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1531953_1 | Europe and U.S. at Odds On Airlines and Privacy | name and date of intended travel to luggage tag numbers, but also including sensitive payment information and billing and e-mail addresses, to be supplied before a passenger arrives. European officials maintain their willingness to stand by the United States in its war against terrorism. But by and large Europe has been more sensitive about divulging personal information in the computer age than the United States has. Much of the housing and personal-finance information that is readily available about Americans is protected by strict European privacy laws. European officials justify their stand by citing recent examples of the privacy issues that have been raised by the Bush administration's airline-security campaign. Two federal agencies announced in September that they were investigating JetBlue Airways in response to the airline's admission that it illegally provided a Pentagon contractor with information about more than one million of its passengers as part of a program to track high-risk passengers. They cite news reports that the Bush administration is using expanded authority under the U.S.A. Patriot Act in criminal investigations that have little or nothing to do with terrorism. Last March the European Union gave airlines permission to comply temporarily with the requests from the United States even though they violate European privacy laws. Now the E.U. is trying to negotiate a formal solution that will respect European privacy laws while providing the United States the information it says it needs. In recent weeks the union's commissioner in charge of data-protection issues, Frits Bolkestein, has been meeting with Asa Hutchinson, the under secretary for transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security, to reach a compromise. This summer, Homeland Security appointed a chief privacy officer, Nuala O'Connor Kelly, in part to allay European concerns. But the Europeans have argued that since Ms. O'Connor Kelly reports to the department's hierarchy, she cannot be considered an independent arbiter. After the last meeting in Brussels in September, Mr. Bolkestein and Mr. Hutchinson continued to disagree about the kind of information the airlines should be required to provide, how long it should be kept and for what purposes it should be used. Mr. Bolkestein told Mr. Hutchinson that access to the information should be limited to anti-terrorism purposes. A further meeting in Washington last month, between Mr. Bolkestein and Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security secretary, also made little headway. Although both men said after their meeting that they hoped to reach |
1533509_0 | Treating Osteoporosis | To the Editor: The discovery of a gene linked to osteoporosis by scientists in Iceland (front page, Nov. 3) offers an exciting new development in research on this serious public health problem. You say, ''The new finding comes at a time of particular difficulty for doctors trying to treat the disease.'' In fact, the recent news indicating that estrogen should not be used solely to prevent osteoporosis is not a problem for most patients, as five other drugs -- alendronate, risedronate, raloxifene, calcitonin and teriparatide -- have passed Food and Drug Administration scrutiny. Bone density testing, which is safe, painless and reimbursed by Medicare and many other payers, is the best way to evaluate fracture risk in postmenopausal women. Genetic testing may well be the promise of the future, but for now, we have good tests and good drugs for the women who need them. ETHEL S. SIRIS, M.D. New York, Nov. 3, 2003 The writer is director of the Toni Stabile Osteoporosis Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital. |
1533535_2 | Disability Requests Reflect Changes in SAT Procedure | public school districts, the process is well-defined, with evaluations provided by the district, and, if appropriate, placement in special education, with an individualized education plan that may include extended time on all tests. Affluent districts, like those in Unionville, Pa., or Basking Ridge, N.J. -- both of which were on the list of 142 schools -- have a far higher rate of accommodations than large urban districts. ''We generally pick up kids who have disabilities and get them tested and into special education, with an academic plan, well before high school,'' said David Dickens, the principal of Unionville High School, whose district last year was Pennsylvania's most affluent. ''We did not have parents coming in this fall and saying they want extra time now that the SAT is unflagged.'' The situation is far murkier in private schools, where, typically, parents who believe their child would do better with extra time go to a private evaluator and come back with a report recommending extended time on tests, a report that is usually accepted. ''We have high-powered, savvy parents, and if they come in with a $3,000 evaluation, dead set on getting extra time, it's very difficult to turn them down,'' said a learning specialist at one selective New York City private school. ''I think the College Board's doing the right thing, and helping us not buckle to parental pressure. But right now we're seeing a lot of freaked-out parents.'' Many school psychologists and guidance counselors said they were pleased to see the College Board tightening its reins. ''I think the College Board is appropriate in looking harder at questionable requests, especially when a child hasn't shown previous need for accommodations,'' said Jill Schehr, the school psychologist at Solomon Schechter School of Westchester. But Ms. Schehr and others said it was only natural that affluent schools used accommodations at a high rate, since parents in those communities were aware that a child's lagging school performance might be because of a disability and were able to afford extensive private testing. At a College Board forum on accommodations in Manhattan, a California educational consultant said on Monday that parents often had trouble accepting that even if an evaluation concluded that their child could benefit from extra testing time, that was not a diagnosis of a learning disability. ''Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that someone could benefit from extra time does not |
1533581_3 | 9/11 Panel Issues Subpoena to Pentagon | of the joint Congressional committee that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks last year, said that a White House offer made this month for partial access to the Oval Office documents was ''completely unacceptable.'' The White House refused to provide copies of the daily intelligence reports to the joint Congressional committee last year, citing executive privilege and the need to prevent leaks of highly classified material. The White House acknowledged last year, in response to news reports, that one of the daily Oval Office intelligence reports in August 2001, the month before the terror attacks, referred to the possibility that Al Qaeda would hijack passenger planes. Last month, the chairman of the federal commission, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that the White House would be unable to assert executive privilege with his panel in denying document requests and that he was willing to subpoena the intelligence reports if they were not made available. The subpoena to the Pentagon today was the second that the commission has issued and reflected the panel's growing antagonism with the Bush administration, which had initially opposed the creation of an independent commission to investigate law-enforcement and intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks. The first subpoena was issued last month to the Federal Aviation Administration. Another Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Washington lawyer, said in an interview that the panel's inability to obtain documents from Norad had seriously set back the work of the panel. ''The result of Norad's noncompliance will be to delay hearings which we had previously scheduled for January and which will require a significant amount of staff backtracking,'' he said. ''The information that we need bears not only on the events of 9/11, which we are charged with reconstructing in a complete and accurate manner, but it also bears on the level of preparedness of our nation's air defenses.'' In its statement, the commission said it had alerted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the panel's problems in obtaining documents related to the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Mr. Rumsfeld had ''pledged to do everything in his power to address the commission's concerns -- he has already taken strong steps to back up this pledge.'' The commission said that its problems in obtaining Pentagon documents were ''not general'' and that ''other components of D. O. D. have provided vital assistance to the commission.'' |
1533597_0 | Our Man In Havana | It would take some chutzpah for me to accuse President Bush, Congressional Democrats and a courageous Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident of bolstering some of the world's most odious dictators. But here goes. The Bush administration has variously backed, threatened, acquiesced in or hinted at tough new sanctions against Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Burma. Democrats helped lead the fight for a new ban on imports from Burma. And the gutsy Nobel laureate from Burma, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, backs sanctions that help impoverish her own people. The U.S. imposed 85 new unilateral economic sanctions on foreign nations from 1996 to 2001. But sanctions, which cost U.S. companies up to $19 billion in 1995 alone, aren't a policy; they're a feel-good substitute for one. Usually they hurt just the people we're trying to help. Fortunately, the Senate last month joined the House in voting to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba. There is now some hope that the U.S. will dismantle the Cuba sanctions, which have hurt ordinary Cubans while helping Fidel Castro, giving him a scapegoat for his economic failures. Take Burma (or Myanmar, as its thuggish generals have tried to rename it). Republicans and Democrats alike approved tough new sanctions against Burma this year, by a vote of 97 to 1 in the Senate. The reality is that Western sanctions have already been failing in Burma for the last 14 years, as they have for more than 40 years in Cuba, as they did for a dozen years in Iraq. We should have learned from Iraq that arms embargoes and U.N. inspections can do some good, while economic sanctions kill children. The claim that sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children, a figure that originated in a Unicef report, was probably exaggerated, but no one doubts that U.N. sanctions contributed to child malnutrition and mortality in Iraq. The U.S. State Department says in a new report that our July ban on Burmese imports has already led to 30,000 to 40,000 layoffs in the garment industry, and that ultimately 100,000 Burmese may lose jobs. Most of them are young women who have no other way of earning a living, and the State Department says that some are being forced, or duped, into prostitution (where many will be killed by AIDS). ''We do believe that some of those young women have gone into the sex trade,'' said Richard Boucher, the State Department |
1532929_0 | World Business Briefing | Global Trade: Mixed Export Data | Southeast Asia's latest trade gauges offer a mixed picture on demand for exports from the United States. A closely watched barometer of manufacturing activity in Singapore rose in October to its highest level in more three years, as faster demand from the United States brightened Singapore's economic prospects. The jump in the purchasing managers' index, compiled by the Institute of Purchasing and Materials Management in Singapore, was the biggest in 18 months. A similar trend is appearing in the Philippines, where the government reported that exports in September rose 2.3 percent, to $3.26 billion, led by a rise in electronics shipments. But exports in Malaysia and Indonesia shrank in September. Wayne Arnold (NYT) |
1535979_3 | A Quick Swing Through Little Costa Rica | trained to see them and, unless one is a skilled spotter or bird-watcher, extremely helpful. My wife, Janice, and I were part of a group of 11 Americans, all well traveled, touring under the auspices of Overseas Adventure Travel of Cambridge, Mass. Our 13-day itinerary took us generally north and west of the capital, San José, once descending to the edge of the Caribbean slope as far as the Sarapiquí River area and its Centro Neotrópico. The centro is an eco-tourism complex established by presidential decree in 1997 at the entrance to the Tirimbina Rainforest Preserve. It's a trip of a few hours from the capital over paved roads, almost 50 miles from the Caribbean itself but with the terrain that exemplifies the jungles on the east side of the Central American Great Divide. At Sarapiquí there are gardens and one of the country's few anthropological sites. Maleko Indians left 70 burial sites here, along with some pottery and petroglyphs. There's a small, well-appointed anthropological museum near the site and a pleasant bar to reflect on it all while listening to howler monkeys and catching the rain-forest breezes. We were traveling in the late-summer rainy season, but our first few days were spared spectacular downpours. The centro offers accommodation in large rooms within thatched buildings in the pre-Columbian village style. The Tirimbina preserve, 820 acres of rich tropical woodlands, is easily accessible across suspension bridges from the Sarapiquí complex. Trails lead through Tirimbina, and, for visitors who want a closer experience of the Sarapiquí River, guided white-water rafting. The rapids are fun, novice class, and along the river, creatures abound: iguanas, sloths and basilisks, along with enough exotic birds to provide regular new entries in a birder's logbook. Our next destination was in the humid tropical forest of the Bosque de Chachagua, not far from the volcano at Arenal. We spent an hour in the town of Quesada, buying meat and vegetables to be cooked later at our hotel, a cluster of pleasant but basic cabins on a hillside. Maintaining the good will of a market stall merchant while attempting to purchase a food item you most imperfectly pronounce -- which in fact you have never tasted, which could be for all you know animal, vegetable or mineral, which in fact you would not recognize if a three-toed sloth hit you on the head with it -- is a reasonable |
1535493_4 | Higher and Higher | Rockefeller's aides persuaded McKinsey to withdraw, and the report, in retrospect on target, was never completed. The architect, Minoru Yamasaki of Detroit, was selected in part because of the delicacy of a project he designed for the Seattle World's Fair. Working with the Port Authority was both painful and corrupting for Yamasaki. Some of the most compelling pages in the book tell how he was forced to abandon delicacy and playfulness for gigantism. He did preserve the thin spandrels that defined the building's facade, and that -- along with the height -- demanded innovative engineering, the brilliant work of John Skilling. A special strength of ''City in the Sky'' is the detail and clarity (including exceptionally effective illustrations) of the discussion of the engineering challenges. The structural innovations worked; when the planes struck the towers, the load was shifted as Skilling had calculated. The engineers were aware of the danger posed by jet fuel if a plane hit the towers, but it was not addressed; nor was heat. Decisions by the Port Authority, which was exempt from the city building code, resulted in grossly inadequate fireproofing. The history of the World+Trade+Center was so short that many of the workers who had built the towers helped with the cleanup. Glanz and Lipton rely on interviews to capture key personalities and moments, and the reporting of the collapse and recovery deploys many affecting vignettes to evoke the human experience of the tragedy. The story of the building of the World Trade Center+echoes disturbingly through the rebuilding project today. Save for the McKinsey analysts, who were ignored, no one considered the larger context of the city's development, nor did anyone pay attention to civic stakeholders' wishes for a less dense area, with greater mixed use. Then and now, the city tried to expand the discussion to larger urban issues, only to be shut out by the state.+And in both cases, a bizarre commitment to 10 million square feet of rentable space undercut sensible urban design and worried the real estate industry. Compliant architects were once pressed by developer-oriented state agencies into compromises that resulted in a monumental failure -- and might be again in the rebuilding project. Does this excellent history amount to a timely alert? Might those who fail to learn from history risk repeating it? Thomas Bender,+the+author+of ''The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea,''+teaches history at New York University. |
1535805_0 | FOLLOWING UP | A Ride Loses Its Rust, But Future Is Unclear It has been deconstructed and reconstructed, and, in between, repainted and restrengthened. Now the question of what's next for the long-orphaned parachute jump in Coney Island is afloat in New York City's bureaucracy. The 262-foot jump ceased functioning as a ride in 1968 after nearly three decades as one of the most popular and thrilling attractions in the bazaar of seaside diversions that made Coney Island famous. But the area's decline left a shrinking amusement park by the 1960's, and the abandoned, rusting steel jump became for some people a depressing reminder of glory gone. Others saw the skeletal tower as a New York City icon, and they prevailed in 1989 when the city designated it for preservation as an official landmark. In 2001, the city's effort to revive Coney Island scored a big run when the Brooklyn Cyclones began playing minor league baseball in the new KeySpan Park, behind whose right-field corner the jump soars. Last year, the city began a $5 million renovation of the tower and said there would be a study on how it could be used again. The renovation was completed four months ago, an official of the city's Economic Development Corporation said last week. About two-thirds of the structure was taken down, in sections weighing up to 34,000 pounds. Deteriorating elements were replaced, and a new coat of bright-red paint was applied before re-erection, said the official, Mel Glickman, an executive vice president. The study, however, has not yet begun. A corporation spokeswoman, Janel Patterson, said there was no indication when it would get under way, let alone when activity might return to the tower. She said a review of legal and other issues, including public access to the jump, had to be completed first. The study is to be financed by the office of the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz. Ms. Patterson said it would assess the practicality of ''all options,'' including putting a restaurant in the tower's base and even reviving the parachute ride. Adrian Benepe, the city's parks commissioner, said, ''It would be nice to see something where people could get to the top and get a view.'' But he said the cost of operating a restored parachute ride could well keep the idea grounded. Ex-Firefighter's Film On 9/11 Gets Audience In August 2002, Mike Lennon, a retired New York City firefighter |
1535872_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1535711_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1535586_9 | 'Master and Commander': On the Far Side of Credibility | action as O'Brian's capstan pawls and mangerboards are to the novel. Nor will such otiose detail compensate O'Brian fans and perhaps others for the wild absurdities of the plot, especially the climactic scene in which the Surprise relies upon a ruse to challenge the more powerful Acheron. Maturin goes ashore on the Galapagos with Midshipman Blakeney and finds a phasmid -- an insect that disguises itself to resemble a twig so as not to alarm its unsuspecting prey or become the prey of another predator. Aha! thinks Aubrey when he is shown this creature. So we shall disguise the Surprise and, like the phasmid, swallow the Acheron. The plan is for the Surprise to imitate a whaling ship by dressing the crew as civilians, painting out its name and contriving a smudge pot to billow black smoke from her deck as if she were rendering blubber. Then when the French ship comes alongside to seize its prey, the British will board and try to seize her instead. Aubrey has depended on disguise before, often sailing under false colors, a legitimate tactic at the time. In ''Master and Commander,'' the first novel in O'Brian's 20-volume series, he pretended to be a Danish ship under quarantine, an episode partly based on a real event, in order to deceive a larger enemy. Whalers have also been known to adopt disguises against predators. But Acheron and Surprise have been chasing each other for weeks, so that even the French captain's hat, seen through Aubrey's spyglass, is familiar to the Surprise, which must by now be no less familiar to the Acheron's crew. Aubrey's clumsy disguise does nothing to alter his ship's distinctive profile or to simulate the characteristic whaleboats that hang from davits above a whaling ship's deck. It is as if today a guided missile cruiser repainted itself so as to be mistaken for a shrimp boat. Luckily for Aubrey, the Acheron proves to be manned by idiots, not one of whom recognizes the frigate they have been chasing throughout the film. As the French privateer comes alongside, the Surprise opens fire and prepares to board the mighty ship. But audiences who have remained in their seats to this point deserve to see for themselves what happens next. FILM Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and other publications. |
1535550_4 | Mr. Bodacious | porcelain-white flesh gleaming against leathery grounds). Other pictures go in the opposite direction. They affect the dumb look of calendar pin-ups and might show scenes in which nude blondes appraise the precise size of their absurd cantaloupe-like breasts. In the early 90's, Currin found another unlikely muse: the lonely postmenopausal woman. ''Ms. Omni'' is an unsettling portrait of a stylish 60-ish matron who looks a little desperate as she stands with her hands on her narrow hips, her clingy blue shirt revealing more than we want to see of her bra-less chest. (The painting, by the way, holds the price record for a Currin work, $650,000.) Curiously, in an age when depictions of nudity have become so commonplace as to barely warrant notice (or so the pundits say), Currin's critics have tended to ignore his stylistic felicities in favor of his fixation with female breasts. He has managed to incite the wrath of even the most worldly observers. In 1992, Kim Levin of The Village Voice, reviewing Currin's first one-man show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, discerned so much misogyny that she demanded that the show be boycotted. On one occasion when the artist's work was exhibited in London, Richard Dorment, the critic of The Daily Telegraph, noted scornfully that ''if Bill Clinton were an artist he'd paint like John Currin.'' It may not exonerate Currin of sexism, but if you look at his paintings in psychological terms, his women can be read as fantasy portraits of himself. He keeps a full-length mirror in his studio and frequently consults his own reflection for help with anatomical details. The curve of his calf or left shoulder might wind up grafted onto a kittenish female figure. He has stuffed balloons up his shirt to simulate the odalisques of art history. One of his most arresting pictures -- ''Mary O'Connel,'' a yearbook-style portrait of a teenage girl with blond winged hair and beady eyes that hint at a buried anger -- resembles the face of no one so much as Currin himself. ''I get energy from using myself as a model,'' he says. ''I definitely identify more with women than with men. Making metaphors out of women comes more easily to me than telling a story with both men and women. My mom -- she wants a lot of things, and she dreams a lot, and I think I have a lot of |
1535549_8 | Remote Possibilities | their core friends and family but are less likely to engage the civic life around them. ''When you're waiting for the bus and it's late, you could talk to the person next to you. But if you're texting to someone, you won't talk to that stranger,'' he says. In Italy, it's even a marital problem. Husbands have been caught incessantly texting their mistresses while hanging out with their wives; newspapers have recently begun printing how-to guides explaining ways to erase the trace evidence. Ling has found that 20 percent of Norwegian teenagers are up past midnight at least one night a week texting with friends, destroying their sleep habits. ''Phones are now the flashlight beneath the covers,'' he says. But even if we'd like to pull back from today's mobile culture, it would not prove easy. Indeed, the next generation of phones is slated to become even more sophisticated. Phone companies have begun offering ''location based'' services with handsets that let other people know where you're walking, all day long. Next year, the French telecommunications equipment company Alcatel will offer Guardian Angel, which will let people track the movements of their children (or their Alzheimer's-ridden elderly parents) via their phones. We won't need to send out those ''where are you?'' queries anymore; instead, we'll have a nearly psychic level of knowledge about one another. New forms of play will arise: in Sweden and Finland, teenagers already play BotFighters war games -- one phone attacks another if they get physically close enough, like two Game Boys sensing each other's presence. Nokia's N-Gage phone, designed specifically to run games, lets players go head to head in a racing or fighting game with anyone nearby. Beyond this ''whoa'' potential, though, the privacy implications of location-based capabilities are hair-raising, says Roger Entener, a mobile-phone analyst at the Yankee Group. ''Your spouse will say she's on a business trip in Kansas City, but you'll notice that her phone is actually down in Chelsea. So you'll go, Hmm, what's happening there?'' Yet even then, observers say, people will probably never be willing to rein in their mobile lives. Bell tells a story that illustrates just how central phones now are. In Malaysia, she recently attended a ''feast of the hungry ghosts,'' where Chinese Malays burn paper replicas of food. ''They do it to ensure that their ancestors are well fed,'' Bell notes. But in recent years, |
1538032_0 | E-mail Messages From Beyond | Die-hard e-mail users take note: You can click ''send'' from the hereafter. Mylastemail.com, a British company, has introduced a service to hold a writer's farewell e-mail messages for three years, to be delivered after the writer's death. The service costs $10, and if the three-year period expires before the subscriber does, the customer can renew. The site saves customers and their families from having to make premature farewells, said Karen Peach, a company founder. ''It's not always appropriate to leave the house every day and make some long speech to your husband or children about how you might not return,'' said Ms. Peach, who spoke by telephone from Yorkshire. ''We thought it would be good to have a log to put your thoughts down where there's no danger of people coming across it.'' Subscribers can store and update up to 5 megabytes of e-mail, video clips or photos, then print instructions so survivors can notify the site operators of the subscriber's death. When the company receives a death notification, it sends e-mail messages to designated survivors, prompting them to retrieve the messages from the site. To ensure privacy, the company says it uses an encryption system to bar employees from reading the mail. The service is not the first of its type, but it is less expensive than LastWishes.com, which not only transmits post-mortem e-mail messages but lets the user communicate about details like burial arrangements and financial disbursements. LastWishes, which has offices in Britain and the United States, charges a $40 enrollment fee, plus $5 a year or $99 for a lifetime membership. In contrast, Ms. Peach said mylastemail ''wanted to do this as simple as possible.'' She said she was pleased with the early response. As of late last week, the site had more than 5 million visits. The number of subscribers was not disclosed; none had yet died. Ms. Peach said that the company had set up ''an escrow relationship'' with another company to guarantee continuation of the service in the event that all five of mylastemail's employees died suddenly. The same company would step in, she said, should mylastemail go bankrupt. |
1538018_2 | In War Over Spam, One Company Is Happily Arming Both Sides | if IronPort can change the way SpamCop operates.'' Some antispam activists are not so worried. ''IronPort's reputation is pretty spotless,'' said Adam Brower, a volunteer at the Spamhaus Project, a spam-fighting group. ''They can help improve SpamCop.'' IronPort denies that there is a conflict in working with commercial e-mail senders and with mail recipients angry about the deluge of unwanted e-mail. And the company says it does not plan to water down SpamCop's current service. Instead, IronPort is attempting to profit from senders as well as receivers of e-mail. The company, which is based in San Bruno, Calif., has created a program, Bonded Sender, that allows senders of e-mail marketing to register and promise to send messages only to people who request them. These senders will be put on a so-called ''white list,'' and participating Internet providers and companies will agree to deliver their messages. (Senders who end up sending spam would be kicked off the list and forfeit a bond they had posted.) Truste, the Internet privacy monitoring organization, has agreed to help supervise the senders in the IronPort program, for a fee, paid by each sender. Bonded Sender is just getting started, but participants already include some major e-mail senders like Cnet Networks, and some big Internet providers like Time Warner's Road Runner unit. ''The reason we started Bonded Sender is that legitimate senders were getting caught in spam filters,'' said Scott Weiss, IronPort's chief executive. ''If we can solve the problem, it is better for the entire industry.'' The market for corporate spam filters is quite fragmented. There are companies, like Brightmail, that sell spam filtering programs that companies can run on their existing mail processing computers. There are companies, like Postini, that filter spam as a service; clients route their mail to these companies to have the spam removed and the rest of the mail is then forwarded to the clients' own mail systems. And there are those, like IronPort and the larger CipherTrust, that make special e-mail processing computers known as gateways. These computers not only filter spam but also try to prevent viruses and other attacks that come through e-mail. Such protection is not cheap: IronPort's e-mail receiving machines can cost $25,000 to $60,000 each. IronPort, which is private and backed by venture capital, expects to turn its first profit next year on revenue of more than $10 million. It was founded by Mr. |
1631988_1 | Job Growth Down Sharply From Pace Set in October | but the United States still has at least 200,000 fewer jobs than it did before the recession began. At the same time, the adult population has grown by about four million. ''The economy is adding jobs, but not at a feverish pace,'' said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research, an economic research firm in New York. ''Economic growth is not expanding at a pace that can engender stellar job growth, and I think you have to get used to these kinds of numbers.'' The biggest areas of hiring last month were at financial companies and in health services like nursing and home health care. But retailers, who had been a primary source of lower-paying jobs, actually shed 16,000 positions in November and have essentially done no net hiring since July. Manufacturers, who have shed over 2.5 million jobs over the last four years, added no additional workers for the fourth consecutive month. The biggest weakness among manufacturers was among computer and electronics companies, which have been stymied by an unexpected sluggishness of corporate spending on information technology. Computer companies dropped 3,800 jobs last month and total employment in that sector is exactly even compared with one year ago. Bond investors reacted to the disappointing report by pushing up the price of Treasury securities, on the expectation that economic growth will be more moderate and that the Federal Reserve will be under less pressure to raise interest rates. But the Fed is almost certain to raise short-term rates by another quarter-point at its next policy meeting on Dec. 14. The central bank has been raising rates since June at what officials call a ''measured pace,'' and officials have given no hint that they are ready to pause in that process. Indeed, economic growth is likely to reach 4 percent in 2004, well above the long-term growth rate, and ''real'' interest rates are still about zero after subtracting the effects of inflation. Most analysts said the economy was still poised for moderate employment growth over the next year. So far this year, the economy has added about 2 million jobs, an average of about 185,000 jobs a month. Economists estimate that the nation needs to generate about 150,000 jobs a month to keep up with the increase in population, which means that employment is keeping slightly ahead of job seekers. ''Available data suggest the recovery remains surprisingly resilient, despite concerns about |
1633414_0 | Effort in Northern Ireland Falls Short of Restoring Shared Power | The prime ministers of Britain and Ireland admitted Wednesday that they had so far failed to restore a power-sharing government between Catholics and Protestants in this British province, which is still trying to recover from three decades of sectarian violence. The reason, they said, was that the two sides could not agree on verifiable means to destroy the last arms caches of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, and Ireland's leader, Bertie Ahern, had hoped to appear together in Belfast's gleaming new Waterfront Hall -- a sign of the economic prosperity that has become more important than politics or strife for many in Northern Ireland -- to celebrate a new agreement. Instead, they expressed frustration with the process and said they were now looking for public support to push the parties toward final compromises before the end of December. That is the deadline the I.R.A. had accepted during the negotiations to complete final acts of disarmament before independent military inspectors. It also pledged to declare an end to warfare and to transform itself into a peaceful organization in return for a full power-sharing partnership with the Protestant majority. Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern also released the draft texts of an agreement and draft public statements to show that they are on the verge of a significant breakthrough. ''We are now on the brink of an accommodation that would have been regarded as impossible a short time ago,'' Mr. Ahern said. He evoked the memory of those who had died or lost family members in the conflict and added, ''It is certainly not acceptable that we should fall short.'' Mr. Blair said he felt that all parties to the two years of complex negotiations -- aimed at ending the conflict, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives -- had climbed to the peak of a mountain only to find ''another mound to go.'' He said he was ''weary as a traveler'' from the negotiations, ''but not downhearted.'' For the moment, the snag is all about photographs -- whether an official photographer can document the destruction of I.R.A. weapons and whether the photographs can then be published in March, when, under the draft agreement made public on Wednesday, Protestant and Catholic politicians in the six counties of Northern Ireland would return to their seat of government at Stormont Castle. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political |
1633343_0 | Certain Type of Breast Cancer Drug Shows Better Result in Study | A class of hormone-blocking drugs called aromatase inhibitors was more effective in preventing breast cancer recurrence in women past menopause than was tamoxifen, a medication now prescribed by many doctors, researchers reported yesterday. The authors of the study, published online in the British medical journal The Lancet, said the findings suggested that aromatase inhibitors should replace tamoxifen as the first line of treatment for postmenopausal women with breast cancer. But other experts said it was too early to tell if treating women with aromatase inhibitors from the outset was better than using tamoxifen first, followed by the newer drugs. The researchers followed more than 9,000 women in 20 countries for roughly five years. They found that women who took the drug Arimidex, one of three aromatase inhibitors on the market, had a lower rate of recurrence and fewer side effects than those who used tamoxifen. ''I think tamoxifen is going to have a difficult time from now on,'' said Dr. Anthony Howell, the lead author of the study and a professor of medical oncology at the University of Manchester in England. The study was financed by AstraZeneca PLC, the London-based maker of Arimidex. Dr. Howell is listed in the medical journal as having received speaking fees from the company. Several experts, while saying that the new findings were encouraging, called the authors' conclusions premature. They said other research suggested that many women might gain a slight advantage by taking the two drugs sequentially, tamoxifen for two to three years followed by an aromatase inhibitor. And it will be at least another year before studies are completed that directly compare an aromatase inhibitor alone with a combination of the two drugs. The United States' leading group of cancer specialists recommended last month that women take an aromatase inhibitor at some point in their treatment, but said it was not clear whether taking the drug from the outset was better. Those guidelines will not change as a result of the new study, said Dr. Eric P. Winer, who was chairman of the technology assessment panel for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which issued the recommendations. ''The unanswered question at the moment is whether aromatase inhibitors should be used as an initial therapy or whether they might work even better if tamoxifen is given first for some amount of time,'' said Dr. Winer, who is also director of the breast oncology center |
1631711_2 | More Data Sought on Drug for Sex Drive | but not until millions of women had used those drugs for years. Whether such risks exist for Intrinsa, they said, cannot be known because only a small number of women have used the patch for more than one year. Procter & Gamble, known more for consumer products than for drugs, said in a statement after the meeting that it planned to work closely with the agency ''on a practical approach to provide additional safety data.'' The number of cases of sexual dysfunction in women has been estimated in the millions. As a result, the first successful drug for the disorder could become a big seller, as Viagra has been for male erectile dysfunction. Procter & Gamble was seeking approval for Intrinsa in women who have had their ovaries removed. But it is also studying the drug for use in naturally menopausal women, a much larger potential market. In clinical trials, the drug increased the number of sexual experiences the women characterized as satisfying to about five a month from three. Placebos increased the number to four a month. The drug also increased women's sexual desire and decreased their distress about their lack of desire, as measured by questionnaires. The F.D.A. staff questioned whether the benefits were ''clinically meaningful,'' but in Procter & Gamble's favor, the committee voted by a margin of 14 to 3 that they were. In testimony to the committee, groups including the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Hyster Sisters, a support group for women who have undergone hysterectomies, urged approval of the drug. They said low sexual desire is a serious problem that can damage a woman's self esteem, relationships and overall quality of life. ''Unless you have experienced the lack of sexual desire you cannot completely understand the feeling of frustration and the sense of inadequacy I have,'' said Roslyn Washington of Silver Spring, Md., who tried Intrinsa in a clinical trial. But Public Citizen, a watchdog group, and Breast Cancer Action, a patient advocacy group, among others, argued that the drug was too risky to be approved, especially since it would probably be used widely by women of various ages. Jonathan Tobert, a consultant who represented the pharmaceutical industry as a nonvoting member of the committee, said requiring a huge trial to rule out long-term risks would be impractical and set a precedent that would make it difficult for other drugs to be approved. |
1631689_1 | No Bear Hunt in New Jersey, State's Highest Court Decides | ordered his agency's Division of Fish and Wildlife not to grant bear hunting permits and closed all department land to bear hunting. In its unanimous order yesterday, the Supreme Court said that in light of the dispute between Mr. Campbell and the council, no hunt could take place until the state adopts a comprehensive bear management policy. Two weeks ago, the Appellate Division of New Jersey Superior Court ruled that Mr. Campbell overstepped his authority when he refused to issue permits, and it ordered the department to begin processing hunting licenses. More than 3,700 permits had been issued by yesterday afternoon. Mr. Campbell said he was pleased with yesterday's Supreme Court's ruling and said he would work with the Fish and Game Council to prepare a bear policy. ''This has been a tough strain on the relationship between the department and hunters and anglers,'' Mr. Campbell said during a telephone conference last evening. ''I look forward to working with the Fish and Game Council in developing a comprehensive black bear management strategy that works.'' Anthony Cali, one of the hunters involved in the lawsuit against the state, said he was disappointed by yesterday's ruling and believed that politics won out over science in the court's decision. ''We assumed the law would be on our side,'' Mr. Cali said, ''but it looks like politics ruled, and it's disappointing because there are a lot of hunters, myself included, who put a lot of time into preparing for the hunt and will now have to wait another year, or longer, to try our luck. But the commissioner wanted to stop the hunt, and he did.'' W. Scott Ellis, chairman of the Fish and Game Council, said he blames Mr. Campbell for canceling the hunt, saying it was he who ''decided to not act on the advice of the council to control the population and instead decided to play politics.'' ''If there is any damage or injury caused by black bears in the state, Mr. Campbell is the sole person who should shoulder the responsibility, because he is the reason bears will be around,'' Mr. Ellis said. Mr. Campbell, who supported last year's hunt, in which 328 bears were killed, said the state would rely on public awareness and experimental contraceptive programs to control the bear population, which he said is around 1,600. Several independent studies have estimated the number at closer to 3,200. |
1631656_2 | The Newest Hot Rods: Retro, Resto and Rat | rodders to the ranks and the abundant disposable income of some baby boomers, who are finally getting the cars they wished they had in high school. The industry is now so big that it is possible to build a hot rod entirely from new parts. And for purists who want old parts, the Internet has eliminated the hallowed junkyard crawl, once a rite of passage. ''Places like eBay have just revolutionized the way we shop for parts,'' said Rob Kinnan, the editor of Hot Rod magazine. The very fact that new reproduction steel bodies are available is an indicator of the trend, since making them requires big investments in heavy stamping machinery. ''Thirty years ago those parts came in fiberglass because it's easier and cheaper to produce,'' Mr. Aust said. ''Now guys are putting out $4 million for a stamping plant because they know they can make their money back, where they would never have made it back before.'' Though proof is hard to come by, hot rodders like to say that there are more 1932 Fords on the road today than were built 72 years ago (254,694 cars). But as hot rodding has grown, the cars have evolved beyond the originals they emulate. Many have air-conditioning, automatic transmissions and power steering, fancy paint jobs and even fancier body styles. Lloyd Earle, a retired Tucson businessman, has a $40,000 purple 1932 Ford roadster made from reproduction parts. It has a Jaguar rear end and a $100 electric Retract-A-Plate, which hides the license plate when he switches off the ignition. ''Who wants to look at a license plate?'' he said. At the other extreme, Monti Messick, an insurance investigator who is a friend of Mr. Earle and Mr. Ribeau, is so committed to the period look of his all-reproduction 1932 coupe that he replaced the modern disc brakes with the big finned drum brakes from a mid-1950's Buick because they were state of the art a half century ago. ''It's just the authentic look,'' Mr. Messick said. But Mr. Messick could have faked it. Cal Speed Shop, a big hot-rod parts retailer, makes dummy Buick drums to fit over disc brakes. Authenticity has its price. Transverse leaf springs, derived directly from horse-drawn buggies and used in prewar Fords, make for a rough ride. Add solid axles, a V-8 engine with a voice like tearing canvas, a low-cut chopped roof that puts |
1631708_0 | Mixed News on Poverty | To the Editor: David Brooks is right to draw attention to the encouraging global poverty data from the World Bank (''Good News About Poverty,'' column, Nov. 27). But he does not point out that economic growth, while an important indicator, is only one measure of success in the fight against global poverty. The Millennium Development Goal on income is one of eight indicators of overall progress in defeating global poverty. The World Bank stresses that there are reasons to worry about progress toward other goals, like a two-thirds reduction in the mortality rate for children under 5 by 2015. The same can be said about access to safe water, a key indicator for the environmental sustainability goal. Combating poverty requires a comprehensive strategy based on the recognition that development is a shared responsibility between rich and poor countries, with civil society and the private sector doing their part as well. Mary Robinson New York, Dec. 1, 2004 The writer, executive director of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, was president of Ireland and United Nations high commissioner for human rights. |
1631734_1 | Americans Relying More on Prescription Drugs, Report Says | than spending for any other category of medical goods and services, the government said. Nearly half of all women -- 49 percent -- were taking prescription drugs in 1999-2000, compared with 39 percent of men. Adults' use of antidepressants almost tripled from 1988 to 2000. Use was higher among women than among men. In 1999-2000, 10 percent of women 18 and older reported taking antidepressants in the previous month, compared with 4 percent of men. Use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs among people 45 and older more than tripled from 1995 to 2002, the report said. Amy B. Bernstein, chief of analytic studies at the National Center for Health Statistics, which issued the report, said, ''Women 65 and older are no less likely than men of the same age to have high cholesterol, but doctors are less likely to report prescribing statins for their female patients.'' Medical records from doctors' offices and outpatient hospital clinics indicated that men 65 and older were about 25 percent more likely than women to receive or be taking statin drugs, which include Lipitor, Pravachol and Zocor. The report also confirms a sharp increase in the use of stimulants by children ages 5 to 17. Such drugs, like Ritalin, are often used to treat the impulsive, aggressive traits known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children. Boys are much more likely than girls to receive such drugs when they visit doctors' offices and clinics. In 2000-2002, the government counted an average of 13.5 such visits for every 100 boys ages 5 to 17, up from an average of 8.5 visits in 1997-1999. The comparable figures for girls were 5.3 and 3.3. By contrast, antidepressants were prescribed at similar rates for boys and girls, and in both cases the rates increased sharply from 1994 to 2002. The report also shows a sharp increase in heart surgery among elderly patients in the last decade. Ms. Bernstein said this reflected an increase in procedures to clear clogged arteries and to insert the wire mesh tubes known as stents, which prop open the arteries. In 1991-92, the government said, hospitals reported 73 operations on heart vessels for every 10,000 people age 75 and over. The rate rose 70 percent in the following decade, reaching 124 procedures for every 10,000 people of that age in 2001-2. The procedures are performed more than twice as often |
1631821_0 | Explorers Club: Less 'Egad' and More 'Wow!' | RICHARD C. WIESE, the president of the Explorers Club, has done something out of the ordinary, once again. He persuades a wary visitor to eat a scorpion on a leaf of endive. Crunchy. There is also the North American farm-raised cricket. And let's not forget the sautéed rattlesnake and the roasted Colombian ants. The cream cheese helps. Mr. Wiese, at 45 the club's youngest president, stands in the wood-paneled study of the international society's headquarters on East 70th Street. ''Trust me,'' he says solemnly. ''There is a direct correlation between someone's passion for food and wine and their passion as a person.'' Perhaps his explanation is baloney. The exotic appetizers are a great gimmick, the sort of adventurous fare typically offered at the club's annual black-tie gala in March. But this is not ''Fear Factor.'' And Mr. Wiese will find no sissy with him on this afternoon. As Mr. Wiese serves up crickets and a lively spiel on the club's history, the sunlight streams through the windows of the brick and limestone town house, which rises six floors. The building is filled with the spirit and artifacts of explorers and club members like Adm. Robert E. Peary, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jane Goodall, Neil Armstrong and Roy Chapman Andrews, the naturalist and, to many fans, real-life model for the ''Indiana Jones'' films. With the club in its centennial year, Mr. Wiese, a former television journalist who won an Emmy for a 1997 science report on WWOR about germs, is determined to shake off its dusty image. He has his work cut out for him. He bounds up the staircase, pausing in front of a hulking stuffed polar bear on the second-floor landing. ''It's really not what someone would do nowadays,'' he says. Moving on, Mr. Wiese points to what he says is the world's largest elephant tusk. And what is that in the corner? Why, it's a three-foot whale phallus. Mr. Wiese shrugs. There are some things, it seems, for which there are no words. Mr. Wiese sees his mission as breathing life and relevance into the fabled organization, which has 3,000 members and 30 chapters worldwide. ''I felt like the Explorers Club was going extinct but no one knew,'' he says. One of his ideas was BioBlitz, an expedition with scientists and students in Central Park last year to catalogue as many living organisms as possible in 24 |
1638567_2 | Gaining Ground on the Wage Front | the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990's, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage has responded by rising. College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs. Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of ''the rising educational attainment of women who work full time.'' That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings. Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990's, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion. For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. ''Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top,'' she said, ''and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay.'' For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles. Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations |
1638543_3 | Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say | agency. ''In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers.'' Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. ''The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits,'' said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. ''There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century'' with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, ''human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century.'' On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. ''Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling,'' Dr. Vaupel said. ''These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong.'' At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with ''remarkable regularity'' over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: ''Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security.'' Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal |
1638509_2 | Text Messaging Pushed for Use as Disaster Warning Systems | some form since 1951 and broadcasts warnings over television and radio. The system is used hundreds of times each year to warn people of local emergencies. Many towns also use speed dialers to warn residents of emergencies. But the rise of the cellphone creates new opportunities. ''The cool thing about mobile messaging is you're not tethered in front of your PC, you don't have to be in front of your television,'' Mr. Wilfahrt said. The idea of governments using mobile messages to communicate with citizens is beginning to take hold. In April 2003, Hong Kong's government sent out a text message to 6 million mobile phones to quash a rumor that Hong Kong had been designated an ''infected city'' for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The Netherlands, too, is building a text message network that will allow the government to issue alerts to mobile phone users nationwide or within an area of a few city blocks. Still, the risks and costs of false warnings are high. A false warning by the Indian government on Thursday that another tsunami was imminent caused thousands to flee their homes. That is why text message warnings ''have to be enormously bulletproof,'' effective and virtually immune to hacking, said James Katz, director of the center for mobile communication studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. In the past, he said, citizens have not been comfortable with the government having a back door to their personal technology. An initiative discussed during the Ford administration to mandate that all televisions be designed to turn on automatically for emergency announcements was dropped, Dr. Katz said, because of fears that it would be seen as an Orwellian ''Big Brother'' program. Ultimately, warning systems will only go so far to address the problems of disaster reduction, said Kenneth Allen, the executive director of the Partnership for Public Warning, a public-private partnership that urged that national alert systems be upgraded after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Allen said the promise of systems like text messaging should not distract policymakers from basics like education about the risk of tsunamis and how to spot natural warning signs like tremors and the strange behavior of the sea. ''Strip aside all of the fancy technology,'' he said, and ''it's getting the right information to people so they can make the right decision -- and in this case, it didn't happen.'' ASIA'S DEADLY WAVES: CELLPHONES |
1638597_10 | China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence | Front-line rioters hurled the rocks at the police -- tentatively at first, then in volleys. Under the barrage, the police retreated. Protesters charged the terrace, shattered the windows and doors of government headquarters and surged inside. Official documents were scattered. Protesters dumped computers and office furniture off the terrace. Soon, a raging fire illuminated the square with its flickering orange glow. Li Jian, 22, took part in the plunder. A young peasant, he had found a city job as a short-order cook. But he longed to study computers, said his father, Li Wanfa. The family bought an old computer keyboard so the young man could learn typing. ''He wanted to go to high school but the school said his cultural level was not high enough,'' Mr. Li said. ''They said a country boy like him should be a cook.'' The police arrested young Mr. Li scurrying through the melee with a Legend-brand computer that belonged to the government, according to an arrest notice. Yet even at the height of the incident, rioters set limits. They did not attack any of the restaurants or department stores along the government square, focusing their wrath on symbols of official power. By midnight, the crowd dwindled on its own. When paramilitary troops finally arrived on the scene after 3 a.m., there were only a few thousand hard-core protesters left. ''Most people went home,'' said Mr. Peng, the man whose home had been flooded by the dam. ''But the armed police were fierce. They beat you even if you kneeled down before them.'' The Tensions Persist The local government praised its own handling of the riot. An assessment published three days afterward in The Three Gorges City News, the daily paper of the Wanzhou Communist Party, also declared the uprising had no lasting ramifications. ''The district government displayed its strong governing ability at a crucial moment,'' the report said. ''This incident was caused by a handful of agitators with ulterior motives who whipped up a street-side dispute into a mass riot.'' The uprising did dissipate as quickly as it emerged. Baiyan Road now bustles with afternoon shoppers. After work, dancers bundled against the damp chill use government square as an outdoor ballroom, a synthesized two-step beat filling the night air. Yet the underlying tensions did not disappear. When the Wan Min Cotton Textile Factory declared bankruptcy in mid-December, scores of policemen occupied the factory grounds |
1638600_22 | How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly | might be broken in the port.'' It was about 1 p.m. Sunday, and he decided to call other ports in Malindi and Lamu, where workers reported similar water movements. ''It was like seeing the sun setting in the east,'' he said. ''The tide was crazy. The water wasn't following the rules.'' Then, Mr. Hamisi said, the minister of foreign affairs phoned to report the heavy damage in Asia. After realizing the direction the waves were headed, Mr. Hamisi called the Port Authority director. ''I said: 'We have a problem. We have to institute our emergency plan.''' The emergency plan was intended for things like oil spills or fires, not tsunamis. But it was all they had. The police were informed to evacuate beaches. The news media were called to spread the word. The local authorities were mobilized up and down the coast. Radio messages were sent to commercial fishing vessels and ships. For the wooden dhows that are so common in Kenya and that lack radio communication, the looming danger was spread by word of mouth. At Jomo Kenyatta Beach in Mombasa, there were thousands of people packed on the sand. The police made announcements at first, and then armed riot policemen moved in to relocate people away from the water. ''It was Sunday, so the beaches were full of holiday makers,'' Mr. Hamisi said. At Hemingway's Resort in Watamu, a plush seaside hotel, employees who heard of the storm on television began working the phones. They called the Port Authority, but the person who answered the phone there did not seem overly alarmed. They called the Kenyan Navy, where someone agreed to investigate. They tried to track down a British professor who someone said was an expert on the wave patterns off the Kenyan coast. Frustrated and fearful, Hemingway's staff began evacuating guests to a parking lot half a mile from the coast. Further north, Mabeya Mogaka, the district commissioner in Malindi, was spreading word of the dangerous seas as well. ''I ran out and told people not to panic but to be aware,'' he said. The beaches were virtually deserted, he said. But not everybody got the message that danger was near. There were still people swimming when the waves began to churn with more force. One of them was Samuel Njoroge, 20, a mechanic from Nairobi who was in the water with his uncle and was swimming |
1633636_1 | For Siblings of the Autistic, a Burdened Youth | with any disability carry the burden of extra responsibility and worry for the future, though they are also enriched by early lessons in compassion and familial love. But autism, a brain disorder that affects communication and social interaction, is in a class by itself in the heavy toll it takes on siblings, according to educators, therapists and a dozen scientific studies. With rare exceptions, no disability claims more parental time and energy than autism because teaching an autistic child even simple tasks is labor intensive, and managing challenging behavior requires vigilance. Also, autistic children can be indifferent to loving overtures, which is painful to siblings, some of whom must literally show a brother or sister how to hug. Finally, some autistic children have raging tantrums, destroy the belongings of others and behave in peculiar ways, which can be frightening or embarrassing to siblings and create an environment of unpredictability similar to that in families with an alcoholic member. ''There's bound to be resentment when the emotional and financial resources are all wrapped up in one kid,'' said Don Meyer, director of the Sibling Support Project, run by ARC, formerly the Association for Retarded Citizens. ''It's Johnny this, Johnny that, the United States of Johnny. Johnny is the sun in the family's solar system.'' Much has changed since Mr. Meyer's first support group, in 1990, when most of the children in it had siblings with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. Now, the siblings of autistic children dominate ARC's 160 sibling support groups nationwide. And groups just for siblings of autistic children are spreading. The focus has changed partly because of the spike in diagnoses of autism, experts say. But it is also because of the recent acknowledgment of the impact on other children in the household, said Dr. Sandra L. Harris, founder of the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center at Rutgers University, one of the nation's first schools for autistic children and a leader in research and programming for siblings. Among Dr. Harris's innovations is formal training for siblings so they can engage an autistic brother or sister in play, using techniques widely considered the most effective in the classroom. Dr. Harris encourages parents to discipline autistic children, say, with a timeout, to make a statement about fairness to other children. She also urges families not to take togetherness to extremes. A normal child's school play or birthday celebration, for instance, need |
1638033_0 | Updates for Driving in a Winter Wonderland | Early in November, in anticipation of the treacherous driving conditions that inevitably accompany a Northern winter, I had new top-of-the-line tires put on my car even though the odometer read over 110,000 miles. I think of good tires as a kind of life insurance policy, and these tires, the salesman told me, were designed to perform well on wet and snowy roadways. I thought I was all set for the coming season -- until the December issue of Car & Travel, AAA's monthly magazine, arrived in the mail with a lead article titled ''Lessons to Unlearn for Winter'' by Joseph D. Younger. He points out that driving safely in winter may require people like me of a certain age to make some changes in the way we handle the road and the car in bad weather. ''What you learned about driving on snow and ice from your parents or in driver's ed might not reflect current thinking,'' he noted. ''In fact, today's vehicles might have rendered some of those lessons obsolete.'' He quotes Frank Niland, an instructor in AAA's Driver Improvement Program as saying, ''You're not driving your father's or grandfather's car, so why should you drive it like your father or grandfather?'' Indeed, my all-wheel-drive minivan is a far cry from my first car, a 1960 Ford Falcon, or the 1953 Chevy I learned on. Yet I know I've made few changes in the way I handle a car or the road in all these years. But it's never too late to learn, especially when one's safety and the safety of others may be at stake. Holding the Wheel I know that many people, especially those talking on hand-held cellphones, often drive with only one hand on the steering wheel, though we were all taught to keep two hands on the wheel at all times. But where should those hands be? Most likely you, like me, would say ''grip the wheel at the 9 and 3 o'clock positions.'' This position, AAA points out, prompts people to use hand-over-hand steering when negotiating a turn, a technique that is still taught by some driving instructors. But this steering method has some important disadvantages in the newer vehicles that most people now drive. It forces drivers to cross their forearms directly in front of the air bag. If an accident occurs and the air bag is set off, drivers will be hit |
1638022_0 | Saving a Species: Can Profit Make the Caged Bird Sing? | The delta of the Orinoco River has always been home to the macaw, one of the parrots most prized by pet smugglers. The delta, 11,000 square miles, is a maze of winding channels separated by marshy mangrove forests that are also home to the jaguar and the Orinoco crocodile. Some 20,000 indigenous people, the Warao, inhabit isolated villages of small wooden huts that dot the shoreline. For years they have subsisted almost entirely on fish caught out of small wooden canoes. But overfishing and environmental degradation have made survival a struggle, pushing many Warao to migrate closer to cities or to join the enterprising poachers who arrive from neighboring Guyana or the island of Trinidad to hunt macaws. Rather than enforcing a strict ban on the sale of macaws, Venezuela's environmental authorities have instead opted to allow some 30 Warao delta residents to capture and sell a controlled number of these birds. The idea is to provide income to the Warao, and an economic incentive to maintain the macaws. Venezuela's macaw program is part of an increasingly popular but controversial conservation movement known as sustainable use. The philosophy is that saving a species may require commercially exploiting it. These days it is easy to find a conservation expert with an opinion about sustainable use programs, but actually tracking down a licensed macaw hunter in the Orinoco delta can be quite a challenge. In Tucupita, a city of 80,000 at the edge of the delta, it took a full day to locate a motorboat and driver to get to the town of Los Remolinos, home to group of macaw hunters. By 8:30 the next morning, two young men from outside Tucupita fluent in both Spanish and Warao were stacking two outboard motors on a 40-foot wooden canoe with two skinny planks to serve as seats and a large blue plastic drum filled with gasoline. The trip was four hours under the roasting delta sun through a maze of canals and channels, some as wide as half a mile and others so narrow the boat could barely squeeze between patches of water hyacinths. To an outsider the twisting canals of the Delta are almost indistinguishable, but natives cruise through this labyrinth as if navigating the blocks of Manhattan, often arguing over the names of channels as if discussing subway lines. Around 1 p.m., the boat pulled into a small channel and stopped |
1637989_0 | Travel Havoc Prompts U.S. To Investigate | The federal government said yesterday that it would investigate air travel disruptions over the holiday weekend that left thousands of people stranded at airports or without their luggage when they reached their destinations. The transportation secretary, Norman Y. Mineta, said his agency would examine disruptions at US Airways and a unit of Delta Air Lines in an effort to prevent them from happening again. The investigation comes after three unrelated factors -- a weekend of labor unrest at US Airways, a major computer malfunction at the Delta unit Comair and winter storms across the Midwest -- combined to wreak havoc on holiday travelers and bruise the reputations of the airlines struggling in the face of higher fuel prices and low-cost competition. ''It is important that the department and the traveling public understand what happened, why it happened and whether the carriers properly planned for the holiday travel period and responded appropriately to consumer needs in the aftermath,'' Mr. Mineta said in asking his agency's inspector general for an expedited review. US Airways, which canceled nearly 400 flights and mishandled at least 10,000 bags, said yesterday that its operations had returned to normal after a large number of ramp workers in Philadelphia and flight attendants elsewhere called in sick. The airline said that it would deliver about 9,000 of the bags by this morning, but the impact of what US Airways described as an ''operational meltdown'' could have far-reaching consequences as it attempts to emerge from bankruptcy protection for the second time in three years. A US Airways spokesman, Amy Kudwa, said the airline had ferried its backlog of bags on empty airplanes and trucks for sorting in Charlotte and Pittsburgh. Comair, a regional carrier owned by Delta, said that it expected to resume a normal schedule of its 1,160 flights by Wednesday. The airline's computerized flight-crew scheduling system crashed Friday night, halting nearly 2,600 flights over the last three days and leaving as many as 67,500 passengers stranded or scrambling to make other plans. The transportation agency's inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said last night that he would immediately begin reviewing this weekend's events in conjunction with a larger study of airline customer service that his office would soon begin. ''This is something that we have been speaking about for some time, as we have seen a steady increase in passengers and flight delays to the levels of 2001,'' said |
1638042_0 | MEMO PAD | SECURITY POLICY MODIFIED -- Reacting to complaints from women who said they had been groped by airport screeners under a new policy to search for nonmetallic explosives, the Transportation Security Administration last week modified the procedures for pat-down security searches. But a lawyer representing some women seeking legal redress for what they claim were unnecessarily invasive pat-down searches that in some cases constituted ''groping or fondling,'' said yesterday that the modifications, though they ''slightly minimize the randomness of the selection'' of whom to search, were inadequate. The modified policy now states: ''Patting down the chest area will now only be conducted if it alarms a hand-held metal detector or if there is an irregularity or anomaly in the person's clothing outline. Unless these criteria are met, screeners will only pat down a line below the chest area to the waist, followed by a pat-down of the individual's entire back.'' But Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer representing the women, said, ''I do not believe the announced changes address the heart of the issue.'' He and some of his clients have a meeting scheduled for tomorrow with the agency in Washington. One concern, he said, is that ''since many women wear underwire bras, the wand is going to go off,'' subjecting that woman to a ''degrading'' pat-down search. The agency has said that screeners ''are trained to conduct the inspections in a professional, respectful manner, while maintaining our high level of security.'' TRAVEL MESS -- The problems with airline travel will not be over on New Year's Day. As anyone who flew last weekend can attest, with airports jammed, flights delayed and bags gone astray, the travel crush this holiday is more intense than it was during Thanksgiving, when domestic travel set a record. But the end of the holidays will not be the end of the crush, as Americans in record numbers are planning winter travel, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. The travel trade group's winter travel forecast predicts that Americans will take 243 million individual trips this month through next February, an increase of 2.6 percent over that period last winter. PICKUP AT LAX -- Picking up somebody by car at Los Angeles International Airport is a little easier for some this holiday season. The airport, which forecasts that it will handle about 2.8 million passengers during the period that started last Friday and continues through |
1637586_3 | Cuba Counters Prostitution With AIDS Programs | passing it along. Once they leave the hospitals, the patients are closely monitored in their homes by social workers, officials say. A decades-old United States embargo on selling Cuba many medical supplies has crimped the country's ability to provide drugs to patients, but the government has replicated some advanced retroviral medicines used to fight AIDS, providing them at no cost. This, too, has slowed the epidemic. United Nations officials who track AIDS say Cuba has done a better job than most countries at corralling the disease. ''Certainly there has been an increase in AIDS, but it is not big, not like you see in the Dominican Republic, or Haiti, or in Puerto Rico,'' said Paloma Cuchi, who oversees the United Nations AIDS program in Latin America. ''They have a very good medical infrastructure, and people have access to care and prevention.'' The low levels of the virus in Cuba and the inexpensive price of sex compared with other places have made the island a destination for male tourists seeking women. In Havana, the sex trade becomes obvious after sunset. Around 10 p.m., young women in skimpy attire begin gathering outside the main tourist hotels, asking men if they would like to go to nightclubs, where a sex-for-cash proposition is usually made. Sex workers, known as jinateras, seeking tourist clients can also be seen outside certain discos and bars, or hitchhiking along the Malecón, the main highway separating Havana from the sea, to proposition tourists. In interviews, several jinateras said the brutal economic conditions in Cuba under an American embargo, where monthly state salaries do not buy enough food for a month, had pushed them into the business. Most work for themselves, and on most days, they say, they can count on $50 to $75 from Europeans, plus meals, drinks and gifts. The government periodically cracks down on prostitution, they said. Undercover police officers work the streets and clubs, looking for prostitutes. An arrest can mean a two-year prison term. But some women said they kept relationships with pimps, or chulos, to pay off the police. These men lurk outside hotels and guide tourists to bars where the women wait. One recent night, a chulo was working the fringes of the Meliá Cohiba, a hotel, trying to persuade men to go to the Copa Room, a nearby disco in the Riviera Hotel. ''If you see a girl you like inside, you |
1637541_0 | Page Two: Dec. 19-25; A Song of Solitude | HUMANS are social animals, and the lifeblood of society is conversation. In its absence, loneliness awaits. Indeed, one reason humans deploy radio telescopes and send time capsules into space may be their hope that evidence of another intelligence will relieve their feelings of intergalactic solitude. Perhaps this explains why the paper ''Twelve Years of Tracking 52-Hz Whale Calls From a Unique Source in the North Pacific,'' published in the December issue of Deep Sea Research, sparked interest well beyond the usual small circle of oceanographers. The paper reported that for many years, a whale had been cruising the Pacific from central California to the Aleutians, calling out with a voice unlike any other whale's, and getting no response. The call, possibly a mating signal, suggests that the animal lives in total, and undesired, isolation. The paper's authors, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, first heard the voice in 1992, and have since tracked it with underwater microphones the Navy uses to listen for enemy submarines. The solitary wanderer emits its metronomic calls at around 52 hertz, a tuba pitch that is, nonetheless, far higher than the calls closest to it - those of the giant blue and fin whales. Its voice subtly deepened through the 1990's, which suggests it was still maturing. Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at Woods Hole who is one of the paper's authors, speculated that the whale might be malformed or miswired, ''broadcasting on the wrong frequency but listening on the right one.'' Or it could be the offspring of a blue whale and another species - and hence truly alone of its kind. News of the unanswered song provoked a host of e-mail messages to the Woods Hole research team, Ms. Daher said. Many came from deaf people, who wondered if the whale shared their disability. And Dr. Kate Stafford, a researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, said that if the song is in fact a mating display, ''He's saying, 'Hey I'm out here.' '' But nobody is answering. There is no conversation. ''He must be very lonely,'' Dr. Stafford said, wistfully. ANDREW C. REVKIN |
1637331_1 | Katharina Dalton [ b. 1916 ]; The Prophet of PMS | Raymond Greene, a colleague, recommended the treatment. It was a kind of miracle. On progesterone, not only did Dalton's monthly migraines disappear; so, too, did the bouts of asthma and epilepsy that plagued some of her patients. Her conclusion was logical: women had premenstrual symptoms not because they were mad or hysterical, as was the dominant theory in her day, but because they suffered from a hormonal imbalance. Dalton and Greene coined the term PMS in a pivotal paper they wrote in 1953. And it was Dalton's tireless efforts that put PMS on the map. She wrote up case studies of women brought back from the brink by progesterone therapy. She did large-scale studies that showed schoolgirls' grades declined by 10 percent premenstrually, followed by a 20 percent increase postmenstrually. She found that half of all female suicides in England in the 50's and 60's occurred in the four days before menstruation, as did half of crimes committed by women. Her best-selling books were revered by readers, but the medical establishment was ambivalent about her findings. Dr. John Studd, a British contemporary, called her methods the biggest medical scandal of the 20th century. Anne Walker, a feminist psychologist, questioned whether cramps and moodiness amounted to ''disease.'' Still, women surged toward Dalton for help. However one feels about the articulation and definition of PMS (does it pathologize women?), Dalton was something of a saint. She bore four children while working full time and doing her research entirely unpaid. She volunteered a day a week at a London hospital clinic she founded. Her first husband was a bomber pilot who died in World War II, and she went on to marry a man who became a Unitarian minister. She saved women from Father Freud, from sticky ids and vapors. She didn't just discover PMS; she had a hand in discrediting the psychoanalytic tradition. In the 80's, Dalton took PMS to court. She defended an 18-year-old named Anna Reynolds who was accused of murdering her mother and managed to get the girl's sentence reduced to manslaughter. She testified that Nicola Owen, an arsonist, had set fires during PMS plunges over which the teenager had little or no control. Some feminists said she was producing a picture of women as harnessed by the vagaries of their hormones, undependable and essentially irrational. Her basic response: pshaw. After all, men are more prone to heart attacks, |
1637371_0 | The Way We Eat; Miracle Grow | Fruits and vegetables are made, not born. In the hands of plant breeders they evolve and take on new colors, shapes and tastes. Two of these innovators died last year. Oved Shifriss concentrated on vegetables. Ross Sanborn experimented with fruit. Both men, in search of more healthful and more delicious food, changed the way we eat. For the longest time, home gardeners who loved tomatoes had a tough row to hoe, wrestling with persnickety, disease-prone plants. Then, in 1949, along came the Big Boy, a hybrid developed by Oved Shifriss, a plant breeder and geneticist at W. Atlee Burpee. On manageable vines, the Big Boy produced large, fat, disease-resistant tomatoes that could weigh a pound or more. ''The Big Boy was the biggest single innovation we ever did,'' said George Ball, Burpee's chief executive. ''It was a quantum leap in performance that opened the door for amateur activity. Suddenly anybody -- mom, dad, the Boy Scout next door -- could garden with the tomato. For gardening, it was as innovative as the V-8 engine or the microchip.'' A half century later, the Big Boy still thrives. In the Burpee catalog, it comes first in the Tomato Hall of Fame sampler package, where it's described, simply, as ''the legend.'' Shifriss, the man behind the Big Boy, did more than tomatoes. At Burpee, in Doylestown, Pa., where he was director of vegetable research from 1942 to 1950, he developed the first commercial hybrids of a dozen produce varieties, including cucumber, eggplant, muskmelon and watermelon. At Rutgers University, where he was a plant breeder and geneticist from 1958 to 1984, Shifriss did pioneering research on plant genetics, particularly in squash. By isolating the B-gene, also known as the precocious yellow gene, from gourds, he developed an entire family of hybrid yellow squash that doesn't show the cosmetic defects typical of cucumber mosaic virus, a disfiguring patchwork of green splotches and stripes that made previous yellow squashes too ugly to sell. For growers around the world, this was a major breakthrough. He also developed the Jersey golden acorn squash, which had 40 percent more protein and three times the betacarotene of the green-skinned acorn squash. After retiring, Shifriss continued his plant-breeding work on a Rutgers plot known as Hort Farm III. He was hard at work on a new squash variety that could rival corn, rice and potatoes as a world crop, a kind |
1637584_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1637456_0 | Cellular Antennas As an Income Source | CO-OP corporations and condominium associations looking to produce a little extra income might consider looking up rather than around. A building's roof has for some time now been good for a lot more than keeping out the rain. These days, it is becoming increasingly common, real estate specialists say, for owners of tall buildings -- and, occasionally, not-so-tall buildings -- to be approached by cellular phone companies looking to rent space on the roof for antennas. ''The amount of money some buildings get is significant,'' said Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan real estate lawyer. Mr. Bailey noted that one client is receiving $2,600 a month for renting out just 400 square feet of roof space. ''It's like having an extra apartment,'' he said. Ken Schmidt, the owner of a cell-tower lease consulting company in Fort Myers, Fla. -- steelintheair.com -- said New York City is a particularly fertile area for wireless antennas. (He works with buildings to negotiate better deals; a normal consultation, he said, is about $400.) ''Radio frequency waves bounce off things when they travel from an antenna,'' he said. ''With many big buildings, radio waves bounce around a lot. That's why New York is a nightmare for wireless operators.'' He said that while a cellular antenna transmission in the suburbs or rural areas might reach several miles, city transmissions may be good for only a couple of blocks. So wireless carriers are constantly looking for new locations. Mr. Schmidt noted that while building owners generally think that only very tall buildings are good candidates, that is not always the case. ''The ideal antenna height is going to depend on the technology,'' he said. ''Taller buildings are more likely to be approached by two-way radio companies and paging companies. Wireless carriers are usually looking for lower locations, about 50 to 100 feet high.'' So, Mr. Schmidt said, even a 5- or 10-story building can be a good candidate. And the monthly rent can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on location. The first thing a building owner should do, he said, is respond promptly, because once a carrier decides it needs an antenna, it will probably contact several property owners. The first to respond, he said, has a better chance of getting the lease. Also, Mr. Schmidt said, if a building's roof is good for one carrier, it is probably good for others. ''A carrier is |
1637561_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1637582_1 | Sunday News Quiz | to head with young Chinese, Indians and Eastern Europeans more than ever, the Bush team is trimming support for the Pell grant program, which helps poor and working-class young Americans get a higher education. (The change will save $300 million, while some 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell grants.) 5. The report this month that children in Asian countries once again surpassed U.S. fourth graders and eighth graders in the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. (U.S. eighth graders did improve their scores from four years ago, but U.S. fourth graders remained stagnant.) A week earlier, the Program for International Student Assessment showed U.S. 15-year-olds scoring below average compared with those in other countries when asked to apply math skills to real-life tasks, the A.P. reported. 6. The report this month that the Bush administration has reduced America's contribution to global food aid programs intended to help the world's hungry feed themselves. (The Bush team said the cut was necessary to keep our deficit under control!) 7. The report that U.S. military spending this year is running at about $450 billion. Wait, wait, don't go way; there's more: 8. The report that Donald Rumsfeld was confronted by troops in Iraq about the fact that they did not have enough armor on their vehicles and were having to scrounge for makeshift armor to protect themselves. 9. The report that among President Bush's top priorities in his second term is to simplify the tax code and to make the sweeping tax cuts from his first term permanent. (The cost to the Treasury for doing so, the A.P. reported, would be over a trillion.) And finally: 10. The report that the U.S. dollar continued to hover near record lows against the euro. So what is the common denominator of all these news stories? Wait, wait, don't tell me. I want to tell you. The common denominator is a country with a totally contradictory and messed-up set of priorities. We face two gigantic national challenges today: One is the challenge to protect America in the wake of the new terrorist threats, which has involved us in three huge military commitments -- Afghanistan, Iraq and missile defense. And the other is the challenge to strengthen American competitiveness in the wake of an expanding global economy, where more and more good jobs require higher levels of education, and those good jobs will increasingly |
1634614_0 | Northwestern Bears Hit Hard by Humans | The two large protected grizzly bear populations that remain in the United States, one in and around Glacier National Park and the other around Yellowstone, were hit hard this year by an unusually high number of deaths caused by humans. In the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, 31 bears were killed illegally or had to be destroyed in a mountain habitat of six million acres that has Glacier National Park and federal wilderness areas at its core. That is the largest number of deaths caused by humans in the region since 1974, when the grizzly was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. In recent years, the most killed annually was 19, in both 1998 and 2000. More worrisome is that 18 of the dead bears were females, which are more important than males to the reproductive health of the entire population. Officials estimate the total number of bears in the ecosystem at more than 500. In the Yellowstone region, where federal wildlife officials are trying to remove the bear's endangered designation, 19 bears were killed, 9 of them female. Dr. Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, said that even though the mortality for females was higher than expected, it was not a threat to the population's long-term viability. Environmentalists say it is. ''They're downplaying the problem because it doesn't fit their political agenda of delisting the bear,'' said Louisa Willcox, director of the Wild Bears Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council, in Livingston, Mont. ''It's a really big problem.'' Environmentalists contend that the Bush administration is pushing to remove protections from the bear to allow federal land managers to increase logging and oil and gas development on federal forest lands around Yellowstone, despite a lack of evidence the population can succeed on its own. Dr. Servheen denies that and says he is confident that the number of Yellowstone grizzlies, a type of brown bear, is still healthy enough to fend without endangered status. ''This is the most intensively studied brown bear population in the world,'' Dr. Servheen said. In the Yellowstone area, most of the bears were killed by hunters in Wyoming, south of the park, who said they were threatened by grizzlies. Three factors are at the root of this year's deaths in Glacier, experts say. First, more bears than ever seem to be present, and |
1634639_0 | Necessity as the Mother of Tenure? | AS we fret over the nation's fitful economic growth and the growing number of jobs moving overseas, few are discussing a matter that may be a better indicator of our future in the global marketplace: the declining number and quality of patents awarded to Americans. Patents, along with available investment capital, are an excellent measure of the potential for job creation. America's competitive advantage in the global economy has long rested on our ability to generate intellectual property -- patents and other expressions of creativity -- and to leverage it by creating companies or increasing market share. The virtual demise of Bell Laboratories, the longtime icon of American inventiveness, and the fact that nothing has emerged to take its place should be seen with alarm. The United States' share of its own industrial patents has fallen steadily over the decades and now stands at 52 percent. As corporations have cut back on research, the government has increasingly encouraged universities to take a larger role in maintaining American economic competitiveness -- as, for example, in the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which encouraged universities to commercialize inventions created with federal financing. However, ''academic entrepreneurship'' -- the patenting and licensing by universities and their faculty -- has not become part of the academic mainstream, and is generally viewed within the Ivory Tower as conflicting with the mission of the university. That mission is now often captured by the phrase: ''to teach, and to research.'' I think a third element should be added: ''to invent.'' There are two compelling reasons for broadening the academic mission. First, the university shapes the thinking and outlook of our future workers, and also offers one of the most stable environments for bright Americans to work on new things and sustain our creative leadership. Second, putting an emphasis on invention would enrich the academic community by adding a new dimension of creative expression. Independent of whether inventing can be taught or not, affirming the creative process as a long-term value in the university will serve to stimulate faculty and students alike. The idea of changing the mission of the university in such a substantial way should not be alarming; a similar shift occurred once before, in the late 1800's, when research was made a priority. A few visionaries then saw that research could be of great benefit to industrial expansion as well as enriching academic life. |
1632872_0 | MEMO PAD | GIFT BAGS ON CONTINENTAL -- That fixture of the celebrity gala and the high-end hotel giveaway, the luxury goody bag, is coming to the front of the plane on Continental Airlines in February on flights from Newark to Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle. On those intensely competitive transcontinental routes, where domestic airlines are trying to add amenities without increasing costs significantly, first-class passengers in Continental will receive promotional items provided by Premier Bags Inc., a company that provides luxury gift bags for the travel, special-events and other industries. The products in the bags ''are not just typical samples; they are high-end, full-use items designed to cultivate a discriminating audience,'' said Chris Carbone, the president of Premier Bags. Each bag will contain well-known brand items like perfume, skin-care lotions and books. SONG GOES INTERNATIONAL -- Delta Air Lines' low-fare carrier, Song, is flying internationally now. Song started daily nonstop service last week between Kennedy International Airport and Nassau, the Bahamas, and is upgrading its in-flight entertainment to include 10 movies on demand, a wide selection of audio recordings, 10 video games and live satellite television programming. FEW CHOOSE QUICKER CHECK-INS -- Although checking in for a flight at the airline's main counter takes significantly longer than curbside service or self-service kiosks, fewer than one-quarter of passengers take advantage of either, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2004 Global Airport Satisfaction Index Study. While overall satisfaction is higher among passengers who check in at curbside, online and at self check-in kiosks, 59 percent of passengers check in at the main counter, which takes an average of 19 minutes. Just 18 percent use a self-service kiosk, which takes an average of 8 minutes, while 10 percent check in at curbside, which takes 13 minutes on average. While many airlines now allow passengers to print their boarding passes through the Internet, only 5 percent of passengers do so. PHILADELPHIA FLIERS MOST DELAYED -- Among the nation's 31 major airports, Philadelphia is where you're most likely to experience a delayed flight, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The best airports for on-time departures: Houston Intercontinental, Tampa and Denver. JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL |
1632774_0 | When Teeth Tell Tales on Bones | Dental X-rays of postmenopausal women can help doctors spot signs of the weakening bones of osteoporosis, as well as more traditional tests, a new study reports. Writing in The American Journal of Roentgenology, the researchers said the tip-off lay in erosion in the lower jaw. If dentists are trained to identify the problem, they can refer their patients for bone density scans and treatment. The study was led by Dr. Akira Taguchi of Hiroshima University Hospital. Earlier research had suggested that the X-rays might be useful in spotting women who were developing osteoporosis, which increases the risk of fractures. For this study, the researchers wanted to know whether they were as accurate as the questionnaires that doctors use to determine whether women should have bone density tests. The researchers examined X-rays of about 300 postmenopausal women and detected the signs of osteoporosis 80 to 87 percent of the time. Dr. Taguchi said the X-rays might also help find the disease in men. That is about the same success rate as the questionnaires. But the advantage of the X-rays is that while many women are never given the questionnaires, the dental X-rays are often already on hand. About 15 million are taken yearly in the United States, the journal said. Dentists would need to be trained to identify the changes, but that could be done in dental school and at professional conferences, said Dr. Kirkland W. Davis, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. ''What would be required is that somebody try to get the information out to dentists,'' Dr. Davis said. VITAL SIGNS: DIAGNOSIS |
1632801_0 | QUOTATION OF THE DAY | ''E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited. It has companies tearing their hair out.'' R. CRAIG HOGAN, a former professor who heads an online school for business writing. [A23] |
1632978_0 | What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence | R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student. ''i need help,'' said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. ''i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you''. Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it. ''E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,'' Dr. Hogan said. ''It has companies tearing their hair out.'' A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The problem shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said. ''It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy,'' said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. ''But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard.'' Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion. Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: ''I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes -- I processed today -- before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'.'' The incoherence |
1635949_1 | Ideas & Trends; Patient, Heal Thyself | retinas, light-sensitive chips that mimic the eye's signal-processing ability, have been tested in a handful of blind subjects, but they usually ''see'' nothing more than bright spots. Interestingly, other technologies offer signs of success by exploiting the body's own abilities, in particular the regenerative powers of the nervous system and muscles. In the same way that antidepressants work best in combination with therapy and liposuction proves useless if patients can't control their diet, so the latest ''cures'' for blindness, deafness and paralysis are successful because they work with the body's own efforts. Indeed, neuroscientists have been repeatedly surprised by the capacity of brain cells to rewire themselves radically -- forming new synaptic connections and dissolving old ones -- in response to stimulation. Even more surprising is the recent discovery that adult brains can sprout new cells in a region that underpins the formation of memories. The brain and body also seem to have other recuperative capacities that certain biomedical devices harness. The most successful example of this is the artificial cochlea, which helps people with hearing loss by transmitting electrical signals from an external microphone to the auditory nerve via implanted electrodes. When widespread clinical trials began in the late 1980's, many neuroscientists predicted that the device wouldn't work well, because its signals would be too crude for the brain to recognize. But the skeptics were wrong. More than 75,000 people worldwide have been outfitted with artificial cochleas. They don't restore hearing immediately, but over time they work quite well, enough for some people who had been totally deaf to converse over the telephone. Neuroscientists had not anticipated how the brain would adjust to comprehend these strange signals. The brain's innate opportunism has been demonstrated even more dramatically by an invention that allows the blind to ''see'' with their tongues. Designed by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, the device feeds data from a camera to a ribbon that lies on the tongue and is studded with electrodes, which tickle the tongue in a pattern that mirrors the incoming data. The sensations are meaningless at first, but over time subjects learn to interpret the data so well that they can recognize faces. A few paralyzed patients have also learned to control a computer via electrodes attached to the skull or implanted in the brain. The electrodes detect the neural signals corresponding to a patient's command and transmit |
1636046_1 | Documents Of Weddings In New Paltz Are Rejected | SSN Card,'' also extends to several other municipalities that permitted gay marriage ceremonies. All certificates issued in Asbury Park, N.J., from March 8 to March 10; in Multnomah County, Ore., from March 3 to April 20; and in Sandoval County, N.M., on Feb. 20, are to be rejected, the policy states, because ''the legality of such documents is still unresolved at the state level.'' Marriage certificates from San Francisco that include the terms ''1st Applicant'' and ''2nd Applicant,'' which are used to identify partners in same-sex marriages, are also being refused, but those that use ''groom'' and ''bride'' or ''husband'' and ''wife'' are not. This exception for heterosexual marriage, however, is not available for the other municipalities, according to the rule, posted on the agency's Web site. Social Security Administration officials in Washington and New York City did not respond on Saturday to e-mail and phone messages seeking comment about the policy, which was first reported in The Poughkeepsie Journal. In New Paltz -- a Hudson Valley town of about 10,000 residents, half of whom live in the Village of New Paltz, which has its own local government -- there was a general sense of outrage. Local leaders said they found it particularly galling that the Social Security Administration failed to distinguish between the marriage documents issued for gay and straight couples, especially since the 300 or so same-sex marriage affidavits issued by Mayor West's office read and look very different from the marriage certificates issued by the town clerk. Federal officials, they said, do not seem to understand their complicated system of Colonial-era local governance. ''It doesn't make any sense,'' said Thomas Nyquist, an opponent of gay marriage who served as the village's mayor until Mr. West defeated him in a May 2003 election. ''If they were saying they wouldn't accept marriage certificates from the village, that would be understandable because the village cannot issue them.'' But the town clerk, he said, already ''made the decision that same-sex marriage certificates cannot be issued.'' The office grants marriage certificates only to heterosexual couples. Dan Wilen, New Paltz's town supervisor and highest elected official, said that he has never even seen the affidavits issued to gay couples and that the town clerk was never even asked to issue them. ''The village mayor is empowered by the State Constitution to grant marriages,'' Mr. Wilen said. ''He did that on his own.'' Mr. |
1635814_1 | Clear Sailing | the boat still has a mission -- as a floating classroom, to raise schoolchildren's awareness of history, science and the wonders of the riverine world, and as a living link to an earlier era of grassroots activism. We have come a long way from the age of belly-up fish and flammable rivers, of groundbreaking lawsuits and the Clean Water Act of 1972. The old boat and its namesake organization have had a lot to do with getting us here. They represent a style of homegrown advocacy that was somehow both dreamy and levelheaded, passionate and smart. The same organization that raised money selling pumpkins and baked goods faced down the Environmental Protection Agency, New York State and the river's industrial polluters, most notably General Electric, the source of the polychlorinated biphenyls that are the river's most durable chemical stain. The Clearwater has functioned as a literal patrol boat, monitoring the river for evidence of pollution that would compel government agencies to do their regulatory jobs. And it has been the focal point of the annual festivals that enlist warhorse folk singers to perform the less tangible but no less vital task of making people know and love the Hudson better. There have been many other factors behind the rebirth of the Hudson, of course, like the national environmental awakening inspired by Rachel Carson and ''Silent Spring,'' Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's support of a pioneering 1965 bond act to build sewage plants, and broader economic trends that led many industries to abandon the region. But the biggest forces behind the Hudson's restoration have often been private ones based along the river, groups like Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper and Clearwater. The folk singer Pete Seeger founded Clearwater and lent his reedy, banjo-assisted voice to the struggle, which was joined by a broad coalition of fishermen, local property owners, artists and activists of every stripe. The river and everyone who lives near it owe much to advocacy groups like these and to every other romantic who can look at an industrial cesspool and envision a place to sail, fish and swim.If all goes as planned, sometime around when President Bush leaves office, the Clearwater restoration will be complete. The shiny sloop will be relaunched with new sails, replanked foredeck, fresh rigging and a modified diesel engine that burns soy-based biofuels. And it'll be time to say again: Damn the PCB's. Full speed ahead. Westchester |
1636091_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1636451_3 | U.S. Slips in Attracting the World's Best Students | universities had expressed anxiety at professional meetings. ''But we compete no holds barred among ourselves for the best faculty, for students, for gifts and for grants, and that's one of the reasons for our strength,'' Dr. Sample said. ''Now we'll compete with some overseas universities. Fine with me, bring 'em on.'' Certainly many American universities continue to be extraordinary global brand names. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has compiled an online academic ranking of 500 world universities, using criteria like the number of Nobel Prizes won by faculty members and academic articles published (ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/2004Main.htm). Of the top 20 on the list, 17 are American. Of the top 500, 170 are American. During 2002, the most recent year for which comparable figures are available, some 586,000 foreign students were enrolled in United States universities, compared with about 270,000 in Britain, the world's second-largest higher education destination, and 227,000 in Germany, the third-largest. Foreign enrollments increased by 15 percent that year in Britain, and in Germany by 10 percent. The countries exporting the most students were China, South Korea and India, but the annual global migration to overseas universities involves two million students from many countries traveling in many directions. That number is exploding -- by some estimates it will quadruple by 2025 -- as economic growth produces millions of new middle-class students across Asia. In October, the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, an economic forum for 30 leading industrial nations, took note of this global movement in a study. Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, an analyst at the organization's headquarters in Paris and an author of the study, said that traditionally most countries, including the United States, had tried to attract foreign students as a way of disseminating their nation's core values. But three other strategies emerged in the 1990's, Dr. Vincent-Lancrin said. Countries with aging populations like Canada and Germany, pursuing a ''skilled migration'' approach, have sought to recruit talented students in strategic disciplines and to encourage them to settle after graduation. Germany subsidizes foreign students so generously that their education is free. Australia and New Zealand, pursuing a ''revenue generating'' approach, treat higher education as an industry, charging foreign students full tuition. They compete effectively in the world market because they offer quality education and the costs of attaining some degrees in those countries are lower than in the United States. Emerging countries like India, China and Singapore, pursuing a ''capacity building'' |
1636393_1 | Battling Insurers Over Autism Treatment; Most Resist Big Payments, Challenging Therapists and Disorder's Nature | drag their feet on payment or avoid it in individual cases by questioning the qualifications of the therapist or even a doctor's affirmation that treatment is medically necessary. Autism is a poorly understood brain disorder that impairs the ability to communicate, form relationships and tolerate change. The kind of intensive therapy that Mrs. Chase has arranged for her son was first developed in the 1970's. The approach, called applied behavioral analysis, breaks learning into tiny components and uses elaborately prescribed behavioral teaching techniques, initially with one teacher for each child. Toddlers begin by learning to imitate a simple action and eventually go on to more complex things like having a conversation or engaging in pretend-play activity. For the parents of these children, winning the insurance battle is crucial because therapy can easily run into tens of thousands of dollars a year over many years. And the window of opportunity for treatment may be small: most experts say that the younger the child, the greater the response to therapy. Several states, among them California, Texas, New Jersey and Connecticut, require health plans to cover treatment. Many of these state mandates, typically enacted despite stiff opposition from insurers and employers' groups, are rooted in state laws passed since the late 90's that required mental health coverage comparable to benefits for physical ailments. Employers and insurers have said that they plan to lobby legislatures in Indiana and other states to repeal the requirements for autism coverage next year. Yet state mandates do not necessarily translate into coverage. Insurers have long raised objections about the very nature of autism treatment. Edward Jones, a senior official of PacifiCare Behavioral Health and chairman of the American Managed Behavioral Health Association, an insurance industry group, asked, ''Is this really an educational service or a therapeutic service?'' A diagnosis for autism is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. Treatment of some kind for most disorders in the manual is covered by health plans. According to Mr. Jones, though, ''most people feel it is a biological, neurological disorder, but that cannot be proven.'' He added that ''we don't seem to have any biological treatment for autism.'' Mr. Jones also said that some autistic children may have depression or attention deficit disorder, as well, and can be covered for the cost of drugs for those conditions. Years ago, as many |
1633889_0 | E-Mail and the Decline of Writing | To the Editor: Re ''What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence'' (news article, Dec. 7): As a university professor, I am troubled by the inability of students (and their working counterparts) to differentiate between their off-the-cuff, private e-mail style and public, formal writing. The speed and informality of Internet and mobile messaging, free of proper spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax, are partly responsible. But secondary schools and universities are also culpable: workers have managed to graduate without knowing how to write. In secondary schools as well as colleges and universities, writing-based learning is being cut in favor of recall and test-based curriculums. Schools need to re-emphasize solid analytical reading and writing, usually taught by much-embattled humanities departments. Classes that stress strong, clear writing once again show their value, not just for teaching content but also for building critical skills. Heather Grossman Chicago, Dec. 7, 2004 The writer is a visiting assistant professor of art history, University of Illinois at Chicago. |
1638159_4 | Postal Service Links Delays In Deliveries To Airlines | problems could be one more headache for airlines. ''It's one more customer that may be upset with these carriers,'' said Robert W. Mann Jr., an airline consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. ''Of course, it is one very big customer: that is to say, the U.S. government.'' US Airways and Comair both said yesterday that they were working to resume normal operations. Comair, a regional carrier owned by Delta, said that it would resume a regular schedule of 1,160 flights today. The airline's computerized flight-crew assignment system crashed on Friday, grounding about 2,900 flights over the last four days. US Airways said that staffing levels had returned to normal and that it expected no cancellations. More than 350 flights were halted over the weekend when a large number of baggage handlers in Philadelphia and flight attendants elsewhere called in sick. Union officials said there was no organized effort by workers, but the disruptions caused more than 10,000 bags to be mishandled. US Airways said that almost all of its passengers would have their luggage soon after the last of 21 planes and trucks took luggage to hubs in Charlotte, N.C., and Pittsburgh for sorting yesterday. Still, the dispute between US Airways and its workers continues as the airline attempts to emerge from bankruptcy protection for the second time in three years. US Airways says that the ''irresponsible actions of a few'' caused an ''operational meltdown'' last weekend; its flight attendants and baggage handlers say the company's failure to anticipate the sick-out was the latest in a series of management blunders. ''This is something that we foresaw months ago and brought to the attention of management, and they failed to act on it,'' said Joseph Tiberi, a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents 8,200 baggage handlers and mechanics at US Airways. There was also an indication yesterday that some union officials were upset with their members. The president of the flight attendants' union at US Airways, Perry Hayes, said in a note posted on the union's Web site that the staff shortages that triggered the cancellation last weekend threatened the company's future. ''Sadly, the employees who took this action may ultimately cause the failure of the airline,'' Mr. Hayes's note said. Mr. Tiberi declined to make any assessment of the eventual result. ''I can't tell you what effect it may have down the road,'' he said. |
1636874_0 | ADMINISTRATION OVERHAULS RULES FOR U.S. FORESTS | The Bush administration issued broad new rules Wednesday overhauling the guidelines for managing the nation's 155 national forests and making it easier for regional forest managers to decide whether to allow logging, drilling or off-road vehicles. The long-awaited rules relax longstanding provisions on environmental reviews and the protection of wildlife on 191 million acres of national forest and grasslands. They also cut back on requirements for public participation in forest planning decisions. Forest Service officials said the rules were intended to give local foresters more flexibility to respond to scientific advances and threats like intensifying wildfires and invasive species. They say the regulations will also speed up decisions, ending what some public and private foresters see as a legal and regulatory gridlock that has delayed forest plans for years because of litigation and requirements for time-consuming studies. ''You're trying to manage towards how we want the forest to look and be in the future,'' said Rick D. Cables, the Forest Service's regional forester for the Rocky Mountain region. The rules give the nation's regional forest managers and the Forest Service increased autonomy to decide whether to allow logging roads or cellphone towers, mining activity or new ski areas. Environmental groups said the new rules pared down protection for native animals and plants to the point of irrelevance. These protections were a hallmark of the 1976 National Forest Management Act. ''The new planning regulations offer little in the way of planning and nothing in the way of regulation,'' the conservation group Trout Unlimited said in a statement. Martin Hayden, a lawyer with Earthjustice, a law firm affiliated with the Sierra Club, accused the administration of watering down protections ''that are about fish and wildlife, that are about public participation, or about forcing the agency to do anything other than what the agency wants to do.'' ''What you are left with is things that are geared toward getting the sticks out,'' Ms. Hayden said. The original 1976 law on forest management was intended to ensure that regional managers showed environmental sensitivity in decisions on how the national forests would be used. During the 1990's, the Clinton administration sought major revisions in the rules governing how the act was carried out. But the Clinton-era regulation was not completed in time to take effect before President Bush assumed office. The new rules incorporate an approach that has gained favor in private industries from electronics |
1636801_3 | On Ever Brighter 5th Ave., Taking Comfort in a Quiet Glow | earlier this year, the upper floors were illuminated. ''One of our concerns was not to overlight the building,'' said Ellen Sears of Thompson & Sears Lighting, which was responsible for the design. ''It's wrong to make things stand out too much. They should blend with the city even as they are revealed. And we all feel so strongly about not contributing too greatly to sky brightness.'' Long, narrow beams wash the building, rendering its old marble the color of pale straw. The effect is textured, with deep shadows around the columns and arches. It is almost possible to imagine those pools of light dancing a bit, as if reflected off the Grand Canal. ''The lighting design makes the grandeur, luxurious materials and perfect architectural details of this commercial palace visible once again to all who pass by,'' said Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which approved the project. ''The softly-lit landmark helps to evoke Christmases past.'' None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with the brighter seasonal baubles uptown, which serve a much different purpose than year-round lighting. ''I'm sure if we'd been on Fifth in the 50's we would have been forced by events to be a bit more of a showstopper,'' said Frederick Bland, a partner in Beyer Blinder Belle. ''Down here, we didn't need to be. This building is holding out the hope that sometimes there's an appropriateness to not being the latest, greatest, edgy, brand-new thing.'' CHRISTMAS will pass again in silence at St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, 262 West 118th Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue. The 97-year-old church, whose admirers consider it worthy of landmark status, closed in 2003, in part because of dwindling attendance and severe structural deterioration, the Archdiocese of New York said. It was to have been torn down to make way for St. Thomas the Apostle Senior Homes. However, at an impassioned hearing before the landmarks commission three months ago, Representative Charles B. Rangel and other opponents of demolition pleaded successfully for time to propose an alternative. Mr. Tierney said this week that ''these conversations are ongoing.'' The archdiocese said there had been no change in the situation. Even though St. Thomas is still standing, winter has come. And Eric V. Tait Jr., a founding member of the Harlem Preservation Foundation, said, ''It's not helping the condition of the church.'' BLOCKS |
1636787_6 | E-Mail Doesn't Take a Holiday | of importance. ''The more senior you grow, the more e-mail you get,'' said Candace Sidner, a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Mass., who co-authored a study of e-mail use. ''Some very senior managers have staff devoted just to their e-mail.'' One reason a pile feels overwhelming, she said, is that tasks arrive by e-mail. If it can't be immediately deleted, the message falls into the potentially time-consuming category of ''to do'' or ''to read,'' or the even more burdensome category of ''indeterminate status,'' where you can't decide what to do with it. Dr. Sidner had no easy answers for coping with the glut, though filters that sort e-mail messages into subfolders can help. In the meantime, ''it's part of going on vacation and coming back to work,'' she said. ''I accept that it's a phenomenon that happens.'' While I'm Away One Worker's Liberator Is Another Worker's Useless Crutch THEORETICALLY, vacation autoreply is efficient. It informs people who send you an e-mail message that you are away. And they know not to send more messages until you return. But in the always connected working world, this is the wrong message to send, said James E. Katz of Rutgers University -- namely, ''that you are away and not being a responsible corporate citizen.'' Many people choose not to use autoreply because they do not want others to know they are on vacation. Besides, they are not out of reach; they will reply anyway, vacation or not. Brian Burch goes even further. Mr. Burch, who works at Raindance Communications, a Web conferencing company in Louisville, Colo., removed the line from his e-mail messages that said, ''Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld.'' ''I can be on the golf course typing out e-mails between shots and no one even knows,'' he said. ''I wanted any outbound mail to carry the normal professionalism of being at work.'' Sarina Evan of Random House likes using autoreply. ''There have been cases when someone has gotten my autoreply and they send me another e-mail telling me not to bother,'' Ms. Evan said. She appreciates that information. ''It is considerate,'' she said. ''It saves time later,'' since she knows she need not follow up. Often, an autoreply replies to junk mail, which will most likely generate a second piece of junk, a bounce message saying your autoreply was undeliverable, said John Mozena, co-founder of an anti-spam |
1636857_3 | Snow. Rain. Avalanche of Catalogs.; Even in E-Mail Age, Mailbags Bulge | needed precautions for threats like the anthrax attacks of October 2001. The service is also in a fight with Congress over $3 billion in savings in the fund for postal workers' pensions. Postal officials say they need the money to cover current costs, but Congress says the Postal Service should save the money for future expenses. But the biggest financial drain is caused by e-mail. While citing inefficiency as a factor, a presidential commission formed to study postal operations concluded in a 2003 study that e-mail was the ''most significant threat'' and that ''unless the Postal Service's expenses can be reduced correspondingly, it is questionable whether affordable universal mail service via a self-financing public institution is sustainable.'' This is exactly what has Representative John M. McHugh, Republican of New York, worried. Mr. McHugh, who represents upstate New York, is chairman of a special House committee on postal reform and oversight, and he has been pushing Congress since 1995 to make the mail service more competitive and efficient. In 2001, the Government Accounting Office put the service on a ''high risk'' list of government agencies in financial jeopardy. ''If the Postal Service falters in its commitment to universal coverage, it would probably most affect districts like ours,'' said Mr. McHugh, referring to areas where post offices serve as community meeting points and where other mail distributors are few. ''In our district you don't measure driving distances in minutes but hours, and closing a post office can really create a problem.'' Mr. McHugh's district stretches from Oswego to Plattsburgh and includes much of the Adirondack Mountains. To help offset its disappearing revenue, postal officials plan to raise the price of sending all mail in 2006. Ralph Moden, senior vice president of government relations for the service, said that the percent increase would probably be in the single digits unless Congress fails to provide the financial help needed. ''It is really out of our hands at this point,'' he said. Postage rates were last raised in 2002. This is unwelcome news for Nina Link, president and chief economic officer of the Magazine Publishers of America, based in New York City. Ms. Link said that for every 1 percent increase in postage rates, magazines incur $30 million in costs. ''It's not just the mailing of the magazines themselves but also the cost of renewal notices, solicitations for subscriptions, and bills,'' she said. ''Everything moving |
1631534_1 | Panel to Review Drug for Low Female Sex Drive | In documents posted on the F.D.A. Web site yesterday along with the company's data from clinical trials, the agency's reviewers also said they had concerns about the long-term safety of the treatment, which consists of the hormone testosterone. Other hormone therapies, involving estrogen and progestin, were widely used in the past by women after menopause, but were later found to raise the risk of heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer, they wrote. Intrinsa has been studied for longer than a year only in a small number of women. The F.D.A. staff often tends to be more critical of drugs than the advisory panels, which are made up mostly of practicing physicians. Elaine Plummer, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, said the company was ''prepared to address those questions'' at the meeting. The shares of Procter & Gamble gained $1.18 yesterday, to close at $54.66. Part of that run-up could be a result of positive economic news about consumer spending that spurred strong gains in the overall stock market. Intrinsa, which Procter & Gamble developed with Watson Pharmaceuticals, involves a patch, worn on the abdomen, that delivers a steady stream of testosterone. While that hormone is usually associated with men, women also make lesser amounts of it and it helps stimulate sexual desire. Some women already use testosterone products approved for men, but those products contain far too much testosterone for women, experts said. Women produce about half their testosterone in their ovaries, so Procter & Gamble is initially seeking F.D.A. approval for Intrinsa as a treatment for women who have had their ovaries removed. It said that 17 to 30 percent of the 10 million women who have undergone such surgery have ''hypoactive sexual desire disorder,'' meaning low sex drive that they find distressing. But the company is also testing the drug in women who undergo natural menopause. In clinical trials, women who used Intrinsa had an increase in the number of ''satisfying episodes'' of sex to five a month, from three. But women who received the placebo also had an increase -- to four a month, from three. The definition of satisfying sex was left to the women, who kept log books during the clinical trials. Some experts say they worry that Intrinsa will be used as a means of enhancing sex by women who are not post-menopausal or do not suffer from hypoactive sexual desire disorder. ''The off-label |
1631461_0 | World Business Briefing | Americas: Mexico: U.S. Eases Avocado Limit | The United States Department of Agriculture has lifted almost all the restrictions on imports of Mexican avocados, the Mexican Agriculture Ministry said. Beginning Jan. 31, Mexican avocados will be allowed to enter all states year-round except California, Florida and Hawaii. By 2007, those states will also be opened. Mexican avocados are now allowed in only 31 states in the months from October to April. The Department of Agriculture estimates that the measure will cost California growers $71 million. Mexico exported $52 million worth of avocados to the United States last year. Elisabeth Malkin (NYT) |
1633091_1 | Shangri-La No More: The Dragons Have Settled In | walking sticks or clutching babies. Many of them have journeyed a week or more in order to make the pilgrimage, often traveling from villages so remote they are not served by roads, yet they wear looks of beatitude upon arrival at the palace. But these days the palace is choked with other, untraditional visitors, Chinese tourists from the east, armed with noisy cellphones and flashing cameras. On the sidewalk in front of the palace these days sit two large concrete dragons, symbols of China's majority Han culture, placed there not long ago in what has every appearance of being a none-too-subtle statement of political domination. In the shops that line the broad boulevard -- Sichuan restaurants, clothing stores and mountaineering-gear sellers, massage parlors and even boutiques hawking Tibetan souvenirs -- the faces one sees behind the counters are overwhelmingly those of Han migrants from eastern China. They are the vanguard of an invasion of commercialism that has raised a pressing question: can an ancient and distinctive culture steeped in religion maintain its life style and identity in the face of an onslaught of Chinese bearing what Tibetans regard as godless materialism and chauvinism backed by the power of the state? It would seem to be no contest, this struggle between cultures, faiths and peoples. On one side are China's majority Han, who number over a billion, and on the other, Tibet's native population of roughly 2.5 million. China is not only racing to catch up to the West in economic growth and development. Much more quietly, but with determination, it is also pushing to dominate vast spaces on its frontier that have eluded its control for millenniums, much as the United States once settled its great West or Australia tamed its Outback. Everywhere one turns in Tibet, it seems, roads are being built to integrate it with China. The biggest leap forward in this strategy will be the completion of a $3.2 billion railroad in 2007 linking Lhasa to Beijing, a distance of more than 2,400 miles. One can easily foresee the scenes, already common in China's other frontier region, Xinjiang, to the immediate north, of thousands of economic migrants from the east disembarking with each train's arrival. The Chinese government is well practiced in the phrases of fraternal harmony and cooperation. In Bayi, county seat of 26,000 nestled amid 15,000-foot peaks near the Indian border in eastern Tibet, meanwhile, |
1638259_0 | From Banner to Bag, And Bold as Ever | Freitag, a Swiss company known for recycling highway signs, truck tarpaulins, tires and seat belts into bags, has created 300 one-of-a-kind tote bags made from outdoor exhibition banners from the Museum Of Modern Art (where earlier Freitag products are represented in the design collection). The bags, which come in scores of colors and patterns, are handmade, waterproof and strong enough to carry heavy things like a pile of magazines or logs for a fireplace. Once the stores sell out of them, some may join other Freitag bags for sale on eBay. Each bag is $90 at MoMA's Design Stores, 44 West 53rd Street, (212) 767-1050 or 81 Spring Street (Crosby Street), (646) 613-1367. MARIANNE ROHRLICH CURRENTS: RECYCLING |
1638295_1 | Rebuilding, Yes, but Taking Pains to Preserve, Too | in recent years it has shown itself capable of sensitivity to the historical value of its properties. With persuasion from inside and outside, the agency has made substantial investments in existing landmarks, sometimes kicking and screaming. It has also committed itself, in the case of the future World Trade Center transportation hub by Santiago Calatrava, to building structures of landmark caliber. ''We all have the responsibility to move things forward,'' said Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., the authority's new executive director. ''But on the other hand, if we can protect these facilities, we ought to do it.'' At ground zero, the authority faces the greatest test yet of its preservation mettle as decisions are made about extraordinary -- if subtle -- physical remnants that stand in the way of redevelopment plans. For instance, just outside the PATH station concourse, an evocative vestige of the trade center shopping mall has been exposed. An irregular section of travertine floor, with courses of contrasting dark bands in angular patterns, seems to correspond roughly with an area once known as the crossroads, around which were the Warner Brothers, Casual Corner, Strawberry and Tourneau stores. More prominent is the badly battered stairway that rises from the south side of Vesey Street and once led to Austin J. Tobin Plaza, which was higher than the surrounding sidewalks. In some quarters, this is called the ''survivors' stairway,'' since it was used by many people to escape from the burning towers. The World Trade Center Survivors' Network is among the groups calling for the preservation of the stairway, which its newsletter describes as a place ''from which survivors, and everyone whose life was profoundly changed that day, could gain a vantage point from which to contemplate the footprint voids, paying respect to their lost friends, colleagues and loved ones.'' The Port Authority has made no decision about the stairway, said a spokesman, Pasquale DiFulco, but is discussing the matter under a federal historic preservation review known as the Section 106 process. As to the travertine floor, he said that there had been no formal discussions but that some kind of salvaging would be considered. The authority has already said it will permanently preserve a 66-foot-long section of the original concourse connecting the PATH station to the E train terminus. It is also salvaging representative or poignant elements from the garage below 6 World Trade Center, which is being demolished |
1638270_6 | Hobbyists Fill Out The Weather Map | the right instruments, the right computer software and a site where you can post your data. Personal weather instruments are available for a wide range of budgets. These are among them: VANTAGE PRO2 from Davis Instruments ($595 at davisnet.com, but available for less elsewhere online) includes a full range of sensors and connects wirelessly with its indoor console reader. WMR968 from Oregon Scientific ($500 at www2.oregonscientific.com, but available for less elsewhere online), another wireless weather station, includes a thermo-hygrometer, rain gauge and anemometer. ULTIMETER 100, the basic model from Peet Bros., ($200, peetbros.com), takes most common weather measurements and adds an adjustable flash-flood alert. The station also includes three serial-port modes to send weather data by phone, modem or radio link. Add-on software packages like these coordinate the transfer of data from instrument to computer, provide graphics that lend an analog feel to the digital information, use graphs to chart weather trends and ease uploading to a personal Web site or a community weather service: VIRTUAL WEATHER STATION by Ambient Weather (ambientweather.com) is a popular weather program that converts data into on-screen bar graphs and meters. It is compatible with many weather instruments. The Internet Edition allows information to be uplinked to Web sites and costs $105. WEATHER DISPLAY ($70, weather-display.com) supports many manufacturers' weather devices and offers numerous real-time, scalable and historical graphs. WEATHER VIEW 32 (weatherview32.com) adds Internet displays like satellite images to personal weather station data. It can send weather alerts to e-mail addresses and pagers. The home edition costs $50; a professional, broadcast-licensed version with slide-show ability costs $1,000. Weather watchers who want to share their findings can post data and images to these community weather services: WEATHER UNDERGROUND, which is at www.wunderground.com, lists more than 12,000 personal stations in its collection. ANYTHINGWEATHER.COM allows contributors to post the data they collect free to pages the service is host to, using a simple template that comes with its basic software package. CITIZEN WEATHER OBSERVER PROGRAM (www.cwop.net) is better known for aggregating contributed data and providing it to government meteorologists rather than as a destination itself. The association verifies data before sending it to weather services, augmenting official readings in outlying areas. WEATHERMATRIX members trade information through e-mail messaging and postings at a Web site (weathermatrix.net) that also provides a free desktop program that uses contributed data to provide weather alerts, radar images and current conditions. Tim Gnatek |
1632185_0 | An Islamic Democracy for Iraq? | Is ''Islamic democracy'' really possible? Or is it something meaningless, like ''Jewish science,'' say, or contradictory, like ''people's democracy'' under Communism? This is the question that will determine the future of Iraq, since the man with the greatest credibility in that broken country is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite cleric, who refuses to run for office himself but says that he supports the idea of Islamic democracy. The ayatollah insists that an Iraqi constituent assembly must be chosen through direct elections and that ''any basic law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum.'' He makes only cursory reference to Koranic law as the basis for that legal code. Any attempts to postpone general elections because of security concerns, especially in the Sunni areas, have also been fiercely resisted. In mid-October, he issued a fatwa requiring all men and women to vote, equating voting with such basic religious duties as fasting during Ramadan. It is the duty of the Shiites, according to the ayatollah, to protect Sunni and Christian interests as well. And although he opposed a plan to allow Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of the Iraqi population, veto power over the constitution, he has not squelched Kurdish hopes of preserving some degree of autonomy under a new government. All these are fine words, of course, yet to be tested in reality. But they are remarkable words for a Shiite cleric born in Iran and should be taken seriously. Despite the recent surge of conservative Christian activism in the United States, the received opinion in the Western world is that in democracies, church and state do not mix. Islam, we are often told, is particularly unsuited to democracy because in Muslim countries the state was never untangled from the clergy. But Iraq was supposed to be a special case, because it was largely secular. In fact, both these assertions were too sweeping. Muslims have rarely been ruled by clerics. Worldly and spiritual authority have usually been kept separate in the Middle East. And until not so long ago, religious minorities, like Jews, were treated with more tolerance in the Muslim world than in Christendom. When worldly authority becomes intolerably oppressive, however, religion is often the only base of resistance. Such was the case in Poland under Communist rule, when the Catholic Church provided a source of dissent. Under Saddam Hussein, the mosque |
1632231_2 | A Steeple Is Ready To Rise Again | damage to the building prompted a campaign to save and restore the Meeting House. The restoration took decades, but today the interior looks much as it did in 1771. The outside tower and steeple have their own history. The Meeting House was financed by a local Colonial-era tax but there was no money left for a separate tower. The builder, Daniel Tyler, raised a private levy but the cost was greater than even he anticipated when one of his workers, Daniel Cloud, fell to his death while erecting the steeple. Repairs were made to the tower and steeple after the 1938 hurricane but over the years that wooden support system deteriorated. Dennis C. Landis, restoration chairman, said that during storms he would sometimes get calls from concerned residents. ''Do you know your tower is leaning?'' they would ask. The church raised $93,000 to remove the rotting timbers, and rebuild the interior of the tower. The fresh lumber of the new stairs and supporting beams contrasts with the aged colonial timbers, some of which are a foot thick. Mr. Landis estimates that the work to the more delicate steeple will cost at least $100,000. Birds did significant damage to the interior and many of the white clapboards need to be replaced and painted both on the steeple and the tower. The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism contributed $66,164, although the money was delayed by the state's recent financial troubles, and the Quinebaug-Shetucket Heritage Corridor gave $20,000. The balance is still being raised. A recent auction produced $8,500 and more fund-raising is being considered. Mr. Landis is confident enough of raising the money that he begun to solicit bids. The work restoring the Meeting House can be taxing for Mr. Landis, who is a curator of rare books and manuscripts at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Why does he do it? He replied: ''It's really because of the social reform involvement of the ministers who were here. There was such a progressive spirit here, that it is an honor to do what I can to preserve this building where they served.'' Mr. Bowen, Brooklyn's first selectman, can see the Meeting House from his office across the street in town hall. The return of the steeple will coincide with reconstruction on Route 6, which will include new sidewalks and other improvements to the village green that borders both historic |
1632352_0 | Guarding the Flow Of Global Production | AS companies rely increasingly on suppliers and factories overseas, keeping their global supply chains safe from terrorism and other disruptions has become an important part of business. Bob Stoffel, senior vice president at United Parcel Service for its supply chain group, talked recently about ways to limit the risks of long-distance shipping. Here are excerpts from a conversation with him: Q. What role is technology playing in the management of supply chains? A. A lot of technology is enabling things that weren't possible before, such as allowing us to see into the supply chain. We operate in a very dynamic environment, obviously, with security threats, wars, epidemics and a West Coast port strike a couple of years ago. Getting real-time information about where your goods are means that you can make smarter decisions about how to meet your customers' requirements. Q. Give me an example of what one of your supply chains can do. A. Take National Semiconductor. They have manufacturing facilities in Penang, Malaysia, and in China. We manage the distribution of their products from Asia to electronic and computer equipment customers. We can go from order to delivery within 72 hours anywhere in the world. Q. How have security concerns after Sept. 11 changed how you manage these chains? A. We work with our customers to declare the items that are coming into the United States before they arrive. Through electronic data interchange, we're able to access that information and pass it on to U.S. Customs. That avoids any delays. Q. But it still seems that these kinds of supply chains are vulnerable to any number of bad things. How can you protect them? A. The keys are information and visibility. You have to be connected to the whole supply chain and know who your reliable suppliers are. If you have multiple manufacturing providers, multiple trade partners, multiple freight forwarders, multiple airlines and other companies stringing together your supply chain, you can't see everything that is happening unless you have an integrated information technology system. As a result, we're seeing more single sourcing and risk mitigation taking place in the United States. By that, I mean there's more consolidation of supply-chain partners to streamline the processes and create more accountability if something goes wrong. If you don't have the footprint network around the world, you can't control the supply chain. Q. Is your global network big enough to |
1632119_0 | Checking In as a Do-It-Yourself Project | EXPERIENCED travelers have grown accustomed to handling many duties that used to fall to airline personnel, from booking tickets to printing boarding passes. Now, consumers are taking charge of another responsibility: checking in baggage. Several airlines, including Alaska, Northwest and Southwest, have begun using machines in a growing number of United States airports that allow passengers to print out their own baggage tags, albeit under the watchful eye of a nearby counter clerk. Once the stickers are affixed to suitcase handles, passengers tote their bags over to security screening machines, hand them to an attendant, and watch them go up a conveyor belt and vanish into an X-ray machine, after which the bags are sent on to airplanes. It is the latest way for passengers to save time and for airlines to save money, a top priority for an industry that is expected to lose another $5.5 billion this year, on top of $30 billion in losses since 2000. Southwest has installed the baggage tag kiosks this year at 30 airports, including Baltimore-Washington, Midway in Chicago and Love Field in Dallas. It plans to add the kiosks at six more airports before the end of the year. Eventually Southwest hopes to offer the service at all 60 of its airports, said Gregory D. Wells, vice president of ground operations. He said the machines used half the counter space Southwest once required, and half the number of clerks. Time savings are enormous. Alaska, the ninth-largest American carrier, estimates it took a typical passenger 20 minutes to complete the check-in process, from the time spent in line to the actual ticketing process and baggage check-in. That was cut to five minutes when Alaska installed self-service kiosks, allowing passengers to check themselves in and get their boarding passes, after which they still headed to ticket counters to drop off their bags. The new baggage system cuts the total check-in process to two minutes or less, said Sam Sperry, a spokesman for Alaska, which is based in Seattle. Thanks to the system, in place since June at Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, a single clerk checked in a 100-member tour group in 17 minutes last summer, Mr. Sperry said. Alaska's system, like those of Southwest and Northwest, eliminates the need for long check-in counters, since the kiosks can be anywhere in the terminal. In Anchorage, in fact, Alaska has just a small check-in |
1632286_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1636986_0 | If You Hear 'Cachaça,' Don't Think of Rum | There are a few things that really irk the average Brazilian. One is to argue that Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer great, was better than Pelé. Another is to confuse samba, the quintessential Brazilian rhythm, with salsa, a popular Latin music genre that has its origins in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean. Now, Brazilians have something new to add to the list: equating cachaça (pronounced kah-SHAH-sah), the country's powerful sugar cane liquor, with rum. Seeking to cash in on the rising popularity of Brazilian culture overseas, Brazil's government is putting the finishing touches on a presidential decree that it hopes will eventually give this South American nation the exclusive trademark rights to the name ''cachaça.'' Brazil hopes to take its national firewater upmarket, giving it the kind of cachet that the French gained with the exclusive right to call sparkling wine Champagne and Mexico has with tequila. Even more important, government officials and industry executives say, it is a way to distinguish cachaça from rum in lucrative export markets like Europe and the United States. ''For years, all the cachaça we exported to the United States, for example, had to be labeled Brazilian rum, which is something that wasn't in our interests at all,'' said Ricardo Cavalcanti, a senior official at Brazil's agriculture ministry who is helping to draw up the legislation classifying cachaça. ''Rum is one thing and cachaça is another.'' Also called pinga, aguardente or arrebenta peito (literally, ''chest smasher''), cachaça is distilled directly from sugar cane juice. Most rums, by contrast, are produced from molasses, a byproduct of sugar refining. Like Brazil's national dish, a hearty pork and black bean stew called feijoada, cachaça was originally a poor man's pleasure, first consumed by slaves on sugar cane plantations in the country's northeast in the mid-1500's. Today, most Brazilians drink cachaça in cocktails called caipirinhas (pronounced kye-pee-REEN-yahs), an exotic but lethal concoction with crushed limes, ice and a generous amount of sugar. Like cachaça, the caipirinha began as a peasant's libation; the name is derived from the word caipira, which in Portuguese means hick or country bumpkin. But the caipirinha has enjoyed a renaissance, becoming a standard in hip bars and restaurants from Rio de Janeiro to New York. ''When I first got into this business it was pretty slow, but over the last few years business has really taken off and my clientele has grown a |
1636974_0 | Ski Condominiums: Upbeat Digs After a Downhill Day | WHO -- Peter D. Wick, 74, a retired general contractor, and his wife, Anne Marie, 58, a retired teacher WHAT -- 2-bedroom condominium with a sleeping loft WHERE -- Sun Valley, Idaho Peter: I've been coming to this area to ski every year for 50 years. In the early days, there were no freeways, and believe me, it wasn't easy to get here. However, what it lacked in ease it made up for in affordability -- at least if you were willing to endure the journey. Back then, two classes of people came to Sun Valley. There were kids, like us, who would do anything to hit the slopes. And there were the celebrity types. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper and Ann Sothern were regulars. It's still that way, but quietly. Celebrities continue to visit or live here, but the atmosphere is low-key. Unlike Aspen or Vail, development here has been gradual and thoughtful. A lot of emphasis has been placed on respecting the environment, and in many ways, Ketchum is still just a small Western town. Anne Marie: We live on a boat in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, so having this condo in the mountains gives us the best of both worlds. In the summer and fall, we sail up to British Columbia, and in the winter, we come here to ski and celebrate the holidays. It's a wonderful place to be. There's a tree-lighting ceremony, for instance, and caroling. And as you wander though the village, everyone is bundled up, excited to be outdoors. Each year, Peter and I take our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren on a horse-drawn sleigh ride. Afterward, we have dinner at the Trail Creek Cabin, a restaurant famous for having been popular with Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner, among others. There's something decidedly old-fashioned and magical about spending the holidays here. Truly, it's the kind of Christmas everyone imagines. As told to Bethany Lyttle ON THE MARKET Information was provided by the listing companies or owners. WHERE -- Telluride Mountain Village, Colo. WHAT -- 2-bedroom condominium HOW MUCH -- $729,000 This ground-level ski-in, ski-out condominium is in a 10-unit complex at the base of the gondola and chair lifts. The unit is 1,348 square feet and was built in 1989. It is on one level and has a gas fireplace; two bathrooms, one with a jetted tub and a steam shower; a back deck |
1637101_0 | Zimbabwe Extends Crackdown On Dissent as Election Nears | A few yards from Raymond Majongwe's office, on the apron of a four-lane highway outside this capital city's downtown, a cherry red sedan sat recently beneath a clutch of trees, its engine off, the driver idle. The sedan has been there for weeks, Mr. Majongwe said. It will be there next week, too. Mr. Majongwe is the head of a rebel schoolteacher's union. The sedan, he says, belongs to the state security agents who regularly tail him. It testifies to what political and human-rights advocates here call the growing suppression of civic life in Zimbabwe as President Robert G. Mugabe girds for national elections that his government cannot afford to lose. Mr. Mugabe and the governing Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, came unexpectedly close to being swept from office in parliamentary and presidential elections in 2000 and 2002, and they have taken a series of measures designed to minimize the chances of another competitive ballot. During the 2002 election the government enacted laws sharply curbing freedoms of the press and public assembly, citing national security. Now, with new national elections looming in March, new laws and other measures promise to silence the remaining independent press and activist groups that have been vehicles for dissent. In November alone, Zimbabwe's Parliament enacted legislation mandating a two-year prison term for practicing journalism without a license. A second law made it illegal to conduct voter education without government approval, requiring most election workers to register and clear electioneering materials with the state. A third law, passed in early December, effectively places nongovernmental groups, churches and charities under state control, empowering the government to investigate their finances, to restrict their activities and, in many cases, to disband them at will. A fourth proposal would impose prison sentences of up to 20 years for ''materially false'' statements or writings that impugn the state. Earlier this year, the government installed equipment on Zimbabwe's Internet service providers to monitor and censor e-mail messages. In July, it tried to bar the one cellphone company outside state control from routing calls outside the country, saying unsupervised foreign telephone calls were a national security threat. The company, Econet Wireless, is controlled by a government critic whose opposition newspaper, The Daily News, was far and away the most popular publication in Zimbabwe. The government closed the newspaper in February. In October, it charged five of Econet's directors with illegal dealings |
1635176_0 | A Child's Autism, a Family's Love | To the Editor: It was very gratifying to see a front-page article about young siblings of children with autism (''For Siblings of the Autistic, a Burdened Youth,'' Dec. 10). As an adult sibling of someone with autism, I felt a mixture of awe and pride as I read about these young, largely unheralded siblings. Things were very different back when my brother and I were growing up, in the 50's and 60's. While one young girl in the article looks daggers at people who talk ill about her unusual sibling, I never admitted to having a brother with developmental disabilities. Alan was a subject filled only with shame for me, a feeling that was abetted by the experts of the day, who had no other solution than to institutionalize children with autism (or even minor learning disabilities). My brother, who was nonverbal and could without provocation pound his head repeatedly, was lost in that ungodly system for more than 30 years. If we still have some problems to solve, it's important to note that in fiercely, defiantly and, yes, sometimes sadly loving our unusual siblings, we've come a long way. Susan Hamovitch Brooklyn, Dec. 10, 2004 The writer is the producer-director of ''Without Apology,'' a documentary about her brother. |
1634009_1 | Find the Hidden Philosophers | for ''West Face'' includes his own photographs of clouds in Colorado, pictures clipped from mountain climbing magazines and books on the Himalayas, and portraits of philosophers from encyclopedias and textbooks. He then projects the finished collage onto a blank canvas and paints the shadow image, he says, ''over-reading it and intentionally getting it wrong.'' The purpose of this optical ambiguity is to encourage multiple and sometimes conflicting readings of the same picture. ''What I'm interested in is the moment between a literal interpretation and a figurative one,'' he explains. ''It may be comedy, it may be tragedy, it may be fraud, but there's a truth that one only finds between interpretations.'' MIA FINEMAN STONE-FACED PHILOSOPHERS With ''West Face,'' Mr. Tansey has created a fanciful Mount Rushmore of Western philosophy, embedding tiny faces of philosophers from Plato and Socrates to Derrida and Foucault in the craggy landscape. The painting represents ''philosophy as a high altitude adventure,'' he notes, with contemporary thinkers at the foot of the mountain and the ancients -- figured as a large classical profile -- at the peak. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN The face of Ludwig Wittgenstein stretches sideways across the base of the mountain. Just above him is a smaller portrait of his estranged mentor, Bertrand Russell; just below is Wittgenstein's contemporary, Karl Popper, who seems to be whispering in his ear. The juxtaposition is a winking reference to a famous incident that occurred in 1946, when Popper came to speak at Cambridge, where Wittgenstein was then teaching. A heated argument ensued, during which Wittgenstein allegedly threatened his colleague with a poker he grabbed from the fireplace. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Like the distorted anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's ''Ambassadors'' (1533), this distended portrait of Nietzsche becomes fully legible when viewed from the side. Traditionally, artists have used anamorphic projection to call attention to the limitations of any single perspective or interpretation. JACQUES DERRIDA When Mr. Tansey painted this image of climbers trying to pitch a tent as it billows in a gust of wind, he had in mind the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's metaphorical image of truth as a fluttering of veils that conceal as much as they reveal. (Derrida's portrait can be found on the lower right-hand side of the mountain, just above the flapping tent.) LOUISE BROOKS The white space between two hikers appears on second glance as the haunting profile of a woman who resembles the movie |
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1634379_8 | South America Seeks to Fill the World's Table | selling. I want to buy more property myself because there is no better investment in the world than buying land in Mato Grosso.'' The Costs of the Boom The real estate boom has not been without social tensions and other costs, particularly to the environment, as the expansion of farm and grazing lands has accelerated Amazon deforestation. Typically, jungle is razed for conversion first into cattle pasture and then, as the agricultural frontier advances, into fields for soybeans and other crops. But producers in the cerrado, which is more than 1,000 miles from the coast, say they are more concerned about the lack of reliable highways, railways and barge routes, which adds to the cost of doing business. That situation, farmers say, is gradually improving, as is Brazil's ability to weather the ups and downs of agricultural markets. After nearly a decade of rising prices and record profits, soybean prices, for instance, have sharply dropped this year, the result in large part of a decision to curb imports and to cancel existing contracts by China, where a huge new market has emerged to satisfy the changing diet of a growing middle class. In the past, when Brazilian agriculture was dependent on a single crop, that would have spelled certain disaster. But Brazil has made a successful effort to diversify its exports, and has reduced its vulnerability to sudden price fluctuations for any single crop. In the 1960's, for example, coffee was responsible for 60 percent of Brazil's exports. Today, coffee is seventh on the list. As a result, the watchword today for Brazilian farm producers is to diversify even further. ''We're entering a phase in which we're not going just to be growing things, but processing them too, turning them into finished products,'' said Eledir Pedro Techio, manager of the local credit cooperative and a soybean and corn farmer. It is also clear that further gains in production are still to come, thanks both to expansion of the agricultural frontier and higher yields. Government officials estimate that an additional 50 million acres, much of it as potentially fertile as the land being tilled here now, are likely to be put into production over the next decade. ''There's no way you can go wrong here,'' Mr. Lawisch said. ''We're champions of production already, but we think we can do even better. We aim to feed not just Brazil, but the world.'' |
1633993_0 | Augmented Bar Code, The | Meant for mechanical eyes only, the bar code divulges little information to the shopper. But Dara O'Rourke, a U.C. Berkeley professor of labor, says that with a few tweaks, it could help foment a consumer revolution. As he explained in a World Bank Group policy paper in the spring, shoppers choosing, say, turkeys could one day scan bar codes with their cellphone cameras to find out where the birds were from, and even see pictures of the farms. The transformed bar code would call attention to environmentally friendly products and raise the consciousness of shoppers everywhere. The idea isn't entirely fanciful. Software already exists that allows camera phones to read bar codes. And some companies have begun sharing encoded product-tracking information with curious consumers. This year, Heritage Foods started providing a tracking number with every piece of meat it sells. When keyed into the company's Web site, the number provides the animal's medical and feed history. The site also features a turkey Web cam, so you can examine the animals' living conditions for yourself. As Patrick Martins, co-founder of Heritage Foods, puts it, you can ''see Tom naturally mating with Henrietta.'' The disclosure of so much production-process detail has risks: what if a turkey keels over on camera? Many companies are reluctant to throw open their doors while their competitors remain invisible. Still, a sizable number of consumers actually want to know how their sausage (or turkey) is made. These folks are less worried about losing their appetites than they are about buying something seriously unhealthful. O'Rourke, whose 1997 report on Nike factory conditions in Vietnam helped spur consumer boycotts, says he hopes the government will construct a vast product-tracking database available to scanner-wielding consumers. If he gets his wish, the bar code may become the most interesting thing on the box. NATHANAEL JOHNSON THE 4TH ANNUAL: YEAR IN IDEAS |
1636170_2 | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Technology; To Test Snow Tires, What Could Top Florida in July? | wears, the fibers open up microscopic holes that act like tiny suction cups. The grains of sand work like miniature claws for better grip in rain or snow. Ford Motor Company used the Eglin facility for the first time in September, just a few weeks before Goodyear's visit. In 4 to 8 inches of snow, Ford engineers worked to develop the electronic stability control systems that are now available on Ford, Lincoln and Mercury sport utilities. ''When I told the test team they had to go to Florida to do cold-weather testing, they just kind of smiled,'' Bob Doyle, who oversees Ford's cold weather and wind tunnel test sites, said. ''But what do you do in the summer?'' Ford returned in November to perform more winter tests on some prototype transmissions and engines. It is not just arctic weather that companies seek when developing new models. Ford researchers put the 330-volt nickel-metal-hydride battery pack of the Escape Hybrid through a simulated Phoenix summer, placing it in a weather chamber for six months. The battery was also tested in minus 40 degree weather in Manitoba, Canada, and subjected to temperatures over 130 degrees in Death Valley, Calif. Mary Ann Wright, director of hybrid programs at Ford, oversaw development of the hybrid battery. She said 15 Escape Hybrids crisscrossed the United States, rolling up 2.5 million miles in the deserts of Nevada, the hills of San Francisco and the icy roadways of upper Michigan. ''We had to validate the cell life and make sure there was sufficient power, even in the most extreme conditions,'' Ms. Wright said. ''No customer will ever drive this vehicle the way we did.'' Researchers say laboratories like Eglin's offer many advantages over testing outdoors, including the consistency and repeatability of weather conditions, a necessity for scientifically valid results. Also, it is cheaper to rent the Eglin facility, even at $15,000 to $30,000 a day, than to ship cars to distant destinations like New Zealand, Mr. Doyle said. ''We're doing more testing than we ever did in the past, and we have to do it faster,'' said Ray Nicosia, a Ford engineer who supervised development of the Five Hundred sedan and Freestyle utility wagon. The increased civilian use of the McKinley lab comes as automakers like Ford are closing some North American testing centers to cut costs. The lab, which was built to test military aircraft after World |
1636150_0 | Sprint Will Offer A Radio Service That Plays Music Over Cellphones | For those annoyed by people who seem to have a cellphone constantly held to their ears, count your blessings. It is about to get worse. Today, Sprint will offer a new reason, besides placing calls, for people to use their mobile phones. It will introduce a radio service that allows people to listen to music over their phones, whether through an earpiece or the phone itself. The service, which will cost Sprint customers $5.99 a month in addition to subscriber fees and any necessary upgrades in their choice of cellphones, will let them listen to commercial-free streams of music from channels including R&B/hip-hop, hit list, 80's, 90's, and a combined country and rock. The release is part of an effort by Sprint -- aware of other services from its competitors -- to turn the mobile phone into an entertainment device. Already, some more expensive Sprint devices offer streaming video delivered over the mobile phone infrastructure. In the case of radio, Sprint has contracted for radio channels from Music Choice, a company that also provides music programming over cable television networks. Sprint is ratcheting up its programming as it hears the footsteps of potential rivals. It has taken the lead in creating video and audio programming to be streamed over phones, industry analysts said, but that lead may not last long. It is expected that in January, Verizon Wireless will introduce content to be streamed over its own high-speed mobile phone network. In the meantime, Sprint said the new radio feature would enable users to have something to do with their phones in those increasingly rare moments they are not using them to talk, play games or send e-mail. ''This is for people who have a little bit of spare time,'' a Sprint vice president, Jeff Hallock, acknowledged. |
1636209_5 | How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading | anxious for their children to appear normal that they cannot respect their way of communicating. Parents argue that their antagonists are showing a typical autistic lack of empathy by suggesting that they should not try to help their children. It is only those whose diagnosis describes them as ''high functioning'' or having Asperger's syndrome, they say, who are opposed to a cure. ''If those who raise their opposition to the so-called oppression of the autistic would simply substitute their usage of 'autism or autistic' with 'Asperger's,' their arguments might make some sense,'' Lenny Schafer, publisher of the widely circulated Schafer Autism Report, wrote in a recent e-mail message. ''But I intend to cure, fix, repair, change over etc. my son and others like him of his profound and typical disabling autism into something better. Let us regain our common sense.'' But the autistic activists say it is not so easy to distinguish between high and low functioning, and their ranks include both. In an effort to refute parental skeptics, the three owners of autistics.org, a major Web hub of autistic advocacy, issued a statement listing their various impairments. None of them are fully toilet-trained, one of them cannot speak, and they have all injured themselves on multiple occasions, they wrote: ''We flap, finger-flick, rock, twist, rub, clap, bounce, squeal, hum, scream, hiss and tic.'' The touchiest area of dispute is over Applied Behavior Analysis, or A.B.A., the therapy that many parents say is the only way their children were able to learn to make eye contact, talk and get through the day without throwing tantrums. Some autistic adults, including some who have had the therapy, say that at its best it trains children to repress their natural form of expression and at its worst borders on being abusive. If an autistic child who screams every time he is taken to the supermarket is trained not to, for example, he may still be experiencing pain from the fluorescent lights and crush of strangers. ''Behaviors are so often attempts to communicate,'' said Jane Meyerding, an autistic woman who has a clerical job at the University of Washington and is a frequent contributor to the Autistic Advocacy e-mail discussion list. ''When you snuff out the behaviors you snuff out the attempts to communicate.'' Perhaps the most public conflict between parents and adult autistics came in a lawsuit brought by several Canadian families who |
1636158_4 | On the Open Internet, a Web of Dark Alleys | begins in three more weeks. We've obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.'' And increasingly, new tools used to hide messages can quickly be found with a simple Web search. Dozens of free or inexpensive steganography programs are available for download. And there is ample evidence that terrorists have made use of encryption technologies, which are difficult to break. The arrest in Pakistan in July of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, thought to be an Al Qaeda communications specialist, for instance, yielded a trove of ciphered messages from his computers. Still, the mere act of encrypting a message could draw attention, so numerous software programs have been developed to hide messages in other ways. At one Web site, spammimic.com, a user can type in a phrase like ''Meet me at Joe's'' and have that message automatically converted into a lengthy bit of prose that reads like a spam message: ''Dear Decision maker; Your e-mail address has been submitted to us indicating your interest in our briefing! This is a one-time mailing there is no need to request removal if you won't want any more,'' and so forth. The prose is then pasted into an e-mail message and sent. A recipient expecting the fake spam message can then paste it into the site's decoder and read the original message. Another free program will convert short messages into fake dialogue for a play. And still simpler schemes require no special software at all -- or even the need to send anything. In one plan envisioned by Mr. Hinnen in his law review article, a group need only provide the same user name and password to all of its members, granting them all access to a single Web-based e-mail account. One member simply logs on and writes, but does not send, an e-mail message. Later, a co-conspirator, perhaps on the other side of the globe, logs on, reads the unsent message and then deletes it. ''Because the draft was never sent,'' Mr. Hinnen wrote, the Internet service provider ''does not retain a copy of it and there is no record of it traversing the Internet -- it never went anywhere.'' The message would be essentially untraceable. Michael Caloyannides, a computer forensics specialist and a senior fellow at Mitretek Systems, a nonprofit scientific research organization based in |
1637803_1 | Mission: Difficult, but Not Impossible | auditors undercover to airports around the country last year to see how well screeners were able to detect guns, knives and explosive devices. We found that it was still far easier than it should have been, two years after 9/11, to get deadly weapons past passenger and baggage checkpoints. Yet the department has been reluctant even to acknowledge the problem, much less put in place some of the recommendations that we made to fix it. There is little reason to believe that screener performance will have improved appreciably by the time the next round of covert testing is completed early next year. Other points of entry also pose challenges. Only about 6 percent of the thousands of containers that arrive at American seaports each day are physically inspected for weapons of mass destruction and other contraband. It is impossible to inspect all incoming cargo, so the department relies on abnormalities in the cargo manifest regarding contents, shipping route and other variables to choose containers for inspection. But manifests can be written to disguise abnormalities. And even when cargo is duly inspected, there is no assurance that smuggled weapons will be found. The department does have agreements with a number of nations permitting the stationing of department inspectors at foreign ports. But it is unclear how much cargo inspection Americans are able to do, or how much oversight they exercise over foreign inspectors. Even if a given shipment is thoroughly inspected before it sails for the United States, it is unclear whether any tampering with cargo en route can be detected. When it comes to screening people, the department is making some progress. The longstanding goal of an entry-exit immigration system at all points of entry, so that we know which foreigners are entering the United States and when they leave, is within reach. The system scans visitors' fingers and takes their photographs, then checks this data against terrorist and criminal watch lists. Since the system was installed at airports and some seaports in January, hundreds of criminals have been caught and scores of suspected terrorists have been turned away. But the department initially exempted the millions of travelers from nations whose citizens do not need visas to enter the United States for 90 days or less. So a free pass was essentially being given to people carrying passports issued by friendly nations -- even though some of those nations' passports |
1634965_1 | No Bang for Our Cheap Buck | and, with it, America's need to attract nearly $2 billion each day from abroad to balance its books. But the dollar has been declining since February 2002 -- it's down by 55 percent against the euro and 22 percent against the yen -- and the trade deficit has stubbornly refused to shrink along with it. The falling dollar has done nothing to diminish America's appetite for foreign goods -- such imports continue to rise at a faster rate than exports. According to yesterday's report, imports were some 50 percent greater than exports in October. Much of October's import growth was caused by high oil prices, which have since subsided. But that's no reason to shrug off the disturbing evidence of the weak dollar's failure to fix the trade gap. The United States is now on track for a trade deficit of more than $60 billion next June. As the American economy heads for higher global imbalances, the need to borrow from abroad grows. And the more we borrow, the weaker the dollar becomes. That's because the markets that set the value of freely traded currencies, like the dollar and the euro, punish indebted nations by pushing down their currencies. The United States, by any measure -- trade, the federal budget, personal consumption -- is by far the world's biggest debtor. The need to borrow in the face of an already weak dollar portends higher prices and higher interest rates. How high and how fast? Who knows? But one thing is sure: that American tourists need to pay $5 for a demitasse in Paris will be the least of our worries if mortgage rates spike, the stock market falls, and businesses curb their already modest hiring. A cheaper dollar would not be as threatening if it was part of a comprehensive strategy to close the trade deficit. For instance, the United States must demonstrate to our trading partners and the currency markets that it intends to reduce the federal budget deficit -- thereby lessening its need to borrow from abroad and reducing downward pressure on the dollar. Unless and until it does so, the United States will lack the credibility and the authority to press for changes that need to occur in other countries to balance out global trade. There are alternatives to a single-minded pursuit of a weak dollar fix. What is lacking is the leadership to pursue them. Editorial |
1569275_0 | Study Doesn't Link Abortion To Higher Breast Cancer Risk | Miscarriages and induced abortions do not increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer later in life, according to a study of 83,000 women worldwide being published today. The study's authors, from the University of Oxford in England, said it was the largest to examine the issue, which has been highly charged politically and scientifically. Since researchers began studying the issue in the late 1950's, some studies have suggested there is a slight risk while others have shown none. Although there is no scientific explanation for such a link, supporters of the higher risk findings have theorized that the breast cancer somehow resulted from a sudden change in a woman's hormonal balance after an abortion. To help resolve the conflict, Dr. Valerie Beral led a team of Oxford epidemiologists that asked authors of all earlier studies on a link between abortion and breast cancer to provide their original data. Authors of virtually all studies collaborated, and the new analysis included some previously unpublished studies, the scientists said. Their report appears in the journal Lancet. The Oxford findings strengthen the opinion of a scientific panel of more than 100 of the world's experts on the issue appointed by the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency in Bethesda, Md. Last year, the panel concluded that abortion did not increase the risk of breast cancer. The panel was appointed after anti-abortion groups and their supporters in Congress asserted that the cancer agency was playing down the link between abortion and breast cancer. By applying identical statistical criteria to analyze original data from 53 studies carried out in 16 countries, Dr. Beral's team said it identified a major systematic flaw that accounted for the inconsistency in earlier findings. The flaw, which concerns the time when women were asked about whether they had had an abortion, falsely created the impression of an increased risk of breast cancer, the Oxford team said. Earlier studies showed that women with breast cancer were more likely to report induced abortions than women who did not have breast cancer. Experts say that many people who develop a serious disease seek explanations for it, and acknowledging an abortion is more likely among women with breast cancer. Studies that reported a link between abortions and breast cancer had not asked women about abortions before they developed breast cancer, Dr. Beral said. |
1566299_1 | In This Recovery, a College Education Backfires | research scientists, corporate executives, financial advisers, strategic planners, advertising executives and television producers. These are Mr. Reich's symbolic analysts, and their great contribution is conceptual thinking. No one does that better than America's college graduates, the argument goes. The next great innovation will come from them -- the breakthrough that will keep the United States on top in the global economy and generate jobs within the country for workers with less education, too. That is bedrock theory. Democrats and Republicans both subscribe to it. True, in the raging debate over the offshoring of jobs, various short-term fixes are offered -- protectionist measures, for example, and tax incentives to encourage companies to preserve jobs at home. But the thesis prevails: Our college-educated, with their superior skills, give the United States a long-term natural advantage. Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent international economist at Columbia University, put it bluntly in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last month. ''I have taught hundreds of fine foreign students in the last few years, but only a small fraction are at the level of proficiency that Intel looks for in its research program.'' Well, if America's college graduates --the men and women with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or more -- are so special and in such demand, why are they suffering in the current job market? No other group has taken the beating they have in the last four years. The percentage of all college graduates 25 and older who hold jobs fell from just over 78 percent in 2000 to just under 76 percent in 2003. That was the lowest level in more than 25 years, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington. And they are joining the rolls of the long-term unemployed at a faster rate than any other group, educated or not. The 25- to-35-year-olds have been hit the hardest. The portion employed in this group of college graduates dropped from more than 87 percent in 2000 to 84.1 percent late last year. That was also the lowest since the late 1970's, and their average wage has fallen since 2001. Let's not blow these hardships out of context, however. College graduates are still more likely to have jobs than others, and their wages are notably higher. ''In terms of employment, college graduates enjoy a big premium, just not as |
1566297_6 | Business; Thinking Outside the Can: A Fresh Look at Food in a Box | a Dean Foods unit in Mount Crawford, Va., and Jasper Products are the only businesses with plants putting dairy products into aseptic plastic bottles. Morningstar has licenses to make milk drinks branded by Hershey Foods and Folgers brand latte drinks for Procter & Gamble. The Dr. Pepper/Seven Up division of Cadbury Schweppes has contracted with Jasper to produce Raging Cow, a shelf-stable dairy beverage. Despite the appeal of plastic bottles, many manufacturers, like Hain Celestial, are content to stick with less expensive paperboard packaging. ''There are so many shapes and sizes that have come out in the last three years,'' said Mr. Jacobson at Hain Celestial. Tetra Pak, which is privately owned and is the world leader in sales of aseptic packaging material and processing equipment, has a line of 150 variously shaped paperboard containers that can be matched with 10 types of openings and closures. ''We've got rounded cartons with screw tops that look like bottles,'' said Jeff Kellar, vice president for strategic business development at Tetra Pak USA. Some of the biggest consumers of aseptic products are food service operations, which care far more about convenience and flavor than packaging. Restaurant workers are now pouring cake batter, crème brûlée and hollandaise sauce out of aseptic containers. Carol B. White, who owns a coffeehouse called Greenberry's Coffee & Tea Company in Houston, says she buys aseptic products like soy milk because ''it's shelf-stable and I want to save refrigerator space.'' Holding up two of the brick-like containers, she said: ''My customers don't see it. They don't know the difference.'' Curtains, Maybe, For Can Openers Does it really taste better? Cook's Illustrated magazine, known for its extensive testing of products and recipes, has decreed that aseptically packaged chicken broth has superior flavor to canned. ''The broth in a box clearly tasted better,'' according to Jack Bishop, executive editor of the magazine, who said everyone in the magazine's test kitchen agreed. ''You can really tell the difference,'' he said. ''Get rid of your can opener.'' I did. I compared chopped tomatoes in a box (Pomi from Parmalat) to chopped tomatoes in a can (Del Monte). The boxed tomatoes had better consistency, flavor and color. I also made the crème brûlée from Chef Creations, a brand available only to restaurants and other food service companies, for a gathering of food snobs. They all loved it, and asked for the recipe. KATE MURPHY |
1566322_1 | The World; China's Economic Engine Needs Power (Lots of It) | industry. Last year, China accounted for almost a third of the world's consumption of finished steel. Electricity consumption jumped by 15 percent. Domestic coal production rose by 100 million tons -- and still there were shortages. Yet China's appetite today is modest compared with what is estimated for the future; the country's energy needs are expected to more than double by 2020. This prospect has the Communist Party reportedly rolling out plans for at least 100 new power plants, including nuclear, hydropower and coal-fired ones. It has also raised concerns that efforts to improve China's polluted environment will be muted by the demand for power. China is trying just about every possible avenue to satisfy its power demands, and none offers a completely risk-free or ''clean'' solution. Plans call for at least 20 nuclear plants to be built by 2020. Hydropower projects, regarded by many Chinese officials as a clean power source, are threatening to disrupt the ecological balance on many important rivers that flow out of the high Tibetan plateau. China's primary energy source, and its dirtiest, is coal, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the power supply. Coal is a primary source of greenhouse gases, and experts predict that by 2020 China could pass the United States to become the world's biggest source of carbon monoxide. That this is happening is perhaps not surprising, because America is an economic, if not political, model for China. ''The fundamental problem is that China is following the path of the United States, and probably the world cannot afford a second United States,'' said Zhang Jianyu, program manager for the Beijing office of Environmental Defense, an American-based advocacy group. In an address earlier this month before the annual meeting of the National People's Congress, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao captured the competing pressures of the economy when he cited environmental protection and called for building a ''conservation-minded society.'' Yet he also exhorted the country to develop more energy sources. ''We must speed up the development of large coal mines, important power generating facilities and power grids, the exploration and exploitation of petroleum and other important resources,'' he said. Michelle Billig, a former energy attaché in the United States Embassy in Beijing, said China's leaders are improving energy efficiency and becoming more environmentally friendly. She noted that China is completing the creation of fuel-efficiency standards that are better than those in the United |
1566064_2 | CHILDREN'S BOOKS | wrong direction. And losing time at sea was serious business, since food and water would begin to run out. Even if a ship managed to arrive at its location in an expeditious fashion, problems were not over. Sure, Grenada was dead ahead -- but at night or when the weather was bad, who knew whether it was 50 miles away or 50 feet? A ship's arrival was often announced with the crunch of wood against sand or, worse, rock. In 1714, Parliament voted to award £20,000, a giant sum, to whoever solved the longitude problem. While astronomers searched for an answer in the shifting alignment of the stars and moon, Harrison approached it from a different angle. It was known that if sailors had a way to calculate the difference between their local time and the time at their starting point, they would know their longitude. But how to keep track of the time back home? The solution was a clock accurate even in harsh conditions at sea. Apart from the logistical challenges (an amusing drawing by Erik Blegvad shows what it might have been like to row a large grandfather clock out to a ship), the more basic problem was that pendulums would not swing true on the ocean. Borden nicely recounts how Harrison solved the problem, developing first a series of clocks and then a watch, and of the nearly six decades it took him to win formal recognition for his accomplishment and the full reward. Her sometimes mechanical text is in blank verse, while Blegvad's illustrations render a distant world with a light, appealing touch. Also, though Borden is long on plaudits for her hero, she is short on details about how the clocks actually worked. By the middle of the next century, thanks to Harrison's work, longitude was no longer an issue. The life of a seaman was still perilous, especially as ships navigated along often treacherous coastal areas before they were properly mapped. ''Ship captains, passengers and merchants have always entrusted their lives and precious cargo to maps of American waterways. Who has been making these nautical charts for almost 200 years?'' Taylor Morrison writes in ''The Coast Mappers.'' In 1807, the United States Coast Survey was created, but the work was slow. Then came the gold rush in 1849, which drew sailors to San Francisco from around the world. ''This enormous increase in ship |
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1566081_4 | Arrivederci, Gucci | has taken concepts and images that he loved and reinvented them as clothes or bags or shoes that inspired a similar connection in consumers. He was the first designer to envision the world as a global marketplace that could be linked by a sensibility -- his sensibility. He and Domenico De Sole, Gucci Group's chairman and chief executive, made Gucci the first real high-end global fashion brand. ''We withstood the Asian collapse in '97 and '98,'' De Sole said. ''We withstood a hostile takeover from LVMH'' -- another luxury house -- ''in 1999. And we got through Sept. 11. Gucci has been like something I read in this book about the great Green Bay Packers' football coach Vince Lombardi. An interviewer asked him, How did it feel to lose a game. Lombardi said, 'We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.' That's what happened here. PPR made their decision, and we ran out of time. But we didn't lose.'' When PPR, headed by François-Henri Pinault, the son of one of France's wealthiest men, bought Gucci, it entrusted Ford to expand the company. In 1999, the company purchased Yves Saint Laurent. One sticking point in the failed contract negotiations with Ford and De Sole was their desire for managerial control of both Gucci and YSL. ''People have been critical of me at YSL, and that upsets me,'' Ford said. ''It was difficult from the start. I made a real effort with Yves Saint Laurent himself at the beginning. I had a foolish idea that we would get along . . . and that he would be happy. I included him in the beginning, but very quickly, he turned on me. I received nasty letters from him, and they were pretty constant. They were sort of vicious.'' Ford had success at YSL. As at Gucci, he endeavored to create signature pieces: the Mombasa bag, with its horn handle, echoed the Gucci bamboo bag, and in 2001, his purple peasant blouse for YSL created a sensation. ''On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in New York,'' Ford recalled, ''and the YSL store was supposed to open. On the day the planes went into the twin towers, we received 42 calls from customers looking for the purple peasant blouse. The World Trade Center is going down, and women are calling a store for a blouse. The power of fashion can be a |
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1566143_6 | High Anxiety | terrorist scenarios they have considered. Whatever those chilling specifics, the general approach that the designers are taking is clear, said Matthys Levy, an engineer and founding partner at Weidlinger Associates, the company that is consulting on the effects of blasts for the project. ''You define attack scenarios,'' said Mr. Levy, who cautioned that he was not directly involved in the work on the Freedom Tower. ''You say under certain scenarios you might lose an element in the building. Then, you look at the redundancy'' -- the ability of the structure to shift loads over to undamaged columns and beams. And in that respect, the basic structure of the Freedom Tower appears to rate high marks, Mr. Childs said. In a reflection of the two sloping corners of the tower, steel support columns in the perimeter intersect in shallow angles and form tall triangles with the floors. Even if part of that structure were blown away, the rest of it would retain its overall integrity, ''like a showgirl's stocking,'' Mr. Childs said. ''They really form a fabric,'' he said. ''So you can tear a hole in it and yet that fabric all still holds together.'' That effect, said Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer who produced an early design for the building (some features of which were incorporated into the current working version), is reminiscent of the one that kept the twin towers standing immediately after the planes punched huge gashes in their sides. According to Mr. Nordenson, the cable system is designed to shift loads from damaged elements on the perimeter to the core, so that a damaged portion of the building could in principle ''hang'' from the core like canvas from a tent pole, which gives the structure added redundancy, and therefore safety. ''It can accommodate whatever scenarios you want to throw at it,'' he said. For his earlier design, topped with a similar structure, Mr. Nordenson calculated what might happen if high-speed aluminum projectiles -- say, the fuselage and wings of an airplane -- struck the cables. Like the cables that hung from dirigibles above London in the Blitz, he said, this structure would probably cut up the planes while holding the building. But because those calculations are preliminary, and based on an earlier version of the design, Mr. Nordenson has not shared them with the rest of the Freedom Tower design team. He said that he has not |
1564270_3 | Athens: An Olympian Metamorphosis | When I asked a Greek how people would weather the heat and nefos this summer, he laughed and said the athletes are already polluted with pills and performance-enhancing drugs. ''A few exhaust fumes shouldn't hurt them.'' For hearty souls, the best advice may be to hike around Athens. In its most salutary innovation, the city has opened a series of pedestrian zones. Some, like Ermou Street, lead past sensible shops full of practical goods. Others, like the ones in the Kolanaki district, are lined with elegant boutiques. But none is more picturesque than Adrianou, a once tumbledown street, where people can now walk carefree and car-free past the ruins of the Agora, the serene symmetry of the Stoa of Attalos and the Temple of Hephaestus, Greece's best preserved Doric temple. Still other pedestrian esplanades snake up the Acropolis to the Parthenon. En route, there are restaurants and cafes where one can refuel and admire the time-worked stone and honey-colored marble. I settled into the St. George Lycabettus Hotel in Kolonaki, at the foot of Lykavittos Hill, which means ''hill of wolves.'' Its pine-covered heights offer panoramic views of the Attic basin as it slopes to the sea and to the islands of Salamis and Aegina. While the wolves have vanished, a canine presence still imposes itself upon the city like an atavism that haunts the urban unconscious. More than 5,000 stray dogs prowl the streets of Athens. Rumor has it these mutts, some of them the size of small ponies, will be shunted from sight during the Olympics, along with derelict ships from Piraeus harbor and prostitutes from prominent corners. But for the moment, the dogs have free rein, and Athenians regard them with blithe imperturbability. People don't shoo them away, not even when they nose around the outdoor tables at tavernas or snooze near Parliament, around the feet of the pompom-shod evzones. Is there a better definition of cognitive dissonance than stepping into Emporio Armani across a high-shag carpet of recumbent pooches? Yet in most respects, the town is as up-to-date as a newly minted euro. While first-time visitors will want to pay their respects to the past and tour the National Archaeological Museum and the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, there's a contemporary scene reminiscent of SoHo or TriBeCa or any other area of former industrial blight that has been gussied up with galleries, nightclubs and expensive restaurants. |
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