Pay all drivers fairly, say commuters

// The quality of reporting from this Straits Times reporter is fit for the trashbin.

If this reporter Neo could only understand that FAIRNESS DOESN'T MEAN THE SAME SALARY. Bus drivers who can speak and fit-in deserve a different salary and that is absolutely fair.

Pay all drivers fairly, say commuters


But higher wages should not mean high fares, they add

by Neo Chai Chin
Updated 11:15 PM Nov 27, 2012
SINGAPORE - Commuters questioned public transport provider SMRT's handling of the dispute with the protesting bus drivers from China, with most amenable to pay increases for the drivers to a level on par with their Malaysian counterparts.

Some had never encountered a labour strike before and said they felt "unnerved" by the drivers' actions. "It's well-entrenched in all of us that you do not go on strike. It puts commuters in a precarious situation where they are held hostage to the drivers' actions," said civil servant Koh Weiming, 30, speaking a day after the strike on Monday.

But he felt SMRT was the most accountable party, saying the drivers' actions "speaks volumes of the way SMRT handled negotiations with them".

"Whether for foreign or local staff, there should be a proper way to handle grievances," he said.

The unhappiness reportedly arose over unequal pay raises, with the Chinese nationals receiving three increments totalling S$75, compared to a total of S$275 for the Malaysians.

Part-time receptionist Chua Lay Kwan, 46, said that the salary grouses of the drivers' warranted a review by SMRT, but felt the drivers who refused to work should be penalised for their actions to deter future occurences.

Photographer Irvin Tan, 30, was supportive of a pay raise for the Chinese drivers. "In any situation to do with wages, fairness has to prevail," he said, adding that the drivers' welfare should also include reasonable work hours, career opportunities and their happiness at work.

But most commuters felt that higher wages should not translate into higher fares, citing public transport as a public good and the profitable status of SMRT.

Executive Ms Wong, 23, who declined to give her full name, said she experienced some inconvenience yesterday as services 960 and 190 - which she takes daily to work in City Hall from the Choa Chu Kang area - arrived at lower frequencies.

Some buses were too full to board, and she gave up after 20 minutes, taking another bus to the train station instead. She hoped for the dispute to be solved as quickly as possible, but said SMRT's management would have its reasons for not offering the same pay to Chinese drivers as their Malaysian drivers.

Labour experts said various reasons could account for pay differences between different groups of workers - recruitment costs, workers' qualifications and experience, and the level of supply, just to name a few.

"In Singapore, for example, we are used to different pay for domestic helpers of different nationalities which may be attributed to demand and supply differences," said labour economist Hui Weng Tat of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

There may be a need to review work conditions and salaries of bus drivers, taking into account their responsibilities in promoting road safety and ensuring smooth functioning of the public transport system, and of their pay relative to other occupations, said Associate Professor Hui, who noted that Singapore bus drivers rank lowest among developed countries in terms of pay.

There is also a need for employers of a diverse workforce to be sensitive to cultural differences, said Singapore Management University's Professor of Strategic Management (Practice) Pang Eng Fong. "If you're going to be managing a workforce that is increasingly diverse - not only in terms of gender and age but also nationalities - you've got to be a lot more sensitive. Differences between groups are going to be sharper and can (result in) resentment if not properly managed," he said.

Agreeing, Member of Parliament Zainal Sapari said: "At the end of the day, if a company is over-reliant on a particular group of workers from a particular country, they must be aware of the cultural differences and labour relations. The PRC workers may not be aware that they what they are doing may be illegal. If a company is over-reliant, they need to manage the risk of it."

Mongolia investment climate as volatile as ever for miners

// Mongolians need to overcome the devils inside themselves. They often look back on Genghis Khan of more than a thousand years ago. But today is not a pan Asian-Europe republic of Mongolia. It is Mongolia, a landlocked country with only underground resources and cashmere.

In my eyes, Mongolians in power have already chosen. They want to make hay while the sun shines - make money - truckloads of it, and bank it in America and move over there - the land they grew up to know to be free, where the air is fresh. But to do this, they need to be in political positions, and to be in those positions, they need to win the masses. They would win the masses with short term short sighted policies, and protest in parliament - put up a good act. Life would be good if they could have a small cut of the billion dollars.

The masses are bound within the borders of Mongolia. They are nomads turned labourers living on coal fired heat outside the city center in UB. The middle class works in offices in UB. The whole city breathes and pollutes smog daily. A perpetual smoking room. While the country is dug out from its intestines and potholes and underground water and the environment is raped again and again.

The way forward for the country is actually all too clear. There is no way this country can progress with Russia and China having a stranglehold around Mongolia's neck. This is a country that can never succeed without the blessings of its neighbours. When you are forever reliant on your neighbours, yet abhor them, there is no way you can live well. 

At best, Mongolia will muddle on for the next 50 years until its resources run dry. Perhaps only once the resources are gone, will we know the true patriots of Mongolia.

Mongolia investment climate as volatile as ever for miners
Peter Koven | Nov 22, 2012 9:40 AM ET

REUTERS/Luke DistelhorstMongolian workers are seen at 551 meters below the surface of the earth while sinking an exploration shaft at the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold project

Resource nationalism continues to rear its ugly head in Mongolia .

For the umpteenth time, the government is trying to renegotiate the 2009 investment agreement on the Oyu Tolgoi mine, triggering a confrontation with Rio Tinto Ltd. and Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd. The government has assumed higher tax rates from Oyu Tolgoi in its current budget, even though the mining companies have no intention of paying them.

Pierre Fournier, a geopolitical analyst at National Bank Financial, warned that the risk of resource nationalism in Mongolia is not going away. He pointed out that there is popular support for it from Mongolians that are not seeing direct benefits from mining, and that politicians from all parties are increasingly supportive as well. In elections last June, the Democratic Party took power, replacing the Mongolian People’s Party. Since the Oyu Tolgoi agreement was signed by the prior government, this one has decided that it does not apply to them.


Additionally, Mr. Fournier noted that hostility between Mongolia and China remains an ongoing threat for mining companies. Mongolians dislike their neighbours and worry about creeping Chinese influence in their country. There was a huge backlash when a Chinese company tried to buy a majority stake in SouthGobi Resources Ltd., and it led the government to draft legislation that attempts to ensure that the state maintains control of “strategic” sectors like mining.

Put together, Mr. Fournier does not expect the investment climate in Mongolia to stabilize anytime soon. If anything, the latest efforts to raise taxes on Oyu Tolgoi will likely gain momentum ahead of presidential elections in May, he wrote.

“Whatever the outcome of the latest attempts to renegotiate the project’s original contract terms, political pressures on the mining sector as a whole will likely remain high for the foreseeable future,” he added.

DeMark Fibonacci Charts Embraced by Cohen Lure Investors

//We really know the answer whether it works from DeMark himself. Are this two Bentleys and Scottsdale home paid off from his million dollar chart subscriptions or from his own investments? 

Hedge fund managers with skin in the game hold their secrets close to their hearts, not sell them. Enough said.

//

DeMark Fibonacci Charts Embraced by Cohen Lure Investors
By Anthony Effinger and Katherine Burton - Nov 13, 2012 8:01 AM GMT+0800
Bloomberg Markets Magazine


How Tom DeMark Makes His Market Predictions

Past the two Bentleys in the driveway and beyond the pool and mini water park, the home theater and a sports bar hung with enough memorabilia to equip a basketball team, Tom DeMark has his office -- a dark, wood- paneled lair with six computer screens.
Enlarge image

Analyst Tom DeMark, shown here in the sports bar of his Scottsdale home with his son, has spent 40 years developing charts that call the markets' highs and lows. Hedge-fund moguls Steve Cohen and John Burbank are such fans, they bought a piece of the company. Photographer: Ramona Rosales/Bloomberg Markets
Attachment: The DeMark System
Enlarge image

Tom DeMark, founder of Market Studies, relaxes by his pool. Photographer: Ramona Rosales/Bloomberg Markets
Enlarge image

Cynthia Kase, seen posing at her Santa Fe, New Mexico home, uses wave theory to predict turns in the price of oil and gas. Photographer: Ramona Rosales/Bloomberg Markets
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The office abuts the master bedroom of his Scottsdale,Arizona, home, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its December issue. It has to, DeMark says, because he often gets up after midnight to scrutinize charts of stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies to see if his numerical system for predicting their behavior is working.

More from the December 2012 issue of Bloomberg Markets:
Slideshow: The 20 Wealthiest Individuals
List: From Slim to Small, World's 200 Richest People
Profile: Ortega Tops Buffett With Zara Fortune of $53.6B

Since he started in the investment business in 1971, DeMark has advised some of the biggest names on Wall Street, men such as Paul Tudor Jones and Leon Cooperman. He’s a consultant to Steven Cohen, founder of SAC Capital Advisors LP, which manages $14 billion, and John Burbank, founder of $3.4 billion Passport Capital LLC. SAC and Passport each own a piece of DeMark’s company, Market Studies LLC. DeMark has a phone on his desk that’s dedicated to Cohen, whose hedge fund has made money every year save one since 1993.

DeMark’s system for predicting where markets will move, divined from four decades of chart gazing, is based partly on the recondite mathematical relationships that devotees see in the design of the Parthenon in Athens and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Get DeMark’s followers talking, and their enthusiasm for his market calls is unbounded.
Thor’s Hammer

“When I use DeMark’s work, I feel like I’m wielding Thor’s hammer,” says David Goel, managing partner at hedge fund Matrix Capital Management Co. in Waltham, Massachusetts, which manages $2 billion. In Norse mythology, the thunder god Thor carries a massive mallet with which he can crush mountains.

Burbank of Passport says he has tested DeMark’s algorithms and they’re much more predictive than any other system.

“Using DeMark indicators is like seeing the market in color, when before you were looking at it in black and white,” he says.

Among DeMark’s calls: On Sept. 22, 2011, he said the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index would soon bottom at 1,076 and then rise 20 percent. The S&P (SPX) touched 1,074.77 intraday eight trading days later and had moved up 20 percent by Jan. 10. His system also flashed buy just before a July rally in oil futures and an August surge in silver.

His latest call on stocks was Oct. 24, when he said the S&P would reach 1,480 -- a new high for the year -- within two weeks, then reverse. He was right about the decline, not the peak. The index rose to only 1,434 intraday before falling. As of the market close Nov. 12, it had dropped 3.8 percent from that high.
Wave Theory

DeMark, 65, is a member of a group of market forecasters who devote their days to poring over price charts, looking for recurring mathematical patterns. Most call themselves technical analysts, as opposed to those who rely on fundamentals like earnings and economic growth. DeMark says fundamentals do matter. He also believes that markets are governed by waves that crest and fall based on a sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence and the closely related golden mean, or golden ratio.

Related story
Understanding the Fibonacci Code and DeMark's System

Fibonacci numbers appear in this infinite sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …, where each number is the sum of the previous two. Divide one Fibonacci number by its predecessor, and the quotients will cluster around 1.618 -- the golden mean, or so-called divine proportion. Technical analysts say that both can be used to predict a market’s direction, and some say they’re literally divine.

“This mathematics is embedded in the structure of the universe,” says Cynthia Kase, whose Kase & Co. uses wave analysis to compile a weekly forecast for oil and natural gas prices. “It is the language of God.”
Technical Boomlet

Technical analysis is in the midst of a post-financial- crisis boomlet. Tyler Wood, marketing director at the New York- based Market Technicians Association, says there has been a 30 percent jump in new members in the past two years, pushing its rolls to 4,500 as of mid-October.

Interest in DeMark’s and other analysts’ charts has been boosted by the fact that since 2008, markets have become correlated, meaning that macro events such as the European debt crisis can slam shares of weak and strong companies alike. Traders are looking for an advantage, and DeMark’s system, which seeks to identify the point at which an up or down market is “exhausted,” offers one, Burbank says.

“Any edge you can get in putting on your position and taking it off is paramount,” Burbank says.
Career Risk

Jason Perl, an adviser to investment funds at Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says the DeMark indicators are crucial in the post- crisis world because so many traders are avoiding making bold moves that might jeopardize their jobs.

“People are managing career risk rather than portfolio risk,” Perl says.

Traditional investors who look at fundamentals and managers of quantitative funds can barely hide their contempt for the technicians.

“Comparing technical indicators to what we do is like comparing bush medicine to the research performed by drug companies,” says Matthew Beddall, chief investment officer at London-based Winton Capital Management Ltd., a quantitative hedge fund staffed by physics and math Ph.D.s.

Technicians who, like DeMark, are believers in Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean are especially annoying to quants.

“There’s a golden ratio mania, and most of it isn’t based on any kind of fact,” says George Markowsky, a computer science professor at the University of Maine, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics. Markowsky wrote a paper in 1992 rejecting most of the claims of the golden mean believers.

“It’s amazing to me that adults take this stuff seriously,” he says.
Buffett Jokes

Investor Warren Buffett is also dubious of the notion that a stock or index’s direction can be predicted merely by studying historical price data.

“I realized that technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the chart upside down and didn’t get a different answer,” the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/B) chairman joked to an audience atVanderbilt University in 2005. A spokesman says that Buffett stands by the statement.

Oswald Gruebel says he’s with the Oracle of Scottsdale, not Omaha, on this one.

“I only use his system,” says Gruebel, former chief executive of both Credit Suisse Group (CSGN) AG and UBS, Switzerland’s two largest banks. A trader by training, Gruebel manages his own portfolio using DeMark’s work.

“It tells you when everyone else has sold and you should be buying,” Gruebel says. “His system is the best I’ve seen in 50 years.”
Political Prediction

DeMark says his indicators can predict everything from the next spike in the price of copper to the twists and turns of presidential politics. Using numbers from the Dublin-based Intradeprediction market -- in which investors buy and sell shares based on their expectations of how real-world events will turn out -- DeMark’s charts indicated a week before the first Barack Obama-Mitt Romney debate that Romney’s fortunes had bottomed and were about to turn up. They did just that after Obama appeared listless before an invigorated Romney.

Technicians have been trying to mine market intelligence from charts since Charles Dow, who founded the Wall Street Journal in 1889, started comparing his industrial and transportation indexes. Robert Prechter has been publishing his Elliott Wave Theorist newsletter since 1979, popularizing the ideas of Ralph Nelson Elliott, a Kansas-born accountant who wrote a 1938 book called “The Wave Principle,” which examined how mathematical oscillations determine prices.
Heretics of Finance

Some finance scholars take the broad field of technical analysis very seriously. Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a book on the topic in 2009 called “The Heretics of Finance.”

“One of the strengths of technical analysis is that it captures sentiment,” says Lo, citing such emotions as fear and greed. “That’s not something that quantitative analysis or fundamental analysis pays attention to.”

Lo says technical analysis is often used by currency traders because fundamental data that affect currencies, like inflation, hardly change from day to day.

“Any currency trader, even if they don’t believe in technical analysis, will look at it because so many people do,” he says.

Lo is chairman and chief investment strategist of AlphaSimplex Group LLC, a derivatives-based hedge fund.
Subscription Sales

Market Studies makes money by charging traders for access to its indicators. It collects “several million” dollars from SAC Capital each year, DeMark says. It also sells subscriptions to the indicators on the Bloomberg Professional service for $500 a month. Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, takes a percentage. DeMark has a similar arrangement with Thomson Reuters Corp. DeMark won’t say how many subscribers he has.

DeMark’s interest in technical analysis was sparked in the early 1970s when he worked as a securities analyst in the investment unit of NN Corp., owner of Northwestern National Insurance. One day, a colleague came to him with a stack of stock charts and told him they held the key to successful trading. It would be their secret, the man said.

“Back then, technical charts were like Playboy magazine in the monastery,” DeMark says. “You had to hide them in your desk.”
Son of DeMark

The Wisconsin native works from his walled Scottsdale compound, which he bought for $4.6 million in 2003 from Adam and Cindy Bronfman, members of the Seagram liquor clan. His 37-year- old son T.J. -- one of his six children -- supervises 13 employees at a nearby office park.

DeMark says he’s obsessive by nature. As a kid, he played as many as 81 holes of golf a day during the summer on the way to becoming Wisconsin state champion among players 13 and under. One year, he ate spaghetti in red sauce 60 consecutive nights.

“I go to extremes,” he says.

During a flight home from London in 2009, DeMark listened to a single song -- Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” -- for 11 hours and 20 minutes. He says he was captivated by both the tune and the message: that a respected king -- or a brilliant market forecaster, in his case -- can see his world turned upside down by a single mistake.

DeMark is equally obsessive about his charts -- and he takes his preoccupation with him on his annual vacation to Hawaii.

“He works the whole time,” his wife, Nancy, complains. “His life calling is figuring out the market. He always says, ‘When I solve it, I’ll die.’”
The System

The Market Studies system consists of more than 100 indicators. One of the most widely used is TD Sequential. The software takes a normal bar chart showing prices rising and falling and, if conditions are right, starts two sequences of numbers. The first is a nine-day count called the “setup” (green numbers). The second is a 13-period “countdown” (red numbers).

DeMark likes to show off a recent one-year chart for silver futures because it worked so well. On July 23, TD Sequential flashed a buy signal on the metal. The sequence of silver price changes that took it there started on May 2, when silver set for delivery in December fell 28.7 cents to $30.77 an ounce. That was lower than the closing price four trading days earlier -- a key comparison for DeMark -- so TD Sequential, running on the Bloomberg Professional service, put a green 1 below the bar for that trading day. The next day, silver closed at $30.13, lower than the close four trading days earlier than that, on April 27. A 2 appeared.
Calling Silver

Silver repeated the pattern nine times, resulting in a green 9 under the trading bar for May 14. Now, countdown could start. The required sequence for countdown is different: in this case, a close below the intraday low two days earlier. That happened 13 times through July 23, when silver closed at $27.12. A red 13 appeared, suggesting, in DeMark shorthand, that silver was about done falling.

The metal’s price dipped again the next day and then started rising, touching $35.45 on Oct. 1. Had you bought silver on the 13th day of the countdown, you would have made a gain of $8.33 an ounce, or 31 percent, in 10 weeks.

DeMark’s indicators don’t always work so well. Shares of Research in Motion Ltd., the Waterloo, Canada-based BlackBerry maker, for example, hit $70.54 on Feb. 18, 2011, and then started to drop. TD Sequential flashed a 13 buy signal in May and then again in June, July and October. The stock rose in August and then kept dropping. It closed at $7.80 on Oct. 15 of this year, driven relentlessly down by RIM’s disastrous fundamentals: falling revenue and losses as Apple Inc. ate its lunch in the smartphone market.
‘Most Brilliant’

DeMark says a weekly TD Sequential RIM chart works better. A steep drop in RIM shares in 2008 also told him that any rally off a 13 would be limited, he says.

However improbable it seems to mathematicians, DeMark supporters insist his system works.

“Tom is one of the most brilliant, creative minds in the history of technical analysis,” says Peter Borish, former director of research at Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp., where DeMark worked from 1988 to 1990 developing trading systems.

DeMark can’t explain why his system successfully marks the highs and lows. "I don't know why it works," he says. "Ask God."

He isn’t a mathematician. He has a Master of Business Administration from Marquette University in Milwaukee. He developed his system through trial and error, he says, starting with two Fibonacci numbers for his counts: 8 and 13. He ended up using the non-Fibonacci number 9 for the TD Sequential setup because it worked better.
Fibonacci Rabbits

Fibonacci numbers are named for Leonardo of Pisa, dubbed Fibonacci, from son of Bonacci in Latin, by a 19th-century biographer. Leonardo described the numerical sequence in his “Book of Calculation,” a tome published in 1202 that introduced Europe to modern arithmetic. Leonardo used the sequence to answer the question: How many pairs of rabbits are created by one pair in a year? The answer was a Fibonacci number: 377. Today, almost all technical analysts agree that Fibonacci numbers can be used to predict a market’s direction.

The so-called golden mean, also known by the Greek letter phi, is closely related to Fibonacci numbers. Divide a Fibonacci number by the previous one, and as you move up the sequence, the quotient will converge on 1.618. Divide it by the following one, and you get 0.618.
‘Chicken Entrails’

DeMark says variations of the number recur in the waves of the market. For instance, the S&P 500 closed at a high of 1,527.46 on March 24, 2000, and then dropped to an intraday low of 944.75 on Sept. 21, 2001. That low was 61.85 percent of the March 2000 high.

“Twenty years ago, people thought technical analysis was voodoo, like reading chicken entrails,” says Kase, who runs Kase & Co. from an adobe house laden with Spanish colonial art nearSanta Fe, New Mexico.

She leases popular software that looks at the wave patterns generated by rising and falling prices and predicts future prices based on the confluence of those waves.

Kase, 60, has also developed her own brand of bar chart. Normal bar charts display a new bar based on a time interval: one minute, 10 minutes, one day. During periods when such prices are static, the charts send a lot of insignificant signals, she says. Kase bars can be customized so that they appear after a specified change in price, which gives clearer signals of future movements, she says.
God’s Waves

In early June, Kase used her system to correctly predict that oil would fall below $80 a barrel from $85, which it did on June 21. For Kase, reading the waves of the markets is a spiritual experience.

“It’s one of the reasons I believe in God,” she says.

DeMark is no less passionate about his own 9s and 13s. He trades a bit in his own account, he says, and he and son T.J. are discussing starting their own hedge fund using the DeMark indicators. For now, though, he makes much of his living advising SAC.

“We have used the DeMark Indicators for many years and found them to be an excellent tool in helping to identify market trends,” Cohen said in a written statement.

T.J. DeMark says the wealth his father has accumulated doesn’t mean much to him.

“My dad has never been motivated by making money,” T.J. says. “This is his avocation and his vocation.”

Wandering through his rambling, Tuscan-style house, DeMark does seem strangely detached from the luxury. He looks puzzled when the spouts in the mini water park won’t come on, and he says he doesn’t drink wine despite having a lavish collection of it in a room off the bar. He is happiest, his son says, in that dark room staring at the lines and numbers that have earned him the scorn of mathematicians and the applause of some of the most successful investors on the planet.

To contact the reporters on this story: Anthony Effinger in Portland, Oregon, ataeffinger@bloomberg.net Katherine Burton in New York at kburton@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Serrill at mserrill@bloomberg.net; Christian Baumgaertel at cbaumgaertel@bloomberg.net.

Ng Boon Gay

//The case represents another witch hunt by CPIB and the DPP who would take on this case on the believe that people in high positions of power would misuse their power. There are ample cases current and historical of such 'percieved conflicts', there is no shortage of where to start.

I can hardly believe that Ng Boon Gay would want to use his power to influence the process - what is the dollar benefit to Cecilia Sue? I would say Ng and Cecilia wanted their share of sex outside marriage and this public affair is beyond their wildest dreams. 

Ng Boon Gay is already a man with his back to the wall. He has no choice but to tell the truth. Using a bit of intellect, one would know where Ng comes from. 

On the other hand, what is most ridiculous are taxpayers funding CPIB and DPP's salaries.

DPP points to Ng's failure to clarify work relation with Sue

In not doing so, he deliberately gave impression he had power to influence tender process to her advantage. -ST
Leonard Lim and Tham Yuen-c

Sat, Nov 24, 2012
The Straits Times

SINGAPORE - Former top cop Ng Boon Gay should have made it absolutely clear to Ms Cecilia Sue that he would excuse himself from tender approvals if her company was involved, the prosecution charged on Wednesday.

In not doing so, he deliberately left her with the impression that as Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) chief, he had the power to influence the tender process to her advantage.

The four occasions he had asked for oral sex from Ms Sue last year in exchange for furthering the business interests of her IT firms were framed in this context, said Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Tan Ken Hwee.

Ms Sue, said the DPP, had also believed that Ng's rank as senior assistant commissioner of police meant he was important and well-connected.

"You knew that by continuing to give her the impression that you could influence business opportunities of Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle, she would not reject you when you asked her for (oral sex)," DPP Tan said.

Ng disagreed with this and other similar assertions which arose in the final moments of yesterday's cross-examination.

The 46-year-old said he had told Ms Sue several times, when the topic cropped up in their chats, that he would leave IT matters to the IT department in CNB.

He had also continued to maintain in court that he would not grant business favours to her on account of their intimate relationship.

But the prosecution tried to cast doubt on exactly how strongly Ng felt about this, referring to phone messages Ms Sue sent on Dec 14 last year while he was in Macau.

Then, Ms Sue had joined Oracle just for a few weeks and, on discovering her role in the company, sent a text message to Ng.

"I know you don't want to be viewed to have work relation with me, and the same goes for me," she texted. "But I really have to engage you for work. So how?"

When she did not get a reply from Ng after 10 minutes, the IT sales manager sent a message that said: "Silence".

About two hours later that night, he had still not replied, and she sent him a question mark, followed shortly by "nvm then". This was shorthand for "never mind then".

Ng replied only at 1pm the next day with a solitary "Hi".

DPP Tan asked Ng why he was able to reply within minutes to messages from Ms Sue earlier on Dec 14, yet was so silent on the work issue.

Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall!

And will Bloomberg like to bear the consequences?

Mr. Xi, Tear Down This Firewall!

This week's meeting in Beijing of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which will inaugurate a new slate of leaders, has not exactly brought a golden dawn of free expression. In addition to cracking down on all forms of media, China's creatively paranoid security forces are on the lookout for threats such as taxi passengers carrying pingpong balls that they might slip through windows to deliver subversive messages.

Such off-the-wall measures, however, usefully highlight one of the central challenges that will confront Xi Jinping, the princeling pegged to be China's next president, and his new colleagues on the elite Politburo Standing Committee: how to maintain the flow of information vital to economic growth and public wellbeing in China without undermining the party's legitimacy and primacy.

An explosion in Chinese Internet use and the rise of social media have made it harder for the outgoing duo of Party Secretary and President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to maintain a "harmonious" society, to use one of Hu's favorite adjectives. The number of Internet users has jumped to 538 million from 20 million in 2001; China also has about 274 million microblog accounts. To keep tabs on them and block information it doesn't like, China's government has built a sophisticated regime of technological filters and human minders. Access to foreign websites is routed through only a few entry/exit points.

Deceitful Web

Within China itself, layers of formal and informal arrangements seek to create a well-tended simulacrum of the Web's wide-open spaces. At Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblogging site, users are given 80 points, which can be deducted for various anti-social offenses; hundreds of its employees are engaged 24/7 in deleting posts or rendering them invisible to followers, closing accounts, or doctoring search results. Under Hu and Wen, China has also insinuated more censors and moles into newsrooms and management offices of traditional media.

These and other repressive measures have raised hackles (and lowered press freedom rankings) without tamping down popular discontent over corruption, pollution and other hot- button issues. The number of protests and social disturbances has grown by some estimates to about 500 per day, up almost fourfold from a decade ago. To their credit, in areas such as pollution and food safety, Chinese authorities recognize that social media can help them do their jobs by exposing problems and focusing public ire. China has also begun to use the Web to promote greater transparency about government decision-making, not least for foreign consumption.

Still, those who violate Beijing's taboos on topics of public discussion or journalistic inquiry -- whether about the Dalai Lama, restive Xinjiang province, Falun Gong or the Party's leadership -- are persecuted. For instance, Freedom House noted that during 2011's short-lived Jasmine Revolution (a phrase inspired by the Arab Spring, and quickly blocked on Chinese social networking sites and chat rooms), dozens of Chinese bloggers, activists and lawyers were abducted and imprisoned.

Since Bloomberg News reported this summer on the $376 million in assets controlled by the extended family of incoming leader Xi Jinping, its website and that of Bloomberg Businessweek have been blocked within China -- a fate that also befell the New York Times several months later when it published its report on the family of Wen Jiabao. Chinese journalists are penalized or imprisoned for crossing the Party's redlines; the reporters and staff of foreign news organizations, including Bloomberg, have been harassed and interrogated.

Apparatchik Apps

Chinese Communism and Western journalism may never mix, but China's leaders have at times championed greater public access to reliable information. During the early 1980s, for example, when the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping were just gearing up, one of his pet projects was a joint venture with Encyclopaedia Britannica to create reference books that would help lead the Chinese out of the dark night of the Cultural Revolution.

China has come a long way since then, and print encyclopedias are going the way of the dodo, but as the country grows richer and the challenges of development become more complex, public access to wider sources of information is even more essential. Just as the Internet and social media have helped shine a spotlight on pollution and food safety, they can also help curb financial fraud, corruption and abuses of power - - all stated goals of the Chinese Communist Party. And without greater Internet access, Chinese companies will find it harder to climb the value chain or compete in the services market.

Outsiders have worked to punch holes in China's Great Firewall. The U.S. Congress has appropriated about $95 million since 2008 for the State Department and USAID to support proxy servers, websites, apps and software targeting users in China and a dozen other countries. Other groups such as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Radio Free Asia and other U.S. international broadcasters, are also involved. More money for such efforts would help, especially if it provided more bandwidth and training for users. Groups such as Freedom House and the Open Net Initiative deserve wide public support for exposing censorship, filtering and surveillance. And all foreign media organizations operating in China have a shared interest in protesting censorship, regardless of whom it targets -- something that hasn't happened often enough in the past.

The genius of what Internet researcher Rebecca MacKinnon calls China's "networked authoritarianism," however, is that it focuses on satisfying average users who don't need or want access to foreign sites, and relies on self-censorship to achieve its goals. To push for change to China's intranet means finding a way to target Baidu and other domestic providers. Legislative proposals to require U.S.-listed companies such as Baidu to disclose their censorship arrangements to investors make sense if they are tailored in a way that doesn't swamp an already overburdened Securities and Exchange Commission.

As we have argued about Iran and Syria, we are less enthusiastic about legislating broad new export controls on U.S. Internet technology than about enhancing the effectiveness of voluntary groups such as the Global Network Initiative, which seeks to minimize the potential for censorship and other human- rights abuses while maximizing the span of the Web.

We are skeptical about any proposals for "reforming" Internet governance that China itself may offer at next month's meeting in Dubai organized by the International Telecommunication Union. That said, the former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman recently predicted that Xi Jinping and his colleagues will inevitably have to re-balance China's own Internet policies in favor of more openness. That would indeed be harmonious, and we hope he's right.

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Today's highlights: the editors on the political imperative of immigration reform; Jonathan Alter on how Obama and business can heal their breach; Margaret Carlson on why another "Year of the Woman" is nothing to celebrate; Stephen L. Carter on why we shouldn't worry about low voter turnout; William Pesek on a possible thaw between the two Koreas; Jonathan Weil on one honest man on Wall Street; Adam Minter on the view from Beijing during the party congress; Sean West on why the fiscal cliff game has changed.

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The Island Where People Forget to Die

October 24, 2012

The Island Where People Forget to Die
By DAN BUETTNER


¶In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

¶One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.

¶Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

¶In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

¶Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

¶I met Moraitis on Ikaria this past July during one of my visits to explore the extraordinary longevity of the island’s residents. For a decade, with support from the National Geographic Society, I’ve been organizing a study of the places where people live longest. The project grew out of studies by my partners, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer. In 2000, they identified a region of Sardinia’s Nuoro province as the place with the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world. As they zeroed in on a cluster of villages high in Nuoro’s mountains, they drew a boundary in blue ink on a map and began referring to the area inside as the “blue zone.” Starting in 2002, we identified three other populations around the world where people live measurably longer lives than everyone else. The world’s longest-lived women are found on the island of Okinawa. On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we discovered a population of 100,000 mestizos with a lower-than-normal rate of middle-age mortality. And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade.

¶In 2003, I started a consulting firm to see if it was possible to take what we were learning in the field and apply it to American communities. We also continued to do research and look for other pockets of longevity, and in 2008, following a lead from a Greek researcher, we began investigating Ikaria. Poulain’s plan there was to track down survivors born between 1900 and 1920 and determine when and where individuals died. The approach was complicated by the fact that people often moved around. That meant that not only were birth and death records required, but also information on immigration and emigration.

¶The data collection had to be rigorous. Earlier claims about long-lived people in places like Ecuador’s Vilcabamba Valley, Pakistan’s Hunza Valley or the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia had all been debunked after researchers discovered that many residents didn’t actually know their ages. For villagers born without birth certificates, it was easy to lose track. One year they were 80; a few months later they were 82. Pretty soon they claimed to be 100. And when a town discovers that a reputation for centenarians draws tourists, who’s going to question it? Even in Ikaria, the truth has been sometimes difficult to nail down. Stories like the one about Moraitis’s miraculous recovery become instant folklore, told and retold and changed and misattributed. (Stories about Moraitis have appeared on Greek TV.) In fact, when I was doing research there in 2009, I met a different man who told me virtually the exact same story about himself.

¶The study would try to cut through the stories and establish the facts about Ikaria’s longevity. Before including subjects, Poulain cross-referenced birth records against baptism or military documentation. After gathering all the data, he and his colleagues at the University of Athens concluded that people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. (Ikarian men in particular are nearly four times as likely as their American counterparts to reach 90, often in better health.) But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end.

¶Ikaria, an island of 99 square miles and home to almost 10,000 Greek nationals, lies about 30 miles off the western coast of Turkey. Its jagged ridge of scrub-covered mountains rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea. Before the Christian era, the island was home to thick oak forests and productive vineyards. Its reputation as a health destination dates back 25 centuries, when Greeks traveled to the island to soak in the hot springs near Therma. In the 17th century, Joseph Georgirenes, the bishop of Ikaria, described its residents as proud people who slept on the ground. “The most commendable thing on this island,” he wrote, “is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

¶Seeking to learn more about the island’s reputation for long-lived residents, I called on Dr. Ilias Leriadis, one of Ikaria’s few physicians, in 2009. On an outdoor patio at his weekend house, he set a table with Kalamata olives, hummus, heavy Ikarian bread and wine. “People stay up late here,” Leriadis said. “We wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

¶Pointing across the Aegean toward the neighboring island of Samos, he said: “Just 15 kilometers over there is a completely different world. There they are much more developed. There are high-rises and resorts and homes worth a million euros. In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”

¶Ikaria’s unusual past may explain its communal inclinations. The strong winds that buffet the island — mentioned in the “Iliad” — and the lack of natural harbors kept it outside the main shipping lanes for most of its history. This forced Ikaria to be self-sufficient. Then in the late 1940s, after the Greek Civil War, the government exiled thousands of Communists and radicals to the island. Nearly 40 percent of adults, many of them disillusioned with the high unemployment rate and the dwindling trickle of resources from Athens, still vote for the local Communist Party. About 75 percent of the population on Ikaria is under 65. The youngest adults, many of whom come home after college, often live in their parents’ home. They typically have to cobble together a living through small jobs and family support.

¶Leriadis also talked about local “mountain tea,” made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-the-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves and adding a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey, too, is treated as a panacea. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating wounds to curing hangovers, or for treating influenza. Old people here will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.”

¶Over the span of the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’s patients. In the area known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekend.

¶On a trip the year before, I visited a slate-roofed house built into the slope at the top of a hill. I had come here after hearing of a couple who had been married for more than 75 years. Thanasis and Eirini Karimalis both came to the door, clapped their hands at the thrill of having a visitor and waved me in. They each stood maybe five feet tall. He wore a shapeless cotton shirt and a battered baseball cap, and she wore a housedress with her hair in a bun. Inside, there was a table, a medieval-looking fireplace heating a blackened pot, a nook of a closet that held one woolen suit coat, and fading black-and-white photographs of forebears on a soot-stained wall. The place was warm and cozy. “Sit down,” Eirini commanded. She hadn’t even asked my name or business but was already setting out teacups and a plate of cookies. Meanwhile, Thanasis scooted back and forth across the house with nervous energy, tidying up.

¶The couple were born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early 20s and raised five children on Thanasis’s pay as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all of Ikaria’s traditional folk, their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months.

¶During a tour of their property, Thanasis and Eirini introduced their pigs to me by name. Just after sunset, after we returned to their home to have some tea, another old couple walked in, carrying a glass amphora of homemade wine. The four nonagenarians cheek-kissed one another heartily and settled in around the table. They gossiped, drank wine and occasionally erupted into laughter.

¶Dr. Ioanna Chinou, a professor at the University of Athens School of Pharmacy, is one of Europe’s top experts on the bioactive properties of herbs and natural products. When I consulted her about Ikarians’ longevity, she told me that many of the teas they consume are traditional Greek remedies. Wild mint fights gingivitis and gastrointestinal disorders; rosemary is used as a remedy for gout; artemisia is thought to improve blood circulation. She invited me to give her samples and later tested seven of the most commonly used herbs on Ikaria. As rich sources of polyphenols, they showed strong antioxidant properties, she reported. Most of these herbs also contained mild diuretics. Doctors often use diuretics to treat hypertension — perhaps by drinking tea nightly, Ikarians have gently lowered their blood pressure throughout their lives.

¶Meanwhile, my colleagues Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain set out to track down the island’s 164 residents who were over 90 as of 1999, starting in the municipality of Raches. They found that 75 nonagenarians were still alive. Then, along with additional researchers, they fanned out across the island and asked 35 elderly subjects a battery of lifestyle questions to assess physical and cognitive functioning: How much do you sleep? Did you ever smoke? They asked them to get up and down from a chair five times and recorded how long it took them to walk 13 feet. To test mental agility, the researchers had subjects recall a series of items and reproduce geometric shapes.

¶Pes and Poulain were joined in the field by Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens, an expert on the Mediterranean diet. She helped administer surveys, often sitting in village kitchens to ask subjects to reconstruct their childhood eating habits. She noted that the Ikarians’ diet, like that of others around the Mediterranean, was rich in olive oil and vegetables, low in dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and also included moderate amounts of alcohol. It emphasized homegrown potatoes, beans (garbanzo, black-eyed peas and lentils), wild greens and locally produced goat milk and honey.

¶As I knew from my studies in other places with high numbers of very old people, every one of the Ikarians’ dietary tendencies had been linked to increased life spans: low intake of saturated fats from meat and dairy was associated with lower risk of heart disease; olive oil — especially unheated — reduced bad cholesterol and raised good cholesterol. Goat’s milk contained serotonin-boosting tryptophan and was easily digestible for older people. Some wild greens had 10 times as many antioxidants as red wine. Wine — in moderation — had been shown to be good for you if consumed as part of a Mediterranean diet, because it prompts the body to absorb more flavonoids, a type of antioxidant. And coffee, once said to stunt growth, was now associated with lower rates of diabetes, heart disease and, for some, Parkinson’s. Local sourdough bread might actually reduce a meal’s glycemic load. You could even argue that potatoes contributed heart-healthy potassium, vitamin B6 and fiber to the Ikarian diet. Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four additional years of life expectancy.

¶Of course, it may not be only what they’re eating; it may also be what they’re not eating. “Are they doing something positive, or is it the absence of something negative?” Gary Taubes asked when I described to him the Ikarians’ longevity and their diet. Taubes is a founder of the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative and the author of “Why We Get Fat” (and has written several articles for this magazine). “One explanation why they live so long is they eat a plant-based diet. Or it could be the absence of sugar and white flour. From what I know of the Greek diet, they eat very little refined sugar, and their breads have been traditionally made with stone-ground wheat.”

¶Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

¶Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping — at least three days weekly — was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with “good duration” and “achievement.”

¶During our time on Ikaria, my colleagues and I stayed at Thea Parikos’s guesthouse, the social hub of western Ikaria. Local women gathered in the dining room at midmorning to gossip over tea. Late at night, after the dinner rush, tables were pushed aside and the dining room became a dance floor, with people locking arms and kick-dancing to Greek music.

¶Parikos cooked the way her ancestors had for centuries, giving us a chance to consume the diet we were studying. For breakfast, she served local yogurt and honey from the 90-year-old beekeeper next door. For dinner, she walked out into the fields and returned with handfuls of weedlike greens, combined them with pumpkin and baked them into savory pies. My favorite was a dish made with black-eyed peas, tomatoes, fennel tops and garlic and finished with olive oil that we dubbed Ikarian stew.

¶Despite her consummately Ikarian air, Parikos was actually born in Detroit to an American father and an Ikarian mother. She had attended high school, worked as a real estate agent and married in the United States. After she and her husband had their first child, she felt a “genetic craving” for Ikaria. “I was not unhappy in America,” she said. “We had good friends, we went out to dinner on the weekends, I drove a Chevrolet. But I was always in a hurry.”

¶When she and her family moved to Ikaria and opened the guesthouse, everything changed. She stopped shopping for most groceries, instead planting a huge garden that provided most of their fruits and vegetables. She lost weight without trying to. I asked her if she thought her simple diet was going to make her family live longer. “Yes,” she said. “But we don’t think about it that way. It’s bigger than that.”

¶Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me. People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism, for example, might also be a painter or an electrician or have a store. “People are fine here because we are very self-sufficient,” she said. “We may not have money for luxuries, but we will have food on the table and still have fun with family and friends. We may not be in a hurry to get work done during the day, so we work into the night. At the end of the day, we don’t go home to sit on the couch.”

¶Parikos was nursing a mug of coffee. Sunlight sifted in through the window shades; the waves of the nearby Aegean could be barely heard over the din of breakfast. “Do you know there’s no word in Greek for privacy?” she declared. “When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because it puts a check on people who don’t want to be caught or who do something to embarrass their family. If your kids misbehave, your neighbor has no problem disciplining them. There is less crime, not because of good policing, but because of the risk of shaming the family. You asked me about food, and yes, we do eat better here than in America. But it’s more about how we eat. Even if it’s your lunch break from work, you relax and enjoy your meal. You enjoy the company of whoever you are with. Food here is always enjoyed in combination with conversation.”

¶In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

¶Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the termplan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.

¶The healthful plant-based diet that Seventh-day Adventists eat has been associated with an extra decade of life expectancy. It has also been linked to reduced rates of diabetes and heart disease. Adventists’ diet is inspired by the Bible — Genesis 1:29. (“And God said: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed . . . and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.’ ”) But again, the key insight might be more about social structure than about the diet itself. While for most people, diets eventually fail, the Adventists eat the way they do for decades. How? Adventists hang out with other Adventists. When you go to an Adventist picnic, there’s no steak grilling on the barbecue; it’s a vegetarian potluck. No one is drinking alcohol or smoking. As Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard, found when examining data from a long-term study of the residents of Framingham, Mass., health habits can be as contagious as a cold virus. By his calculation, a Framingham individual’s chances of becoming obese shot up by 57 percent if a friend became obese. Among the Adventists we looked at, it was mostly positive social contagions that were in circulation.

¶Ask the very old on Ikaria how they managed to live past 90, and they’ll usually talk about the clean air and the wine. Or, as one 101-year-old woman put it to me with a shrug, “We just forget to die.” The reality is they have no idea how they got to be so old. And neither do we. To answer that question would require carefully tracking the lifestyles of a study group and a control group for an entire human lifetime (and then some). We do know from reliable data that people on Ikaria are outliving those on surrounding islands (a control group, of sorts). Samos, for instance, is just eight miles away. People there with the same genetic background eat yogurt, drink wine, breathe the same air, fish from the same sea as their neighbors on Ikaria. But people on Samos tend to live no longer than average Greeks. This is what makes the Ikarian formula so tantalizing.

¶If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

¶Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

¶As our access to calories has increased, we’ve decreased the amount of physical activity in our lives. In 1970, about 40 percent of all children in the U.S. walked to school; now fewer than 12 percent do. Our grandparents, without exercising, burned up about five times as many calories a day in physical activity as we do. At the same time, access to food has exploded.

¶Despite the island’s relative isolation, its tortuous roads and the fierce independence of its inhabitants, the American food culture, among other forces, is beginning to take root in Ikaria. Village markets are now selling potato chips and soda, which in my experience is replacing tea as the drink of choice among younger Ikarians. As the island’s ancient traditions give way before globalization, the gap between Ikarian life spans and those of the rest of the world seems to be gradually disappearing, as the next generations of old people become less likely to live quite so long.

¶The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot.

¶I called Moraitis a few weeks ago from my home in Minneapolis. Elpiniki died in the spring at age 85, and now he lives alone. He picked up the phone in the same whitewashed house that he’d moved into 35 years ago. It was late afternoon in Ikaria. He had worked in his vineyard that morning and just awakened from a nap. We chatted for a few minutes, but then he warned me that some of his neighbors were coming over for a drink in a few minutes and he’d have to go. I had one last question for him. How does he think he recovered from lung cancer?

¶“It just went away,” he said. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”

¶I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, “What happened?”

¶“My doctors were all dead.”


¶This article is adapted from new material being published in the second edition of “Blue Zones,” by Dan Buettner, out next month from National Geographic.

¶Editor: Dean Robinson


¶This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

¶Correction: October 28, 2012



¶An article on Page 36 this weekend about the reasons people on the Greek Island of Ikaria live long lives misstates the period when fasting is practiced by the island’s inhabitants. They fast before Orthodox feast days, not during Orthodox feast days.