Still, such concerns – as well as the annoyance factor – are prompting dozens of towns across the nation to adopt “Do Not Knock” registries, the door-to-door equivalent of the “Do Not Call” list. Harrison officials recently proposed such an ordinance, which requires solicitors to avoid the addresses of those residents who sign up. Charitable, religious and political groups are exempt, but those who knock where they shouldn’t face a summons and a fine.

Registries are a popular option for municipalities because laws that outright ban door-to-door soliciting have been overturned on constitutional grounds when challenged in court. Communities have responded over the years by charging licensing fees to solicitors and running background checks on applicants – several states, such as Utah and Massachusetts, require statewide checks. Rye, N.Y., next door to Harrison and with a population of 17,000, was the first community in the area to adopt a “Do Not Knock” registry in 2010. Now 488 homes are listed on it.

Old encyclopedia sets seem to be disappearing - much like the door-to-door sales industry itself. (Photo by Mark Lungariello/CNS)

But given the state of the door-to-door sales industry, are such precautions even necessary? Direct sales, including door-to-door sales, represented $28.6 billion in 2010, down from $32.18 in 2006, according to the Direct Sellers Association. The U.S. Department of Labor says that in 2010 there were fewer than 7,000 door-to-door salespeople, down from about 33,000 in 2000. And for all the talk of a Do Not Knock registry in Harrison, the town only issued 11 door-to-door selling permits in 2011, and had issued four permits for 2012 by May 2012.

Between the rise of the Internet and two-income couples, Do Not Knock initiatives seem to be a quaint answer to a rapidly disappearing problem.

Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., which published its first multivolume set in 1768 and was sold door-to-door for decades, announced in March that its 2010 print edition would be its last. “The end of the print set is something we’ve foreseen for some time,” said company president Jorge Cauz in a press release announcing the move to all-digital.

Fuller Brush Co., founded in 1906 to sell cleaning brushes, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February. The company branched into selling cleaning supplies, with its sales force going door to door nationwide, becoming so well- known that two movies were made with its name in the title. “The Fuller Brush Man” starred Red Skelton in 1948 as an annoying door-to-door salesman. Two years later, Lucille Ball was featured in “The Fuller Brush Girl.”

Even in its heyday, the door-to-door trade was hardly loved. In 1931, founder Alfred C. Fuller challenged a city ordinance in Green River, Wyo., that prohibited door-to-door solicitation. In 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed his appeal “for want of a federal question.”

It takes a special kind of mindset to go into door-to-door sales. John Nelson, vice president of the National Field Selling Association, a trade group, spent 28 years on the road. Today, he manages a team that sells chemical products “on the ground,” as he calls it. He blames the bad rap plaguing door-to-door salespeople on the stereotype of dishonest rainmaker pitches and “snake oil” products. “There’s good and bad everywhere, but when it comes to your door in the form of selling a product, a lot of people don’t have anywhere to turn or know what to believe,” Nelson said.

Nelson said that traveling salespeople are actually good for the economy of the towns they visit, spending an average of $455 per week in those areas and reinvesting as much as 30 percent of what they earn through local lodging, gas and food. The sales are also a local benefit through sales taxes and permitting fees, he said.

Nelson said his organization, founded in 1987, has members who live up to a pledged ethical code in their relationship to both prospective buyers and would-be employees. “Prospective sales persons shall be informed of the nature and extent to which travel is involved,” the code reads, “including the method used to transport persons to and from the geographic locations where sales are conducted.”

Selling on the ground is clearly not for everyone. “It’s no confidence booster,” said Brendan Fitzherbert, 33, who sold ADT security systems door to door in San Diego 11 years ago. “At least with telemarketing, you don’t have people recognizing who you are.”

Fitzherbert said his job required wearing a suit in all weather, carrying lawn signs, and making a sale for about every 50 homes visited. Although he received a $120 commission for each sale, the stress wore him down after about three months. Today, he works as an account rep for an IT company. “You’d be going door-to-door to each house, just waiting for someone to answer the door,” Fitzherbert said. “People would drive by knowing exactly what you were doing and give you dirty looks. Other times kids would drive by yelling at you.”

But for those who can stand it, the wisecracks and local registries don’t get to them. Donald Steinbach, of Manalapan, N.J., still sells clothes and jewelry door to door at age 84. “It takes a special kind of guy to go up cold and knock on someone’s door,” he said. Today, Steinbach makes rounds three times a week, now only by appointment, for clients buying through a catalog. “I enjoy it,”he said.  “I got a little arthritis, I have a little of this and a little of that, but I don’t hate my job.”

Email: ml3283@columbia.edu

“You mean to tell me my five times great-grandfather was trying to stick it to George Washington?” the actor said in astonishment.

Lowe’s televised odyssey from California to Washington, D.C. , to Trenton to Germany may have entailed more time and money than most researchers can spare.  But embarking on a quest to trace one’s familial roots is not extraordinary;  it’s a popular pastime. In fact, the genealogy research site Ancestry.com gained 800,000 subscribers – an 80 percent increase – since November 2009, said J.P. Canton, the site’s public relations manager.

And with the availability  of digitized, online records, reconstructing one’s family tree is easier than ever, say professional genealogists – but some see pitfalls amid the ease of access.

For a yearly membership of $155.40, Ancestry.com alone provides 9 billion historical records, including census, immigration, birth, marriage, death and military records, says Anastasia Harman, the site’s lead family historian.

Ancestry.com has made filling out a family tree easier than ever, but don' be lulled into thinking the research stops there. (Photo by Stephen Childs/CNS)

The site just added a digitized version of the 1940 census, but because a crew must personally review and catalog every record, making a searchable index of the records will take some time.

There are no shortage of enthusiasts.

“People are more willing to do it because they can do it in their pajamas at midnight,” says Jan Alpert, immediate past president of the National Genealogical Society, an organization with 10,000 members that focuses on promoting genealogical education through courses, publications and conferences.

Kathleen W. Hinckley, a certified genealogist with the Association of Professional Genealogists, agrees. Before records became digitized, she says she operated  by “cranking microfilm and writing letters to courthouses.”  Now she spends 80 percent of her research time on the Internet, using sites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org to find clues.

And clues abound.

FamilySearch.org, a free online service provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, adds 40 million new records from 130 countries to its site and has millions of users each month, says Paul Nauta, the site’s manager of public affairs.

Besides these, a host of other sites dedicated to helping researchers track ancestors as well as the digitization of many newspapers have literally put information at the public’s fingertips.  Still, problems arise.

“People getting into it are so used to convenience, that they have the perception that if it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist,” says Nauta, who points out that only about 20 percent of genealogical records are online.

Many times, Hinckley’s clients give up just because digitized records haven’t been indexed, she says, adding that she likes Ancestry.com for the convenience it affords her, but also because it boosts her business.  When people underestimate the amount of time and research involved even with these e-luxuries, they come to her.

“The two strengths of Ancestry is that they have a great database and they have a great search engine,” says Alpert.  “But at some point you get stuck.”

The farther back one traces a family’s roots, the less helpful digitized records become, she says.  While sites store records that date back to the 17th century – and some beyond – the quality of the data varies based upon where one’s ancestors lived and their socioeconomic status.  African-Americans whose ancestors that were enslaved prior to 1870, for example, will not find any information for them by going through digitized vital records, says Harman.

To hurdle these obstacles, Alpert recommends using vacations to visit the Library of Congress or state libraries, or local libraries, courthouses and churches that store county vital records as yet undigitized.

That’s what Lowe did, and it’s advice that Jerry Coghlan is heeding as well.

When his mother died in 1996, Coghlan, a retiree now living in Hilton Head, S.C., found a cemetery deed in her house that led him to a lot in a Philadelphia church graveyard. Buried on that lot, with no marker, were 15 of his ancestors, including an older brother who died in infancy, and his great-grandfather, the Coghlan family patriarch, Patrick Coghlan.  Through records from the Catholic Church and Ancestry.com, he was able to learn more about his ancestors.  He even located the house they’d inhabited on Hanover Street in Philadelphia.

But because Patrick Coghlan emigrated from Ireland, Jerry needs to travel to Ireland to research the family line further.

“The big questions became ‘what county in Ireland,’ ‘when did they come,’ and ‘how did they get here?’” said Coghlan.  Trying to answer even those questions through Internet records proved difficult, because the spelling of the family changed over the years, Coghlan said.  But after meeting Jan Alpert, the possibilities narrowed. Through Irish Records Extraction Database, Alpert was able to provide Coghlan with a short list of counties for him to investigate, which he will do next year on a family trip.

In addition to spelling issues, Alpert warns of another common problem.

Not every tree on Ancestry.com is accurate, she says.

“If you can’t find two or three records that really tie a family together, then you really have to question your records.”

Of course, genealogy also has a price – “$500 will get you started,” says Alpert – but for the savvy researcher, the chances of success are good.

“Everybody has a germ of an interest to see where it all started,” says Coghlan.

Email: scc2147@columbia.edu

“You have to tell them that’s why there’s lines there,” said the 28-year-old from Bridgeport, Conn. “If you have two cars, you can use two spots but you don’t, you only have one.” Taking up more is rude, Marachi said, and may be part of a childish “mine-mine-mine” mentality. “I’d blame the parents,” she added. “Maybe they take up two parking spots too.”

Few things can cause as much disdain as a greedy parker. Facebook has several groups dedicated to venting about those whose cars cross the line. A website with a vulgar name features pictures and videos of badly parked cars and encourages readers to leave “notices” under the windshield wiper of the offending vehicles. “Sick of a car taking up two spaces on the street?” the site says under its “About Us” section. “Now you can do something about it.”

Greedy parkers, like this one in Harrison, N.Y., have many seeing red. (Photo by Mark Lungariello/CNS)

Notes from those who did something about it, according to a Huffington Post feature, ranged from the political insult (“Your vehicle occupies two parking spaces. You must be special … Or Republican.” ) to the kind that uses language that can’t be printed here. There are even Citizen Parking Violations, which say, in part, “The reason for giving you this is so that in future you may think of someone other than yourself.”

Says book editor Rob Kirkpatrick, 43, who hates greedy parkers more than he hates missed deadlines, “They’re basically telling the world, ‘I’m more important than you are.’” He added, “If people were still tarred and feathered, these are the ones who’d deserve it the most.”

Taking up more than one spot isn’t illegal, per se. Local parking enforcement officers can issue tickets for improperly parked vehicles at parking meters or in municipal lots. But the offense often takes place in corporate or private lots, where enforcement depends on what, if anything, the lot’s owner is willing to do about it.

Ron Fini, 49, of Highland Heights, Ohio, notices a connection between bad parking habits and expensive cars or pickups. “It’s an arrogance with the BMW owners that ‘my car is nicer than yours so don’t get close to me,’” he said. “With the Ford F150 owner, they seem to be saying ‘my truck is bigger than your car so I can do what I want.’”

When it comes to parking, size apparently does matter. But it isn’t just big cars that overpark, as the declining sales of large vehicles show. Though the auto industry posted strong sales overall in the first quarter of 2012, large cars and SUVs with expanded cargo and passenger space fell 84.6 and 6.3 percent respectively from the year earlier, according to MotorIntelligence.com. But there is evidence  that a growing class divide may have made its way into the parking lot: luxury car and SUV sales jumped 16.7 and 11.4 percent respectively over the same period.

The feeling that bad parkers “get away with it” has rule-following parkers in a huff,  according to psychoanalyst Hillary Volper, of Larchmont, N.Y. She said people typically project their frustrations onto others, such as assuming  a luxury car owner feels “entitled” to two parking spaces when the driver may simply have been in a rush or preoccupied.

“While we can’t have a conversation with the person who took two parking spaces, we may want to temper our responses and give the person the benefit of the doubt,” Volper said. “Is it really worth it to get angry and worked up over someone we don’t even know?”

Patrizio Torregiani, an assistant sales manager at New Country Porsche in Greenwich, Conn., said that having a nice car does not always equal needing two spaces. Torregiani deals with clientele that range from the well-off to the very, very wealthy. During the day, he observes parking patterns in the lot outside the dealership. “Some people, no matter what car they drive – it could be a $300,000 supercar – they take one spot, quietly, come in,” he said. “Then we have the other guy that comes in, maybe in a BMW on which he owes more than it’s worth. He’ll pull up and take up maybe three spots, walk in and immediately expect attention.”

Some two-space parkers are up front about their proclivity. Kevin McShane, who drives a Volkswagon GTI, freely admits to taking up two spaces, not to make a statement but as a defense mechanism. “If 95 percent of people with cars weren’t morons and/or had some consideration for other people’s cars, I wouldn’t have to,” he said. “Even parallel parked, my car has sustained unnecessary damages.” Now he parks as far as “humanly possible” from the any store he visits with a parking lot, usually taking up multiple spaces.

Then there is Vincent Pastore, a New York radio host and actor, who played Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpenspiero on “The Sopranos.” He is a regular two-space parker because he is a big man and says he is  “doing a favor” for fellow drivers by leaving plenty of distance between his Chevy Impala and other cars to avoid setting off their car alarms when he gets in and out. In true wiseguy fashion, Pastore doesn’t appreciate being asked why he takes up two parking spaces, or even what kind of car he drives. “Why? What, do you want to follow me?”

Email: ml3283@columbia.edu

“It was such an exciting time to get involved with my classmates and with my school, and then get the chance to perform,” said James, a two-time Tony Award nominee, and currently a star of the NBC musical drama “Smash.” “It helped define me in a new way, which was so important to me in my evolution as a person. It gave me confidence.”

Brian d'Arcy James plays Frank Houston, husband to Debra Messing's lyricist Julia, on NBC's "Smash." (Photo by Will Hart/NBC)

Shows like “Smash” and Fox’s teen hit series “Glee” have brought musicals and show choirs to the small screen. They not only draw in viewers (“Smash” recently had around 6 million viewers; “Glee’s” audience hovers around 7 million, according to Entertainment Weekly), but also have been inspiring more students to get involved with the musical arts, many educators say. While some choir directors and drama teachers may quibble with whether the television shows are realistic, they say that the shows shine a spotlight that their students are eager to step into.

Storm Ziegler, who has directed young chorus hopefuls at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for 16 years, said musical shows tend to underplay how much work it takes to put on a good show. “If you watch ‘Glee,’ you get the perception that kids walk into the room and can sing, no rehearsal necessary,” he said. “We start rehearsing in July and do the full performance for the first time the following January.” Ziegler said.

Now these television shows are inspiring more high schools to put on their own musicals. The number of show choirs competing in national championships has jumped in recent years. And NBC is sponsoring an initiative that connects the fictional world of “Smash,” which is about big-time producers trying to put on a Broadway show, to schools trying to, yes, put on their own shows and build their musical theater programs.

The “Smash”: Make A Musical initiative helps participating schools with teacher stipends and rights to a musical, as well as classes with educators from the youth theater organization iTheatrics. NBC is funding 20 schools nationwide this year, and is in the final stages of choosing next year’s winners.

One of this year’s participants is the Leadership and Public Service High School in Lower Manhattan. On an afternoon in March, Marty Johnson, the director of education at iTheatrics, and his colleagues were instructing three Public Service High teachers assembled in a classroom how to get parents, local businesses and potential donors involved with the school’s musical, “Guys and Dolls Jr.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars could be a budget for a show,” Johnson said. He hopes Public Service High makes enough money with its two performances in May to produce another musical next year. After all, the goal of the initiative is to teach the schools how to fish, and not just give them the catch.

Part of the process is to make these schools independent leaders, Julie Moore, director of marketing at NBC, said. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Producing a musical requires teamwork, in real life as well as on NBC's musical drama "Smash." (Photo by Mark Seliger/ NBC)

But for at least one school in the Make a Musical program, the first show will also be the final curtain. The Middleton Street Elementary School in Huntington Park, Calif., is cutting its entire arts program. Music teacher Claudia Zuniga is especially sad now that she has seen how enthusiastically her students are preparing for their production of “Seussical” this year.

“I guess we’ll be going out with a bang,” Zuniga said.

It isn’t just musical theater that can thank a television show for newfound popularity. Fox’s “Glee” is still going strong in its third season, spiked interest in show choirs by making singing and dancing look cool. This year, about 100 choirs competed in the Fame Show Choir National Championship Series, up from 14 at its first competition in 1996.

“We’ve seen probably an 18 to 20 percent increase in show choirs since shows like ‘American Idol’ and ‘Glee,’ said Joel Biggs, the championship’s organizer.

Indeed, in a 2011 survey by the National Association for Music Education, 43 percent of school choral directors said they noticed a sharp increase in interest in their choir programs after “Glee” came out.

At Los Alamitos High School in California, the number of singers in the school’s seven show choirs has doubled in the last four years to nearly 400 students, said David Moellenkamp, the choir director.

“What it has done is shed a light on what we do, give awareness of what our program is like,” Moellenkamp said. “We get more support and respect from the school and the community.”

One of his singers, 16-year-old junior Hailey Harn, has been a part of the school’s advanced mixed troupe “Sound FX” since her sophomore year.

“I can do something that I love while also improving someone else’s day,” Harn said. “People can see that show choir is such an uplifting experience, it just draws you in.”

As for James, he sees similar benefits “Not only are you creating something together, you’re making something, you have pride of achieving something,” he said. “For a lot of kids in the show, there’s something invaluable in learning what that means and what it can really do for the individual in terms of their character.”

Email: ccb2141@columbia.edu

BetaVille allows players to design buildings for New York. (Photo by Nastaran Tavakoli-Far /CNS)

BetaVille is a recent addition to the multiplayer digital media projects being developed at various universities nationwide to encourage the public to participate in developing and getting the best use from urban spaces. By inviting public participation, the projects outsource work, while giving people a say in the planning process. BetaVille’s developers at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center liken its process to the “democratization of city planning,” and it joins projects such as Cyclopath, born at the University of Minnesota, where the city’s cyclists to share their cycling routes.

Carl Skelton, who founded the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at New York University’s Polytechnic school, said politicians and the public need to be able to cooperate easily on urban projects to benefit local communities. Otherwise, people must live with the results of experiments by designers, which may not always benefit communities best.

Interactions with a design team in Bremen, Germany, spawned the idea behind BetaVille, which was launched in April 2010, with nondeveloper participants becoming involved in the fall of last year. Currently more than a thousand people “play” on BetaVille, including students at several high schools.

Loaded onto the average laptop, which is more powerful than the machines used by architects 30 years ago, participants can quickly learn to render structures and place them on to the map. Subsequent users can continuously make adjustments; the goal is to present these structures to city councils soon for building approval.

Despite the public’s not being professionals in design or city planning, Skelton said, “What they do have is the fundamental experience and the moral authority.” As nonprofessionals they are often not clued into the logistical and practical aspects of development projects, and this renders them freer to think of ideas, however grand or strange they may be. “Off the map ideas become legitimate when it’s a casual media experiment,” Skelton said, “so there’s a lot more experimentation.”

Children have a sense of fun that can lead to bold and at times innovative ideas. “They’ve a sense of humor with so many of these designs that gets lost when people think about implementing these designs,” said Kate Thomason, a teacher at Louis Armstrong Middle School in Flushing Meadows. As the school’s coordinator of the project, she oversees a team of about 17 students, all with an interest in architecture and engineering, who meet twice a week to work on BetaVille. Thomason said middle school students are old enough to understand technical processes, something important to their work on BetaVille, and also come up with ideas that may seem very zany, but which actually are very innovative.

Scott Vincent, 13, is one of Thomason’s students. He said he enjoys making designs which may not be feasible in the real world—and BetaVille’s capability to allow players to flip buildings onto their sides. “I believe BetaVille allows your mind to go free and to do whatever you want,” Vincent said.

Having grown up in an age concerned about environmental issues, the students also naturally think about sustainability and renewable energy and water use when designing and incorporating related features. Solar panels, the ability to recycle water and the incorporation of gardens are just some of the factors that Jennifer Randin, 12, said she considers when participating in BetaVille. “We’re trying to design a building that would be good in the future,” she said.

While these features have benefits for the environment, she also believes such buildings can also become tourist attractions. In fact, Randin became interested in architecture and urban design after a family visit to the Netherlands and Belgium.

Thomason said that as her students learn about various technologies through their involvement in BetaVille they think the public should understand these processes too. “A lot of the kids are very concerned with letting the public know how these things work, which we take for granted,” Thomason explained.

As citizens use the urban infrastructure every day, their opinions matter greatly to planners, but can be hard to gather. These platforms can also enable easier exchange of information between people and planners, and lead to designs that will benefit the community. Cyclopath is a map of the cycle routes in Minneapolis and allows cyclists to show routes and also comment on them, for example, with regards to safety or speed. Founded by University of Minneapolis’ Prof. Loren Terveen and a doctoral student, Reid Priedhorsky, the project not only helps cyclists find routes that best match their preferences, but provides planners with valuable data.

“What we can do is give them data that they know they would not have been able to collect easily,” Terveen said, “data which helps with as assessment of where people want to ride and analytics on the effects of changes.” Terveen believes there is great potential for using the public to gather all kinds of data essential to improving the built environment they inhabit.

“It could be monitoring various kinds of pollution,” he said, “the use of public transportation and making decisions regarding where you need bus stops, the use of parks, how to design trails and where to put observation points.”

Minneapolis transportation planner James Andrews said Cyclopath can provide information of great help to himself, but which is tricky to collect.  His department is setting up features within its own analytics systems to use the data Cyclopath provides, aiming to have this system up and running over the summer.

“The best experts in terms of understanding how the system is functioning are the bicyclists themselves,” Andrews said. ”The public is who we are serving with planning.”

Email: nt2321@columbia.edu

To save them, nurses are often forced to cut off the sexual organs of these precious bloomers to save the rest of their shriveling bodies.

“Some of them won’t make it, depending on how early they were intercepted,” says Eric Imperiale, a specialist in rescuing these precious creatures. “Sometimes the whole shipment could be gone.”

A hybrid phalaenopsis at the New York Botanical Garden, one of the country's largest orchid rescue centers. (Photo by Michael Wilner/CNS)

For a flower that has more genetic hybrids than natural breeds, occupies a billion-dollar sector of the plant market and can sell between $25 and $8,000 a stem, some orchids still get it rough. But these are not your mother’s flowers, or the ones you find in grocery and hardware stores. These are often the rarest of species, some coveted for their beauty and some “rescued” from a disappearing habitat.

More than 30,000 species are known to exist in the wild, and an additional 120,000 hybrid breeds have been engineered to the tastes of particular consumers, who have grown to expect perfectly manicured blossoms on these already exotic plants.

But whether an orchid’s value is driven by markets or by a passion for the natural arts, importers and smugglers face significant hurdles bringing exotic shipments into the United States.  That’s because the rarity of these imported flowers is secondary to U.S. Customs and border protection, whose mandate to protect the nation from imported pests or diseases means they look askance at any flora and fauna attempting to cross the border.

People ship in orchids for a variety of reasons: for profit, for hobby, or perhaps to save the planet. But without the proper paperwork — like a human traveling without a passport — border patrol is left with no choice. They must seize the flowers and, if they are able, race them to rescue centers before the creatures die.

“In the past, those plants would be sent back to the country of origin,” says David Horak, chair of the conservation committee at the American Orchid Society, explaining that they would often wither in the process. “And the ones that weren’t, including some that were extremely rare, were terminated.”

So today, the U.S. government has made agreements with over 65 conservatories across the country to serve as rescue centers.

Dori Gerber, a specialist in orchids at the New York Botanical Garden, says that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which allows countries to nominate species as endangered and allots resources to their protection, has stepped up its efforts to recognize the problem of illegally imported orchids. But because of the difficulty of discerning different orchid species, all orchids crossing borders are treated as endangered wildlife.

“A lot of plants look exactly the same when they’re not in bloom,” says Horak. “So if they’re coming through a checkpoint, or carrying it in their luggage, you wouldn’t be able to discern common ones from rare ones.”

And once a plant is rescued, survival is not a given. Marc Hachadourian, who oversees the rescue center at the New York Botanical Garden, says: “Some shipments that arrive in extremely poor condition can have all the plants fail while other shipments have a 100 percent survival rate. We have many plants in our botanical collections that are from CITES rescue that are now over 20 years old.”

Hachadourian’s facility reports an orchid survival rate between 60 and 75 percent. The number they receive each year varies; sometimes their conservatory will receive a shipment of hundreds of beaten flowers, followed by months of silence.

As a rule, rescue centers in northern states always expect dry spells during the wintertime, when shipping endangered plants in low temperatures would likely prove hazardous.

“When they’re dried up and crunchy, you know they’re dead on arrival and past the point of no return,” says Joan Leonard, the greenhouse coordinator at Ohio State University’s rescue center, who hopes that biologists will eventually be able to identify an orchid’s genus by its DNA, instead of waiting for the plant to bloom.

Only when that happens, often months later, will a rescue center know for certain whether a flower will make it.

“It’s similar to what doctors have to deal with,” says Imperiale, a nursery specialist at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. “It’s a case by case basis.”

For Cheryl LeBlanc, an orchid research technician at Ball State University for 19 years, one shipment of flowers was particularly memorable. She could clearly identify their origins were from Asia, and yet they had come in from Costa Rica.

And yet her job wasn’t to figure out how or why they arrived. It was instead to save them, by submerging them in water for energy, and then to nurture them in perpetuity.

“The fun part for me is following the mystery,” LeBlanc says, “grouping an unknown plant into a structure, and giving it a name.”

Dead or alive, these plants become the property of the U.S. government after seizure from border patrol – and remain under its ownership even after treatment. That’s because, even under CITES, plants crossing borders need paperwork.

“When the rescue centers were first created, big shipments were being confiscated,” Horak says. “But now there are fewer and fewer taking place because people are realizing they can’t get away with it. So the truth is, the system is kind of working. It’s suppressing a lot of illegal activity.”

But the hardcore collectors aren’t going anywhere. In one of the New York Botanical Garden’s most dramatic encounters, one smuggler tried to steal the Madagascar Star orchid — “a particularly rare breed,” Gerber explains — right from the botanical garden’s library building.

At the Bronx conservatory’s Orchid Show, billed as the largest in the world to date, one volunteer shrugs at the memory.

“It’s a real problem when people are willing to kill flowers and possibly go to jail for it,” she says.

Email: maw 2192@columbia.edu

“Prolotherapy was a much better alternative than having a nerve cut and hoping it would grow back,” as one doctor suggested, says Michelle Silliman, Rachel’s mother.

Prolotherapy involves administering injections of sugar-water or the patient’s own blood (sometimes mixed with fat or bone marrow) in an attempt to cure anything from back pain to arthritis.

Though medical research has not demonstrated its effectiveness, some doctors and patients tout its curative powers.

“Prolotherapy stimulates the body to repair painful areas,” says Dr. Ross Hauser, who has used prolotherapy at his Oak Park, Ill., practice since 1993.

Dr. Ross Hauser treats a patient's wrist with prolotherapy. (Photo courtesy of Caring Medical staff)

“It’s harnessing the body’s own healing ability,” he says.

Pioneered in the 1940s and 50s, prolotherapy has recently enjoyed a surge in popularity as a way to treat chronic pain and joint dysfunction.  For a long time, says Dr. Christopher Calapai, an osteopath who has treated patients with prolotherapy for 24 years, “it’s been the world’s best-kept secret.”

Marc Darrow is a Los Angeles physician who has treated patients with prolotherapy since 1998.

“When I started, I was one of the lone wolves, and I was literally begging my patients to let me try it on them,” he says.  Now Darrow says he treats 300 patients with prolotherapy every month.

“The main thing that is hampering prolotherapy is that it’s not covered by insurance,” says Hauser.  “People are paying for this out of pocket, and it’s growing.”

Prolotherapy has gained recognition over the past five years, says Calapai, for three reasons: It works, it’s cost-effective and it involves no major risks. And modern variations of the procedure – platelet-rich plasma therapy and autologous stem cell therapy – which include using the patient’s own blood platelets and stem cells, have increased its potential as an alternative to surgery, say physicians who offer the procedures.

In its most basic form, prolotherapy involves a doctor injecting a syringe of dextrose (sugar) solution into a painful area. The solution causes inflammation, which stimulates cells that make up connective tissue to repair the damaged area, Hauser explains.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy involves removing blood from a patient, running it through a centrifuge to concentrate the platelets, then re-injecting the solution into the body.  This helps the body heal naturally, Hauser says, because platelets contain growth factors that are released when they encountering wounds,  which generates healing.

With autologous stem cell therapy, another type of prolotherapy, a doctor injects a problematic area with bone marrow harvested by drilling into the hip, or fat tissue, obtained through a liposuction, mixed with platelet-rich plasma, depending on the kind of injury. Both fat and marrow contain stem cells that help replenish cellular deficiencies that might lead to chronic pain, says Hauser.

“One of the big attractions for patients is that there’s few side-effects because you’re not injecting a drug or medication,” says Dr. David Martin, chairman of the Mayo Clinic’s Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology. “But the downside is that it’s not proven.”

Dr. Samir Mehta,  chief of orthopedic trauma and fracture service at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Although the only FDA approved use of platelet-rich therapy or autologous stem cell therapy is for surgical bone-grafting, Mehta says “off-label” treatments for pain, like prolotherapy, are now common. Most studies that purport to prove the efficacy of these “off-label” uses have been ill-designed, he says, while the best data suggest that prolotherapy has “limited to no effect.”

In a December editorial in American Family Physician, Dr. David Robago, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, reported that while smaller studies have shown prolotherapy’s effectiveness for treating overuse injuries like tennis elbow, the “largest and most methodologically rigorous study,” which tested its effect on low back pain, showed no difference in improvement between prolotherapy and a placebo.

A study conducted by a team of doctors at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, including Robago, concluded in March: “The potential role of PRP in healing musculoskeletal injuries, especially in the high-level athlete, is an exciting frontier that may even lead to newer improved therapies, but a healthy amount of caution should be maintained until clinical evidence is established.”

Still, Mehta, who performs PRP, adds that prolotherapy “can fit into an algorithm of care” to avoid surgery in cases of less-severe, soft-tissue injuries like tennis elbow. When PRP does work, it could be the inflammatory effect, a placebo effect, or the platelet-rich plasma that makes the difference, he says. Or it could be a combination of those factors. “The data is all over the map,” he says.

Prolotherapy is also less expensive in the long run, says Darrow, who offers both the dextrose injections and PRP.

“It’s cheap relative to surgery, which doesn’t work in most cases,” said Darrow. Even though insurance companies don’t cover the procedures, for which he charges between $295 and $800, the treatments are not only more effective in his view, but ultimately, cheaper than surgery.

That was the case for Rachel Silliman, the dancer.

After one visit to Hauser for dextrose injections, Rachel reported 50 percent improvement.  A second treatment mitigated the ankle pain enough for her to dance at the national competition, which she won, although she says she did experience 20 minutes of pain and swelling after doing so. After the third treatment, Rachel says her ankle was “perfect” and now even feels stronger than her untreated ankle.

For Darrow, cases like Rachel’s validate prolotherapy, regardless of what medical research suggests.

Yet without strong clinical research to bolster prolotherapy’s credibility, Mehta describes himself as “just in the middle” about using the treatment, although he says he sees little harm or down sides to the procedure.

“It might be a worthwhile investment to keep you out of the operating room,” he says.

Email: scc2147@columbia.edu

Pet owner Kelley Kim and her cat, Gobi. (Photo courtesy of Kelley Kim)

When Jordan Rinke looks at his 20-month-old American Staffordshire, Pixel, there is no regret in what he has fed his pet.  A vegan on and off for the past few years, Rinke says it was important to find a balance between the way he lives and how he treats his animal. “I felt it was a bit hypocritical to be buying mostly meat-based food for my dog while claiming to a vegan,” says Rinke, a virtualization engineer from San Antonio, Texas.

Talk to some veterinarians, however, and they say feeding some pets a vegan diet, devoid of any animal products, is a recipe for disaster:  Most pets, after all,  are meat eaters. While some owners advocate pet veganism, a number of veterinarians say it is harmful. The debate about whether a diet made solely of vegan or holistic ingredients can be harmful to a pet is a hot one.  Vets do agree with the notion that neutered adult, pregnant or lactating animals should not be limited those types of foods. “We can argue this issue all day long,” says Tony Buffington, a professor of veterinary clinical sciences at Ohio State University. “The bottom line is that if pet owners want their pets to be vegans, they do it at their animal’s own peril.”

The U.S. pet food industry, with $16 billion a year in revenues, has recently started selling vegetarian products in stores, receiving praise from pet owners and backlash from veterinarians who think those pet owners could be playing with fire.

Veterinarian Katy Johnson Nelson says pet owners need to be cautious when considering turning a pet into a vegan. (Photo courtsey of Katy Johnson Nelson)

Companies like Harbingers of a New Age sell home-prepared vegan foods for cat and dogs.  Harbingers spokesman James Peden says there are cases where pets have thrived using a vegan diet and that veterinarians are telling only one side of the story. “Vets take little in the way of nutrition classes to get their degree. The information that is provided in their education is usually provided by pet food companies that have a vested interest in keeping their slaughterhouse products consumed,” he says.

Buffington says converting a pet into a vegetarian or feeding it holistic foods can be an ethical or moral issue, but it is mostly a philosophical argument when it comes to humans. “Veganism is about where the foods come from,” says Buffington, who has been at Ohio State for 25 years and whose son is a vegetarian. “For someone who comes to me thinking about changing their pet’s diet, I would highly discourage it.  Pets can’t speak up and tell you that they don’t want certain things.” That goes especially for cats, he says, which are carnivores and must have meats in their diets. Dogs, on the other hand, can adapt well to a plant-based diet under the right circumstances.

Kelley Kim is not concerned about harming her pet cat, Gobi: She says it was easy for her to do decide what was best for her cat. While shopping at NYC Pet store in Brooklyn for specific pet foods, she looks at the vegan food selection and feels that is the best alternative.  But, she says, “Cat owners must be very wary of feeding their cats 100 percent vegan diets. I buy canned, wet cat food because it has a higher fat content and feed that to her along with the dry vegan food,” says Kim, who has been a vegetarian for three and a half years.

Veterinarian Katy Johnson Nelson in Alexandria, Va., says she tends to be more mainstream when it comes to what pets should be eating: the food needs to be FDA approved, safe and have a good reputation in the animal community.

For example, Nelson thinks it is totally unnatural for a dog to be a vegetarian, but a dog can live without meat as long as it gets certain vitamins, minerals and amino acids. “I would tell my clients to find animals the best diet they can to live the longest life possible,” says Nelson, who owns two pets and has been a veterinarian for 11 years. “The bottom line is people can feed what they want to their animals. If I was an animal I would want to eat meat.”

While some owners like Rinke say they converted their pets to veganism for ethical reasons, Buffington says they should consider the ethics of making unhealthy decisions for an animal. “Can an animal’s nutrient needs be met by feeding them vegan ingredients? No one knows.  Is it cheap? No. Can it be successfully done? It depends on who you talk to,” Buffington says. “Because dogs and cats are captive animals, they have no choice in the matter.”

The pet owners say that while they are careful about not doing harm to their pets and do as much research as they can, what they feed their pet is their decision alone. “In the case of vets they spent years in school, so I think they are more entitled to an opinion than a random person,” Rinke says. “I, however, don’t agree with it.”

Email: tma2125@columbia.edu

Fiery explosions rain down during the Apocalypse in "Left Behind: The Movie." (Movie still courtesy of Cloud Ten Pictures)

Its producer, Cloud Ten Pictures, a Christian film company in Ontario, Canada, called it the most ambitious Christian movie of its time. Between 2000 and 2005, the company poured roughly $12 million into three profitable “Left Behind” movies, which are based on the best-selling novels of the same name.

But this year, Cloud Ten is quadrupling down on “Left Behind.” It plans to spend roughly $15 million to remake just the first of the series, nearly four times the budget of each of the original three. Not many movies get a complete reboot at four times the original cost just a few years after being released.

The move by Cloud Ten reflects an appetite for Christian cinema that has grown significantly in the last five years. “We really just wanted to be reaching a wider audience,” said Andre Van Heerden, the company’s CEO. The first films had a “movie-of-the-week” feel, no big-name stars and focused myopically on religious themes, he added. He believes a sleeker, refocused film could cross over to the mainstream.

Over the last five years, independent Christian movies — films with overt proselytizing — have been among the most profitable independent releases across all genres. Several “faith-based” movies from major studios — films with redemptive messages or Christian characters —  have also reaped larger-than-expected profits, causing the big studios to take greater notice of the market.

Todd Juenger, a senior analyst at New York City-based Bernstein Research, said that after the major studios reduced their production slates to focus more on  big-budget franchise films, the door opened for a variety of smaller budget religious films. “Faith-based films offer the benefit of an identifiable, relatively efficient-to-reach target audience, which provides marketing advantages,” Juenger said.

The boomlet in Christian films dates to 2008. “Fireproof,” the story of several firefighters struggling with marriage and religion, was that year’s highest grossing independent film, taking in $33.5 million on a $6 million budget. That is tiny compared to a major studio blockbuster but it is still a tidy profit.

Things picked up with last September’s “Courageous,” a redemption story with inspiration from the Bible about policemen reconnecting with their families. The film brought in $35 million on an $11 million budget. Then in March, “October Baby” — a heavily pro-life film, which opened on only 390 screens — placed in the top-10 its first weekend, beating out mainstream fare that played in 10 times as many theaters.

“October Baby,” “Courageous”  and  “Fireproof” featured no stars. In fact, “Courageous” and “Fireproof” relied largely on volunteers from the church affiliated with the films’ producer, Sherwood Production Co.

“Religious audiences have felt marginalized by cultural changes,” said Craig Detweiler, director of the Center of Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University. “Rallying around a particular film is a way to vote with their feet and say, give us more.”

The surge has not been missed by major Hollywood studios who have seen mainstream audiences increasingly gravitate to “faith-based” movies. “The Blind Side,” a film about a Christian family taking in an impoverished and talented high school football player, was a surprise hit in 2009. It grossed over $300 million, was nominated for the best picture Oscar and won for best actress (Sandra Bullock).

All six major movie studios have recently started divisions dedicated to acquiring and producing overtly Christian movies, as well as more mainstream “faith-based” films. Affirm Films, a division of Sony Pictures, was originally founded in 2007 to acquire Christian movies for distribution on DVD. But the success of “Fireproof” and “Courageous,” which Affirm acquired, led Sony to expand the division into production.

In "Left Behind: The Movie," the United Nations secretary-general rises up as the Antichrist after the Rapture. (Movie still courtesy of Cloud Ten Pictures)

“There was some trust and desirability to stretch a little bit and see what else we could do,”  said Rich Peluso, Affirm vice president.

Last year, Affirm developed “Soul Surfer,” based on the true story of a teen who returns to competitive surfing after losing an arm in a shark attack. The film starred Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt and teen AnnaSophia Robb, who starred in the popular children’s films “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Bridge to Terabithia.” It was released on 2,000 screens — more than double the exposure that most independent films get  — and grossed nearly $44.5 million on a $37 million budget.

“If we can just get these movies in the theaters and put them in front of people, they will respond because they’re hearing about it and they want it,” Peluso said. “They just can never find it.”

Which is why Van Heerden of Cloud Ten is targeting 2,500 screens and is aiming to land a name director and star actors for the new “Left Behind” film, slated for 2013. The 16-book series — hugely popular in the Christian community but largely unknown outside it — follows people battling with their faith during the Apocalypse. First, Christians and children ascend during the Rapture, then an Antichrist rises in the form of a United Nations dictator. Van Heerden sees the remake less as a Christian parable and more like a mainstream end-of-the world flick like “Armageddon.”

But Ted Baehr has seen it all before. He might even be the most well-versed authority on the history of Christian cinema. In 1986, he founded the Christian Film and Television Commission, which encourages media outlets to produce wholesome content, and Movieguide, a publication and now website that reviews movies based on their Christian-friendly content.

“These things always go in waves,” he said. “They’re going to get tired of it eventually.”

Email: cb2868@columbia.edu

Do we need to touch base on the meaning of sports metaphors in business? (Photo by Kimberly Drelich/CNS)

Hit it out of the ballpark.  Run interference on it.  Swing for the fences.  That was a Hail Mary pass.  We’re in the bottom of the ninth.

This isn’t just the language of sports enthusiasts in conversation. Increasingly, it’s the lingo of the business world, searching for the proper metaphor to describe goals and operations.  But as these terms become commonplace in the workplace, they’ve divided it into those who get the point and those who don’t.

And for those who don’t measure their lives by batting averages and driving to the hoop, the explosion of sports metaphors has become an annoyance.

Although Stephanie Yeung has played competitive sports since she was 5 years old, she does not take her sports metaphors to the office.  The 27-year-old MBA student at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business accepts their use and says the terms can sometimes be helpful; while living in Hawaii, she heard a paddling metaphor to describe leadership within a team, which made sense.

But as an athlete, Yeung understands when sports metaphors get used incorrectly.  She hears the term “chip shot” to refer to someone trying to speak more for the sake of speaking, rather than to communicate a specific point.  But she finds that using this term — which originates from the tiny swing that gets you into the green — ineffective in that context, because she knows, as a golf player, that “chipping is actually pretty difficult.”

Still, sports metaphors have lately become embedded within everyday corporate language — perhaps because they fit the culture of teamwork, competition and goals.  But more people are questioning their use.  As workplaces become more global and diverse, and the explosion of social media accelerates trends towards open communication, the time-tested sports metaphor in business may not play to every crowd.

“What becomes interesting about them is that they’re not as broadly available as we like to think they are — which is often true of the metaphors we use,” said Spencer Harrison, assistant professor at the Boston College Carroll School of Management, “and they privilege some people more than others.”

But Harrison believes companies are becoming more aware of this potential pitfall.  He said it would be rare today for a CEO to announce to the company that “we’re going to score this touchdown,” to express a business’s mission, because it could exclude part of the workforce.

And while metaphors can be divisive when it is assumed that everyone understands them, organizations can also avoid this problem by having an open culture where people are free to question meaning. For example, a visitor to England asking someone in business what the rugby term “scrum” means can lead to a dialogue  on the interconnection of people and actually strengthen the metaphor’s meaning.

Sports terms are frequently used in business. (Photo by Kimberly Drelich/CNS)

Some individuals are becoming more aware that sports metaphors can exclude people from conversations, and are rethinking their usage.  Bryce Robbins, a student at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, acknowledges that he probably unintentionally uses sports terms, such as “hitting it out of the park” or “swinging for the fences,” too frequently.  Since attending business school — where the 30-year-old has met people from diverse backgrounds — he’s become more aware of speaking to his audience and avoiding metaphors that are not universally understood.  For example, saying “we’re in the bottom of the ninth” might express urgency to a certain American audience, he says, but that “meaning will be lost on people who understand cricket rather than American baseball.”

“Sports tends to be a gray, fuzzy area,” he added, “and I think I’ve definitely tried to shy away from those types of metaphors.  Or at least, if I say one, follow up with a brief explanation of what I am trying to convey and make sure the actual message comes across.”

Elizabeth Powell, an assistant professor of business administration at Darden, said that sports metaphors can be a convenient way to speak about competition in business — but that as businesses become more diversified, there are some voices saying “these sports metaphors just don’t work for me.”  Powell added that as more women have entered the workplace, language may have become more “gender inclusive.”  She is just as likely to hear businesses spoken of as families or communities than as teams, such as the phrase “we treat our employees as family.”  But regardless of the metaphor, she feels it’s important to define what the terms mean, especially in terms of power.

In addition, as business culture becomes more open and accessible — with a push toward transparency accelerated by trends, such as Facebook — sports metaphors may also seem more trite.  Harrison, the Boston College professor, said in corporate culture at large, savvy companies push towards transparency and authenticity, with fewer organizations using metaphors that may be somewhat “naively exclusionary, or maybe insidiously exclusionary.”

Email: kad2162@columbia.edu