Papal Conclave Accompanied by Reports of Scandals and Intrigue

Osservatore Romano/Reuters

Pope Benedict XVI, right, spoke to cardinals at the Vatican on Saturday.

VATICAN CITY — As cardinals from around the world begin arriving in Rome for a conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, new shadows have fallen over the delicate transition, which the Vatican fears might influence the vote and with it the direction of the Roman Catholic Church.

In recent days, often speculative reports in the Italian news media — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sex abuse crisis — have dominated headlines, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack enemies in the dying days of a troubled papacy.

The reports, which the Vatican has vehemently denied, touch on some of the most vexing issues of Benedict’s reign, including the child sex abuse crisis and international criticisms of the Vatican Bank’s opaque record-keeping. The recent explosion of bad press — which some Vatican experts say is fed by carefully orchestrated leaks meant to weaken some papal contenders — also speak to Benedict’s own difficulties governing, which analysts say he is trying to address, albeit belatedly, with several high-profile personnel changes.

The drumbeat of scandal has reached such a fever pitch that on Saturday, the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a rare pointed rebuke, calling it “deplorable” that ahead of the conclave there was “a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories, that cause serious damage to persons and institutions.”

The Vatican compared the news reports to past attempts by foreign states to exert pressure on the papal election, saying the latest efforts to skew the choice of the next pope by trying to shape public opinion were “based on judgments that do not typically capture the spiritual aspect of the moment that the Church is living.”

Benedict had hoped to address at least one scandal with the Feb. 15 appointment of a new head of the Vatican Bank. It is less clear why he reassigned a powerful Vatican diplomatic official to a posting outside Rome, though experts say it diminishes the official’s role in helping steer Vatican policy.

On Feb. 11, Benedict made history by announcing that he would step down by month’s end. He said he was worn down by age and was resigning “in full liberty and for the good of the Church.” The volley of news reports since appeared to underscore the backbiting in the Vatican that Benedict was unable to control, and provided a hint of why he might have decided that someone younger and stronger should lead the church.

At the conclusion of the Vatican’s Lenten spiritual retreat, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the director of the Pontifical Council for Culture and a papal contender, spoke darkly of the “divisions, dissent, careerism, jealousies” that he said plagued the Vatican hierarchy.

The recent spate of news reports were linked to an earlier scandal in which the pope’s butler stole confidential documents that was considered one of the gravest security breaches in the modern history of the church.

Last week, largely unsourced articles in the center-left daily La Repubblica and the center-right weekly Panorama reported that three cardinals whom Benedict had asked last summer to investigate the leaking of the documents, known as the “VatiLeaks” scandal, had found evidence of Vatican officials who had been put in compromising positions.

The newspapers reported that, after interviewing dozens of people inside and outside the Vatican, the cardinals produced a hefty dossier. “The report is explicit. Some high prelates are subject to ‘external influence’ — we would call it blackmail — by nonchurch men to whom they are bound by ‘worldly’ ties,” La Repubblica wrote.

Vatican experts speculated that prelates eager to undermine opponents during the conclave were behind the leaks to the news media over the last week.

“The conclave is a mechanism that serves to create a dynasty in a monarchy without children, so it’s a complicated operation,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Center in Bologna and the author of a book on conclaves.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of a cardinal. His name is Roger M. Mahony, not Roger M. Mahoney.

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The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

I WAS born in Hollywood, Calif. — truly a shocking notion if you know how unstruck I am by stars.

Ken Richardson

Stephen Kaufer is the president and C.E.O. of TripAdvisor in Needham, Mass.

AGE 50

FAVORITE QUOTATION 'The harder you practice, the luckier you get' — Gary Player, golfer

PREFERRED MODE OF TRANSPORTATION Tandem bicycle with his wife

My father was a trial lawyer. He taught me the power of articulate persuasion. We’d sit at the dining room table and take sides of a debate. He would argue me into a corner, then at some point say, “Switch,” and I’d have to defend the opposite position. He would then deftly argue himself out of the corner he had just painted me into.

My mother had multiple sclerosis. By the time I was 13 she was in a wheelchair, and she was bedridden when I went to college. She passed away in 1986. A huge responsibility fell to me at an early age as the oldest of three kids. I balanced the household checkbook at 13. I had a special driver’s license at the age of 15 to take my siblings around.

I picked up fencing in high school partly because it attracted the craziest bunch of people. I helped start my high school team, recruiting students with the pitch, “Wouldn’t it be fun if you learned how to stab your friends?” I went to the Junior Olympics when I was 16 or so and lost every one of my bouts. But I got better. When I went to Harvard I made the varsity team, was later elected captain, and in 1983 won a slot on the collegiate All-American team. In fencing, you have to think three moves ahead. It turned out to be good training for corporate life.

I went to Harvard thinking I would major in physics. I liked the pulleys-and-levers part but not the extensive math. Computer science was a bit of a backwater of academia then, but I liked the game of solving programming problems. I’d be pumped at 3 in the morning when I found bugs in programs.

In 1985, after I had graduated from college, I was co-founder of a company called CenterLine Software, which made programming and testing tools that we sold to software developers. In 1998 the other owners and I sold half the assets, and the other half became CenterLine Development Systems, which was headed by my wife, Caroline.

That same year, Caroline and I were planning a vacation in Mexico, and I started looking online for unbiased opinions about a particular hotel. What I got was a thousand sites showcasing exactly the same gorgeous picture and the very same descriptive paragraphs.

It took a lot of time, and some advanced Boolean logic in my search queries, but eventually I found a write-up from a couple who’d stayed at the hotel I had in mind, with pictures that showed rusted chairs and a beach not up to our expectations. I had dodged a bullet.

Later Caroline suggested I build a Web site to help other travelers in similar situations. “Just keep it easy to use and honest,” she said. TripAdvisor and its other Web sites now attract more than 75 million monthly visitors.

Unfortunately, Caroline did not live to see how large we would grow. She passed away from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in 2005 at the age of 42. I was left to raise our four children — ages 5, 7, 12 and 13 at the time. It was difficult, to say the least, but today we are a happy and healthy family. In 2012, I married a wonderful friend and an amazing mom with four kids of her own. With eight kids, a dog and a turtle, we take “full house” literally. Through the Stephen and Caroline Kaufer Fund for Neuroendocrine Research, we’ve supported medical research at several leading scientific institutions, as well as through our efforts with a great cancer charity called the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation.

Most people assume I am an avid traveler who would like nothing more than to roam the world for three months. Not true. The company was born of an average traveler’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.

As told to Perry Garfinkel.

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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Fundamentally: Investors Rediscover Risk-Taking Abroad

RISK-TAKING may be staging a comeback overseas.

While equities around the world soared last year, the stock market rebound abroad was decidedly different from the one that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 16 percent in 2012.

In the United States, the most economically sensitive stocks, like shares of banks and other financial businesses, posted the biggest gains as investors grew confident that an economic recovery was at hand. Overseas, by contrast, it was the defensive-oriented shares like health care and consumer staples stocks that performed the best for most of the year.

What’s more, investors favored stocks in the developed world over riskier but faster-growing emerging markets equities.

This is not all that surprising. “The economic situation abroad in the last 12 to 18 months has either been worse or has slowed more dramatically than in the U.S., creating an even bigger ‘risk off’ mind-set in those markets,” said James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management.

Yet Mr. Paulsen believes that investors’ appetite for risk-taking overseas is likely to improve. In fact, that process may have already begun.

Among the early signs are that economically cyclical sectors, like financial stocks in the MSCI EAFE index of foreign equities, have been outperforming defensive areas like health care and consumer staples since December.

Part of this can be attributed to the growing clarity about the state of the global economy, money managers say. It is not so much that the economy is booming, but that some of the greatest potential dangers seem to have receded.

Most prominently, concerns about a euro zone breakup have abated since Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, declared that the bank would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Ever since that announcement, in late July, European equities have been in rally mode.

“In the international markets, you saw the removal of major tail risks last year, particularly in Europe,” said Jason A. White, a portfolio specialist at T. Rowe Price.

Meanwhile, fears over China’s slowdown seemed to subside at the end of last year on signs that the world’s second largest economy was finally beginning to re-accelerate. In November, government data showed that industrial output and retail sales in China grew much faster than expected, bolstering the bullish case for Chinese and emerging-market stocks. Since then, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has soared nearly 20 percent.

The improving global economy, though, isn’t the only reason risk-taking may be re-emerging.

Money managers note that fear over Europe’s debt crisis has been driving investors into defensive-oriented stocks overseas for several years. This is particularly true for shares of consumer companies that manufacture staples like food and household products that continue to be in demand regardless of the health of the economy.

“In an environment where returns for the equity markets were quite poor, you saw very decent returns in those staples,” said Harry Hartford, president of Causeway Capital Management. As a result, though, “consumer staples outside the U.S. looks pretty fully priced,” he said.

Take Diageo. Shares of the British spirits maker, which has sales in about 180 countries, have climbed more than 26 percent a year for the last three years. That means Diageo shares now trade at a price/earnings ratio of more than 18, based on forecast profits. By comparison, the average P/E for MSCI EAFE stocks is less than 14.

Unilever, the packaged food and household goods company, is another example. In 2008, amid the global financial crisis, the stock was trading at around 11 times earnings. Today, Unilever’s P/E ratio stands at 17 times earnings.

“A lot of the defensive industries had big runs, so valuations got extended,” said W. George Greig, head of international investing for the asset manager William Blair & Company. As a consequence, he said, “some investors are starting to say that the defensive stocks aren’t as defensive as they thought.”

NOT all money managers are convinced that the worst of the economic storm is behind us. “We know that after a financial crisis, it takes a long time to recover,” said Simon Hallett, chief investment officer for the asset manager Harding Loevner. “We think a conservative approach is still appropriate — there are still an awful lot of things that can go wrong.”

Mr. Greig said investors were not seeking economically sensitive stocks out of a newfound sense of euphoria. “This is not a venturesome ‘risk on’ mind-set,” he said. Rather, investors are reluctantly seeking out cyclically oriented stocks because their valuations are so low that they now look compelling, and there may be better values in areas that had been considered riskier.

Paul J. Lim is a senior editor at Money magazine. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com.

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Scud Missile Attack Reported in Aleppo

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

People gathered to search for survivors under rubble after what activists said was a Scud missile hit in Aleppo's Tariq al Bab neighborhood on Friday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Antigovernment activists in Syria said Scud missiles fired by the Syrian military slammed into at least three rebel-held districts of Aleppo on Friday, flattening dozens of houses, leaving at least 12 civilians dead and burying an undetermined number of others, perhaps dozens, under piles of rubble.

The assertion, corroborated by videos posted on the Internet, came one day after Syrian government targets in central Damascus were hit by multiple car bombings that were among the deadliest and most destructive so far in the nearly two-year-old conflict.

The reported attack on Aleppo’s Hamra, Tariq al Bab and Hanano areas with Scuds, which are not known for their accuracy, was the second time this week that the Syrian opposition has accused the military of using such missiles on Aleppo’s rebel-held areas.

Aleppo, the embattled northern city that was once Syria’s commercial capital during more peaceful times, has become one of the focal points of rebellion in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. On Tuesday, according to activists in Aleppo, a Syrian missile leveled part of Jabal Badro, another neighborhood controlled by the rebels, killing at least 19 people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with contacts inside Syria, said in a statement that the victims of missile explosions in Aleppo on Friday included children and that the number of victims “is expected to rise significantly because there are dozens of wounded under the rubble.”

There was no immediate mention of the Aleppo attacks by Syria’s state-run media. The Web site of Syria’s official SANA news agency was dominated by the aftermath of the car bombings that had hit central Damascus on Thursday and had left more than 70 people dead. The ferocity and scope of those bombings were unusual for central Damascus, which up until now has been largely insulated from much of the carnage and destruction wrought by the conflict in the outer Damascus suburbs and other parts of the country.

Most of the casualties in Damascus were caused by an especially powerful bomb near the headquarters of President Assad’s Baath Party and the Embassy of Russia, which were both damaged, according to witnesses contacted inside Damascus and Russian news reports. SANA said a hospital and neighboring schools also were damaged.

No group has taken responsibility for the Damascus bombings but the government has said they were carried out by terrorists, its generic description of the alliance of armed rebels seeking to depose Mr. Assad. The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main Syrian group for the opposition which was meeting in Cairo at the time, condemned the bombings, as did its Western supporters, including the United States.

Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States denounces such bombings as “indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians or against diplomatic facilities, which violate international law, and we continue to emphasize that perpetrators on all sides have to be held accountable.”

Nonetheless, the bombings appeared to create a new source of diplomatic friction between the United States and Russia, which has consistently supported the Syrian government during the conflict and has rejected any proposed solution that would force Mr. Assad to relinquish power.

Russia’s mission to the United Nations accused the United States of blocking its attempt to seek approval of a Security Council statement that would have condemned the Damascus bombings as terrorism. The United States mission denied the Russian accusation, saying it had only requested that the Russian statement include a paragraph that also condemned the Syrian government’s “continued, indiscriminate use of heavy weaponry against civilians.”

Erin Pelton, a spokeswoman for the United States mission, said in news release posted Friday on its Web site that “Unfortunately, if predictably, Russia rejected the U.S. suggested language as ‘totally unacceptable’ and withdrew its draft statement.”

Other insurgency-related violence was reported by the Syrian Observatory and other activists elsewhere in Syria on Friday, including random sniping attacks in the north-central city of Raqqa that killed four people during an antigovernment demonstration, and seven people killed around a mosque in Dara’a, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising first began in March 2011.

The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad network of activists, reported that fighters from the Free Syrian Army and other groups had taken control of at least two military facilities in the suburbs of Deir al-Zour, the eastern city that has been a battleground for many months. The report, which could not be corroborated, also claimed that rebels had gained control of a missile facility in Deir al-Zour that was formerly the site of a partly built nuclear reactor bombed by Israeli warplanes in 2007. Syria disclosed the existence of the missile facility four years ago at a technical meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Media Decoder: Nielsen Adjusts Its Ratings to Add Web-Linked TVs

9:04 p.m. | Updated

For media executives, there may be nothing worse than a viewer or listener who is not counted.

On Thursday, in a move that might help ease those concerns, Nielsen said that it would start considering Americans who have spurned cable, but who have a television set hooked up to the Internet, as “television households,” potentially adding to the sample of homes that are rated by the company, the standard for television ratings. In front of skeptical network officials, the company pledged to measure TV viewership on iPads and other mobile devices in the future.

Those executives have a gnawing feeling that their consumers are being missed more and more often. As new pipelines open up for viewers and listeners through social media, mobile apps and game consoles, advertisers fret that they don’t know how many people are really seeing their ads, television networks fear they’re not getting credit for getting those people to tune in and record companies wonder how they can keep up with all the ways their customers consume music.

These problems will only worsen in the years to come as new technologies further erase the boundaries that once existed between television and Internet; newspaper and cable news network; video and article.

Nielsen’s move was announced a day after Billboard said it would start including YouTube streams in its calculation of the most popular songs of the week. That shift immediately vaulted “Harlem Shake,” a modestly selling hip-hop single that has become a viral video sensation, to the top of the charts.

Nielsen’s decision was the culmination of two years of thinking, a painfully long time for media executives. Their collective sense of urgency has increased as new Web services like Aereo have allowed people to watch TV channels, ads and all, without a cable subscription or an antenna.

The new definition “will include those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set,” said Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. Currently a “television set” is the flat-screen kind, but in the future a tablet computer like an iPad could also be considered a TV set.

Nielsen’s decision won’t have an immediate impact on the ratings system that governs billions of dollars in advertising decisions, because just 0.6 percent of households in the United States meet the new description.

As that statistic shows, a large majority of households have chosen not to cut the cable TV cord to date. But predictions of “cord-cutting” continue to resonate; the Dish Network chief Charles Ergen said earlier this week that “I think cord-cutting is here to stay and will accelerate over time” as customers reject increases to their monthly bills. By beginning to count Internet-only homes, Nielsen is trying to get ahead of the change.

In some media corners on Thursday, the reaction was summarized in a word: Finally. Television executives who have long prodded Nielsen to evolve — and been disappointed before — said they would wait and see how far the company actually goes in counting online views.

Right now, most Internet views of their shows are not counted in the TV ratings that serve as a kind of nationwide popularity contest, either because there are no ads attached (see Netflix) or because the ads are not exactly the same as the ones that appeared on the original TV broadcast (see Hulu). But new services are popping up that stream TV shows and ads without the need for cable.

Aereo, which is available in New York and is expanding to other cities, is one. NimbleTV, which is in a test phase, is another. Further into the future, Intel is planning to start a cablelike subscription service that will be delivered over the Internet, and a bevy of other companies are interested in doing the same thing. If and when these services steal customers away from cable, advertisers will need to know if their spots are being seen and Nielsen will need to track it.

Alternatively, cable companies and the owners of cable channels are trying to keep customers by streaming shows in a manner known as TV Everywhere. In some cases, these services need to be rated, too.

Ms. McDonough said in a telephone interview on Thursday that viewing on Aereo would now be included in the Nielsen ratings sample. Theoretically, a cablelike service from Intel would be included, too.

The new definition also applies to homes that have cable but also have extra TV sets that are hooked up only to PlayStations, Rokus or other Internet devices.

The changes emanated from a measurement committee comprising Nielsen executives and two dozen representatives from networks and advertising firms. The committee met in New York on Tuesday and discussed Nielsen’s proposals. They were subsequently obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

The proposals, Nielsen said in a statement, were necessary to “more completely reflect media consumption.”

There is intense anxiety about the ratings at the major television networks because, in some cases, their ratings are evaporating before their eyes. The culprits include digital video recorder use, delayed viewership thanks to the existence of Netflix and other online sources, and increased competition from other channels and the Internet. Counting the small sliver of homes that have Internet-connected TVs, but not cable, will not make a big difference in the short term.

Then again, as Ms. McDonough put it, “It’s up to the networks to decide how best they want to monetize their content.”

If a network like ABC decided to run the same commercials with “Modern Family” on TV and on Hulu and on ABC.com and on its app, Nielsen would count all those views equally.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/22/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Nielsen Adjusts Ratings to Include Web-Linked TVs .

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Question Mark: Acne Common in Baby Boomers Too

Pimples are no surprise on babies and teenagers, but boomers?

You no longer have to gaze over a school lunchroom, hoping to find a seat at a socially acceptable table. You don’t rush to get home at night before your junior license driving restrictions kick in. And you men no longer have to worry that your voice will skip an octave without warning.

But if adolescence is over, what is that horrid protuberance staring at you in the mirror from the middle of your forehead? Some speak of papules, pustules and nodules, but we will use the technical term: zit. That thing on your forehead now is the same thing that was there back in high school, or at least a close relative. Same as it ever was (cue “Once in a Lifetime”).

We get more than the occasional complaint here from baby boomers who want to know about this aging body part or that. So you would think people would be happy with any emblem of youth — even if it is sore and angry-looking and threatening to erupt at any second. But oddly, there are those who are not happy to see pimples again, and some have asked for an explanation.

Acne occurs when the follicles that connect the pores of the skin to oil glands become clogged with a mixture of hair, oils and skin cells, and bacteria in the plug causes swelling, experts say. A pimple grows as the plug breaks down.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, a growing number of women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and even beyond are seeking treatment for acne. Middle-age men are also susceptible to breakouts, but less so, experts say.

In some cases, people suffer from acne that began in their teenage years and never really went away. Others had problems when they were younger and then enjoyed decades of mostly clear skin. Still others never had much of the way of pimples until they were older.

Whichever the case, the explanation for adult acne is likely to be the same as it is for acne found in teenagers and, for that matter, newborns: hormonal changes. “We know that all acne is hormonally driven and hormonally sensitive,” said Dr. Bethanee J. Schlosser, an assistant professor of dermatology at Northwestern.

Among baby boomers, the approach of menopause may result in a drop in estrogen, a hormone that can help keep pimples from forming, and increased levels of androgens, the male hormone. Women who stop taking birth control pills may also see a drop in their estrogen levels.

Debate remains over what role diet plays in acne. Some experts say that foods once thought to cause pimples, like chocolate, are probably not a problem. Still, while sugar itself is no longer believed to contribute to acne, some doctors think that foods with a high glycemic index – meaning they quickly elevate glucose in the body — might. White bread and sweetened cereals are examples. And for all ages, stress has also been found to play a role.

One message to acne sufferers has not changed over the years. Your mother was right: don’t pop it! It can cause scarring.

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. You can reach us by e-mail at booming@nytimes.com.

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Question Mark: Acne Common in Baby Boomers Too

Pimples are no surprise on babies and teenagers, but boomers?

You no longer have to gaze over a school lunchroom, hoping to find a seat at a socially acceptable table. You don’t rush to get home at night before your junior license driving restrictions kick in. And you men no longer have to worry that your voice will skip an octave without warning.

But if adolescence is over, what is that horrid protuberance staring at you in the mirror from the middle of your forehead? Some speak of papules, pustules and nodules, but we will use the technical term: zit. That thing on your forehead now is the same thing that was there back in high school, or at least a close relative. Same as it ever was (cue “Once in a Lifetime”).

We get more than the occasional complaint here from baby boomers who want to know about this aging body part or that. So you would think people would be happy with any emblem of youth — even if it is sore and angry-looking and threatening to erupt at any second. But oddly, there are those who are not happy to see pimples again, and some have asked for an explanation.

Acne occurs when the follicles that connect the pores of the skin to oil glands become clogged with a mixture of hair, oils and skin cells, and bacteria in the plug causes swelling, experts say. A pimple grows as the plug breaks down.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, a growing number of women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and even beyond are seeking treatment for acne. Middle-age men are also susceptible to breakouts, but less so, experts say.

In some cases, people suffer from acne that began in their teenage years and never really went away. Others had problems when they were younger and then enjoyed decades of mostly clear skin. Still others never had much of the way of pimples until they were older.

Whichever the case, the explanation for adult acne is likely to be the same as it is for acne found in teenagers and, for that matter, newborns: hormonal changes. “We know that all acne is hormonally driven and hormonally sensitive,” said Dr. Bethanee J. Schlosser, an assistant professor of dermatology at Northwestern.

Among baby boomers, the approach of menopause may result in a drop in estrogen, a hormone that can help keep pimples from forming, and increased levels of androgens, the male hormone. Women who stop taking birth control pills may also see a drop in their estrogen levels.

Debate remains over what role diet plays in acne. Some experts say that foods once thought to cause pimples, like chocolate, are probably not a problem. Still, while sugar itself is no longer believed to contribute to acne, some doctors think that foods with a high glycemic index – meaning they quickly elevate glucose in the body — might. White bread and sweetened cereals are examples. And for all ages, stress has also been found to play a role.

One message to acne sufferers has not changed over the years. Your mother was right: don’t pop it! It can cause scarring.

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. You can reach us by e-mail at booming@nytimes.com.

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Shortcuts: Why It’s Not Always Good to Forgive

IT seems, these days, that we can barely keep pace with the tales of the famous and near famous who climb to great heights, plummet to great depths and then try to work their way back into the public’s affection.

Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A man in Los Angeles watched Lance Armstrong acknowledge his use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Since the beginning of this year alone, we’ve had Lance Armstrong’s sort-of apology interview with Oprah Winfrey acknowledging his use of a variety of performance-enhancing drugs, the efforts by the fashion designer John Galliano to put an anti-Semitic tirade behind him and the seemingly ill-fated, public (and lucrative) mea culpa by the best-selling author Jonah Lehrer for plagiarism and fabrication.

Even as I was writing this column, news broke about another fallen celebrity: Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee Olympic runner, was charged with murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend.

These never-ending stories may not affect our lives — except, perhaps, to make us more cynical when the mighty fall. But they do raise questions about forgiveness and atonement that are important outside the world of the celebrity.

“Stories of trust violations abound in the media and business press,” Kurt T. Dirks, a professor of managerial leadership at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues wrote in a recent journal article. “However, these high-profile incidents are vastly outnumbered by the many trust violations that occur in the offices and hallways and other arenas of virtually all work organizations.”

And with our friends, partners, children, parents and, of course, the companies we do business with.

I’ve written quite a bit about the need for our society to be more open to mistakes and failure. But what happens after that? Is forgiveness automatic? And how difficult is it — or should it be — to get redemption after a serious misstep?

First, what is forgiveness? Jeffrie Murphy, a professor of law, philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University, who has written about the issue for years, says it is “a change of heart toward someone — overcoming the feelings of anger and resentment that typically come from being wronged by another.”

But it is important to differentiate between forgiveness and trusting someone again, Professor Dirks said. So you may be willing to forgive a business that messed up a deal but nevertheless decide not to work with that business again. Or forgive an abusive partner, but never be in a relationship with that person again. Or even forgive those who committed a crime against you, but still believe they should be punished.

“The question is how much you’ve been personally harmed and what’s at stake for you in the future,” he said. “It depends, also, if we have something to gain by interacting” with the person or business again.

Of course, it is often easier to avoid interacting with a person who has harmed you than a business, because often no good alternatives are available.

But we can feel that we have some control by refusing to buy from a company that has sold us a lemon or provided terrible service. And, on occasion, enough consumers have pulled together to force a company to back down, as they did in 2011, when Bank of America bowed to customer pressure and dropped plans to impose a $5 monthly fee on debit cards.

Research has also shown that we seem to be more willing to forgive — and trust again — those who make errors of competence rather than of character, Professor Dirks said.

“We believe issues of competence are changeable over time, but not issues of character or integrity,” he said. “And the truth is that probably you can change certain skills, but the underlying value system is probably harder to change.”

It has become somewhat common wisdom to believe that forgiving a person who did you wrong is not just the right thing to do, but will make you emotionally, and even physically, healthier in the long run by alleviating the anger and stress you feel.

But Professor Murphy warned against assuming that forgiveness was always the right answer and that someone who failed to offer forgiveness was “not a good person or a mentally healthy person.”

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a professor at Arizona State University. He is Jeffrie Murphy, not Jefffrie.

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