'Conspiracy theories finally laid to rest' by report on leaked climate change emails

July 30th,2010    by Eric

Scientists involved in last year's "climategate" leaked emails controversy, which added to scepticism about the science of global warming, were not open enough with their data and unhelpful with requests for information, an independent review of the affair found yesterday.

They and their institution, the University of East Anglia (UEA), did not embrace the "spirit of openness" enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act, according to a long-awaited report into their conduct carried out by a panel of senior academics.

However, the review found that the researchers concerned, led by the Director of UEA's world-renowned Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Professor Phil Jones, could not be faulted for their "rigour and honesty as scientists", and there was no evidence that they had behaved in a way that might undermine the conclusions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Carried out by a team led by Sir Muir Russell, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, the review – the third official British inquiry into the affair this year – effectively clears those involved of dishonesty and corruption; it absolves them of the allegation made by climate sceptics that they had manipulated both climate data and the scientific peer-review process, to serve their predetermined views that climate change is man-made.

Sir Muir said the allegation that the CRU had "something to hide" and its research into changes in global temperature could not be trusted because the scientists were concealing or manipulating data "does not stand up".

In these conclusions the Russell review is broadly similar to the two previous enquiries, one by the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology in March and the other from a panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, former rector of Imperial College London, which reported in April. Both had given votes of confidence in the credibility and integrity of the studies into climate change which the CRU has carried out.

Yesterday Professor Jones, who had been heavily criticised in the controversy and had stood aside from his post while the review was conducted, was reinstated in the CRU in the new position of Director of Research, which UEA stressed was not a demotion, but merely allowed him to concentrate on research while reducing his administrative responsibilities. The UEA Vice-Chancellor, Professor Edward Acton, said Professor Jones had undergone "a terrible ordeal" and felt he had been "wronged and publicly traduced". Professor Jones himself said that he was "extremely relieved" that the review had been completed.

"We have maintained all along that our science is honest and sound and this has been vindicated now by three different independent external bodies," he said. "There are lessons to be learned from this affair and I need time to reflect on them before speaking in public."

Professor Acton said he hoped the report would "finally lay to rest the conspiracy theories, untruths and misunderstandings that have circulated." The Russell review had "exposed as unfounded the overwhelming thrust of the allegations against our science," he said.

Nevertheless, the review's condemnation of the lack of openness at UEA, which was extended to the university's senior management, amounted to "significant criticisms", Sir Muir said, and its practices needed to change, not least in the light of the new ways in which scientific discourse was being conducted, especially in "the blogosphere".

The so-called Climategate affair began last November when more than 1,000 emails and other documents sent and received by CRU staff over more than a decade were hacked from a UEA server and suddenly placed on the internet, where they were widely circulated and publicised by climate- sceptic bloggers.

No-one has ever discovered who did the hacking and a police enquiry into it is continuing, but it is widely believed that it was carried out to serve the climate sceptic cause and specifically to undermine the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, which ultimately proved a failure, with nations unable to agree on carbon emission targets.

The publication of the emails and the storm which followed gave the biggest boost yet to the position of these denying that climate change is man-made – at a vital moment. Most concerned Professor Jones and a small number of other leading climate researchers in Britain and the US who, the sceptics claimed, were shown in them as trying to manipulate some data, suppress other data, have their own views included in the IPCC reports at the expense of differing opinions and refuse access to data to climate sceptics.

The crucial significance of Professor Jones and his unit is that the CRU is one of a handful of bodies which has established – and maintains – the global temperature record back to 1850, using data from instrumental measurements and before that by using "proxies" such as the annual growth of tree rings, whose width and density can give an indication of the average temperature of a year. Reconstructions of previous climates and temperatures by the CRU have been used to support the theory that recent decades have proved the hottest for at least 1,000 years and thus to give credence to the idea that recent warming is outside natural variability and thus down to human actions. Climate sceptics have made determined attempts to discredit the CRU construction of the records. In the most notorious and damaging of the emails, Professor Jones writes that he has just concealed an inconvenient piece of data in an important graph for the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the fact that the record of temperatures from tree rings, which for a long time followed instrumental temperatures closely, began to diverge from the instrumental temperature record in about 1960 and while thereafter the instrumental record showed temperatures going up, the tree ring record showed them going down.

Professor Jones tells a colleague he has just carried out "a trick" to "hide the decline" in the tree ring data – he has simply removed the descending line and substituted the rising line from the instrumental measurements.

He is slated for this in the Russell review's most damaging comment, which says that the figure supplied for the WMO report was "misleading", a potentially devastating word to use of a senior scientist.

However, another review panel member, Professor Geoffrey Boulton, said there had not been an intention to mislead, as the true position was explained elsewhere in the document, but it should have been explained in the caption to the graph.

Professor Jones is criticised also over unhelpfulness in providing emails to climate sceptics who had put in Freedom of Information Act requests to see them and the committee finds evidence "that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them". But members of the review team said they had not asked Professor Jones specifically if had deleted emails in order to prevent them being seen.

The Government's chief scientist Professor Sir John Beddington said last night: "This is the third review to find no evidence of scientific malpractice at the university. The scientific case that climate change represents a major threat to our world and our societies is clear and compelling."

What the five reports said

* House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: no evidence that the work of Professor Phil Jones and the Climatic Research Unit has been undermined, but they could have been more open.

* Lord Oxburgh inquiry into the science: "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety". Could have used better statistical methods and given greater emphasis to uncertainty, but all conclusions were sensible and honest.

* Sir Muir Russell's inquiry into the emails: the argument that the climate scientists had something to hide "does not stand up". No evidence of selective use of data to produce a predetermined outcome. Scientists needed to be more open to scrutiny.

* Two inquiries by the University of Pennsylvania into scientist Michael Mann: the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr Mann did nothing that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community. A previous investigation found him innocent of suppressing data, deleting e-mails, and misusing confidential information.

How the sceptics responded

* Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a sceptical think-tank, said the report was a "damning indictment of the university's handling of freedom of information requests". He said: "I don't think the university can just claim this is a vindication."

* Andrew Montford, a climate sceptic who is conducting a review of how the three Climategate enquiries were set up and carried out, said the Russell review "has picked up some of our concerns on freedom of information" but had "brushed other issues under the carpet." He said: "Not to ask Professor Jones if he had deliberately deleted emails so they could not be requested is a pretty extraordinary omission."

* David Holland, a retired engineer and climate sceptic who was one of the principal seekers of information from the CRU, said: "When it was set up 20 years ago the IPCC rules required climate science to be assessed on 'a comprehensive, open and transparent basis'. Sir Muir Russell's enquiry has rightly reported that UEA has not lived up to this."

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Idowu hopes to lead Tamgho a merry dance in triple jump final

July 29th,2010    by Eric

He is not exactly the last Tamgho in Paris. All of Teddy Tamgho's family live in the French capital where they will be watching on TV as the 21-year-old attempts to be not just the first Tamgho in Barcelona but first in tonight's triple jump final.

A week ago it looked like the bright new star of the hop, step and jump might not even make it to the European Championships here. Having missed the Diamond League meeting in Paris on 16 July because of hamstring and calf injuries, he was said to be struggling in training and considering withdrawing from the French team. Reports of his likely demise appear to have been somewhat premature.

In the qualifying round on Tuesday night Tamgho picked off a 17.37m jump with the minimum of effort to head the list of 14 jumpers who progressed to the final. The young Frenchman who has taken a significant step ahead of Britain's Phillips Idowu thus far in 2010 will start favourite.
Idowu won the outdoor world title in Berlin last summer but must have felt like he had been Tamghoed when he sat at home watching on television as his rival took the world indoor crown in Doha in March with a mighty 17.90m, a world indoor record. The 31-year-old Briton probably felt the same when he jumped a steady 17.31m at the New York Grand Prix in May and Tamgho uncorked a 17.98m jump, coming within a tantalising 2cm of joining Jonathan Edwards and Kenny Harrison in the 18m club.

Idowu did beat him at the European Team Championships in Bergen six days later but the Belgrave Harrier only jumped 17.12m for second place, and an out-of-sorts Tamgho 17.10m for third, as the Ukrainian Viktor Kuznyetsov claimed an unlikely victory with 17.20m. "There's no pressure on me," Idowu insisted, looking ahead to tonight's rematch. "Hopefully, I'll do enough to win the gold. That's all I'm aiming for."

That is Tamgho's sole aim, too, although he has long-term designs on 18.29m, the world record distance held by Edwards, of Gateshead Harriers and Great Britain, since 1995. The Frenchman made that plain when he first met Edwards, in Turin last year.

"I introduced myself and told him I was going to break his world record," Tamgho recalled. At the time, it was a bold statement to make, the Parisian having just failed to register a valid mark in the qualifying round at the European Indoor Championships in the northern Italian city. Eighteen months on, the track and field world is wondering how far Tamgho might be able to venture beyond the 18m mark – with a little bit of inspiration from the Great British master of the triple jump.

"I study all of Jonathan Edwards's jumps on video," Tamgho said. "Technically, he is the one who has approached the model of perfection. At this stage in my development, I don't know about breaking his world record. I hope to have the legs for it one day, but I have to find another 32cm and that's a lot."

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Leaving Asia's shade

July 28th,2010    by Eric

FIFTEEN months after we launched our column on Asia, the current Banyan is moving on. At the launch, readers and colleagues chipped in with a dire prediction. Banyan would find Asia had little in common with itself, a mere congeries of nations and occasional failed states. However defined, Asia was a geographical accident, a Western construct. Banyan himself, readers charged, entertained the fantasies of a fevered colonial mind.

Yet after plenty of roaming, the prediction has failed to come true. The case for treating Asia as a shared space, falling under a columnist’s purview, is only reinforced. But let’s be blunt: no serious project for integration is close to existing. It is inconceivable that South Korea or the Philippines would have cheered, say, Bangladesh in the World Cup, as most of Africa roared for Ghana.

What a huge chunk of Asia does have in common is a joint adventure, namely the pursuit of materialism based on rapid economic development. The optimism is striking. Tomorrow may look different from today, but everyone agrees that it is likely to be better. The optimism is usually justified. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan have joined, or are joining, Japan among the ranks of rich countries. Malaysia and Thailand, once dirt-poor, are now middle-income countries. China has lifted 250m-odd out of poverty. Health, a good education, the pursuit of happiness: hundreds of millions of Asians can now aspire to these.

The shorthand for all this, the “Asian miracle”, used to be a littoral phenomenon, confined to East and South-East Asia and tied via the shipping container to Western markets. But now the miracle is powerfully reshaping the continental land mass and old perceptions with it. India’s new rates of growth, nearly matching China’s, are part of this. So too is the transcontinental development of roads, railways and pipelines, laid at a dizzying pace.

Places once indifferent to each other in economic terms—think of India and China, or South Korea and Central Asia—are waking up to the possibilities of exchange. That is binding Asia closer together. It is also plugging Asia, even its remoter parts, into the energy markets of the Middle East and consumer markets farther afield. There may be, as Kipling said, “no ’busses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay”. But railway planners talk of a two-day high-speed trip from Shanghai to London by 2025.

Infectious optimism, but the following dampens it. Asian growth belches out greenhouse gases. In the ten years to 2008 Asia’s energy use grew by 70%. The future is coal-based: half of Asia’s primary energy consumption, and 70% of China’s, is coal.

Development is laying waste to the region’s natural richness. The Chinese miracle is built on a raw, bulldozed landscape of unrelenting horror. In Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, once-vast stands of virgin forest are gone. Laos and Myanmar (“Elephints a-pilin’ teak”) are now going the same way. Asia’s sushi fad bodes ill for the bluefin tuna even on the far side of the world.

And a model of development that excels at laying down highways and throwing up factories is less good at ensuring “inclusive” growth and social protection. Success is inequitably shared. Every new villa for rich Chinese shunts poorer Chinese out of the way. Extreme poverty remains widespread. Researchers at Oxford University claim that more poor people live in eight states of India than in the 26 poorest African countries combined.

Lastly, Asia has its failed, rogue and nuclear-tipped states, none ghastlier than North Korea. Asia has a dozen or more insurgencies and civil conflicts before even considering Afghanistan, a problem for the rest of Asia as much as for the West.

And Asia has its share of killing fields. On July 26th in Cambodia, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, will hear his sentence as former commandant of Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge prison which 14,000 entered and barely a dozen left. If punished, he will be an Asian exception. In Timor-Leste, there has been no real reckoning of how 200,000 died at the hands of the Indonesian army and its agents. In Sri Lanka a triumphalist government brooks neither an investigation into its defeat of the Tamil Tigers last year, when perhaps 20,000 Tamil civilians died, nor even the slightest attempt at reconciliation. Bulldozing the traces of the recent past does not build strong foundations for the future.

For these reasons, whenever optimism has turned to political arrogance, alarm bells have rung for Banyan. Asians are right to be proud of their region’s resilience in the global financial crisis. Leaders are right to feel in their gut what the West grasps only superficially, that the crisis has hastened the “rise of the rest”.

But leaders are wrong when they conclude that success is based on some enlightened Asian political way. Those who think this tend to reside in more or less authoritarian states, with stunted political development, directing the economy with a strong hand. Such authoritarianism is particularly good at generating, along with the growth, the negative consequences of expansion, corruption included. It is hard to see how that qualifies authoritarians above others to clean up the mess, particularly in ways that are socially just.

The call of Mandalay (visa permitting)

Political stuntedness is now Asia’s biggest problem. China, in particular, fails to explain how democracy with Chinese characteristics—democracy without multiparty elections, the separation of powers and the rule of law—is better than the ordinary sort. Nor in the internet age is employing a police state to censor what people may know an effective use of taxpayers’ money. Call these the musings of a fevered mind. Yet, for all Asia’s shortcomings, Banyan greatly regrets his going:

“For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: Come you back, you British columnist; come you back to Mandalay!”

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Congress Is a PC: Expense Review Shows Just $22,000 in Apple Purchases

July 26th,2010    by Eric

July 21 -- Legislating: There's an app for that. Commissioned by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., it's called GovWatch, and it aggregates the social media feeds of the GOP members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, with a goal of "giving the American taxpayer a mobile window on Washington spending."

Though it's not quite as flashy, there's another way to keep tabs on Congress' spending, and specifically what it spends on itself: The searchable database that the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation has created from the the House's Statement of Disbursements. Collecting all the invoices generated by Congress every three months, it was made available in digital form for the first time in December. Following the most recent update in June, the House's expenditures for the last six months of 2009 and the first three months of 2010 are now online.
What those reports show is that while Apple has made some inroads on Capitol Hill -- Politico reports that the the unofficial iPad Owners Caucus includes Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.; Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass.; and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah; along with Issa -- it still has a long way to go in winning over Congress' many CrackBerry addicts.

For more of what Congress spent on office equipment and supplies during the nine months in question -- including its not-inconsiderable bill for freshening up the decor -- read on. And because we love few things more than wallowing in data, AOL News has also put together an overview of the charges the House racked up in other categories.

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New Zealand School Fired Sports Coach For Being Gay

July 23rd,2010    by Eric

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A New Zealand Christian school has been ordered to pay undisclosed compensation and apologize to a sports coach it fired because he was gay.

Board members of Middleton Grange School in Christchurch – on New Zealand's South Island – will also attend courses on human rights awareness, school principal Richard Vanderpyl said Thursday.

"We're thinking of the impact on him," Vanderpyl said. "We care for him and respect him."

He said he offered to rehire the 28-year-old coach, but the man had already found a new job at another Christchurch school.

The coach, whose identity has been withheld, was employed in February to coach the girls' netball team but was dismissed when the school board discovered he was gay.

"At first I was shocked. I've never felt so small in my life," the man told New Zealand media Thursday. "It's hard enough to go through finding yourself and accepting yourself and being 'out' in the first place. Having to go through discrimination doesn't help."

The school board refused to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement.

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Foreclosures Reduce A Home's Value By 27%, MIT Study Finds

July 22nd,2010    by Eric

Thinking about defaulting on your mortgage? You might be putting a serious damper on the value of your neighbor's home.

A single foreclosure can decrease value of homes within 250 feet by an average of one percent, according to a recent MIT study.

The study, which examined 1.8 million home sales in Massachusetts from 1987 to 2009, also found that the typical foreclosed home has its post-foreclosure price slashed by an average of 27 percent. (That number tends to be larger for houses with "low-priced characteristics in low-priced neighborhoods," the study found.)

By contrast, the authors note, if a house is sold after the death of an owner, the value drops five to seven percent. If a homeowner declares bankruptcy, the study shows, the price only falls three percent.

Why do foreclosures cause such a large decline in a home's price relative to other kinds of forced sales?

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Dean Smith Memory Loss: UNC Coaching Legend's Health Addressed

July 21st,2010    by Eric

RALEIGH, N.C. — Dean Smith still plays golf, still pops into his campus office and still savors watching the North Carolina program he led for more than three decades take the court under Roy Williams' direction.

Yet his family also says that the Hall of Fame coach is also losing some of the remarkable memory that could recall even the smallest details of the past.

Smith's family sent a letter to former players and coaches Saturday, discussing the 79-year-old's health after generally declining to comment for privacy reasons. Smith's condition was described as a "progressive neurocognitive disorder that affects his memory."

"He may not immediately recall the name of every former player from his many years of coaching, but that does not diminish what those players meant to him or how much he cares about them," the letter said. "He still remembers the words of a hymn or a jazz standard, but may not feel up to going to a concert. He still plays golf, though usually only for nine holes instead of 18."

Smith had largely kept a low profile in retirement, consistent with his habit of trying to deflect credit to his players while never seeming comfortable with the attention that followed him during the peak of his coaching years. He has maintained an office in Chapel Hill, frequently coming in to meet with former players, sign autographs or return fan mail.

Smith's health became a question after The Fayetteville Observer recently reported he had occasional memory loss. A week later, author John Feinstein posted on his blog that he backed off an effort to collaborate with Smith on a book in the past year because of related issues.

Eric Montross, the starting center on Smith's second national championship team in 1993, said the letter was "perfect" in refuting rumors about Smith's health and giving former players a clearer picture of what was happening.

"(The family) felt a real need to address some of the comments that were not accurate," said Montross, now an analyst on radio broadcasts of the team's games. "Everybody's curious because the general public doesn't come into contact with Coach Smith very often. They care about him, they want to know about him and they're interested in how he's doing.

"I was never in a position where I was overly concerned with things. He's in pretty good shape."

Still, Smith's health remains a sensitive topic that had been whispered around the program in recent months. On Saturday, three players declined to comment on the letter when reached by The Associated Press, citing respect for Smith's privacy, while at least a half-dozen others didn't return calls or e-mails for comment.

The letter states that Smith has had two hospital procedures in the past three years, one for knee replacement and the other for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. His wife, Linnea, said following the knee replacement surgery in December 2007 that there had been some "cardiological and neurological complications," though she didn't elaborate at the time.

"It's a stark contrast," the letter states of Smith's memory loss, "because he is widely known for remembering a name, a place, a game, a story – it's what made other people feel like they were special, because our dad remembered everything.

"Coach Smith wanted to keep his professional and personal life separate. But as we all know, the personal and professional life can sometimes overlap, and we understand that many fans, former players and friends are concerned about his well-being."

Smith retired in 1997 after 36 seasons with the Tar Heels as the winningest coach in Division I men's basketball. He has 879 victories, a mark passed a decade later by Bob Knight.

Smith won 13 Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments, reached 11 Final Fours and won the NCAA championship in 1982 and '93. But his imprint on the game goes beyond numbers, from the creation of the Four Corners slowdown offense that ultimately helped lead to the creation of the shot clock to the simple gesture of pointing to the passer after a made basket.

In addition to coaching some of the game's biggest names – Michael Jordan among them – Smith oversaw a program that graduated more than 96 percent of its lettermen.

Smith made a handful of public appearances during the program's centennial season last year, first for a game featuring alumni playing in the NBA or overseas. His presence in the building bearing his name drew a standing ovation from a roaring sellout crowd, prompting him to quickly acknowledge the crowd before pointing several times at the players as they applauded him.

During the game, Smith sat at the scorer's table between Jordan and Charlotte Bobcats coach Larry Brown, who played for Smith in the 1960s. He appeared again in February during halftime of the North Carolina State game in which the Tar Heels honored more than 200 former players.

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A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading

July 20th,2010    by Eric

It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sport to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and specialfeatures ($fJsL) as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre and music. A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality (Efr^ti), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient(;OM$]) value. For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and sequence, his own news paper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.

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Band of Outsiders

July 19th,2010    by Eric

Last season, we were on the beach in California. For Fall, Scott Sternberg took us to the snow-covered Manhattan suburbs. A chunky camel cardigan and scarf worn with brown plaid cuffed trousers and oversize blue-lens sunglasses gave off an Ice Storm vibe, though Sternberg said the writer Joan Didion was his muse for the paisley print blouses and dresses. He developed that print, by the way, by manipulating Polaroid images of silk ties. The designer's favorite REI hiking socks were another source of inspiration: He found a mill that produces a mélange wool that's not itchy, and he turned it into a turtleneck, a skirt, and even pants with reinforced knees. Among his other quirky ideas were platform sandals made from watch straps, a skirt sewn together from actual neckties, and… cutting a Jaguar in half for the set? This last element didn't, in fact, come to pass—too expensive—but Sternberg did pay a woman from upstate, with whom he connected on Craigslist, to borrow her old Jag for the night.

All fun and games? Not completely. What keeps people coming back—aside from the entertaining sets—is Sternberg's knack for tweaking (quite liberally at times) preppy American classics. Two examples: a sharp-looking double-breasted gray flannel jacket was paired with terry sweatpants, and a checked flannel shirt, buttoned to the neck and worn with slim corduroy trousers, came topped by a peacoat cut from silver fox. What Manhattan suburb was that again? We want to move in.

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Schools Trying To Expel Junk Food

July 16th,2010    by Eric

SAN FRANCISCO — It's not hard to figure out that stocking school vending machines with sugary sodas and salty, fatty snacks is a bad idea. Replacing those culinary culprits with something more nutritious is tougher.

But a growing number of school districts around the country are trying anyway.

"I can't say enough for what it does for the kids to have the junk out of the machines," says Patricia Gray, who as former principal of San Francisco's Balboa High School oversaw a switch to healthier snacks.

"It was not an easy task," says Gray, now an assistant superintendent with the district, "it was a re-education process."

Efforts to get empty calories out of students' hands are being made in almost every state, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A 2008 School Health Profiles Survey found that fewer secondary schools were selling less nutritious snacks compared with two years before.

Among the findings: Across 34 states, the median percent of secondary schools that ditched non-nutritious snacks increased from 46 percent in 2006 to 64 percent in 2008.

Still, the report found more progress needs to be made.

How big a deal is what kids eat at school?

According to the Institute of Medicine and the National Center for Health Statistics, the average young person gets more than 10 percent of his or her calories from saturated fat, takes in less than two-thirds the recommended intake of calcium and more than double the recommended amount of sodium. And for boys and girls ages 9 to 13, 21 percent get more than one-fourth of their energy intake from added sugars.

Food in the lunch and breakfast programs must meet nutritional standards to qualify for federal reimbursement, but food sold in other school venues, including vending machines, aren't subject to those requirements.

Some states have passed their own laws regulating vending machines, including California, which forbids some non-nutritious snacks. In San Francisco, the school board has a stricter policy, passing a wellness policy implemented in the 2003-04 year that banned sodas (this is now part of the state standard, too) and nixed snacks like baked potato chips.

"It may be less bad for you, but that doesn't mean that it's good for you," says Dana Woldow, a leader in the push for better snacks and co-chair of the district's Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

Things aren't perfect now, but they're "a million times better," than the past when sodas, candy and fried chips were the rule, Woldow said.

Starting this fall, one machine is being piloted in a San Francisco high school that will offer full, reimbursable, meals – fruit, vegetable, milk, sandwich. The "smart" machine will tally up when a student has selected enough items to qualify as reimbursable.

Drinks allowed in San Francisco school vending machines include water, juice, milk and juice/water blends with no added sweeteners, caffeine or herbal supplements. Snacks include yogurt bars, tuna salad and crackers, fruit bars and sunflower seeds.

Healthier snack machines are showing up all over. Jolly Backer, CEO of San Diego-based Fresh Healthy Vending, says the company has machines in 1,700 locations, including schools, across the United States. Offerings include items such as yogurts and fresh fruit. "All the top-selling drinks and snacks that you'd find in a Whole Foods Market you'll find in our machines," says Backer.

Some, like food activist Marion Nestle, say the idea of healthier vending machines is flawed.

"It depends how you define healthy," she said. "If you define healthy as slightly better for you than junk food, they're doing a really good job."

She advocates taking out vending machines and focusing on improving school lunch options.

But Woldow notes that the school day is long with extracurricular activities that can go on for hours after the cafeteria closes, which means students might dash out to corner stores for high-fat, high-sugar snacks. "Isn't it better to offer them healthy choices which are also convenient?" she says.

For those working to boost the nutrient value of vending machines, one issue is that machines are often under independent contract, perhaps to the PE department or the English department, making it hard to centralize control.

Bringing about change requires a comprehensive approach, says Gray. In addition to working on vending machine content she stopped the sale of candy for fundraisers, a very unpopular decision for a while, and curtailed bringing in junk food from home. "If you don't have a principal that's totally committed to (healthier snacks), it won't work."

And be patient, she says. Passing out fresh fruit started out as a novelty and turned into a treat. "They will eat it if it's available and you don't have the bad stuff. Kids get hungry. They're going to eat one way or the other."

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