toy maker, where Marggraff invented toys that linked audio to paper. His first device, the LeapPad, was a book that would speak words and play other sounds whenever a child pointed a stylus at it. It quickly became Leapfrog’s biggest hit.

In 2001, Marggraff was browsing a copy of Wired magazine when he read an article about Anoto, a Swedish firm that patented a clever pen technology: it imprinted sheets of paper with tiny dots that a camera-equipped pen could use to track precisely where it was on any page. Several firms were licensing the technology to create pens that would record pen strokes, allowing users to keep digital copies of whatever they wrote on the patterned paper. But Marggraff had a different idea. If the pen recorded audio while it wrote, he figured, it would borrow the best parts from almost every style of note-taking. The audio record would help note-takers find details missing from their written notes, and the handwritten notes would serve as a guide to the audio record, letting users quickly dart to the words they wanted to rehear. Marggraff quit Leapfrog in 2005 to work on his new idea, and three years later he released the first Livescribe pen. He has sold close to 500,000 pens in the last two years, mostly to teachers, students and businesspeople.

I met Marggraff in his San Francisco office this summer. He and Andrew Van Schaack, a professor in the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University and Livescribe’s science adviser, explained that the pen operated, in their view, as a supplement to your working memory. If you’re not worried about catching every last word, you can allocate more of your attention to processing what you’re hearing.

“I think people can be more confident in taking fewer notes, recognizing that they can go back if there’s something important that they need,” Van Schaack said. “As a teacher, I want to free up some cognitive ability. You know that little dial on there, your little brain tachometer? I want to drop off this one so I can use it on my thinking.” Marggraff told me Livescribe has surveyed its customers on how they use the pen. “A lot of adults say that it helps them with A.D.H.D.,” he said. “Students say: ‘It helps me improve my grades in specific classes. I can think and listen, rather than writing.’ They get more confident.”

Livescribe pens often inspire proselytizing among users. I spoke to students at several colleges and schools who insisted that the pen had improved their performance significantly; one swore it helped boost his G.P.A. to 3.9 from 3.5. Others said they had evolved highly personalized short notations — even pictograms — to make it easier to relocate important bits of audio. (Whenever his professor reeled off a long list of facts, one student would simply write “LIST” if he couldn’t keep up, then go back later to fill in the details after class.) A few students pointed to the handwriting recognition in Livescribe’s desktop software: once an individual user has transferred the contents of a pen to his or her computer, the software makes it possible to search that handwriting — so long as it’s reasonably legible — by keyword. That, students said, markedly sped up studying for tests, because they could rapidly find notes on specific topics. The pen can also load “apps”: for example, a user can draw an octave of a piano keyboard and play it (with the notes coming out of the pen’s speaker), or write a word in English and have the pen translate it into Spanish on the pen’s tiny L.E.D. display.

Still, it’s hard to know whether Marggraff’s rosiest ambitions are realistic. No one has yet published independent studies testing whether the Livescribe style of enhanced note-taking seriously improves educational performance. One of the only studies thus far is by Van Schaack himself. In the spring, he conducted an unpublished experiment in which he had 40 students watch a video of a 30-minute lecture on primatology. The students took notes with a Livescribe pen, and were also given an iPod with a recording of the lecture. Afterward, when asked to locate specific facts on both devices, the students were 2.5 times faster at retrieving the facts on the pen than on the iPod. It was, Van Schaack argues, evidence that the pen can make an audio stream genuinely accessible, potentially helping students tap into those important secondary ideas that we miss when we’re scrambling to write solely by hand.

Marggraff suspects the deeper impact of the pen may not be in taking notes when you’re listening to someone else, but when you’re alone — and thinking through a problem by yourself. For example, he said, a book can overwhelm a reader with thoughts. “You’re going to get ideas like crazy when you’re reading,” Marggraff says. “The issue is that it’s too slow to sit down and write them” — but if you don’t record them, you’ll usually forget them. So when Marggraff is reading a book at home or even on a plane, he’ll pull out his pen, hit record and start talking about what he’s thinking, while jotting down some keywords. Later on, when he listens to the notes, “it’s just astounding how relevant it is, and how much value it brings.” No matter how good his written notes are, audio includes many more flashes of insight — the difference between the 30 words per minute of his writing and the 150 minutes per word of his speech, as it were.

Marggraff pulls out his laptop to show me notes he took while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers.” The notes are neat and legible, but the audio is even richer; when he taps on the middle of the note, I can hear his voice chattering away at high speed. When he listens to the notes, he’ll often get new ideas, so he’ll add notes, layering analysis on top of analysis.

“This is game-changing,” he says. “This is a dialogue with yourself.” He has used the technique to brainstorm patent ideas for hours at a time.

Similarly, in his class at St. John’s, Licata has found the pen is useful in capturing the students’ dialogues with themselves. For instance, he asks his students to talk to their pens while they do their take-home quizzes, recording their logic in audio. That way, if they go off the rails, Licata can click through the page to hear what, precisely, went wrong and why. “I’m actually able to follow their train of thought,” he says.

Some experts have doubts about Livescribe as a silver bullet. As Kiewra points out, plenty of technologies in the past have been hailed as salvations of education. “There’s been the radio, there’s been the phonograph, moving pictures, the VCR” — and, of course, the computer. But the average student’s note-taking ability remains as dismal as ever. Kiewra says he now believes the only way to seriously improve it is by painstakingly teaching students the core skills: how to listen for key concepts, how to review your notes and how to organize them to make meaning, teasing out interesting associations between bits of information. (As an example, he points out that students taking notes on the planets will learn lots of individual facts. But if they organize them into a chart, they’ll make discoveries on their own: sort the planets by distance from the sun and speed of rotation, and you’ll discover that the farther you go out, the more slowly they spin.) Kiewra also says that an effective way to get around the problem of incomplete and disorganized note-taking is for teachers to give out “partial” notes — handouts that summarize key concepts in the lecture but leave blanks that the students must fill in, forcing them to pay attention. Some studies have found that students using partial notes capture a majority of the main concepts in a lecture, more than doubling their usual performance.

Indeed, many modern educators say that students shouldn’t be taking notes in class at all. If it’s true that note-taking taxes their working memory, they argue, then teachers should simply hand out complete sets of notes that reflect everything in the lecture — leaving students free to listen and reflect. After all, if the Internet has done anything, it has made it trivially easy for instructors to distribute materials.

“I don’t think anyone should be writing down what the teacher’s saying in class,” is the blunt assessment of Lisa Nielsen, author of a blog, “The Innovative Educator,” who also heads up a division of the New York City Department of Education devoted to finding uses for new digital tools in classrooms. “Teachers should be pulling in YouTube videos or lectures from experts around the world, piping in great people into their classrooms, and all those things can be captured online — on Facebook, on a blog, on a wiki or Web site — for students to be looking at later,” she says. “Now, should students be making meaning of what they’re hearing or coming up with questions? Yes. But they don’t need to write down everything the teacher’s said.” There is some social-science support for the no-note-taking view. In one experiment, Kiewra took several groups of students and subjected them to different note-taking situations: some attended a lecture and reviewed their own notes; others didn’t attend but were given a set of notes from the instructor. Those who heard the lecture and took notes scored 51 percent on a subsequent test, while those who only read the instructor’s notes scored 69 percent.

Of course, if Marggraff has his way, smart pens could become so common — and so much cheaper — that bad notes, or at least incomplete ones, will become a thing of the past. Indeed, if most pen-and-paper writing could be easily copied and swapped online, the impacts on education could be intriguing and widespread. Marggraff intends to release software that lets teachers print their students’ work on dot-patterned paper; students could do their assignment, e-mail it in, then receive a graded paper e-mailed back with handwritten and spoken feedback from the teacher. Students would most likely swap notes more often; perhaps an entire class could designate one really good note-taker and let him write while everyone else listens, sharing the notes online later. Marggraff even foresees textbooks in which students could make notes in the margins and have a permanent digital record of their written and spoken thoughts beside the text. “Now we really have bridged the paper and the digital worlds,” he adds. Perhaps the future of the pen is on the screen.