Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them

BUFFALO — Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.

But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.

“You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here,” he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. “That’s it. See?”

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 — much later than many have assumed.

The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.

And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.

Beyond Counting

In a typical preschool class, children do very little math. They may practice counting, and occasionally look at books about numbers, but that is about it. Many classes devote mere minutes a day to math instruction or no time at all, recent studies have found — far less than most children can handle, and not nearly enough to prepare those who, deprived of math-related games at home, quickly fall behind in kindergarten.

“Once that happens, it can be very hard to catch up,” said Julie Sarama, a researcher in the graduate school of education at the University at Buffalo who, with her colleague and husband, Doug Clements, a professor in the same department, developed a program called Building Blocks to enrich early math education.

“They decide they’re no good at math — ‘I’m not a math person,’ they say — and pretty soon the school agrees, the parents agree,” Dr. Clements said.

“Everyone agrees.”

In a Building Blocks classroom, numbers are in artwork, on computer games and in lessons, sharing equal time with letters. Like “Sesame Street,” Building Blocks has children play creative counting games; but it also focuses on other number skills, including cardinality (how many objects are in a set) and one-to-one correspondence (matching groups of objects, like cups and saucers). Teachers can tailor the Building Block lesson to a student’s individual ability.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at the Makowski center, Buffalo’s Public School 99, Pat Andzel asked her preschool class a question:

“How many did you count?”

She had drilled them on the number seven. She held up a sign with “7” and asked her students what number they saw (“seven!”); had the group jump seven times, counting; then had them touch their nose seven times. As the class finished counting seven objects on a poster, she asked again:

“How many?”

“I never used to ask that,” Ms. Andzel said in an interview after the lesson. She asks it all the time now, she said, because it drives home a subtle but crucial idea: that the last number they said in counting is the quantity; it is the answer.

“Many of these kids don’t understand that yet,” she said.

The curriculum includes a variety of math-based lessons and activities, as well as software programs, all drawing on findings from cognitive science. When it comes to understanding numbers, for example, recent research suggests that infants can distinguish one object from two, and two from three.

By preschool, the brain can handle larger numbers and is struggling to link three crucial concepts: physical quantities (seven marbles, seven inches) with abstract digit symbols (“7”), with the corresponding number words (“seven”). Lessons like the one Ms. Andzel taught are meant to fuse this numeric trinity, which is crucial for understanding basic math in kindergarten.

Children begin recognizing geometric shapes as early as 18 months, studies find; by preschool, the brain can begin to grasp informal geometric definitions.

It can when taught properly, that is. Many books use a pizza slice to illustrate a triangle, for example, even though slices are rounded at one end. Once a child has fused the word triangle with a specific shape (triangle = pizza slice), it is hard to break that association later on.

“The definition,” Dr. Clements said, “is a three-angled shape. Period.” Building Blocks teaches this definition, illustrating it with triangles skinny and fat, squat and tall.

In all, this curriculum and others link numbers to objects, to rhythms, to the chairs and plates around a table — to the physical world.

“If children have games and activities that demonstrate the relationship between numbers, then quantity becomes a physical experience,” said Sharon Griffin, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who found in a series of careful studies that a curriculum she devised, called Number Worlds, raised the scores of children who lagged in math. “Counting, by contrast, is very abstract.”

In a study published last year, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University reported that playing what seems a simple childhood game, similar to Chutes and Ladders (sometimes called Snakes and Slides), accelerates the understanding of numbers for low-income preschoolers.

“Being told 8 is 2 times 4 is one thing,” said Robert S. Siegler, a psychologist who is one of the authors. “It’s another to see that it’s twice as far to the number 8, and that it takes twice as long to get there.”

The Number Instinct

“Use your eyes like cameras,” said Lara Lazo, one of the teachers at P.S. 99, after the midmorning break. “Get ready to take a snapshot.”

The children bracketed their eyes with their hands, making “cameras,” and Ms. Lazo showed them a paper plate with three dots on it — then quickly covered the plate.

“What number did you see?”

A cacophony of “threes” and “fours” erupted.

“O.K.,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

The lesson is intended to teach a skill called subitizing. “The idea,” Dr. Sarama said, “is to get them to recognize quantity — to say, ‘I see three’ — not by counting, but by instantly recognizing how many are there by sight.”

A crude “number instinct” is hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain, recent research has found. Mammals can quickly recognize differences in quantity, choosing the tree or bush with the most fruit. Human beings, even if they live in remote cultures with no formal math education, have a general grasp of quantities as well, anthropologists have found.

In a series of recent imaging studies, scientists have discovered that a sliver of the parietal cortex, on the surface of the brain about an inch above the ears, is particularly active when the brain judges quantity. In this area, called the intraparietal sulcus, clusters of neurons are sensitive to the sight of specific quantities, research suggests. Some fire vigorously at the sight of five objects, for instance, less so at the sight of four or six, and not at all at two or nine. Others are most active in response to one, two, three, and so on.

When engaged in a lesson or exercise, these regions actively communicate with areas of the frontal lobe, where planning and critical thinking are centered.

“This is what we believe focused math education does: It sharpens the firing of these quantity neurons,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris and author of the books “The Number Sense” and “Reading and the Brain.” The firing of the number neurons becomes increasingly more selective to single quantities, he said; and these cells apparently begin to communicate with neurons across the brain in language areas, connecting precise quantities to words: “two,” “ten,” “five.”

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until about age 11.

“As these kinds of findings come in, they will have implications not only for teaching, but also education policy,” said Daniel Ansari, an assistant professor in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Western Ontario University.

Explaining Five

In math, there is no faking it. Children either know that five is more than three, or they do not. Either they can put number symbols in exactly the right order, or they cannot. In their studies, Dr. Clements and Dr. Sarama test children one on one and videotape the results for comparisons.

Over the past four years, the couple has tested Building Blocks in more than 400 classrooms in Buffalo, Boston and Nashville, comparing the progress of children in the program with that of peers in classes offering another math curriculum or none at all. On tests of addition, subtraction and number recognition after one school year, children who had the program scored in the 76th percentile on average, and those who did not scored in the 50th percentile.

By the end of kindergarten, a year after the program has ended, those who had had it sustained their gains, scoring in the 71st percentile, on average.

Many hurdles remain for this and similar curriculums based in cognitive science, experts say. Schools may move away from the curriculum; teachers move around, as do students; and in later grades there is always the risk that children who have mastered basic math will not get the attention they need to advance even further.

But for now at least, education based on brain science has helped hundreds of Buffalo children refine their native abilities in math. In one videotaped exam, a 4-year-old boy in a FUBU jersey and long dreadlocks who entered P.S. 99 in 2006 was unable to count or match cards with 3, 5, 2, 1 and 4 on them to cards with equivalent numbers of grapes.

In a video of his post-Building Blocks exam, six months later, he instantly says there are 10 pennies placed in front of him, without counting. He easily matches the number cards to their corresponding grape cards — and puts the mixed-up numerals in the correct order.

“What’s the biggest, nine or seven or five?” asks the teacher giving the exam.

The boy thinks for a moment. “Nine,” he says. “Five is the littlest.” Then he holds one palm above the other and says: “Five is like this. See?”

“Do you see what he’s doing?” Dr. Clements said, interrupting the video. “Right there. He wants to explain. He wants to explain five.”

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/health/research/21brain.html?_r=1&em

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Brittany Murphy, Actress in ‘Clueless,’ Dies at 32

Brittany Murphy, the perpetually perky and slightly quirky actress who worked her way up from supporting parts to romantic leads after her breakout roll in the film “Clueless,” died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 32.

Ed Winter, an assistant chief coroner in Los Angeles County, told The Associated Press that Ms. Murphy apparently collapsed in the bathroom and that the cause of death “appears to be natural.” He said that an official cause of death might not be determined for some time.

The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a call at 8 a.m. Sunday at the home that Ms. Murphy shared with her husband, Simon Monjack, a British screenwriter, in West Hollywood. Ms. Murphy was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 10:04 a.m. Sunday, said Sally Stewart, a spokeswoman for the hospital.

The actress’s wide brown eyes and unrestrained, asymmetrical smile made her a frequent choice for the role of ditz with an edge — such as the urban transplant to a Beverly Hills high school in “Clueless” and the riches-to-rags au pair in “Uptown Girls” — or a woman over the edge, playing characters with severe mental illness in the thriller “Don’t Say a Word” and the drama “Girl, Interrupted.”

The 1995 teen comedy “Clueless,” an adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma” set in southern California and starringAlicia Silverstone, was a surprise hit, and though Ms. Murphy was 15 when she played the supporting role of Tai, the airhead persona stuck with her. It was her 2003 stint as the romantic lead in the Eminem vehicle “8 Mile,” she told The A.P., that earned her more recognition.

“That changed a lot,” she said in the 2003 interview. “That was the difference between people knowing my first and last name as opposed to not.”

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said Ms. Murphy played the character of Alex “with hot desperation and calloused vulnerability. She’s dynamite.” But she was never a critics’ darling. Stephen Holden of The New York Times was among those who compared her unfavorably to other female contemporaries, writing that she “suggests a dumbed-down Meg Ryan with a gloss of Melanie Griffith” in the 2004 romantic comedy “Little Black Book.”

Ms. Murphy was born on Nov. 10, 1977, in Atlanta. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her mother, Sharon, raised her primarily in New Jersey before bringing Ms. Murphy to Los Angeles to pursue a screen career.

But during the filming of “Clueless,” her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, an event Ms. Murphy said affected her profoundly.

When Sharon Murphy’s cancer returned in 2003, Ms. Murphy told People magazine that she “went to every doctor’s appointment and chemo session” with her mother. “My mom taught me there’s always a way to channel your fears into love.”

A diverse set of credits accumulated in Ms. Murphy’s filmography, including the tough, abused waitress in the gritty “Sin City,” a concentration camp victim in the television film“The Devil’s Arithmetic,” and the voice of an animated penguin in “Happy Feet.”

She also lent her voice to the character Luann on more the 200 episodes of Fox’s animated series “King of the Hill.”

She had a side career in music, and in 2006 she had a club hit with the single “Faster Kill Pussycat,” with Paul Oakenfold.

“I don’t really take myself very seriously,” Ms. Murphy told The San Jose Mercury News in 2003. “I’ve never formally trained in acting, so I’m very instinctual and visceral with decisions. It hasn’t really been a plot or scheme in any way, shape or form.”

Indeed, her image often slipped beyond her control. She was repeatedly romantically linked to her co-stars, including Ashton Kutcher from “Just Married,” and a string of broken engagements made her tabloid fodder.

Ms. Murphy married Mr. Monjak in 2007. She is survived by him; her mother; her father, Angelo Bertolotti of Branford, Fla.; and a brother.

The Sylvester Stallone film “The Expendables,” which features Ms. Murphy, is in post-production and is scheduled to be released next year.

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/movies/21murphy.html?hp

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To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook

Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.

Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”

“We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said.

By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.

The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.

Some teenagers, like Monica and Halley, form a support group to enforce their Facebook hiatus. Others deactivate their accounts. Still others ask someone they trust to change their password and keep control of it until they feel ready to have it back.

Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit.

“It’s like any other addiction,” Dr. Young said. “It’s hard to wean yourself.”

Dr. Young said she admired teenagers who came up with their own strategies for taking Facebook breaks in the absence of computer-addiction programs aimed at them.

“A lot of them are finding their own balance,” she said. “It’s like an eating disorder. You can’t eliminate food. You just have to make better choices about what you eat.” She added, “And what you do online.”

Michael Diamonti, head of school at San Francisco University High School, which Monica and Halley attend, said administrators were pondering what the school’s role should be, since students used Facebook mostly at home, although excessive use could affect their grades.

“It’s such uncharted territory,” Dr. Diamonti said. “I’m definitely in support of these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.”

In October, Facebook reached 54.7 percent of people in the United States ages 12 to 17, up from 28.3 percent in October last year, according to the Nielsen Company, the market research firm.

Many high school seniors, now in the thick of the college application process, are acutely aware of those hours spent clicking one link after another on the site.

Gaby Lee, 17, a senior at Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif., had two weeks to complete her early decision application to Pomona College. Desperate, she deactivated her Facebook account.

The account still existed, but it looked to others as if it did not.

“No one could go on and write on my wall or look at my profile,” she said.

The habit did not die easily. Gaby said she would sit down at the computer and find that “my fingers would automatically go to Facebook.”

In her coming book, “Alone Together” (Basic Books, 2010), Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses teenagers who take breaks from Facebook.

For one 18-year-old boy completing a college application, Professor Turkle said, “Facebook wasn’t merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was,” and he opted to spend his senior year off the service. He was burned out, she said, trying to live up to his own descriptions of himself.

But Facebook does not make it easy to leave for long. Deactivating an account requires checking off one of six reasons — “I spend too much time using Facebook,” is one. “This is temporary. I’ll be back,” is another. And it is easy to reactivate an account by entering the old login and password.

For Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, who studies self-control and willpower, “what’s fascinating about this is that it involves spontaneous strategies of self-control, of trying to exert willpower after getting sucked into a huge temptation.”

Professor Mischel performed a now-famous set of experiments at Stanford University in the late 1960s in which he tested young children’s ability to delay gratification when presented with what he called “hot” temptations, like marshmallows.

Some managed to stop themselves; others could not.

“Facebook is the marshmallow for these teenagers,” Professor Mischel said.

Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence” (Penguin Press, 2009), said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from.

“You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,” Ms. Simmons said. “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

It is that addictive quality that makes having a partner who knows you well especially helpful. Monica said that when she was recently in bed sick for several days, she broke down and went on Facebook. And, of course, she felt guilty.

“At first I lied,” Monica said. “But we’re such good friends she could read my facial expression, so I ’fessed up.”

As punishment, the one who breaks the pact has to write something embarrassing on a near-stranger’s Facebook wall.

After several failed efforts at self-regulation, Neeka Salmasi, 15, a sophomore at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., finally asked her sister, Negin, 25, to change her Facebook password every Sunday night and give it back to her the following Friday night.

Neeka quickly saw an improvement in her grades.

Still better, she said, is that her mother no longer visits her room “every half an hour to see if I was on Facebook or doing homework.”

“It was really annoying,” she said.

Last year, Magellan Yadao, 18, a senior at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago, went on a 40-day Facebook fast for Lent.

“In my years as a Catholic, I hadn’t really chosen something to give up that was very important to me,” Magellan said in an e-mail message. “Apparently, Facebook was just that.”

In his follow-up work, Professor Mischel said he found that some of the children who delayed gratification with the marshmallows turned out to be higher achievers as adults.

Halley said she and Monica expect their hiatus to continue at least through the rest of the school year. She added that they were enjoying a social life lived largely offline.

“Actually, I don’t think either one of us wants it to end,” she said.

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/technology/internet/21facebook.html?_r=1&hp

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Web Attack on Twitter Is Third Assault This Year

An online attack Friday morning on Twitter was the result of the simplest of security breaches: someone got the password to enter the master directory of Twitter’s Internet addresses and then redirected users to an alternate site instead.

No user information appears to have been stolen in the attack. But the security breach — the third major one at Twitter this year — underscores the continuing weakness of the company’s systems as its micro-blogging service is becoming more important to business and even global politics.

The incident also highlights a basic vulnerability in the way life is lived as it becomes increasingly digital: With so much vital information stored on the Web, people are only as safe as their passwords.

During the assault, which security analysts said began about 1 a.m. and lasted roughly an hour, hackers tinkered with Twitter’s domain name servers, which are hosted by a Manchester, N.H., company called Dyn. When Web surfers tried to reach Twitter’s pages, they were sent instead to a site for the “Iranian Cyber Army,” which claimed responsibility for the attack.

The domain names were eventually fixed and redirected back to the correct servers at about 2 a.m., but because of time the reset took, Twitter’s Web site was not fully functional again until an hour later, according to Rod Rasmussen, president of Internet Identity, an Internet security company, who watched the attacks unfold in real time through a new technology his company is building.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, declined to discuss details of the attack, and it was not clear how its security was compromised.

But Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing with the security firm IOActive, said that “in terms of this sort” of domain name server attack, “this is easily one of the most common hacks.” He said that a recent report by Verizon Communications found that 61 percent of Internet security breaches happen through simple password failures.

Security specialists say it will be extremely difficult to determine who was behind the attack. There was some indication that the attack came from within the United States, but authorities are still investigating.

Beth Jones, a senior threat researcher at the Internet security firm Sophos, said the attack did not look very sophisticated and probably was not the effort of a Web terrorist or other professional. “It could have been any number of people doing it,” she said.

Ms. Jones said the incident may have been “hacktivism,” an attack with a social or political motivation. “The point could purely be just to prove the site is insecure,” she said.

Although the attack did not appear malicious, it easily could have been, Ms. Jones said.

“Instead of throwing up a banner to cover the site, what if it had been an exact replica of the home page?” she said. “If this attack had been a phishing page instead, who knows how many millions of credentials they could have gotten?”

The attack was another black eye for Twitter, which had two major security breaches this summer.

In July, the technology blog TechCrunch published internal Twitter documents that had been stolen by an unidentified hacker who apparently figured out an employee’s e-mail password.

In August, unidentified attackers bombarded several social networking sites, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, with millions of junk e-mail messages in an attempt to block the Web pages of a 34-year-old economics professor who was writing about a skirmish between Russia and the republic of Georgia. The other sites withstood the assault, one of the most common types of Internet attacks, but Twitter struggled with its service for days.

Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security company in Woburn, Mass., said the latest incident was an embarrassment to Twitter. “Even if it was the fault of the hosting company, Twitter has a track record this year of having weak passwords and being compromised,” he said.

In September, Twitter raised $100 million from investors, adding $55 million it had raised. Despite all that new money, “Twitter still doesn’t seem to invest all that much in security,” Mr. Schouwenberg said.

In a blog post Friday afternoon, Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, confirmed that the hijacking occurred. “The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users,” he said. “We don’t believe any accounts were compromised.”

Mr. Stone and other company officials declined requests for interviews.

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/technology/internet/19twitter.html?adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1261221343-Q7qr1/byCam3pfw/OkxbuQ

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Charities Criticize Online Fund-Raising Contest by Chase

JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.

At least three nonprofit groups — Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project and an anti-abortion group, Justice for All— say they believe that Chase disqualified them over concerns about associating its name with their missions.

The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.

“They never gave us any indication that there was any problem with our organization qualifying,” said Micah Daigle, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “Now they’re completely stonewalling me.”

Three days before the contest ended, Chase stopped giving participants access to voting information, and it has not made public the vote tallies of the winners.

“This is a problem of accountability,” said David Lee, executive director of Justice for All. “Simply publish the votes and let us see that the 100 organizations named as winners won.”

Contests using social media to award or raise money for charities have exploded, as companies and nonprofit groups test the use of Facebook, Twitter and other online tools for marketing and fund-raising.

The Chase Community Giving contest is one of the largest ever mounted, open to more than a half-million charities. More than a million people signed onto Chase’s fan page, where they were awarded 20 votes to cast for the charities of their choice.

In an e-mail message to Mr. Lee, Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for Chase, explained the thinking behind the changes in the contest.

“Regarding the vote tallies,” Mr. Evangelisti wrote, “we have taken down individual charity counts with a couple of days left to build excitement among the broadest number of participants, as well as to ensure that all Facebook users learn of the 100 finalists at the same time and so we have an opportunity to notify the 100 finalists first.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Evangelisti declined to give the vote tallies for any of the organizations or to say whether any of the groups that are complaining had been disqualified. Chase’s eligibility rules make it clear that the bank can disqualify any participant.

“We are proud that through this effort we’re giving $5 million to small and local charities,” he said, “raising awareness for thousands of charities and helping them gain new supporters.”

In such contests, companies typically select a group of charities and ask people to vote for one of them. But Chase opened its contest to any charity whose operating budget was less than $10 million and whose mission “aligned” with the bank’s corporate social responsibility guidelines. Organizations also had to affirm that they did not discriminate in any way.

Chase did not create a public leader board showing a ranking of the charities based on the votes they had received on its Chase Community Giving page on Facebook. Instead, participating charities had to go to Facebook to find out how many votes they had received and who had voted for them.

So some participants created informal leader boards. For instance, the National Youth Rights Association, a tiny nonprofit that works to teach young people about their rights and how to protect them, compiled voting data on almost 400 contestants, and 82 of the organizations that it tracked were among the 100 winners Chase named.

The association itself was among those winners, and the $25,000 it will get from Chase is more money than it has raised all year and the largest donation it has received in its 11-year history, said Alex Koroknay-Palicz, its executive director.

“For the most part, the organizations Chase picked were exactly the organizations we expected to win, because we had spent a lot of time and effort tracking it,” Mr. Koroknay-Palicz said. “So the biggest surprise was Students and a couple of pro-life groups, as well as the organization called the Prem Rawat Foundation, didn’t make it, because they had been doing pretty well.”

According to the leader board he created, Students for Sensible Drug Policy collected 2,305 votes through Dec. 9, when organizations no longer could track their votes or see who had voted for them. The Marijuana Policy Project had 1,911 votes, and Justice for All had 1,512.

The Prem Rawat Foundation, a humanitarian group, had 4,324 votes. It did not respond to a message left at its offices. Mr. Evangelisti said the 100 finalists “reflect those organizations that received the most votes among eligible participants.”

Mr. Lee, a veteran of these types of contests, said the changes Chase made on Dec. 9 had made it much more difficult to continue attracting votes. After the changes, would-be supporters of Justice for All called and e-mailed to say they could not get their votes to go through.

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/us/19charity.html?_r=1&ref=technology

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