Features

NEW YORK –– More test-tube babies were born in the United States in 2012 than ever before, and they constituted a higher percentage of total births than at any time since the technology was introduced in the 1980s, according to a report released on Monday.

The annual report was from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), an organisation of medical professionals.

SART’s 379 member clinics, which represent more than 90 per cent of the infertility clinics in the country, reported that in 2012 they performed 165,172 procedures involving in vitro fertilisation (IVF), in which an egg from the mother-to-be or a donor is fertilised in a lab dish. They resulted in the birth of 61,740 babies.

That was about 2,000 more IVF babies than in 2011. With about 3.9 million babies born in the United States in 2012, the IVF newborns accounted for just over 1.5 per cent of the total, more than ever before.

The growing percentage reflects, in part, the increasing average age at which women give birth for the first time, since fertility problems become more common as people age. The average age of first-time mothers is now about 26 years; it was 21.4 years in 1970.

Although the rising number of test-tube babies suggests that the technology has become mainstream, critics of IVF point out that the numbers, particularly the success rates, mask wide disparities.

“It’s important for people to understand that women over 35 have the highest percentage of failures,” said Miriam Zoll, author of the 2013 book “Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High Tech Babies”.

Earlier data from SART showed that the percentage of attempts that result in live births is 10 times higher in women under 35 than in women over 42. And in the older women fewer than half the IVF pregnancies result in a live birth.

Zoll added, “these treatments have consistently failed two-thirds of the time since 1978,” when the first test tube baby was born in England.

After years in which IVF physicians were criticised for transferring multiple embryos to increase the odds of pregnancy — because that sometimes resulted in the birth of triplets and even higher multiples, often with dangerously low birth weights and other health risks — infertility clinics transferred fewer embryos per cycle in 2012 than 2011. As a result, the number of twin and triplet births were both down.

LONDON — The artworks at a new gallery in London’s Shoreditch are not for sale, and their creator plans to destroy them when the show is over. Phlegm, known only by his pseudonym, did not attend the opening and does not give interviews.

Gallery owner Richard Howard-Griffin plans to pay the rent from sales at other shows. For now, he is providing the first ever gallery space to an artist who has already won recognition in the underground art world and many thousands of followers.

“Phlegm is immensely respected around the world,” after more than a decade of painting enormous urban murals across Europe and in the United States, Howard-Griffin said.

A new, mass audience has emerged for street art as the Internet and smart phone cameras enable people to capture images and share them across the world.

Howard-Griffin calls it the “democratisation of art” and said he wants the gallery to act as a conduit for this new wave of artists, rather than an arbiter.

“In the past, museums were how Joe Public got to see artwork,” and the artist depended on an elite audience of gallery owners and museum curators to win recognition, Howard-Griffin said.

“Street art plays to a huge audience, but it doesn’t have an elite audience.”

Phlegm — who Howard-Griffin says “doesn’t care about money” — makes a modest living by selling a limited number of his prints and books directly to fans. He took six weeks to build his show, called The Bestiary.

The artist and

the old dog

This is only the second show for the Howard Griffin Gallery. Its first last September did make money, around 70,000 pounds ($115,000), for the gallery and the artist — Londoner John Dolan, who was then homeless.

For three years, Dolan had sat at the same spot on the inner city borough’s High Street, drawing cityscapes of gritty London and portraits of George, the Staffordshire bull terrier at his side.

Meanwhile, Howard-Griffin, 31, had quit his job in a corporate law firm to try to make a living from his interest in street art — leading guided tours, curating small group shows and organising festivals and mural projects.

He saw Dolan drawing day after day, liked his work and proposed doing a show. The owners of an unused storefront across the street offered the space.

It took 11 months to organise. Howard-Griffin recruited well-known street artists to add fantasy touches to Dolan’s citscapes. The roughly 100 pieces in “George the Dog and John the Artist” all sold.

It was originally meant to be a one-off. “(But) the John show did so well that it gave me the resources and impetus to fund this gallery,” Howard-Griffin said.

Dolan, who said he has signed a book deal on his life story, describes himself as the gallery’s resident artist. He can often be seen there drawing, while George sits in the window and helps attract visitors.

“The gallery launched me, and I launched the gallery,” Dolan said.

For his next show, Howard-Griffin plans to feature Thierry Noir, a 55-year-old French artist who lived in a squat in Berlin and painted miles of the Wall from 1984 until it fell in 1989, dodging arrest by the East German police.

His exploits took place long before the rise of an Internet audience, and the forthcoming show will be his first solo exhibition, Howard-Griffin said. “He has nowhere near the level of recognition in the art world that he deserves.”

TALLINN –– Irked by high bank fees on international money transfers, two Estonian IT whizzes who helped engineer Skype and Paypal have hatched TransferWise, a global Internet platform coordinating currency swaps between individuals.

“Hey, hidden fees. Your secret’s out,” taunts the site founded by Taavet Hinrikus, 32, and partner Kristo Kaarmann, 33.

TransferWise has been giving banks a run for their money since its 2011 launch, even attracting applause from tycoon Richard Branson, who sings its praises as a low cost business tool for start-ups.

“They are dramatically lowering the cost of transferring money overseas, by effectively matching people and companies in different countries who want the opposite currency,” the Virgin billionaire said in a recent blog post.

The marriage of IT ingenuity and financial savvy also garnered a prestigious 2013 World Summit Award, a United Nations-backed prize for outstanding web-based business innovations.

TransferWise offers international money transfers for a fee of just one British pound (1.2 euros, $1.6) for all transfers under £200 and 0.5 per cent for everything above — a tenth of what banks typically charge.

At that price, business is booming with the company processing around £1 million per day.

While European rules specify that euro to euro transfers must be free of charge, banks fees on international money transfers between currencies range between 3 and 6 per cent with exchange rates that routinely favour banks.

The new platform boasts customers from across Europe and is most popular in Britain, France and Spain, mostly among working or retired expats plus small- and medium-sized businesses looking to cut operating costs.

It’s also eyeing expansion in Asia, Africa and the US, offering services for the Indian rupee, South African rand as well as US, Australian, Hong Kong and Singapore dollars.

Co-founder Hinrikus was Skype’s director of strategy until 2008, where he joined as the first employee. Kaarmann worked as a consultant for banks with Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers before setting up TransferWise.

Cashing-in on algorithms

The idea took shape when Hinrikus found himself living in London and spending in pounds, but earning euros at his job with Skype at its headquarters in his native Estonia.

Kaarmann, meanwhile was earning pounds in London, but paying a mortgage for his home in the Estonian capital Tallinn in euros.

“We found that we had the opposite currency requirements, so we started to exchange it among ourselves at the actual mid-market rate — that’s the exchange rate you see in the papers, not the inflated rate you’ll be offered by your bank,” Hinrikus told AFP.

“Soon we realised we had saved a fortune by not moving the money across borders and that perhaps it could be a big business idea. A few years later TransferWise was born,” he added.

A few algorithms later, they had come up with the programming to connect people with complementary currency needs.

Hinrikus explains that a customer in Britain who wants to send money home to Estonia can put their pounds on a TransferWise account.

The company then spots a customer in Estonia who wants to send an equivalent amount of money to the UK.

Rather than actually sending the money across borders, TransferWise then simply pays it out to the desired recipient in each country, for the minimal fee.

Teaching Arabs, Writing Self: Memoirs of an Arab-American Woman
Evelyn Shakir
Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2014, 170 pp

In her memoir, Evelyn Shakir keeps readers on their toes and turning pages as much with her lively prose as with her insightful observations about herself, her family, new people and places, culture and life itself. Having previously published short stories and non-fiction about Arab-American women, she finally focuses on her own experience in what was to be her last book before her death in 2010.

Shakir’s descriptions of growing up in the Boston area are priceless, at once feisty and respectful of her Lebanese immigrant family. In some ways, their life was very American. Her uncle, for example, operated an amusement park on the Atlantic shore, where they spent summer holidays. Still, this was the America of the 1950s where a somewhat drab uniformity reigned, and she was always being reminded of falling short of the norm in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Her parents smoked and drank, and her mother ran a business — all things which her fifth grade teacher said “the better class of people didn’t do.” (p. 8) For many years, Shakir just longed to fit in, but as she matured, attaining a top-notch education at Wellesley, Boston University and Harvard, and subsequently teaching writing at Bentley University, the US evolved too. Multiculturalism was gradually being recognised, and Shakir began to play a significant role in recording the Arab-American experience.

Once Shakir’s interest in her roots was awakened, she pursued it with vigour, which eventually led her to teach English literature in Lebanon, Bahrain and Damascus, often as a Fulbright Scholar. It is her experience there, and her interactive approach to teaching, that gives the book its title. As she was teaching Arab students English, she also hoped to find her own Arab identity, but as she discovered in Bahrain: “Although my students and I got along fine, it didn’t follow that they saw me as one of their people.” (p. 68) Their responses to the literature she selected for discussion was almost always surprising, and she was constantly reworking their opinions in her mind to learn more about them and herself. “It seems to me now, as I look back… that the roles of student and teacher kept turning inside out and back again, like the cupped hands of an Arab woman dancing.” (p. 72) “I’d been expecting a mirror and found a window… looking at my students, I wasn’t merely staring at my own face. Though, yes, I could still detect a family resemblance.” (p. 87).

Shakir’s account of her teaching experience is greatly enriched by her descriptions of everyday life and encounters with people outside academia in the three places where she taught abroad. For a variety of reasons, Damascus was the place where she was most able to fit into normal everyday life: “I hadn’t guessed that Syria would be so seductive or that it would challenge the hold that Lebanon had on my affections… I bantered with shopkeepers in my broken Arabic, cooked stews, brewed Turkish coffee, washed soot off the floors of my apartment, learned where to dispose of my kitchen garbage, coped with power failures and, once, a flooded bathroom.” (p. 141) Any foreigner who has lived in Damascus will immediately connect with her experiences. Shakir was there during the partial opening allowed by Bashar Assad in his first years of power, but her parting words on Syria, after returning to the US, are tragically predictive of today’s war.

Alternating anecdote with snatches of information about Bahrain, Lebanon and Syria, Shakir makes an understanding of life in these countries more accessible to outsiders, while playfully grinding many a stereotype into dust. Successive passages of “Teaching Arabs, Writing Self” attest to the fact that she was a woman who loved new beginnings, and consciously sought new adventures not only for the thrill involved, but for what she could find to expand her own horizons and those of others. The enthusiasm with which she embraced new situations is matched only by the bravery with which she received the news that her cancer had reoccurred after thirty years of remission. Brimming with humour, humanity, and thinking outside the box, Shakir’s book offers many new insights on Arab-Americans, the younger generation in Beirut, Damascus and Manama, cross-cultural exchange and, not least, the art of teaching.

WASHINGTON –– Looking to meet women, 20-year-old US college student Leland turned to mobile phone app Tinder, after a friend told him about his own successful exploits.

Leland’s results were mixed: He was matched with around 400 women over more than a year but only ended up meeting two, and one of them felt “awkward”.

“I get to experiment with ice breakers and pickup lines, so that aspect of it is pretty entertaining,” said Leland, a sophomore at a midwestern college. He asked that his full name not be used.

For now, Leland said he plans to stop using the app and go back to the old-fashioned way of meeting women, because “I don’t want to be known as that Tinder guy.”

Nonetheless, the use of mobile apps for meeting and dating is multiplying as people rely more on their smartphones as a daily hub. The apps can help people discover new friends in real time, based on the location pinpointed in their devices.

With apps like Tinder, prospective daters can see pictures of people who are nearby. If they see someone they like, they can swipe right to indicate interest. People who both swipe right on each other’s profiles can then contact each other.

Around 3 per cent of Americans have used mobile dating apps, while 9 per cent have tried traditional online dating websites, according to the Pew Research Centre.

Pew researcher Aaron Smith said dating app users “tend to be quite young, primarily people in their mid-20s or 30s” and very tied to their smartphones.

‘Digital Crush’

Julie Spira, author of a cyber-dating book and blog, said young people are most comfortable with mobile dating apps, which can speed up courtship and deliver “push notifications” of a so-called “digital crush”.

“People spend a lot of time checking e-mails or Facebook; it’s the first thing they look at when they wake up, so it makes a lot of sense to find love or friends or dates through the apps,” Spira told AFP.

SinglesAroundMe, among the first location-based dating apps, claims two million members in 100 countries around the world.

“One of the things women told me is they want to know where the single guys are,” said Christopher Klotz, founder and chief executive of the Canadian-based firm.

When SinglesAroundMe launched in 2010 “it seemed spooky to people” to use geolocation, but attitudes have evolved, Klotz said.

To ease security concerns, SinglesAroundMe developed technology which can mask or shift the location of users.

Another mobile app called Skout, which launched in 2007, calls itself the “largest global, mobile network for meeting new people” with 8 million members around the world, and says it facilitated over 350 million connections in 2013 alone.

Spokeswoman Jordan Barnes said Skout “is not just a dating app” because it helps facilitate professional relations and friendships as well as romantic encounters.

Barnes said Skout began as a website and shifted to mobile as smartphone use increased, and allowed people to connect based on location.

The app also has a “virtual travel” feature which enables users to find friends in a city they plan to visit.

“I think the digital age has changed people’s attitudes, it has taken the stigma away from meeting people online,” she told AFP.

Matching through Facebook

Hinge, a mobile app created by a startup in Washington, does not use geo-location but pulls information from users’ Facebook profiles to recommend matches.

“We think most people don’t necessarily want to meet someone where they just happen to be,” said Arjumand Bonhomme, head of engineering for Hinge.

By drawing from a user’s Facebook friends, likes, favorites and places, Hinge aims to introduce people who already share connections, often friends in common.

“Everyone we show is connected to you in some way. It is often someone you could have met at a house party or cocktail party,” Bonhomme told AFP.

To get around the problem of developing critical mass –– since people want to use the apps with the largest pools of users –– Hinge began by focusing on Washington, before launching in New York, Boston and San Francisco, with more cities to come.

NEW YORK — With 1.23 billion users in all the flavours and up-and-down stages of romantic relationships, Facebook knows a thing or two about love.

For example, two people who are about to enter a relationship interact more and more on Facebook in the weeks leading up to making their coupled status official — up until 12 days before the start of the relationship, when they share an average of 1.67 posts per day.

Then, their Facebook interactions start to decline — presumably because they are spending more time together offline. But while they interact less, couples are more likely to express positive emotions toward their each other once they are in a relationship, researchers on Facebook’s data science team found.

Touching on everything from religion to age differences, Facebook has been disclosing such light-hearted findings in a series of blog posts this week, with one coming up later Friday and another, on breakups, Saturday. Friday, of course, is Valentine’s Day.

Facebook data scientist Mike Develin, whose background is in mathematics, notes that the relationship stuff is sort a side project for his team, the findings geared more toward academic papers than Facebook’s day-to-day business. His “day job” is Facebook’s search function — how people use it, what they are searching for that isn’t available and how to make it more useful.

But the patterns Facebook’s researchers can detect help illustrate just how useful the site’s vast trove of data can be in mapping human interactions and proving or disproving assumptions about relationships. Can horoscopes predict lasting love? Forget about it.

“We have such a wide-ranging set of data, including on places there may not be data on otherwise,” Develin said, adding that because Facebook knows a lot about people’s authentic identity, there are “almost no boundaries” to the kinds of questions the researchers can explore — about the structure of society, culture and how people interact.

Someday, researchers studying Facebook data may be able to predict whether a couple will break up, learn whether people are happy together or see what makes relationships last. Of course, the data has its limits — not everyone is on Facebook and not every Facebook user shares everything on the site.

Still, people share quite a bit. When looking at breakups through the lens of changed relationship statuses (see: “Joe Doe is single”), the researchers found couples who split up and got back together — and dutifully documented it on Facebook — 10 or 15 times a year. The maximum, Develin, recalls, was a couple who went in and out of a relationship 27 times in one year. While one may assume that a couple wouldn’t want to broadcast so much relationship drama to the world, people actually “very faithfully update Facebook at each twist and turn”, he says.

Facebook’s researchers use aggregated, anonymised data from hundreds of millions of users on the site. This means that while they see information such as age, location, gender, a person’s relationship status, for example, such data is not tied back to a specific person.

It was in a study of 18 million anonymised Facebook posts exchanged by 462,000 Facebook couples that researchers delved into how “sweet” couples are to one another on the social networking site.

“For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions (like ‘love’, ‘nice,’ ‘happy”, etc.) minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones (like ‘hate’, ‘hurt’, ‘bad’, etc.),” writes Facebook data scientist Carlos Diuk in Friday’s blog post. The data is plotted on a graph, which shows a visible, general increase in the proportion of warm fuzzy feelings right at the start of a relationship.

Hands & Hearts
Weavings from Jordan
Khalil Naouri
Editor: Katharine Scarfe Beckett
Design by Beyond, Amman, Jordan
Printed by National Press
Pp. 240

“Jordanian weaving is the work of artists. It is something to be fully experienced. You must see it, touch it, feel it and live with it. These pieces are so beautiful it is sometimes hard to imagine they were made for hard use.”

It is the avowed belief of the author of this precious book of aesthetic and documentary value that introduces the reader, novice and connoisseur alike, to Jordanian weaving and, by extension, a way of life.

Wishing to document this dying art form, Naouri, “passionate about traditional weavings that were made from forty to a hundred and fifty years ago”, has travelled the country’s length and breadth for well over a decade — initially trading in Jordanian weavings, later building a collection “to help share our heritage more widely” — to form a representative collection for this book and, later, a museum.

“I hope this will help us as Jordanians to begin to truly share and celebrate our rich history of weaving, and then to share Jordanian weaving with the world around us so it receives the attention it merits.”

Richly illustrated with different items woven for practical purpose of adornment, the book contains 150 photographs, mostly of the pieces that are part of a much larger collection of this passionate dealer turned scholar.

The colours and patterns of the rugs, pillow covers or decorative bands are amazingly similar, and akin to those of the region and the larger Mediterranean basin, proof that art and skill travel, and are adopted by mankind eager to learn and embellish its life.

“Rugs were traded and given between tribes, families, and individuals throughout Jordan, taking their designs with them to a new place where they might be imitated or adapted.

“Therefore, although we can recognise certain characteristics that belong to one town or region, there is no single, precise ‘code’ for the patterns in traditional weaving. Instead, each piece must be understood as itself, with its own maker, history and context,” says the author.

Made of sheep wool, goat hair and camel pile, the weavings are painstakingly created on, mostly, ground looms. Reds and oranges predominate, but there is also the whole range of browns, creamy white, dark blue and occasionally green.

While in the past the hues would have been made using natural dyes or simply the colour of the animal fibre, more recently weavers would resort to synthetic dyes.

“The process is harsh and unrelenting, like Jordan’s most extreme natural environments. However, when you experience a finished piece of Jordanian weaving, you do not feel the suffering, only the soul of its creator and the utility of the piece. There is no artifice here, just creativity and survival,” says Naouri who leaves no doubt about his passion for the outcome of this labour of love.

The items shown in this book are named in Arabic (with the English equivalent given), another attempt by the author to preserve tradition.

The reader will admire and come to learn the names of small bags for dried foodstuff (aliga) or bigger storage bags (idl), at times adorned with beads, buttons or shells; of village/town rugs (fijjeh) or of rugs used in bedouin tents (mafrash); of sleeping bags presented to newlyweds (ghafra) or of coverings for camel hindquarters (gafaya); but also terms used for certain patterns (Hosn design; nagesh, to create triangular blocks of colour; or ragm, a complex warp patterning in bands), and have a glimpse at a way of life by seeing the “saha” — “an often elaborately patterned dividing curtain for use inside the tent”, separating men from women — the “rasan” (camel headstall) or the “sfeefy” (long, colourful decorative bands for tents, camels and horses).

The book has another surprise: pages from a book published in 1958 from a manuscript by Maj. Gen. Frederick Gerard Peake, creator of the Arab Legion, who, in 1920, as lieutenant-colonel in the British army was sent to police parts of the territory then called Transjordan; and of maps showing the approximate geographical location of various tribes of Jordan.

The page from the preface of Peake’s book figured in Naouri’s book gives an idea of how Peake Pasha “came to know Transjordan well at about the same time that many of the weavings in this book were probably being created” and “explains a little how the three maps he made between the 1920s and 1930s came later to publication”.

“Jordan is a complex land of oral history, unique interpretations, and constant flux. Given these realities, it is important to realise that this is a book of art, not history,” says Naouri who, while going about documenting the items in his collection, recognised that although there are no definite characteristics setting tribes apart in the art of weaving, it is in fact possible to identify different types, origins and traditions within Jordan.

“A star shape on a rug might equally well represent a constellation or a spring flower. It might simply be a pattern used traditionally by the tribe who made it, or it might be newly created by its weaver,” he however acknowledges, perhaps by way of underlining, that the process is painstaking and only fairly accurate.

Wherever they originated, the items in Naouri’s book and the thousands in his collection were lovingly acquired, carefully preserved and are displayed in the hope that this dying skill may be revived and that Jordan’s traditional heritage is not forgotten.

For, as he says, “Jordanian weaving achieves the remarkable feat of being both essential for the traditional ways of life and also breathtakingly gorgeous.”

The book is available at Shiraz Store, Jordan Intercontinental Hotel, Books@café, Jacaranda Images, Jordan River Foundation, Readers@Cozmo, Wild Jordan and Alia Airport bookshops.

CHICAGO — Mothers may say they don’t care whether they have a son or a daughter, but their breast milk says otherwise.

“Mothers are producing different biological recipes for sons and daughters,” said Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

Studies in humans, monkeys and other mammals have found a variety of differences in both the content and the quantity of milk produced.

One common theme: Baby boys often get milk that is richer in fat or protein — and thus energy — while baby girls often get more milk.

There are a lot of theories as to why this happens, Hinde said Friday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

Rhesus monkeys, for instance, tend to produce more calcium in the milk they feed to daughters who inherit social status from their mothers.

“It could be adaptive in that it allows mothers to give more milk to daughters which is going to accelerate their development and allow them to begin reproducing at early ages,” Hinde said.

Males don’t need to reach sexual maturity as quickly as females because the only limit on how often they reproduce is how many females they can win over.

The females also nurse for longer than male monkeys, who spend more time playing off on their own and thus need more energetically dense milk.

It is not yet clear why human mothers produce such different milk for their babies, Hinde said.

There is evidence, however, that the stage is set while the baby is still in utero.

Hinde published a study last week that showed that the sex of the foetus influences the milk production of cows long after they are separated from their calves (typically within hours of the birth).

The study of 1.49 million cows found that, over the course of two 305 day lactation periods, they produced an average of 445 kilos more milk when they had female calves than when they had bulls.

They also found no difference in the protein or fat content of the milk produced for heifers than for bulls.

Much remains to be understood about how breast milk impacts infant development in humans, Hinde said.

Knowing more could help improve the baby milk formulas sold to mothers who are unable or unwilling to nurse their infants, she said.

“While the food aspects of milk to some extent are replicated in formula, the immuno factors and medicine of milk are not and the hormonal signals are not,” she said.

Getting a better understanding of how milk is personalised for specific infants will also help hospitals find better matches for breast milk donated to help nourish sick and premature infants in neonatal units, she added.

DETROIT — The race to increase vehicle fuel economy is taking a toll on quality.

Owners of three-year-old vehicles are reporting more problems than they did a year ago, according to J.D. Power and Associates’ annual survey of vehicle dependability. It’s the first time since 1998 that the average number of problems per vehicle has increased.

J.D. Power, a California-based ratings and consulting company, said engine issues accounted for most of the increase in problems reported by the original owners of cars and trucks from the 2011 model year. Owners reported an average of 133 problems per 100 vehicles, up from 126 problems a year ago. Only problems within the prior 12 months are counted.

Automakers are rapidly implementing new engine technology to save fuel, including direct fuel injection and turbo charging, stop-start systems that automatically shut cars down at traffic lights and transmissions with higher gears. But those more complex systems can cause problems. David Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of global automotive, said the company saw an increase in complaints about engine hesitation, rough transmission shifts and lack of power.

“While striving to reduce fuel consumption, automakers must be careful not to compromise quality,” Sargent said in a statement.

The scores could improve in coming years because since 2011, automakers have worked to make new transmissions shift more smoothly, they’ve refined clunky stop-start systems and improved other fuel-saving technologies.

Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac had the vehicles with the fewest reported problems. Lexus had just 68 problems per 100 vehicles, the only brand with fewer than 100 problems.

General Motors Co. had the most winners in each segment, with eight, including the highest-ranked compact car, the Chevrolet Volt, and the highest-ranked pickup, the GMC Sierra. Toyota Motor Co. was second with seven segment winners, including the Toyota Camry minivan and Lexus ES luxury compact car.

Mini, Dodge and Land Rover had the most reported problems. Mini, the worst performer, had 185 problems per 100 vehicles.

The survey questioned 41,000 owners of 2011 model year vehicles between October and December of last year.

TORONTO –– A Canadian study that many experts say has major flaws has revived debate about the value of mammograms. The research suggests that these screening X-rays do not lower the risk of dying of breast cancer while finding many tumours that do not need treatment.

The study gives longer follow-up on nearly 90,000 women who had annual breast exams by a nurse to check for lumps plus a mammogram, or the nurse’s breast exam alone. After more than two decades, breast cancer death rates were similar in the two groups, suggesting little benefit from mammograms.

It’s important to note that this study did not compare mammograms to no screening at all, as most other research on this topic has. Many groups have not endorsed breast exams for screening because of limited evidence that they save lives.

Critics of the Canadian study also say it used outdated equipment and poor methods that made mammograms look unfairly ineffective.

The study was published Wednesday in the British journal BMJ.

Breast cancer is the leading type of cancer and cause of cancer deaths in women worldwide. Nearly 1.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year. Many studies have found that mammography saves lives, but how many and for what age groups is debatable. It also causes many false alarms and over treatment of cancers never destined to become life-threatening.

In the US, a government-appointed task force that gives screening advice does not back mammograms until age 50, and then only every other year. The American Cancer Society recommends them every year starting at age 40.

Other countries screen less aggressively. In Britain, for example, mammograms are usually offered only every three years.

The Canadian study has long been the most pessimistic on the value of mammograms. It initially reported that after five years of screening, 666 cancers were found among women given mammograms plus breast exams versus 524 cancers among those given the exams alone.

After 25 years of follow-up, about 500 in each group died, suggesting mammograms were not saving lives. The similarity in the death rates suggests that the 142 “extra” cancers caught by mammograms represent over-diagnosis — tumours not destined to prove fatal, study leaders concluded.

The work was immediately criticised. The American College of Radiology and Society of Breast Imaging called it “an incredibly misleading analysis based on the deeply flawed and widely discredited” study. Mammograms typically find far more cancers than this study did, suggesting the quality was poor, the groups contend.

In a letter posted by the medical journal, Dr Daniel Kopans, a radiologist at Harvard Medical School, described outdated machines and methods he saw in 1990, when he was one of the experts asked to review the quality of mammograms used in the study.

“I can personally attest to the fact that the quality was poor,” he wrote. “To save money they used secondhand mammography machines” that gave poor images, failed to properly position breasts for imaging, and did not train radiologists on how to interpret the scans, he wrote.