Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 21, 2012

An article on Tuesday about using MDMA, or Ecstasy, in combination with psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress described incorrectly the office arrangement that a husband-and-wife team use to conduct therapy sessions using MDMA. The couple, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, hold the sessions in an office in a converted house; they do not conduct the sessions in their home office. And because of an editing error, an accompanying picture carried an incorrect credit. The photograph of the Mithoefers was taken by Hunter McRae, not by Gretchen Ertl.

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Airlines’ On-Time Performance Rises

Rich Addicks for The New York Times

Delta Air Lines employees monitor ground traffic from a tower at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

ATLANTA — Next time you dawdle at the duty-free store or an airport bar, thinking you have a few more minutes until your flight is set to go, know this: the plane’s doors might have already closed.

There is a lot to complain about in air travel, particularly during the holiday season, with seats and overhead bins filled to capacity and the airlines charging fees for everything from a few inches of extra leg room to a bite to eat. But there is a nugget of good news. The number of flights leaving, and arriving, on time has improved significantly in recent years.

That is partly the result of the airlines flying fewer flights. But it is also because some airlines are focusing more on getting their planes out of the gate on schedule.

“There has been a lot of focus on improving performance across the industry,” said Peter McDonald, United’s chief operations officer. With carry-on space at a premium, he said passengers are also eager to board early. “There’s not a lot of hanging out at the bar until the last minute anymore.”

John Fechushak, Delta Air Lines’ director of operations in Atlanta, compared the daily task to “putting together a puzzle with different pieces every day.”

Here is a sampling of what Delta, for instance, looks at each day for each flight. How many minutes did it take for a plane to reach its gate after landing? Was the cabin door opened within three minutes? How soon were bags loaded in the hold? Did boarding start 35 minutes before takeoff? Were the cabin doors closed three minutes ahead of schedule?

So far this year, 83 percent of all flights took off within 15 minutes of schedule, the highest level since 2003, according to the Department of Transportation, which compiled figures through September. But that average belies a wide range of airline performances.

Hawaiian Airlines, helped by good weather for much of the year, topped the rankings, with 95 percent of flights leaving on time. At US Airways, 89 percent of departures were on time in that period, while Delta had 87 percent.

The biggest laggard this year has been United, which is struggling with its merger with Continental Airlines. The carrier has had three major computer problems this year, including two that crashed the airline’s passenger reservation system, stranding thousands of travelers and causing significant delays and cancellations. Its on-time departure rate, as a result, was 76 percent this year, the industry’s lowest.

American Airlines, which is going through bankruptcy proceedings and has been dealing with contentious labor relations, has also performed poorly. It delayed or canceled hundreds of flights in recent months after pilots called in sick or reported more mechanical problems. The airline also canceled scores of flight after seats were improperly bolted on some of its planes. As a result, nearly 40 percent of American’s flights were late in September.

Government statistics, however, do not provide the full picture: smaller carriers, like ExpressJet and SkyWest Airlines, which operate regional flights for Delta, United and US Airways, generally have lower on-time performance than their partners.

On-time statistics also vary widely by month, with the worst months in August and January, when summer storms, holiday travel or winter weather cause more disruptions. There are also single events that throw off the airlines: statistics, for instance, will be skewed for October by Hurricane Sandy, which shut down air travel through much of the East Coast and caused more than 19,000 flight cancellations.

Carriers have strong incentives to get planes out on time. Airlines now operate schedules that leave little wiggle room. Airplanes typically fly to several places every day, so any delayed flights, especially early in the day, can cascade through the system like falling dominoes and bedevil flight planners all day. Airlines often have to burn more fuel to try to make up for lost time, or make new arrangements for passengers who miss connections.

Airlines have long padded flight times to make up for congestion at airports or delays caused by air traffic controllers. Even so, passengers still expect their flight to take off and land at the time printed on their ticket.

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Israel, Hamas keep up attacks as talks continue in Egypt

GAZA CITY — As negotiators worked on a tenuous cease-fire deal, Israel and Hamas pounded each other for a sixth day and anger rose in the Gaza Strip over the increasing number of casualties.

Hopes for a truce grew Monday night when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened Cabinet members to discuss the details of what was said to be a multiphase, multiyear cease-fire agreement.

Officials in Egypt, where the talks were underway, expressed cautious optimism. Arab League leaders and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was visiting the region, were trying to help negotiate a deal. The White House said President Obama, who is visiting Asia, called Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Monday.

Israel is seeking assurances from Egypt that Hamas will halt rocket fire into Israel and not be allowed to rebuild the weapon caches that Israel has destroyed in recent days. Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, wants an end to the land and sea blockade that has crippled its economy, and to targeted killings of its leaders by Israel.

Any sort of agreement must overcome huge obstacles. Israel views Hamas as a terrorist organization and the Islamist militant group refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist.

Even if the two don't alter those stances, any internationally endorsed truce would usher in a new phase in their relationship. Previously Israel and Hamas have refused direct negotiations, occasionally reaching informal agreements brokered through intermediaries, such as last year's deal to release captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

There are sizable risks for both sides, but also opportunities, said Doron Avital, a lawmaker with Israel's centrist Kadima party and a former commander of an elite military unit.

Hamas would win some of the international legitimacy it craves, but it would also need to moderate its behavior, just as the Palestine Liberation Organization did after signing the Oslo peace accords in 1993.

"It might elevate the status of Hamas, but that will also mean that Hamas will have to play realpolitik," Avital said. "It can't stay a terrorist organization forever. There's an interesting potential here."

Heated comments by Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal during a Cairo news conference Monday underscored the level of animosity. He called Netanyahu a "child killer" and "murderer."

"It is Netanyahu who asked for a truce," Meshaal said. "Gazans don't even want a truce."

For Israel, besides gaining an end to rocket attacks from Gaza, a deal might start the process of encouraging Hamas to become more moderate. And if Egypt guarantees an agreement, it would be directly invested in keeping Hamas unarmed.

With no cease-fire in place, Israel has massed soldiers and armor along the Gaza border in preparation for a possible invasion. But ground fighting would almost certainly lead to more Israeli and Palestinian casualties, and voices on both sides have cautioned against it.

Some said the negotiations may have led to an uptick in violence in recent days, as each side attempts to intimidate the other before a truce is called.

Palestinian casualties were relatively low in the first days of the conflict, but have increased as Israel's air campaign hit targets in more populated areas. On Monday, Israel attacked the Sharouk communications building in Gaza City where it said four senior members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were meeting.

Among the dead was Ramez Harb, a Palestinian journalist. Israel said he was a legitimate target because he served in the information department of Islamic Jihad.

Hamas' Health Ministry said 107 people had been killed in Gaza, including more than two dozen children. At least 850 people had been wounded.

Three Israelis have died in the barrage of rockets from Gaza and a dozen have been wounded, including three on Monday. An additional 135 rockets were fired Monday, pushing the total over the last week to more than 1,000. Hamas has fired rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time.

The White House said Obama, in his conversation with Morsi, emphasized that the rocket fire into Israel must end.

In a somber sign of the climbing death toll, hundreds of Gazans crowded around the Shifa Hospital morgue Monday morning in a familiar ritual: collecting the bodies of loved ones.

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Mark Cuban Calls Facebook a 'Time Waster'

Mark Cuban isn’t done criticizing Facebook. After saying last week the social network had “blown up” and alienated businesses by limiting their access to users’ news feeds, the Dallas Mavericks owner and tech entrepreneur is now calling Facebook a “time suck” that needs to learn its humble place in the media landscape.

Cuban posted the comments to his personal blog to clarify comments he made last week to ReadWrite on how Facebook aggressively filters posts from business pages to users’ news feeds. He wrote that Facebook is a “time waster” for people too anxious to “talk to the person next to you.” As such, Facebook should not bother filtering posts from business owners like Cuban:

FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff. I think that they are over-thinking what their network is all about .

Being a time suck that people enjoy is a good thing… [But] who really appreciates that some posts rise to the top of their newsfeed because some folks they used to work with and are still friends with shared a baby picture ? … In a perfect FB world every post enters the friends/like/subscriber’s timeline. If they log in and want to spend the time searching their timeline they see it, if not, not.

The Facebook news feed has been algorithmically favoring selected content, like the baby picture Cuban mentioned, since its launch in 2006. Facebook programmers are constantly tweaking the feed — to please users, they say — and in September began filtering page posts more aggressively after complaints about spam. This meant that business owners like Cuban tend to reach fewer users with each post and must buy “promoted post” advertising from Facebook if they want to reach even more.

Filling the role of “time suck” is actually a competitive job for properties like Facebook, which has made billions in profits replacing earlier time sucks like MySpace, Friendster, and AOL. Facebook itself faces competition from the likes of Twitter and Google, which is partly why it spends so much time trying to improve the relevance of its news feed.

It’s odd that Cuban, of all people, doesn’t appreciate the complexity involved in being a “time waster.” His NBA team the Mavericks spends inordinate time and money trying to be a compelling “time suck” for fans with nothing better to do than watch strangers play basketball for hours on end. The Mavericks hone elaborate on-court strategies, release and acquire highly skilled players, and strike complex broadcast and merchandizing arrangements. They don’t let just any random dribbler onto their home court to entertain the fans. Facebook works the same way.

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Mitt Romney a Twihard? Candidate and Wife Take in “Twilight” Finale

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – He may have missed out on becoming leader of the free world when he lost the election to President Obama, but Mitt Romney is keeping busy – with the romantic vampires and werewolves of “Twilight.”

Saturday night, he was spotted with his wife Ann heading into a showing of “Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ at a cineplex in Del Mar, Calif., by TMZ. After the movie, they and two young men went to a nearby pizza place, where they reportedly spoke and posed for pictures with patrons.

The Saturday night out for the Romneys was in contrast to the recent movie-viewing by the man who beat him in the election. President Obama last week viewed Oscar hopeful “Lincoln” in a special White House screening with several of the cast members and filmmakers.

There was no word on whether Romney or his wife aligned with Team Edward or Team Jacob.

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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In L.A., inexperienced teachers more likely to be assigned to students behind in math, study says

A new study has found that inexperienced teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District are disproportionately more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students, perpetuating the achievement gap.

The study also found that L.A. Unified teachers "vary substantially" in their effectiveness, with top teachers able to give students the equivalent of eight additional months of learning in a year compared with weaker instructors.

Such findings raise "deep concerns," said Drew Furedi, the district's executive director of talent management, who oversees teacher training. "For us, it's a call to action."

The study by the Strategic Data Project, which is affiliated with Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research, analyzed the performance of about 30% of L.A. Unified teachers and presented findings based primarily on students' standardized math test scores from 2005 through 2011 in grades three through eight. The study's authors acknowledged that test scores were only one measure of teacher effectiveness.

The study also found that teacher performance after two years is a fairly good predictor of future effectiveness. That finding could be used to challenge moves to overturn laws that let teachers gain tenure after just a few years — a growing effort by those who argue that administrators need more time to make that decision.

"Two years gives you a substantial amount of information," said Jon Fullerton, the research center's executive director.

Fullerton said L.A. Unified teachers varied more than those in three other school districts studied in North Carolina and Georgia. More so than in the other districts, Los Angeles schools also disproportionately placed newer teachers with less-proficient students: Their students were, on average, the equivalent of six months behind peers assigned to more experienced instructors.

The study did not explore the reasons for the situations it found, but it was aimed at providing "information and insight" to the district to craft responses, Fullerton said.

The study also found:

•The performance of math teachers improved quickly in the first five years, then leveled off.

• Those with advanced degrees were no more effective than those without, although L.A. Unified pays more to teachers pursuing such degrees.

• Long-term substitute teachers — who have been employed more frequently to fill in amid widespread layoffs — have positive effects in teaching middle-school math.

No single finding can produce a strategy to erase the district's substantial achievement gap between white students and their black and Latino counterparts, the study said, noting that the difference in performance on fifth-grade math tests was roughly equivalent to more than 1 1/2 years of learning. Multiple strategies would be needed, the study said.

Furedi said one key area of action would be the placement of effective teachers with lower-performing students. District Supt. John Deasy has made it clear that principals should strive to "understand where teachers are and place those with success in front of kids who need them most," Furedi said.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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Amazing Time-Lapse Video Features Ever-Changing Earth and Sky

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Heaven meets the Earth in this moving time-lapse video showing gorgeous landscapes underneath an ever-changing night sky.

“Within Two Worlds” was created by photographer Brad Goldpaint. The film features shooting comets, a giant tilting Milky Way, and glowing purple and pink auroras peeking over the horizon. Stunning sequences watch day turn to night and night to day, as overhead stars shine their beautiful light above mountains, forests, and waterfalls.

“This time-lapse video is my visual representation of how the night sky and landscapes co-exist within a world of contradictions. I hope this connection between heaven and earth inspires you to discover and create your own opportunities, to reach your rightful place within two worlds,” Goldpaint wrote on his Vimeo page.

Below you can see some of striking images from the movie, including screenshots of the Geminid meteor shower over Castle Lake in California and auroras over Crater Lake National park in Oregon.

Geminid meteor shower over Castle Lake

The Milky Way soars over Crater Lake as a Lyrid meteor flies overhead.

Star trails over Mount Shasta in California

Pink auroras over Crater Lake

Images and Video: Copyright Goldpaint Photography

Music composed by Serge Essiambre entitled, ‘Believe in Yourself’

Adam is a Wired reporter and freelance journalist. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.

Read more by Adam Mann

Follow @adamspacemann on Twitter.

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Movie industry has shed 16,000-plus jobs in L.A. since 2004, study says

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The motion-picture industry has lost more than 16,000 jobs in Los Angeles County since the peak year of 2004, according to a new study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

And according to the study, “runaway productions” that have moved out of the county due to tax incentives in other areas could be to blame.

The study noted that the motion-picture and video production sector of the entertainment industry – the largest segment of the industry in Los Angeles County – was responsible for 118,200 jobs in the county in 2004, a peak year for the sector. In 2011, by contrast, that number dropped to 102,100 – a 13.6 percent decrease that accounts for 16,100 jobs.

“Arguably, runaway production has had a deleterious effect on industry employment,” the report notes. “New York State alone added 14,100 jobs in this sector over that period, while Georgia added nearly 800 jobs. Meanwhile, Louisiana added over 2,200 jobs since implementing its own tax-credit program in 2002. Other states added jobs in the sector as well.”

The study also points out other factors that could account for the job drain, such as piracy and international competition in such farflung areas as Canada, India and Nigeria, which surpassed Hollywood in 2009 as the second-largest film producer in the world, following India’s Bollywood, according to a report from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Daniel Stern, Who Studied Babies’ World, Dies at 78

Dr. Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist who increased the understanding of early human development by scrutinizing the most minute interactions between mothers and babies, died on Nov. 12 in Geneva. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Dr. Nadia Bruschweiler Stern.

Dr. Stern was noted for his often poetic language in describing how children respond to their world — how they feel, think and see. He wrote one of his half-dozen books in the form of a diary by a baby. In another book, he told how mothers differ psychologically from women who do not have children. He coined the term “motherese” to describe a form of communication in which mothers are able to read even the slightest of babies’ emotional signals.

Dr. Stern, who did much of his research at what is now Weill Cornell Medical College and at the University of Geneva, drew inspiration from Jay S. Rosenblatt’s work with kittens at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. Dr. Rosenblatt discovered that when he removed kittens from their cage, they made their way to a specific nipple of their mother’s even when they were as young as one day old. That finding demonstrated that learning occurs naturally at an exceptionally early age in a way staged experiments had not.

Dr. Stern videotaped babies from birth through their early years, and then studied the tapes second by second to analyze interactions between mother and child. He challenged the Freudian idea that babies go through defined critical phases, like oral and anal. Rather, he said, their development is continuous, with each phase layered on top of the previous one. The interactions are punctuated by intervals, sometimes only a few seconds long, of rest, solitude and reflection. As this process goes on, they develop a sense that other people can and will share in their feelings, and in that way develop a sense of self.

These interactions can underpin emotional episodes that occur years in the future. Citing one example in a 1990 interview with The Boston Globe, Dr. Stern told of a 13-month-old who grabbed for an electric plug. His alarmed mother, who moments before had been silent and loving, suddenly turned angry and sour. Two years later, the child heard a fairy tale about a wicked witch.

“He’s been prepared for that witch for years,” Dr. Stern said. “He’s already seen someone he loves turn into something evil. It’s perfectly believable for him. He maps right into it.”

Dr. Stern described such phenomena in 1985 in “The Interpersonal World of the Infant,” which the noted psychologist Stanley Spiegel, in an interview in The New York Times, called “the book of the decade in its influence on psychoanalytic theory.”

In recent years, Dr. Stern ventured beyond childhood development to examine the psychology of how people thought about time. In one experiment, he interviewed people in depth about a single brief moment at breakfast and found that it took them a full hour to describe all that went through their minds in 30 seconds. This resulted in the 2004 book “The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life,” which called for people to appreciate every moment of experience and discussed the nature of memory.

In 2010, he published “Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development,” which used new understandings of neuroscience to explain human empathy.

Dr. Stern, who wrote hundreds of scientific articles, also painted, wrote poetry and had friendships with important artists. He gave Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, the title for his “Dances at a Gathering.” His friend Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director and playwright, said Dr. Stern’s slow-motion baby films helped inspire his seven-hour “silent opera,” “Deafman Glance.”

“So many things are going on, and the baby is picking them up,” Mr. Wilson said.

Daniel Norman Stern was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1934. He graduated from Harvard and completed his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After conducting psychopharmacology research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., he did his residency in psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He later trained as a psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia.

Dr. Stern is survived by his wife, a physician who collaborated on much of his research; two sons, Michael and Adrien; three daughters, Maria, Kaia and Alice Stern; a sister, Ronnie Chalif; and 12 grandchildren.

Dr. Stern pointed out how the evolution of the human body bolstered mother-child interaction. He noted that the distance between the eyes of a baby at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about 10 inches, exactly the distance for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for a young infant.

“Her smile exerts its natural evocative powers in him and breathes a vitality into him,” he wrote. “It makes him resonate with the animation she feels and shows. His joy rises. Her smile pulls it out of him.”

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Which Tablet to Buy Among Dozens Confuses Shoppers

Holiday shoppers with a tablet computer on their gift list this year might be forgiven for feeling a little panicked.

Look at the tablets available online or at a consumer electronics store and it can be dizzying to choose from among the dozens of slim rectangles with touch screens — each with various sizes, features, prices and applications.

Tablets were supposed to be a simple alternative to the bloated personal computer market. And when “tablet” was synonymous with “iPad,” that was true.

But this is the first holiday season in which the iPad faces competitors that have built up a solid footing in the market. Amazon and Google introduced tablets just in time for the shopping rush. As a result, many consumers and analysts say, the new market of keyboardless computers is quickly becoming as confusing as that of the old-school PC.

“What’s different about this holiday season is that consumers have not just more choice, but really good choices,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, who studies consumer computing trends at Forrester. “There have been many iPad wannabes but no real quality alternatives, and now there are several.”

While choice is a good thing for consumers, she said, it also makes shopping “confusing and complicated.”

For the companies that make tablets, the choice means everything. The stakes are much higher than the sale of individual devices. Each company is trying to snag lifelong customers for their other products — like music, apps, e-books, movies, Web search or word-processing software.

While Apple has dominated the market until now, selling more tablets than any other company, its perch is being threatened by the newcomers.

“Apple left a lot of room for rivals to grow,” said Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst.

By keeping its tablet prices so high, he said, Apple could lose its place as the biggest tablet seller, just as it did with smartphones when it lost the first-place position to Samsung, which makes less expensive phones using Google’s Android software. The iPad still dominates the market with a 50 percent share, according to third-quarter figures from the research firm IDC, but that is down from 60 percent a year ago. Samsung is in second place with an 18 percent share, Amazon is third with 9 percent, and Asus, which makes Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, is in fourth with 8.6 percent of the market.

But Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue on Web ads, still lags in the tablet market, even though sales of its Nexus 7 tablet are approaching one million a month, according to Asus. About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company. Google would like more of that traffic, as well as more buyers for apps and media from its Google Play store, as would Amazon and Microsoft.

“The first decision you make is what ecosystem am I in, do I want the Android Play store and content or some other?” said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president for engineering for Android. “So the importance of the ecosystem can’t be overstated.”

But the decisions after that are still complex.

Say, for example, that you want a tablet that runs Google’s Android operating system. There is the Nexus 7, a seven-inch tablet made by Asus, and the Nexus 10, a 10-inch tablet made by Samsung. Then there are the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, a 5.5-inch smartphone). And that’s not to mention the dozens of Android tablets made by Lenovo, Toshiba and others.

This year, Microsoft also has a tablet, called Surface. Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, and Barnes & Noble has the Nook HD and HD+. Once shoppers choose one, they have more choices to make, like whether they want to pay $15 more for the privilege of not seeing ads on the Kindle Fire.

Even Apple, which has always prided itself on having simple product lines, now offers the new iPad, the older iPad 2 and the iPad Mini. If you factor in the various amounts of storage and the choice of cellular data or just Wi-Fi, there are essentially 14 iPad models to choose from.

Complicating the decision on hardware, different tablets connect to different online stores for apps, music and video. If you have built your music and app collection on Apple devices, an Android tablet may mean starting from scratch, and vice versa.

The proliferation of products is nothing new for a mature market, as anyone who has stood in front of a wall of televisions at Best Buy or in a parking lot of Priuses at a Toyota dealership knows.

But some consumer electronics companies that have given their customers too many options have run into trouble, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee. They include Motorola Mobility, which is trying to rescue its cellphone business by paring its lineup of 27 devices, and Research in Motion, which offers a perplexing matrix of BlackBerrys with confusing names, like the BlackBerry Torch 9810, 9850 and 9860.

Google in particular runs this risk, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner, because it gives away its Android operating system to any device manufacturer that wants to use it, resulting in an uncontrolled array of Android devices running different versions of the software. Some apps will work only with particular versions, making it difficult to know exactly what you are getting.

Google has tried to address this problem in recent months. It gave its line of Nexus products names corresponding to their screen size and began selling them in its Play store. (Google teams up with manufacturers to build the Nexus devices.) It began running ads for the tablets online, on billboards, in print and on television, which had been rare for the company, and assigned a public relations employee to focus on selling hardware to consumers.

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