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1564520_3 | Business; A Drug's Royalties May Ease Hunger | the University of California, lists four inventors: Dr. Mendelsohn, Dr. Sato and two researchers in Dr. Sato's lab who did the grunt work - J.Denry Sato, who is Dr. Sato's son, and Tomoyuki Kawamoto, a postdoctoral researcher from Japan who died some years ago. The inventors and the estate of Dr. Kawamoto will divide 42.5 percent of the university's proceeds from the patent, after legal fees are deducted, a university spokeswoman said. The terms of the license are confidential, but the royalty rate is believed to be 1 percent. So if Erbitux sales reach the expected level of several hundred million dollars a year, Dr. Sato could receive several hundred thousand dollars a year. Royalty payments are set to end in mid-2007, when the patent expires, though the university will probably apply for an extension. In the 1960's and 70's, Dr. Sato did pioneering work in figuring out how to grow cells in the laboratory using certain proteins called growth factors. These proteins fit into receptors protruding from cell surfaces the way a key fits into an ignition, spurring the cells to grow. Cancer cells depend on this mechanism to grow wildly. Dr. Sato and Dr. Mendelsohn decided to try to block the receptor for one of these growth-spurring agents, called epidermal growth factor. ''We just thought, 'Let's stick a piece of chewing gum in our lock so the key can't get in,''' Dr. Mendelsohn said. Dr. Sato said he had been more interested in just studying the growth factor by stopping it from working. Dr. Sato's researchers purified the receptor protein and injected it into mice, which treated it like an invading germ and made many antibodies to attack it. The antibody that stuck best to the receptor was called 225, after the number of the well in the laboratory plate in which it was found. Years later, the antibody was changed to make it chimeric - part human, part mouse - to reduce the immune reactions in patients. After that, it was called C225, by which it became widely known. In 1983, the year the results were first published, Dr. Sato left San Diego to become director of the W.Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, N.Y. He stayed until 1992. But even as he grew cells in dishes, he was experimenting with growing things on a larger scale in the desert. That interest started, he said, |
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1564324_2 | Jesus as Box-Office Superhero | in the culture wars is to state the obvious. What makes the movie so fascinating, and so unnerving, is that it marches onto a battlefield much older, and much more brutal, than the continuing arguments about the moral direction of contemporary American society. Mr. Gibson, brushing aside any pretense of pluralism and interreligious politesse, seems intent on reopening a 2,000-year-old theological dispute about a radical Jewish preacher whose followers believed he was the son of God. To the consternation of many, he appears to have succeeded. I will stay out of that one for now. For it seems to me equally important, even if it has been less widely noted, that Mr. Gibson's film has also landed squarely on the centuries-old fault line -- one nearly as consequential as the fissure between Judaism and Christianity -- between the sacred and the secular. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the ideological differences between believers and nonbelievers, but rather about the ways that people who profess various faiths (or none at all) divide the world into different realms of meaning and experience. To say that I, as a film critic, approach movies as secular phenomena is not to describe my religious beliefs, but rather the norms of my professional practice. I love movies -- you might even say that, on some days, I worship them -- but like most of my colleagues I understand them to be the products of human intention, rather than, say, expressions of divine will. What ''The Passion'' has taught me is that not everyone agrees. In the wake of my review, I received, not surprisingly, an unusually large number of phone calls and e-mail messages from readers. Most of them took issue with my criticisms of what I took to be the film's excessive violence and its vengeful, angry spirit. Some were abusive (and startlingly foul-mouthed) rants about the ''left-wing'' media (and also in some cases, predictably enough, the ''Jewish'' media), while others, repeating certain key words and phrases almost verbatim, looked like an orchestrated e-mail campaign. The dominant theme among the more temperate and thoughtful reactions was that I had failed to understand the story, and to grasp the truth and meaning of Christ's suffering, depicted by Mr. Gibson in such harrowing detail. One reader called ''The Passion'' ''a realistic portrayal of a true story,'' and along with many others took my objections to |
1567411_0 | Reducing Travel Trauma | To the Editor: I would like to heartily second Harvey Molotch's notion to make airport security more user-friendly (''You Want Me to Put My Shoes Where?,'' Op-Ed, March 12). I suggest that the most appreciated first step would be to have the conveyor belts slant down to eliminate the current waist-high lift of suitcases. (They might even deliver them to the ground when they've been scrutinized, although gravity gives us a ''lift'' there.) I am a slightly built senior, trying to see as much of my grandchildren and the world as time permits, and this would reduce my travel trauma, both physical and emotional. BETTY GOOD EDELSON Chevy Chase, Md., March 15, 2004 |
1567518_0 | U.S. Will Celebrate Pakistan As a 'Major Non-NATO Ally' | Secretary of State Colin L. Powell praised Pakistan's handling of a sweeping nuclear proliferation scandal during a visit here on Thursday and announced that the Bush administration would designate the country a ''major non-NATO ally.'' Once it is formally conferred by President Bush, the status will give Pakistan added diplomatic prestige and greater access to American military technology, surplus defense equipment and training, State and Defense Department officials said. The United States and Pakistan are still working out the details of $1.5 billion in long-term military assistance, and the new status will give the Pakistanis access, for instance, to American counterterrorism research projects that could be used in the offensive against Al Qaeda operatives along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pakistan is the fifth Islamic country to receive the title, after Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait. Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, Australia and New Zealand also enjoy this status. ''In some instances it is more symbolic than practical,'' Mr. Powell told reporters traveling with him. ''I don't know if Pakistan, whether they'll be able to take great advantage of it. But it is just a sign of the strength of the relationship.'' The designation will bolster the government of President Pervez Musharraf, who has faced strong domestic opposition to his support of the American-led campaign against terrorism, even as it solidifies that support. Mr. Powell said granting Pakistan the status ''was something we have been working on for months and months and months and months.'' ''Both our countries recognize our alliance is crucial to winning the worldwide war on terror,'' Mr. Powell said. ''We must do together more if your region, and if indeed the whole world, is to live in peace.'' At a morning news conference, Pakistan's foreign minister, Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, told reporters he had made clear to Mr. Powell that it was in Pakistan's own interest to fight proliferation. ''We are going to spare no effort to try and make efforts to pull this out root and branch, wherever this network is,'' he said. Days after saying he would press Pakistani officials on whether senior government officials were involved in the proliferation scandal, Mr. Powell praised the government's investigation. He also hailed ongoing Pakistani military operations along the border with Afghanistan designed to capture members of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden. Mr. Powell was not able to comment on reports that Pakistani forces may have |
1567546_1 | City Hall Steps: Pulpit, and Now an Altar | married two women and two men. Both Rabbi Lippman and Ms. Bumgardner said they had performed similar ceremonies in the past. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has declined to give his personal position on the issue, said of the ceremonies outside his office: ''I think this is more theater than anything else. If you want to change the law, I would suggest that a demonstration in Albany would be more effective than a demonstration at City Hall.'' State law gives members of the clergy and some government officials the right to perform marriages, but it specifies that the couples must have licenses. After a government clerk refused to issue licenses last month, the mayor of New Paltz, Jason West, performed weddings for 25 same-sex couples. He now faces prosecution and is barred by a court injunction from performing any more ceremonies. Two ministers who stepped in were charged on Monday. Yesterday, more than 100 activists, well-wishers and journalists braved the cold for the ceremonies at City Hall. ''I was overwhelmed by the cameras and crowd as we walked up to the steps,'' said Ruth K. Finkelstein, who married her companion of 12 years, B.C. Craig. ''But once we stood under the huppah it was only the five members of our family: the rabbi, the cantor, my love and our son.'' Sam H. Craig, 4, Ms. Craig's son, shyly wrestled with a rose that detached from his blazer's lapel. ''We want to make our relationship public and just as real as a straight couple,'' Ms. Craig said. ''Ruth cannot bring Sam for pre-K registration at P.S. 321 in Brooklyn next week because she is not recognized as a parent.'' A major motivation for the clergy at the event was the sense that President Bush had breached the separation of church and state by calling for a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. ''The president tried to steal the pulpit by taking a stance on what religious leaders can and cannot do,'' said Rabbi Ayelet S. Cohen of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in Manhattan. ''Last I checked he is not a religious leader, and I will conduct marriages and other religious rites according to my faith, not what he tells me to do.'' Rabbi Cohen said she has collected the names of nearly 100 clergy members from more than half a dozen states who are willing to perform same-sex marriages around the |
1567461_1 | The Free Lane on the Information Highway | In Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, laptop users can sit at one of the public tables on a glorious afternoon and read their e-mail while sipping a latte, thanks to the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. Similarly, Columbia University offers free wireless access on its campus. But these are the exceptions; most of the wireless access points, or nodes, in Manhattan are provided, perhaps inadvertently, by individuals. I, for instance, don't ''lock'' my signal with a secret access code; I have an ''open node,'' and thus anyone within range is free to go on the Net through me. Since I pay for Internet service, I don't feel particularly guilty when I'm away from home and make use of someone else's portal to the Web. What's more, with WiFi technology, allowing other users to look at their e-mail through my hub isn't going to slow me down. Not surprisingly, this type of thinking alarms Internet service providers, which maintain that users can't share their service. And there is certainly opportunity for abuse, as when apartment buildings charge residents a fee to log onto the Net using the building's WiFi hubs. Clearly, reselling a service under false pretenses, when the costs are borne by a different company that reaps no commission, is -- and should remain -- illegal. But what about when individual users choose to make their WiFi available to the public at no charge? Are they merely exercising their right to use their service as they see fit -- analogous to inviting a few friends over to watch a video you rented? That's the argument being made by participants in a relatively unheralded movement among America's techies promoting free wireless access. This movement has gained momentum in the past year, so I recently took a walk with my laptop around residential neighborhoods in Manhattan with the hope of seeing how WiFi access has changed since Public Internet Project.org conducted a census of the island in 2002. Back then, it found that about 30 percent of some 13,000 access nodes were locked. On my walk, I found that the proportion of locked nodes had increased, to just under half. I also found what the 2002 census did: as much as I wanted to stereotype neighborhoods as ''selfish'' or ''open,'' it seemed to be pretty random which areas had a higher proportion of open nodes. The |
1568104_0 | When College Graduates Struggle to Find Jobs | To the Editor: Of course we need to be concerned about the diminishing job prospects for college graduates. But we should not overlook the fact that even nowadays, many people go to college to improve not only their job prospects, but also their minds. Felicia Ackerman Providence, R.I., March 16 The writer is a philosophy professor at Brown University. |
1568103_0 | When College Graduates Struggle to Find Jobs | To the Editor: ''In This Recovery, a College Education Backfires'' (Economic View, March 14) described how more college graduates have found themselves unemployed as American companies have downsized and outsourced more work overseas. But in what fields are these unemployed college students getting their degrees? There is one issue, and the most serious, when their degrees are in science, engineering, medicine or business. On the other hand, I hear of many students who get their degrees in subjects they happen to like -- whether art history, geography, literature or other areas -- that have limited appeal to business at this time of economic recovery. Whatever the reason for their unemployment, college graduates face additional misery in trying to repay student loans of tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the real question is whether college career counselors are giving the best advice to their students. John A. Bing Laguna Beach, Calif., March 14 |
1567974_5 | Sheep Farm With a Local Following | January, but she changed the schedule this year so that lambing began in February, after the most bitter cold of the winter, to protect the newborns. She thinks the change is responsible for this year's high percentage of multiple births. The lambs and calves are given no growth hormones or antibiotics. Mrs. Sankow maintains that the excellent flavor of the lamb is because, in part, of the fact that even before it is born, she controls the genetics and what the mother eats. After they are born, ''I raise them,'' she said, sitting on her knees in a stall, bottle-feeding a newborn ewe lamb. According to Mr. Sankow, the first few batches of animals sent out each year to slaughter are tough on both of them. There are several sheep farms in Connecticut, but Beaver Brook is the only one whose food products are consistently available locally, at least in the eastern part of the state. (You may also find artisanal cow's milk cheeses made at Cato Corner Farm in Colchester.) Markets and restaurants that buy from Beaver Brook do so for several reasons. ''I like to have foods that are different from the norm,'' said Ron Forte, the owner of Forte's Quality Meats in Guilford. ''I sell quite a bit of cheese and some of their cheeses are unlike anything else I can get hold of.'' Jeffrey Pandolfino, who recently opened Plum, a gourmet shop and catering business in Cos Cob, works to support local food producers; he appreciates the taste of the cheeses and the fact that they are produced in Connecticut. ''It's fantastic cheese and even more fantastic because it's in our backyard,'' Mr. Pandolfino said. He said he had to wait a little while to get the cheese in sometimes, but then it ''flies off the shelf.'' Tim Quinn, the executive chef of Sherlock 221 in New London, also prefers buying local. He buys both cheese and lamb for the restaurant. About the cheese, he said: ''You can go up there and see them making it, and that's really something. You can see the camembert as it ages, getting a little softer and a little smaller.'' Mr. Quinn said Beaver Brook lamb was for people who think they don't like lamb, because it has a ''less gamey flavor.'' ''People see Beaver Brook on the menu,'' he said, ''and they notice: 'Hey, it's just up the road.''' |
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1567847_4 | Losing Their Religion | consort of men and angels, the wisdom of the body in rapture. Informally opposed to this school, cynical rather than pessimistic, was a tendency that found some of its best expression in the writings of the Whig aristocrat Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville shared with the mighty Thomas Hobbes a view of man as Homo homini lupus: man the wolf. For him, any truly practical philosophy (and any really effective politics) must be based on the demonstrable facts of human venality. People were out for themselves. Why deny it? It was not, looked at through the right end of the telescope, a bad thing at all. Self-interest was the motor that drove society: an outbreak of altruism and fair-dealing would bring the walls down. ''The war of all against all,'' Porter writes, ''was socialized into emulative competition. . . . Once harnessed, selfishness worked to the general good, vice became a virtue, and private vices, public benefits.'' It is an argument that 250 years later triumphed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, and that today perhaps, beneath a light (yet somehow suety) crust of fundamental Christianity, thrives in George W. Bush's America. It is interesting to note -- as Porter does -- how two thinkers working from a common premise can reach such different conclusions. For both Adam Smith and Bernard de Mandeville, society's primum mobile was the hunger for profit, yet Smith has none of the laughter-in-the-dark quality of the earlier writer, and his thesis, by comparison, feels almost utopian. Mandeville's taproot descended into the blood of the British civil wars; Adam Smith, born 50 years later, was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, a realist but never a cynic. The nightmares of the late century were still distant. When ''The Wealth of Nations'' was published in 1776, Robespierre was little more than a boy. Smith's friend and fellow luminary of the northern Enlightenment was David Hume. Porter gives a fine presentation of this noble philosopher, and the neatest synopsis of his work -- volumes and volumes of it -- I have come across. Hume died of liver cancer in 1776. One of those who visited the sickroom was James Boswell (and who can write about Britain in the 18th century without mentioning Boswell?). The biographer hoped his fellow countryman would have a last-gasp profession of faith and expire as a good Christian, but Hume was made of sterner stuff and |
1567984_1 | Staying Eco-Friendly By Building Green | -- a belief echoed by other contractors and suppliers around the county. Homeowners and builders alike more often prefer traditional materials like cedar and slate over eco-friendly options, like roofing and decking made from recycled plastics and rubber, they said. ''Very few clients will actively choose to use environmental materials,'' Mr. Mooney said. ''People aren't willing to make the effort or spend more money. And there are too many products that are cheaper and easier and are more accessible but less environmental.'' Mr. Mooney said he has tried to incorporate an environmental consciousness into his company philosophy by automatically using some recycled products, reusing and donating supplies and cutting waste. It also means using engineered lumber, which is made from reused scrap lumber, rather than standard lumber for home additions, he said. He said he also refuses to use some popular materials, like clear cedar, which typically comes from older, larger trees, and Philippine mahogany, a rain forest product. Trying to persuade clients to go green is also part of the process, he said. Mr. Mooney said he tries to use existing construction and materials as the basis for home improvements like additions. He also salvaged old materials, from lumber and doors to windows and tiles, and has a warehouse full of old materials waiting for users. Gary Cooper and Lorett Cameron are Larchmont homeowners who gave one of the new options a shot when they decided to replace the asphalt roof on their house using EcoStar, an imitation slate product made from old tires and other recycled rubber. Mr. Cooper, a retired systems engineer with a degree in architectural technology, said he chose EcoStar for the couple's 1926 Tudor because it allowed them to install a roof in keeping with the home's design without the cost of using real slate. ''I always thought the house should have a slate roof,'' said Mr. Cooper, who hired Mr. Mooney to redo the roof in conjunction with other renovations. But Mr. Mooney said the cost of an average EcoStar roof is about $30,000 versus $40,000 for a slate one. Asphalt averages about $12,000, he said. But Mr. Cooper and Ms. Cameron are Mr. Mooney's only clients who have chosen a recycled roof. He has fared better with clients willing to forgo wood in favor of recycled decking material, which Mr. Mooney used on his own New Rochelle home. About 10 clients have |
1567882_2 | The Socratic Shrink | death, the need for a reliable ethics. ''Even sane, functional people need principles to live by,'' Marinoff told me, his voice lowering without slowing in the sun-flooded courtroom, ''so we are offering what Socrates called the examined life, the chance to sit with a philosopher and ask what you really believe and make sure it's working for you.'' Regardless of C.C.N.Y.'s unease about philosophical counseling, the public appears ready and eager for at least some form of philosophy in the daily diet. Witness Tom Morris, a former Notre Dame professor, charging the likes of I.B.M. and General Electric up to $30,000 an hour for his lecture on the ''7 C's of Success,'' distilled from Cicero and Spinoza, Montaigne and Aeschylus. Christopher Phillips, author of ''Six Questions of Socrates'' (just out from W. W. Norton), has been traveling the country engaging spontaneous crowds in Socratic dialogue about the nature of justice and the meaning of courage. And ''Philosophy Talk,'' a new San Francisco-based radio show modeled on NPR's ''Car Talk,'' offers two wisecracking Stanford professors -- and their many call-in guests -- tackling thorny matters like ''Is Lying Always Bad?'' and ''Would You Want to Live Forever?'' As for philosophical counseling, in which the philosopher serves as a kind of life coach/bodhisattva, the practice does have a toehold in Europe, Israel, South Africa, India and especially the U.K., where Alain de Botton's 2000 best seller, ''The Consolations of Philosophy,'' became a six-part television series. Marinoff wasn't the first to try philosophical counseling in the United States, but he's way ahead of the pack when it comes to building the institutions of legitimacy and seeking access to the river of money known as health-insurance reimbursement. Like any entrepreneur cornering a new market, Marinoff has worked fast and furiously, sometimes bruising competitors along the way. In short order, he has established the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), started a series of three-day counselor-certification weekends and begun setting up an academic journal. Before those pesky lawyers got involved, he was even performing research on human volunteers at C.C.N.Y. and arranging for a New York foundation to finance free philosophical counseling through the C.C.N.Y. campus wellness center. Marinoff does have his fans - Vaughana Feary, a New Jersey-based practitioner and A.P.P.A. board member, says that Marinoff's books bring her a steady stream of would-be clients. But to many of the other philosophical counselors in this |
1567845_3 | My Favorite War | parallel, the ground is laid. When we later read that the republic was a ''superpower,'' that the rich dominated its politics, that the elite indulged in luxurious holiday villas, mistresses and gourmet meals while proclaiming an ethic of self-restraint, the ominous implication is that America, too, is on the verge of losing its freedom to autocracy. Times have changed. The leaders of the American Revolution courted the Roman comparison. George Washington staged a performance of Joseph Addison's play ''Cato'' for his officers at Valley Forge, presumably to inspire them with the austere tragedy of a statesman willing to sacrifice all for the republic. The 18th century was the Augustan age, in which the Stoic virtues of discipline and self-control -- qualities the Romans, in turn, admired in the Spartans -- were prized above the raucous squabbling of democracy in the Greek mode. By 1863, as Garry Wills writes in ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' Romanticism had replaced the Stoic ideal with the Greek Revival, and Athens was no longer disdained for being ''ruled by mobs'' and ''anarchical.'' The transformation has lasted and affected more than politics, as a reading of ''Cato'' shows. In the play, Cato's two sons compete for the hand of a young woman. She prefers the ''graceful tenderness'' of one over the ardent, fiery ''vehemence'' of the other, which she regards with ''a secret kind of horror''; her choice seems bizarre now, in a time when overpowering passion is prized above all in matters of the heart. Everyone wants to be the Greeks -- democratic if disorderly, cultured if impulsive. Nobody wants to be the Romans, with their well-oiled war machine, their vaunted sobriety and their frank imperial ambitions. But even in books intent on characterizing contemporary America as either one, it's possible to find as many differences as similarities. We have a republic, for one example, not the direct democracy of Athens, and our enfranchised citizens include people excluded from the government of both. American politics at the dawn of the 21st century doesn't resemble the shambles of the late Roman Republic. Furthermore, it's hard to find legitimate parallels between the territorial battles of the Greeks and Romans and today's ''war'' on terrorism, a fight against small groups of stateless, elusive enemies who target civilians using unconventional weapons. Ancient history has to be bent pretty far to meet that comparison, and one of these days it might just |
1569115_0 | World Briefing | United Nations: Measure To Keep Arms From Terrorists | The United States and Britain introduced a Security Council resolution aimed at filling a gap in existing international law that they said did not bar nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the materials to make them, from falling into the hands of terrorists. ''There are lots of disarmament and nonproliferation agreements that bind states to certain standards of behavior,'' said John D. Negroponte, the United States ambassador, explaining that the measure would apply to ''nonstate actors'' -- groups and individuals not tied to states, a diplomatic characterization of terrorists. Emyr Jones Parry, Britain's ambassador, said the resolution was intended to prevent ''the ultimate nightmare -- the bringing together of weapons of mass destruction and the terrorists.'' Warren Hoge (NYT) |
1569044_2 | BOLDFACE NAMES | eyebrows. Tamer: (Polite) It's harder do that. It's a bit wider part of the head. And it's for safety as well. You can feel, you see how he's gonna react. When he's willing to do it, there's no tension in the jaws and when he's had enough, he'll start to close so you'll know when to take your head out. But he's very good at that. There is a very long pause as the reporter considers this. Reporter: See, it's this critical juncture, this moment when he's had enough that I'm thinking about. You can jerk a finger away pretty fast, but your face? Tamer: The animal has been trained, so he knows it's 15 or 20 seconds and then it's the finish of the trick. It's a controlled situation. Reporter: Once again the choice of words: ''Controlled situation.'' How controlled can it be when, how many pounds is, what is it, SIMBA? Tamer: Sasha. He's got to be 300, 360 pounds. Reporter: Aerialists can try out a trick a few feet above the ground. How can you try out sticking your head in a lion's mouth? Tamer: Well, first you have to decide who it's going to be. Out of all these lions, the only ones I can actually touch are Zulu, Chico and Sasha. FADE OUT, FADE IN Tamer: First, I go behind him, rub his bum, his tail, rub his back till he's comfortable with physical contact. You get him to accept being touched. FADE OUT, FADE IN Tamer: Then you just start stroking under his chin and open his jaws. Reporter: That first time, you remember it? Tamer: I've got all my 10 fingers, so it must have been all right. Reporter: What else? Tamer: Well, my dad was there. He said come on, just do it. Your fingers are a barrier between his teeth. Reporter: Is there a point where there are no hands? Tamer: Not now, but there will be. I'm starting to take one hand away now. The canines have to rest somewhere, they don't use their incisors. (Demonstrating) They rest there on your temples and your cheek. The reporter leans in, looking at the side of the lion tamer's head. Reporter: I'm looking for ... actually I do see a little mark. Tamer: It might be a pimple. Reporter: Turn around, you've got one there, too. FADE OUT, FADE IN Tamer: I'm |
1569120_0 | Bite Your Tongue | To the Editor: Re ''An 'Oops' Button, or a Tool for Retrieving That E-Mail Note You Sent'' (March 11), on BigString, a service that allows users to pull back an e-mail message or prevent it from being printed by the recipient: What possible justification can exist for preventing someone from printing a message that they've seen -- other than the desire to ensure that no evidence of the message exists? This program sounds like a wrongdoer's dream, designed to allow plausible deniability for e-mail that might otherwise be uncomfortably provable. E-mails do not share speech's evanescence, nor should they. To speak to someone is to be within their personal space, and speech thus bears certain consequences. E-mailers are already comfortably insulated by distance; to make e-mail even more transitory is to allow them to evade completely any consequence that might follow from their letters. SHAYNA KRAVETZ Toronto |
1568978_0 | To Save a Life or a Limb, Gently Shake a Minefield | MILLIONS of unexploded land mines lie beneath the dirt and sand of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and many other nations. If the mines are made of metal, detectors can usually find them. But when more sensitive detectors are used to locate plastic-based mines with little metal in them, they often fail to distinguish between mines and metal debris. As a result, for every actual mine found, there are thousands of false alarms. But a new technology that shakes the surface of suspected mine fields with gentle seismic waves may one day detect many plastic or metal mines while ignoring metal debris. That is because these mines vibrate differently from the soil or debris around them. Radar or laser-based scans can detect this difference and, with the right signal processing, show the location of mines in computer displays. The new systems, many of them in early development at universities, generate waves with loudspeakers above the ground or with mechanical ''shakers'' that thump the ground. The waves excite low-frequency vibrations in the slightly flexible shells of the plastic or metal mines. Those telltale vibrations are nothing like the motions of nearby soil or sticks that might be set humming by the waves. ''Antipersonnel mines can have many shapes,'' said Dimitri M. Donskoy, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who has developed one of the new mine detection systems. ''But they all have this flexible casing and they all vibrate differently than the objects around them.'' The waves are strong enough to vibrate the mines but will not set them off, said Dr. Donskoy, who has tested some of his equipment with live mines. Much of the research in the new technology is financed by the Army and the Navy. The Office of Naval Research, for example, supports some of the work being done by researchers at Stevens Institute, Georgia Tech and the University of Mississippi, said Clifford W. Anderson, deputy director for discovery and invention at the expeditionary warfare operations technology division there. Mr. Anderson hopes that the new technology will eventually yield information that complements electromagnetic techniques like ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors. ''This is a completely different approach in that it uses mechanical excitation -- shaking the dirt -- to look for the vibrations of land mines,'' he said. There are 45 million to 60 million unexploded land mines worldwide, said Sean Burke, program manager |
1569070_3 | In their hiring of teachers, do the nation's public schools get what they pay for? | new research by Caroline M. Hoxby, a Harvard economist, and Andrew Leigh, a doctoral student at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, suggests a more complicated story here, too. High-scoring women aren't the only women with greater opportunities today. All sorts of jobs, including those that require only average abilities, have narrowed the gender pay gap over the last generation. ''We see the doctors and lawyers,'' Mr. Leigh said in an interview, ''but I don't think we're as aware that the same thing has happened to bookkeepers.'' He and Professor Hoxby examine the effects of two different trends: changes in the ratio of male and female pay across all professions and changes in the level of unionization among teachers. Unionization tends to compress the range of salaries, raising the average but reducing the premium to top teachers. To separate the two effects, they divide teachers by state, since both pay-equity and unionization laws changed at different times in different places. Surveys with individual test scores aren't large enough to break down by state, so the economists use a larger data set that records where each person went to college. As a proxy for each woman's aptitude, they use her college's mean combined SAT score. (The paper, ''Pulled Away or Pushed Out? Explaining the Decline of Teacher Aptitude in the United States,'' which will also be published in the American Economic Review's Papers and Proceedings issue, is available at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers.html.) While imperfect, this measure isn't correlated with either unionization rates or pay equity, so it's good enough to answer the researcher's question: Are women from top colleges leaving teaching because of the ''pull'' of better pay elsewhere or the ''push'' of reduced earnings at the top of teaching? To their surprise, they find that wage compression explains a huge 80 percent of the change. If women from top colleges still earned a premium as teachers, a lot more would go into teaching. ''Women who went to a top 5 percent college earned about a 50 percent pay premium in the 1960's and earn about the same as other teachers today,'' Mr. Leigh said. ''By comparison, somebody who went to a bottom 25 percent college earned about 28 percent below the average teacher in the 1960's, and they have the earnings of about the average teacher today.'' In hiring teachers, we get what we pay for: average quality at average wages. Economic |
1569006_0 | Russia's Future, Putin's Legacy | Although most independent observers agree that last week's presidential election in Russia was unfair, there is little doubt that Vladimir V. Putin would have won re-election by a landslide even in an honest election. That's because a campaign slogan used to great effect in America 12 years ago -- ''It's the economy, stupid'' -- also holds true in Russia. An economic record similar to Mr. Putin's would assure the incumbent's re-election in almost any democratic country. By almost any measure, the record is outstanding. Despite the global economic slowdown, Russia's gross domestic product has grown spectacularly during his tenure, at an average rate of 6.5 percent annually. Mr. Putin has presided over four consecutive years of budget and trade surpluses. Foreign debt has declined to 30 percent from 50 percent of G.D.P.; foreign currency reserves have tripled, and now exceed annual imports. Meanwhile, capital outflow has finally come to a stop. Last year Moody's Investors Service upgraded Russian bonds to investment grade; the other two major rating agencies are expected to follow later this year. The stock market is still narrow, but its performance has been impressive: since Mr. Putin took over, the main market R.T.S. index has increased sevenfold in dollar terms. And contrary to conventional wisdom, the benefits of this growth have reached beyond the rich. The average Russian household is now 53 percent better off in real terms than four years ago; real wages are up 86 percent. Inequality is still very high, but poverty and unemployment have declined by a third. About one in four Russians now has a mobile phone, up from about 0.5 percent of the population four years ago, and the number of Internet users has tripled. Real estate prices have doubled in dollar terms, and car ownership has increased by 10 percent. To what extent can Mr. Putin take credit for this success? Certainly, he has been exceptionally lucky. Oil prices have been extraordinary high during his tenure, and according to various estimates, rising oil prices account for half to two-thirds of Russia's recent economic growth. In addition, when Mr. Putin took over, the Russian economy was at a low point, with all the foundations for a quick recovery -- undervalued ruble, cheap labor, unused capacity -- in place. Yet Mr. Putin has played a strong hand well. His economic policies have been consistent and predictable. Mr. Putin's foreign policy has helped |
1568988_1 | When Instant Messages Come Bearing Malice | are counting on to transform IM services into a handy route to deliver spam (known as ''spim'' on IM), unleash viruses, create back doors into the systems of unsuspecting users and cause general mayhem across the Internet. Instant messaging was first popularized by teenagers in the 1990's; it has since gained widespread use among consumers and businesses as a vehicle for sharing documents, digital photos and links while knowing which contact on a list is online at any given moment. Last year there were an estimated 162 million consumer IM accounts worldwide, compared with 82 million in 2000, according to IDC, a technology research firm in Framingham, Mass. While the numbers are far short of the estimated 524 million consumer e-mail accounts worldwide, experts say that hackers and spammers may increasingly make IM users a target because of the nature of instant communication. ''Now that everyone is using Instant Messenger, it has become a popular target,'' said Sharon Ruckman, the senior director of Symantec Security Response, a provider of Internet security updates and solutions. The CERT Coordination Center, a computer security response team based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has repeatedly cautioned that IM users are especially susceptible to ''social engineering,'' meaning attacks that prey on human foibles by enticing people with promises of free products, pornography and interesting-sounding links. In responding to strangers' offers, people may divulge personal information or leave their systems vulnerable. ''It's a tactic to get you to open your door and have people come in and take pictures around your house so they learn the weaknesses,'' Ms. Ruckman said. ''Then when you're at work they know exactly how to break into your house.'' IM also leaves much to be desired when it comes to privacy. When two people communicate through instant messaging, the messages are relayed as plain text through an IM service's central servers before they reach the recipient. An unscrupulous systems administrator could easily train a program to search for words, passwords or combinations of numbers to harvest critical personal information, privacy advocates say. The lack of privacy is compounded when IM messages travel over public wireless networks like those at cafes, airports and hotels. These wireless hot spots keep security levels low to give users access to the network with little trouble. Using a commercial sniffer, ''you can see all these packets of text data flying around,'' said John LaCour of |
1568974_0 | Stand and Fight: An Arsenal for Spam Victims | THE subject lines on junk e-mail may present rich source material for cultural anthropologists, but for most users, spam is simply a maddening headache. Fortunately, effective weapons are emerging in the Battle of the In-Box. You can install special software that works alongside your e-mail program to filter incoming messages, or choose a new e-mail program with ingenious spam-blocking features. Or, because spammers frequently use fake return addresses to evade filters as they blast out millions of messages, you may choose to install a companion program that requires the sender to verify his or her identity before the message can be delivered. Such options enable you to stand firm against spam without having to get a new e-mail address. Add-On Programs Most of the programs created specifically for screening out spam have a similar lineup of features. They allow you to import the names in your e-mail address book so that all your regular correspondents are already on the approved list. You can create custom filters and set the software to monitor several e-mail accounts. Some of the programs even provide handy toolbar buttons that integrate with common programs like Outlook Express, so that a junk message can be disposed of with a click. These types of programs, most of which work with a variety of e-mail software, give you considerable control in managing your spam. They run independently of your mail program, though, so you have to remember to start them up. Once you do, the spam-swatting program typically checks your mail server and downloads the mail, filters it and then sends on the legitimate mail to your regular in-box. You can scan the contents of the program's spam holding pen, rescue any mistakenly blocked messages and quickly delete the rest. SpamKiller 5.0, McAfee Security's latest spam-busting program, works with most stand-alone e-mail programs for the PC that use the POP3 or MAPI protocols for fetching mail from the mail server, as well as with MSN/Hotmail accounts. It requires Windows 98 or later and can be downloaded for $39.99 at www.mcafee.com or purchased on CD for $49.95; a yearlong subscription for filter updates is included. The program's filters are thorough; they even have the scanning power to quash scams and virus hoaxes forwarded by friends. SpamKiller can generate complaint letters to be sent to the spammer's Internet provider, although spammers' addresses are so commonly forged that this tactic is |
1567037_0 | Seed Concerns Donate Data On Corn Gene | The nation's two leading seed companies have agreed to make a vast amount of information about corn genes available to government and academic scientists, an effort that the companies and outside scientists said could greatly accelerate improvement of one of the nation's most important crops. The move by the companies, Monsanto and the Pioneer Hi-Bred International unit of DuPont, is at least partly aimed at persuading the government to undertake what could be a complex and expensive project to determine the entire DNA sequence of corn, something that could aid in efforts to develop crops with higher yields, resistance to drought or other desirable traits. ''The technology exists to sequence the corn genome very rapidly,'' Tom Adams, the director for genomic technology at Monsanto, said in a conference call on Monday when the data donation was announced. ''It really is a matter of lining up all the efforts together.'' Ceres, a small plant biotechnology company in California that collaborates with Monsanto, also said on the conference call that it would make its information available. The donation of the data was arranged in part by the National Corn Growers Association, which is also pushing for a project to sequence the corn genome. Academic scientists welcomed the decision, saying that the amount of corn gene sequences that will be put into the public domain by the companies vastly exceeds the amount that is there now. ''For the public sector it will be a very valuable asset,'' said Joachim Messing, a professor at Rutgers University who has been active in government-financed projects to determine corn genes. ''We have been trying to persuade the companies to do that and it has been very difficult in the past.'' The change of heart by the companies could reflect changing priorities in the agricultural biotechnology industry. A few years ago the companies, commanding budgets that public-sector scientists envied, were far ahead in the search for genetic information on important crops. But in the last few years the government has been financing gene sequencing projects for crops, helping the public sector catch up. Much of the information the companies developed is about specific genes, and the companies are believed to have already filed for patents on some of the information they are now making publicly available. The next step is to find where in the chromosomes the genes are, something that requires determining the entire DNA sequence of |
1566994_0 | U.S. Is Fighting Mexican Taxes On Beverages | The United States filed a complaint on Tuesday with the World Trade Organization accusing Mexico of imposing unfair taxes on beverages sweetened by high fructose corn syrup. Mexico imposed a 20 percent sales tax in January 2002 on soft drinks and other beverages that do not use cane sugar as a sweetener and another 20 percent tax on the distribution of the drinks. The United States trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a statement that the taxes had hurt corn exports to Mexico and that they violated global trade laws. ''Mexico's beverage taxes are discriminatory and protectionist,'' he said. ''This administration will continue to work to make sure Americans are treated fairly and that there is a level playing field for our exports.'' Members of Congress asked Mr. Zoellick to bring the case after corn farmers and agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland and Corn Products International asserted that the soft drink tax had hurt their ability to export corn. For its part, Mexico released a statement on Tuesday saying the issue was part of a larger problem of United States restrictions on Mexican sugar imports in what it said was a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Mexican department of the economy said it was prepared to defend the taxes before the trade organization. The United States won a case with the trade organization in 2001 that overturned antidumping duties imposed by Mexico against imported high fructose corn syrup. Earlier, Mexico asserted that the United States had flooded the country with subsidized corn, which undermined their farmers and their sugar industry when the corn was processed into high fructose corn syrup. The United States gives $19 billion a year in subsidies to farmers for growing corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice. These subsidies, as well as those of other wealthy nations, are at the heart of the current impasse in trade talks at the W.T.O. |
1567008_3 | U.S. Professors Rush to India to Study Rush of U.S. Jobs There | and academicians alike. ''Today, every other country in the world is trying to reposition itself to compete with India and China,'' he said. Few have tracked outsourcing more closely than AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at Berkeley and one of the trend's early researchers. ''The speed with which this phenomenon has taken off has amazed me,'' said Professor Saxenian. By contrast with today, she said that on her first visit to India in 1997, American companies were highly skeptical of the idea of doing business there. Vivek Paul, vice chairman of Wipro, said, ''The rapid acceptance of offshoring of services is viewed by academia as being part of a huge change still in its infancy, with much yet to be discovered.'' He added, ''Students are eager to learn how this trend will affect employment opportunities, what entrepreneurial openings this may create and what skills are required to succeed in the new world.'' Mr. Paul, who is based in Wipro's American headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has lectured at Purdue University, Berkeley, Columbia Business School and the Kellogg School of Management. Some of this academic interest is translating into requests for internships. Intel's India unit is receiving more résumés from students, not of Indian origin, from universities like Stanford and Chicago. The internship program at Infosys, India's second-largest software services company, received 3,000 applications last year for 33 positions from students at such schools as Princeton, M.I.T., Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago and Michigan. Like students, some career-driven Americans appear eager to experience the country firsthand. Catalytic Software, a software services firm in Seattle founded by two former Microsoft employees, has most of its development operations in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. The firm is finding a sea change in attitudes towards relocating to India. ''When I moved here four years ago, I was regarded as being brave and unusual,'' said its chief executive and co-founder, Swain Porter. ''People stared.'' Now, some of its employees based in the United States are asking to be posted in Hyderabad. ''The new global perception is that India has arrived on the world scene by transforming into a thriving modern economy; the energy that creates is very attractive to newcomers,'' said Mr. Porter, who oversees the firm's Indian operations. Catalytic's 120 employees include 12 Americans living in India. ''People want to be on the ground floor of India's emergence,'' Mr. Porter said, ''For many U.S. firms, India |
1563618_0 | For Audio Players, A Chance to Cut the Cord | ELECTRONIC devices have been cutting the cord for years, with one notable exception: portable music players. From the earliest Walkman to the latest fashion-accessory MP3 player, music on the go has generally meant cables trailing from ears to pocket or purse. But a short-range communications technology based on magnetism may mean those days will finally be on the wane. Two new telephone headsets are the first consumer products that incorporate the technology, which is known as near-field magnetic communication and makes use of the principle of magnetic induction. The Unleash Wireless Headset from Reason Products can be used with any cellular or land-line phone. The headset consists of a matchbook-size base station and an earpiece with a boom microphone. The base station plugs into the audio jack; a storage case doubles as charging station. The Unleash headset has a list price of $99, and Rod Rougelot, the chief executive of Reason Products, said it would sell for as little as $79 in some stores. It is to reach electronics retailers by April. Meanwhile, it can be ordered online at www.reasonproducts.com. A second headset based on the new technology, the Cord Free Headset from FoneGear, takes a slightly different approach, incorporating an AA battery into the base station that plugs into the cellphone. It is available for $75 online at www.tagaccessories.com. Cellphones are just the beginning, though, according to Kip Kokinakis, the chief executive of Aura Communications, the company that developed the magnetic communication technology. The real promise of the technology lies in its suitability for streaming music. Agreements on licensing the magnetic technology to makers of portable audio headphones are in the works, and Mr. Kokinakis indicated that products could begin reaching consumers by the end of the year. The driving factor is the convergence of voice and audio functions -- phone and music player. Magnetic induction devices work by creating a static magnetic field that is 1.5 to 2 meters, or about six feet, across; data is transmitted by modulating the field at a low frequency (10 to 15 megahertz, compared with 2.4 gigahertz for radio-frequency technologies like Blue-tooth). Because they work within a kind of spatial bubble rather than by radiating energy in all directions, magnetic induction devices encounter less interference. ''What we have is an uncrowded spectrum, so if you have 10 people on a train in Japan,'' Mr. Kokinakis said, ''you don't have those signals bouncing |
1563355_0 | Estrogen Study Stopped Early Because of Slight Stroke Risk | A large federal study of estrogen therapy in postmenopausal women has been stopped a year ahead of schedule because the estrogen increased the risk of stroke and offered no protection against heart disease, the government announced yesterday. The study included only women taking estrogen alone, not those who take combined hormones. An earlier study, halted abruptly in 2002 after the researchers found an increased risk of breast cancer, involved only women taking the combined hormones estrogen and progestin. The National Institutes of Health, which sponsored the estrogen study, part of the Women's Health Initiative, said it stopped the study because ''an increased risk of stroke is not acceptable in healthy women in a research study.'' But health officials also noted that the increased risk was small, estimated at about eight extra strokes per year for every 10,000 women taking estrogen. In addition, they said, a related study found that the hormone may also increase the risk of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in older women. ''Women should not feel that this is some grand emergency for them,'' said Dr. Barbara Alving, director of the Women's Health Initiative. Dr. Alving said that although women in the study had been instructed to stop taking their pills, other women who use estrogen should discuss the findings with their doctors to decide whether to continue taking it. The study also found that estrogen alone did not increase the risk of breast cancer or heart disease, a result that was unexpected and that differed from the findings of earlier studies of combined hormones. But Dr. Alving and other researchers cautioned that the results of the estrogen study had not been fully analyzed and would not be final until published in a medical journal, probably within a month or so. The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it would assess the findings to determine whether the labeling on estrogen and directions to patients should change. Consumer advocates, drug makers and groups representing doctors who prescribe hormones differed in their reactions to the announcement. Cindy Pearson, the executive director of the National Women's Health Network, a consumer group, said, ''What is important is that all those hopes of the last 30 years, that in one version of a hormone pill or another there existed a fountain of youth, those hopes are dashed.'' Ms. Pearson added: ''I was most struck by the trend toward a possible increase |
1563456_0 | INSIDE | Another New Design Santiago Calatrava, who designed the World Trade Center transportation hub, is planning a residential tower in Lower Manhattan. PAGE B1 Estrogen Study Halted A large study of estrogen therapy in postmenopausal women was stopped because estrogen increased the risk of stroke. PAGE A15 Haiti Confusion Deepens A rebel leader in Haiti proclaimed himself chief of a revived army and threatened to jail the prime minister. PAGE A8 Correction: March 10, 2004, Wednesday An architectural rendering on March 3 with an article about a design by Santiago Calatrava for an apartment tower in Lower Manhattan, and another version with a front-page contents entry, carried an incomplete credit. (The error occurred again in some editions yesterday.) While Mr. Calatrava's studio created the image of the building, the background photograph was by David Sundberg/Esto. |
1563408_2 | U.S. and France Set Aside Differences in Effort to Resolve Haiti Conflict | and the navy based in the Caribbean will be deployed in Haiti. On Tuesday, Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie acknowledged that France was involved in protecting Mr. Aristide but said he was free to leave whenever he wished. ''Today, he is protected and not imprisoned,'' Ms. Alliot-Marie said in an interview with Europe 1 radio. She added that, ''France is not controlling his comings and goings,'' but that, ''this is simply a question of ensuring that his temporary stay in the Central African Republic takes place under normal conditions.'' But Mr. Aristide can go nowhere unless another country gives him asylum, and Ms. Alliot-Marie did not say where or when he might be going. However, her remarks prompted a swift denial by Col. Christian Baptiste, the spokesman for the French Armed Forces. ''She's not in the know with what is happening in regards to the security of this man,'' he said in a telephone interview, adding, ''There was no physical or verbal contact between the French and the Aristide group.'' A senior official at Élysée Palace also said French troops helped Mr. Aristide's plane to land but were not stationed anywhere near the place where he had taken refuge. A senior Defense Ministry official defended his boss, saying that local authorities would never have agreed to accept Mr. Aristide, however temporarily, without guarantees of French protection. During the Iraq crisis, Mr. Powell and Mr. de Villepin each felt betrayed by the other. The low point came in January 2003 when Mr. Powell felt he had been blindsided when Mr. de Villepin turned a Security Council meeting into a forum to severely criticize Washington and declare that nothing justified envisaging military action in Iraq. American officials who were with Mr. Powell that day said at the time that they had never seen him so angry. In turn, Mr. de Villepin said he felt betrayed by Mr. Powell's assurances that the goal of American policy was not to overthrow Saddam Hussein but to disarm Iraq. But that was then. The Haiti crisis has required Mr. Powell and Mr. de Villepin to consult regularly by phone, sometimes more than once a day. Both nations have an interest in forestalling an influx of refugees -- the Bush administration to Florida during an election year, and France to its Caribbean provinces. About a million French citizens live in the Caribbean area. THE ARISTIDE RESIGNATION: THE ALLIES |
1563510_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Unionists Quit Talks | Northern Ireland's second-largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, pulled out of negotiations to restore the province's suspended local government in a protest over perceived breaches of the Irish Republican Army's cease-fire. The party's leader, David Trimble, above, wanted Prime Minister Tony Blair to punish Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., by excluding it from the talks. Instead, Mr. Blair met with Sinn Fein's president, Gerry Adams. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1563396_0 | Estrogen Therapy Woes | Another stake has been driven into hopes that long-term hormonal treatment might provide health benefits to postmenopausal women. The National Institutes of Health halted a trial of estrogen therapy in thousands of American women this week because it increased the risk of stroke and failed to protect against heart disease, the main potential health benefit. The findings give further reason to limit hormone therapy primarily to uses where all agree it is valuable: short-term treatment to relieve acute symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes and vaginal discomfort. The latest findings contribute to the woes that have dogged hormone therapy for the past two years. Although the treatment was once promoted as an anti-aging elixir to ward off chronic illness and make women feel more energetic, mentally sharper and more sexually responsive, a series of studies have questioned its presumed benefits and highlighted the risks. In July 2002, federal health officials halted a large-scale trial of a combined estrogen-progestin pill that was causing more harm than good, notably by increasing the risk of breast cancer, heart disease and strokes. Now a part of the study that used estrogen alone for women who had had hysterectomies has also been halted. This was a closer call -- the dangers were fewer and expert advisers were split. But the estrogen pills clearly increased the risk of stroke and may also have increased the risk of dementia or mild cognitive impairment, undercutting the belief that the pills are good for mental alertness. The most encouraging finding was that estrogen alone, unlike the combination pills, did not increase the risk of breast cancer. That should relieve the concerns of many women who have taken estrogen for years. The hormone treatments clearly reduce the risk of hip fractures. But health officials recommend that hormone therapy for hips be considered only for women at significant risk of osteoporosis who can't take alternative medications. The best advice is to use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible. |
1564913_3 | Up in the Air On Estrogen: Women Under 50 | years, and one says go off hormones and the other says stay on them,'' she said. Dr. Margery Gass, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Cincinnati and the immediate past president of the North American Menopause Society, said there were answers for such women but added, ''The problem is our answers may not be based on data.'' Dr. Gass says she tells patients that even if estrogen increases a younger woman's risk for stroke as much as in older women, the risk is still very low. Younger women have a very low risk of stroke to start with, and a slight increase is still not much of a risk. If estrogen makes younger women feel better, she said, they should take it until they are 50, she said, and then try to go off it. Dr. Brzyski also tells younger women to take the drug until the normal age of menopause, saying, ''I think that in most patients, the benefits outweigh the risks.'' Dr. Isaac Schiff, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he had turned to data from birth-control pills to try to assess the risk of estrogen in women under 50. ''We're really reaching here,'' he said. But he added that estrogen could protect bones and relieve menopause symptoms. Studies of birth-control pills, he said, provide some assurance of safety. The pills contain much more estrogen than women take for menopause, but have not been associated with breast cancer. Still, when women reach 50, the therapy should be re-evaluated. ''Then you have to open up the dialogues as if they're menopausal,'' Dr. Schiff said. Many women who wrote to Dr. Hays asked about other treatments for the symptoms of menopause, like estrogen creams, estrogen patches or vaginal rings containing estrogen. Some also asked about other drugs or supplements, including soy and herbs like black cohosh. But Dr. Hays said she was cautious about recommending any of those remedies. She said some doctors told women that an estrogen patch was safer because the hormone bypassed the liver, making blood clots less likely. While plausible, she said, that hypothesis has not been proved. As for creams and ''natural estrogen'' formulations, Dr. Hays refers women to the Food and Drug Administration's warning that in the absence of studies demonstrating that such options are safer than estrogen, their safety cannot be assumed. Alternatives |
1564972_1 | Biting Back at Barking Security Agents | punch in the back -- a closed fist, by the way -- at least three times.'' Deborah deGroff, another frequent business traveler, said that a ''large burly screener'' recently insisted that she remove her Hermès scarf so he could have a look at her neck. ''What I am increasingly aware of, and afraid of, is that the rules are not uniform and that one of these goons could have me fined or arrested,'' she said. A lot of the friction between passengers and screeners seems to have to do with shoes. T.S.A. guidelines ''encourage'' passengers to remove shoes when passing through security, noting that those whose shoes set off the alarm are more likely to be selected for a ''more thorough secondary screening.'' Hank Humphrey said he was wearing shorts when going through security in Hawaii, and voluntarily removed his shoes. He said he was taken in his bare feet to a secondary screening area, where the guard, apparently flummoxed by his lack of shoes, ''started to wand my bare feet and legs,'' Mr. Humphrey reported. Pete Gorman said he often encounters shoe confusion. When he politely explains that removing shoes is not a requirement, he said, ''I am rudely waved through and then ordered to the area for the isolated full-body search.'' ''What is the message here? Never question authority?'' A. Craig Settlage, who was among many readers who felt that screeners are sometimes inconsistent in applying and even understanding the rules, wrote: ''No, I don't think security is well run from a customer service perspective. How can even a very frequent traveler be expected to deal with the T.S.A. when not only the rules keep changing, but individual screeners apparently have the authority to do whatever they choose to do and to whomever?'' That is also of concern to Don Kay, a jeweler who often carries a 35-pound case of jewelry and precious stones packed in small boxes and trays. This usually means a thorough inspection, item by item, in a private room while he is ordered to stand aside and touch nothing, he said. ''On my last trip about two weeks ago, although I touched nothing, I was told that I was interfering 'in a verbal manner''' and subject to being ''detained'' for expressing concern about the sloppy way the jewels were being handled, he said. ''I just shut up and wondered if he could really detain |
1564964_0 | U.S. Asks Allies To Condemn Iran On Nuclear Issue | The United States is pressing its European allies in the International Atomic Energy Agency to condemn Iran's nuclear program despite Tehran's insistence that it is for peaceful purposes only, according to a spokesman for the agency. The United States is circulating a draft resolution at the agency's current board of governors' meeting that condemns Iran for failing to disclose in a declaration in October that it was working on an advanced centrifuge design capable of producing highly enriched uranium suitable for use in atomic weapons. But the Europeans, led by France, Germany and Britain, favor a milder reproach, the spokesman said, fearing that stronger action could cause Iran to stop cooperating with the agency. The agency's governors, representing 35 member nations, will issue resolutions on both Iran and Libya at their meeting here this week, the spokesman added. Both nations are under international scrutiny for having pursued nuclear programs that go beyond what is allowed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Libya admitted last year to having undertaken a program to produce nuclear weapons and has since cooperated with the I.A.E.A. in dismantling that effort. But it has continued to insist that its recently disclosed nuclear program is for power generation only and has asked the nuclear agency to stop what it calls a ''propaganda war'' claiming that it intends to build a bomb. Washington sought to condemn Tehran with a resolution from the agency last year that would have referred allegations of Iran's misconduct to the United Nations Security Council. France, Britain and Germany, which together brokered Iran's agreement to suspend its uranium enrichment program in October, argued at the time -- and are arguing again now -- for milder language in an agency resolution that would placate the Iranian government enough to keep it cooperating. Correction: March 11, 2004, Thursday Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about American pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency to condemn Iran's nuclear program misidentified the nation that has insisted its nuclear program is peaceful and has demanded a stop to the agency's ''propaganda war.'' That nation is Iran. (Libya has admitted to a nuclear weapons program and, as the article stated, has since cooperated with the agency in dismantling that program.) |
1564933_1 | When the Games Began: Olympic Archaeology | be held in Athens, in the land where it all began. A closer study of ancient texts, art and artifacts and deeper archaeological excavations are giving scholars new insights into the early games and just how integral athletics was to ancient Greek life. The games, said Dr. Stephen G. Miller, an archaeologist who is a classics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, ''ran hand in hand with Greek cultural development.'' For almost 12 centuries, starting as early as 776 B.C. at Olympia in the Peloponnesus, organized athletics were so popular that nothing was allowed to stand in the way. When it was time for the games, armies of rival cities usually laid down their weapons in a ''sacred truce.'' In 480 B.C., while the Persians were torching Athens, there was no stopping the foremost games at Olympia. In athletics, scholars are finding, the ancient Greeks expressed one of their defining attributes: the pursuit of excellence through public competition. The games were festivals of the Greekness that has echoed through the ages and reverberates in the core of Western culture. ''Of all the cultural legacies left by the ancient Greeks,'' Dr. Edith Hall of the University of Durham in England has written, ''the three which have had the most obvious impact on modern Western life are athletics, democracy and drama.'' As Dr. Hall noted in the Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece, all three involved performance in an adversarial atmosphere ''in open-air public arenas in front of a large mass of often extremely noisy and critical spectators.'' In these competitive exhibitions, she added, ''success conferred the highest prestige, and failure brought personal disappointment and public ignominy.'' Dr. Donald G. Kyle, a professor of ancient history at the University of Texas in Arlington, said that long before the Greeks, others engaged in competitive sports like running and boxing. Contemporaries of the Greeks in Egypt and Mesopotamia put on lavish entertainments at court, with acrobats and athletes performing, and also promoted some sports as part of military training. Dr. Kyle is writing a book on sport and spectacle in the ancient world. But the Greeks, the historian said, took athletics out of the court and into the wider public, beyond the singular spectacles to regularly scheduled competitions. They spread their games as they colonized Sicily and southern Italy and Alexander the Great conquered Eastern lands, he said, ''in the same way the |
1570669_4 | Once Looted and Forlorn, An Iraqi Symbol Revives | ago. The thieves dragged it down the stairs, breaking the marble steps. Now, the stairs have been repaired and a ghostly veil of marble dust covers the floors of the galleries. The statue, rescued from a cesspit by the American military police and Iraqi police, sits cleaned in a museum storeroom. Shortly after the looting, the museum staff members took it upon themselves to get the antiquities back. They went to mosques and asked the imams to have their followers return objects. They made appeals over the radio. They went to the fledgling Iraqi police and customs services. They offered rewards. The American military also began to help. Gradually, people began to return artifacts. Some items had been looted from archaeological sites, not the museum, but the staff also accepted those. Then there were the rescuers. Walking through the museum one afternoon, Mr. George pointed to a board in the Sumerian gallery that had two large jagged holes in it. From here, two bronze reliefs of bulls from a Sumerian temple in southern Iraq had gazed upon the sunlit room. During the three days of looting, a couple of young men walked in, Mr. George said, and were heartbroken by what they saw happening around them. So they pretended they were looters and removed one of the bull heads. They came back in late April, their car loaded with the bull's head and other articles they had saved. Still, some 6,000 or 7,000 objects remain missing. While the search continues, the museum is trying to make up for lost time with the artifacts it does have. Foreign donors have stepped in to help. The United States Congress provided $700,000 last year to improve the museum, including its computer system, plumbing and air-conditioning. The Italian government has spent $185,000 so far to build a restoration laboratory at the museum. The museum has few restorers and those who work there are chemists and artists by training, not professional conservators. During the lean years under United Nations sanctions after the Persian Gulf war, the museum was shut off from the world. Foreign colleagues could rarely come to Iraq. Even periodicals were scarce. That, in turn, has affected the ability of the museum staff to care for artifacts by the best methods possible, said Alessandro Bianchi, an art historian with the Central Institute of Restoration of the Italian cultural affairs ministry. The museum has |
1565176_0 | Chance to Revive Sales Draws Nuclear Industry to China | China plans to significantly expand its nuclear power in the coming decades, and the Bush administration has been courting the country's top officials on behalf of American companies seeking a starring role in that expansion. The United States is competing with France, Russia and, in a minor way, Canada to build four 1,000-megawatt plants that energy executives say will signify China's coming of age as a nuclear energy provider, and offer crucial relief to makers of nuclear technology starved of new orders in their home countries. ''China is the country most likely to have robust growth in nuclear power in the next 10 years,'' said Ron Sinard, who oversees plant development for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington organization that represents the United States industry. ''Looking at the market over the next decade, it's probably the biggest piece of the pie.'' The call for tenders may be issued as early as this month, nuclear industry executives said. The winner is likely to have an advantage in subsequent bids for 20 or more nuclear plants that may be built by 2020. China currently has eight nuclear power plants that generate a total of 6,200 megawatts; by 2020 nuclear power could provide China with 32,000 megawatts. Even if all the proposed plants are built, nuclear power would supply China with about 4 percent of its electricity needs by 2020, with the bulk of electricity coming from coal-fired stations and, to a lesser extent, hydroelectric projects like the Three Gorges Dam. In choosing among rival bids, China will be making choices not only on which technology it will use but also on geopolitical allegiances, environmental safety and, in the case of American bidders, China's gaping trade surplus with the United States. ''The stakes are huge. These are big contracts with a lot of implications,'' said Jean-Christophe Delvallet, who represents the French energy company EDR in China. In recent months, a procession of political leaders has pressed China to favor power plant designs and equipment from their home countries. They have included President Jacques Chirac of France; former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada; Viktor Khristenko, who was named fuel and energy minister in Russia on Tuesday; and dozens of less-prominent officials. President Bush even raised the virtues of American nuclear technology with the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, during a meeting in December, said Jim Fici, a senior vice president at Westinghouse, which |
1565215_0 | Dam Building Threatens China's 'Grand Canyon' | The highest villages in the mountains above the Nu River seem to hang in the air. Farmers grow cabbage and corn nearly a quarter-mile up, as if cultivating ski slopes. Necessity has pushed them into the sky; land is precious along the river. They may have to move higher still, perhaps into the clouds. The Nu, which flows through a region that is home to old-growth forests, some 7,000 species of plants and 80 rare or endangered animal species, is the latest waterway coveted by a Chinese government that is planning to build a new generation of dams to help power its relentless, booming economy. Unlike the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project and the subject of a bitter international debate, the Nu River plan has barely stirred a ripple outside China. But in China the project, which calls for 13 dams in all, has unexpectedly touched a nascent chord of environmental awareness and provoked rare public rifts within the government. The reason is that the Nu is one of the last pristine rivers in one of the world's most polluted countries, running through a canyon region unlike any other, which a United Nations agency has designated a World Heritage Site. Last year, China's State Environmental Protection Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences publicly criticized the Nu project. ''If this river system is destroyed, it would be a terrible blow,'' said Li Bosheng, a prominent Chinese botanist. ''This area has been called the Grand Canyon of the Orient. It forms one of the world's most special canyon environments.'' For China, which already has more large dams than any other country, environmental awareness has been slowly growing since the long fight over the Three Gorges, where ground was broken a decade ago for a project that will cost at least $25 billion and displace more than a million people by the time it is finished in 2009. No estimate has been made public for the cost of the Nu project. In Yunnan Province in southwest China, the Nu project would force the relocation of as many as 50,000 people, many descended from Lisu, Nu, Drung, Tibetan and other ethnic hill people. Many are farmers and herders who cannot speak Chinese and who choose to live on the land as their ancestors did. ''If people are forced to move around because of the projects, they are going to lose |
1569791_3 | Secondhand Finery, First-Rate Shopping | the news that it was a knockoff. ''I've done a lot of research on what's real and what's not real,'' said Lamis Faris, who runs the 1,200-square-foot Princeton Consignment Boutique in Skillman. ''I have someone who goes out and helps me make sure what we're selling is authentic.'' ''For example,'' she added, ''we have a very nice working relationship with Coach, and if somebody brings in a brand-new bag, we'll get in touch with the company and they'll tell us if it's phony. ''I've been fooled once. It was a Tod's bag, a wonderful knockoff. I found the customer I sold it to and I told her and gave her money back.'' ''You stand on your integrity in this business,'' said Ms. Faris, who has been with the store since 1999. ''It's key.'' So is conveying a sense that the rules of the consigning game are meticulously and consistently followed when it comes to pricing. Most stores follow a formula: items are priced at one-third of regular retail, with the consigner receiving 50 percent of the sale. After 90 days, some items are returned to the consigner or donated to charity. Others are further reduced in price. Stephanie Gangi, a business writer from Piermont, N.Y., regularly consigns at Past and Present. ''There are things I get tired of, things that for one reason or another enthralled me when I was in the store but maybe didn't fit as well or didn't thrill me when I brought them home,'' she said. ''It just seems like a better way to recycle these things than sending them to the Goodwill. I know there's somebody who would want it.'' Diana Wische, a 42-year-old Livingston nurse, consigns to Duet. ''You get tired of things,'' she said, ''and it's great to have somewhere to bring them, to be able to get a little return on them. I've brought in Prada and Gucci -- pants, shirts a lot of shoes. I also sold my fur coat; I decided one week I wasn't Liberace anymore.'' Haggling is acceptable in some stores but not tolerated in others. ''I don't haggle at all,'' Ms. Meisler said. ''The reason is because coming up with a price in this business is practically an art. We'll sit down at the computer, and we'll say, 'O.K., black is more desirable in this item.' So we're considering supply and demand. And then we figure one-third |
1569781_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
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1569881_0 | Use of Credit Records Grows In Screening Job Applicants | Job seekers know the to-do list. Rework the résumé, using zippy action verbs like ''initiated'' and ''negotiated.'' Scan online classified ads and make sure the navy blue suit still fits. Practice, practice answers to those 101 common interview questions. But what about checking the credit report? Employment professionals say companies are screening applicants' backgrounds more often and more thoroughly than ever. The vetting can include credit checks on how much candidates owe and how faithfully they have repaid their debts -- information that many people assume only lenders consider. ''As a potential applicant, I would want to know what's in my credit report,'' said Mallary Tytel, president of Healthy Workplaces, a management consulting firm based in Bolton, Conn. Jobs providing access to money, from fast-food cashiers to chief financial officers, typically require credit checks. So do jobs with government contractors or jobs that involve handling small, valuable items, like jewelry or electronics. Credit checks are also increasingly common for jobs that permit employees to enter homes, whether to kill bugs, shampoo rugs or care for the elderly, according to hiring consultants. Many temporary-help agencies and other staffing services also consider credit checks standard nowadays. ''The bottom line is that a bad credit report can now cost you a job no matter how qualified you are,'' said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization in Princeton, N.J. Employers or screening firms can buy reports from credit reporting bureaus for $10 to $12 each after proving their identities and signing contracts assuring that the reports will be used to evaluate potential employees. Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the regulations for disclosure of credit information are stricter than those involving the release of many records. Criminal records, for instance, are open to anyone, and any employer can obtain a potential employee's driving record as long as the purpose is to confirm information already provided by the applicants, said Robert R. Belair, a partner in Oldaker, Biden & Belair, a Washington law firm that specializes in credit reporting and privacy matters. Calls for tighter controls on hiring explain much of the rise in background checks, hiring firms said. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, employers intensified their efforts to confirm applicants' identities, and credit reports can help do that. In addition, after the rash of accounting scandals in 2002, many companies added credit reports to improve |
1568398_2 | Far From the Ocean, Surfers Ride Brazil's Endless Wave | ''The first time I did it, my legs hurt so much afterward that I could hardly walk for a couple of days. But then I learned to relax.'' In the language of the Tupi Indians, ''pororoca'' means ''mighty noise,'' and a classic Amazon surge is just that. Long before the pororoca can be seen, it can be heard, first as a distant rumble and eventually as a thunderous roar. In addition, there are what might best be called natural hazards. Surfers need to watch for alligators, piranhas, snakes and leopards, as well as tree trunks and other debris stirred up by the force of the wave. Surfers must also demonstrate maneuvers that are ''radical and fluid'' to win points, said Mauro Cunha, a judge in the competition. First, surfers must find the pororoca. The contestants board motorboats or water scooters, which race madly up and down the Capim and Guamá Rivers, looking for telltale signs that a pororoca is coming -- an area of calm water, caused by the tug of war between currents, or frightened birds in flight. This has been an unusually wet rainy season in the Amazon. That lifted surfers' hopes for giant swells. But on Saturday, the first day of this year's tournament, the pororoca failed to appear at each of the four sites where the competition is held. Old-timers, however, say the strength of the pororoca has diminished in recent years. They attribute the decline to deforestation in this region, once rich with Brazil nut trees but now dominated by pastures. ''The river seems shallower than it used to be'' because of runoff from deforested land, said Francelino Carvalho, a 62-year-old carpenter and an area resident. ''The deeper the water, the stronger the pororoca.'' The pororoca surf competition has become such a popular tourist attraction that there is now a sanctioned ''pororoca surf national circuit'' that includes competitions in the neighboring states of Amapá and Maranhão in April. For this town of 17,000 people, the tournament has been a way to make itself known. This year's competition also has a Miss Pororoca beauty pageant, concerts and dances, a food festival and a new paved highway, inaugurated by the state governor at the competition's opening ceremony. ''This is going to revolutionize radical sports,'' Mr. Sobrinho predicted enthusiastically. ''Where else in the world can you go surfing with alligators as an audience?'' São Domingos do Capim Journal |
1567272_2 | Tighter Gas Supply Is Expected to Send Prices Even Higher | Chávez and his domestic opponents has weighed on oil markets that were already under some strain from surging demand in China, the slow recovery of Iraqi exports in the violent aftermath of the Iraq war, and signs of renewed assertiveness in OPEC. ''Our cowboy mentality has failed us miserably in Venezuela,'' said Fadel Gheit, an energy industry analyst at Oppenheimer & Company in New York. ''We could have pumped up Chávez to be our back-alley oil reserve, but instead we squandered our attention and resources elsewhere. We're paying for having botched Venezuela.'' Venezuela is a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is pressing forward with production cuts announced in February at a meeting in Algiers and is scheduled to discuss further action on output levels when it meets at the end of this month in Vienna. The Venezuelans, among the largest OPEC producers, have been outspoken supporters of high prices. And Saudi Arabia, the largest oil producer and the force behind OPEC, has shaken markets by confirming in recent days that it has in fact made some of the cuts previously agreed to. If concern with global oil supplies were not enough, other important factors are contributing to higher gasoline prices. The most prominent may be the need for refineries to comply with environmental regulations aimed at cleaner-burning gasoline, which have been carried out in piecemeal fashion throughout the country in recent years. The rule changes have resulted in more than 20 gasoline formulations being introduced in cities and states, up from just regular and premium in many states 20 years ago, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. The association's members sell about three-quarters of the nation's gasoline. New regulations in New York and Connecticut, for instance, will require ethanol to be used as a substitute this spring for methyl tertiary butyl ether, a substance referred to as M.T.B.E., that makes drinking water smell like turpentine. Spikes in prices may result because the two states import much of their gasoline from refineries in Europe, where supplies are said to be short on ethanol, an additive made from corn or sugar. Supplying custom-blended fuel to New York and Connecticut may also result in higher prices in neighboring states, since nearby refineries will have to focus on getting their mixtures right, limiting their capacity to produce other blends of gasoline. The gasoline transportation system is being |
1567331_2 | Federal Hall Is Uplifted, First by Steel, Then by Art; Paintings From the Uffizi to Arrive | an engineer and the firm's principal in charge of the project. Because the building is rigid masonry and is surrounded by subway and utility lines, it had been threatened by vibrations and settling soil for many decades. Indeed, the rumbling of passing trains can be felt through the hall. Ms. Ennis said the investigation of attack-related damage afforded the chance ''to figure out, once and for all, what all the problems were at Federal Hall.'' Working with Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, the architects brought in ground-penetrating radar. What they found at one corner shocked them. ''There was no soil, but 24 inches of air, under one of the columns,'' Ms. Ennis recalled. ''I lost a lot of sleep when we found that air void.'' The solution was to insert four steel pilings about 60 feet deep down to rock. The next round of underpinnings will take the form of mini-caissons made of a concretelike grout that is injected in cavities drilled by a special rig. ''Once that's done, we'll work our way up the building,'' Ms. Ennis said. Parts of the marble facade may be cleaned. Depending on conditions, the project is expected to take about a year. At times, Federal Hall may have to be closed to the public. Built on the site of the Federal Hall in which Washington was inaugurated, the current building served originally as the Custom House and then as the United States Sub-Treasury. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has used it in recent years to unveil plans for the overall trade center site, as well as the final designs for the Freedom Tower and the ''Reflecting Absence'' memorial. ''It has, in many ways, re-established itself as the center of Lower Manhattan,'' said Kevin M. Rampe, president of the development corporation, which contributed $250,000 toward the $1.2 million cost of the festival. As for day-to-day events at Federal Hall, a treasure that many New Yorkers still manage to overlook, Mr. Avery said, ''We're thinking about a broad range of enhancements and a broadening of programs.'' The park service, he said, is searching for a curator ''because we'd like to fill the place'' with exhibitions. For six weeks this fall, that will not be a problem. Twenty-two paintings from the Uffizi will go on view on Oct. 1 and remain until Nov. 15. ''We consider this an extraordinary event, because the Uffizi doesn't lend easily,'' |
1567193_1 | Ready for Takeoff, With Emphasis on 'Off' | Carson, of a committee established last year at the request of the F.A.A. to explore the problem. Scores of experts from airlines, aircraft equipment makers and consumer electronics companies have been meeting since early 2003 and hope to issue recommendations in about 18 months. Yet new products are entering the market so fast that the committee's recommendations will be quite broad rather than tied to specific products, Mr. Winfrey said. While travelers may know that cellphones are signal producers and comply with rules banning their use in flight, their understanding of the risks posed by other devices is fuzzier. Passengers with laptops equipped with Wi-Fi cards may turn on the laptop without grasping that it is broadcasting, looking for an access point. Some may turn on a wirelessly equipped hand-held to look at a calendar and forget that it, too, is radiating. And that only accounts for devices in the passenger cabin. A passenger might pack a two-way pager in checked luggage, Mr. Carson said. ''Then you can't get a hold of it even if you do remember,'' he said. The seriousness of the problem is hard to gauge. Mr. Winfrey and Mr. Carson are not certain that there has ever been a problem in flight that was traced directly to electronic interference originating on board. But the idea haunts safety experts. In theory, all devices are putting out radio frequency emissions only in the ranges assigned to them by the Federal Communications Commission and thus should not interfere with each other. But electronics experts worry about signals straying outside the assigned range. Those emissions would not have to be large to cause a problem. Signal strength from Global Positioning System satellites is in the range of one-billionth of a watt at the receiver, so even a faint competing signal could interfere. On the ground, there are also potential safety problems, Mr. Carson said. Hand-held electronics might interrupt a transmission between a cockpit and a tower, for example. If a tower controller issued a clearance for a taxiing plane to cross a runway and then revoked it but the latter transmission was not heard, the result could be catastrophic, he said. While the scheduled carriers have flight attendants who enforce a ban on using wireless devices at high altitudes and on using any electronics below 10,000 feet, charter operators of planes large and small often tell their passengers to feel |
1567193_2 | Ready for Takeoff, With Emphasis on 'Off' | is broadcasting, looking for an access point. Some may turn on a wirelessly equipped hand-held to look at a calendar and forget that it, too, is radiating. And that only accounts for devices in the passenger cabin. A passenger might pack a two-way pager in checked luggage, Mr. Carson said. ''Then you can't get a hold of it even if you do remember,'' he said. The seriousness of the problem is hard to gauge. Mr. Winfrey and Mr. Carson are not certain that there has ever been a problem in flight that was traced directly to electronic interference originating on board. But the idea haunts safety experts. In theory, all devices are putting out radio frequency emissions only in the ranges assigned to them by the Federal Communications Commission and thus should not interfere with each other. But electronics experts worry about signals straying outside the assigned range. Those emissions would not have to be large to cause a problem. Signal strength from Global Positioning System satellites is in the range of one-billionth of a watt at the receiver, so even a faint competing signal could interfere. On the ground, there are also potential safety problems, Mr. Carson said. Hand-held electronics might interrupt a transmission between a cockpit and a tower, for example. If a tower controller issued a clearance for a taxiing plane to cross a runway and then revoked it but the latter transmission was not heard, the result could be catastrophic, he said. While the scheduled carriers have flight attendants who enforce a ban on using wireless devices at high altitudes and on using any electronics below 10,000 feet, charter operators of planes large and small often tell their passengers to feel free to use cellphones, wireless modems, two-way pagers and similar devices. In fact, said Les Dorr, an F.A.A. spokesman, it is the Federal Communications Commission that bans the use of ''land mobile devices'' in flight, although the F.A.A., in an advisory document, supports that restriction. The advisory document also recommends that the airlines prohibit intentional transmitters, but it ''doesn't carry the force of law,'' he said. The burden of proof lies with the aircraft operator, Mr. Dorr said. Most airlines mention only cellphones; some add remote-control toys. Then they refer passengers to a list published in their in-flight magazines, which travelers may read only if they boarded without a hand-held or laptop to entertain them. |
1567214_1 | Junk E-Mail Is Unabated Despite Law, Survey Says | not worsening, problem, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Roughly 75 percent of the Internet users surveyed reported no change or an increase in the amount of junk e-mail they receive, and nearly one-third of them said they were using e-mail less because of it. ''Things aren't getting better,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet project. ''And for many Internet users, they're getting worse.'' The survey, based on 1,371 Internet users and conducted between Feb. 3 and March 1, found that the uninterrupted flow of spam was undermining most people's confidence in e-mail. Among those surveyed, 63 percent said that they were more distrusting of their e-mail, up from 52 percent in a comparable poll taken last June. What's more, 77 percent of e-mail users, up from 70 percent in June, said that spam made it ''unpleasant and annoying'' to be online. ''One of the most important aspects of people's enthusiasm about the Internet is the way it helps them communicate more efficiently, more broadly, and maintain certain important social connections,'' Mr. Rainie said. ''So, there's this level of frustration on the public's part. Congress acted; we've heard that this is a tough new anti-spam law. And yet there are more headlines and bigger problems.'' The legislation, which was passed in December and went into effect on Jan. 1, was expected to help curtail the unmarked and sometimes sexually explicit or deceptive messages that have flooded millions of in-boxes. The law tightened restrictions on mass e-mail by requiring that e-mail marketers identify themselves accurately and by prohibiting the use of deceptive subject lines and fake return addresses. Under the law, senders must also inform recipients of how to opt out of receiving future e-mail messages. The one area where the law seems to be having its intended effect, according to the survey, is in curbing sexually explicit spam. Of those respondents who reported having received sex-related spam in the past, 25 percent said they were now getting less. Mr. Rainie said that the spam problem was unlikely to be solved by federal legislation alone. ''The technology community has its job to do, the legal and legislative communities have their jobs to do, and people have their own jobs to do,'' he said. ''It would help if some people were smarter about what they open, or don't open, in their in-boxes.'' |
1567302_0 | Osteoporosis Drug Found Safe to Take for 10 Years | For millions of women who have the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, researchers are reporting that Fosamax, the drug most commonly used worldwide to improve bone density and prevent fractures, can be taken safely and effectively for 10 years. About three million Americans now take the drug, most of them postmenopausal women with osteoporosis, according to its maker, Merck. The new study, the longest clinical trial ever conducted in osteoporosis, found that Fosamax enabled postmenopausal women to maintain or increase their bone density through 10 years of treatment, with no apparent ill effects. The improved bone density persisted even after the drug was stopped and diminished only gradually. The study is being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Interest in Fosamax and related drugs has increased in recent years, especially because estrogen, once the first choice for preventing bone loss after menopause, is now recommended only as a last resort. Estrogen's benefits are outweighed by increases in the risk of breast cancer, stroke, blood clots and heart attacks. ''Osteoporosis is a chronic condition and therefore requires long-term treatment, so it's really important to know what happens in the long run when you treat it,'' said the director of the Fosamax study, Dr. Henry G. Bone, chief of endocrinology and metabolism at the St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit, and director of the Michigan Bone and Mineral Clinic. But other researchers cautioned that the research left important questions unanswered. Although Fosamax can be used for 10 years, it is not clear whether patients need to take it for that long, or when they should start. In addition, although previous, shorter studies have proved that the drug can halve the risk of breaking a bone, the 10-year study relied on bone density measurements, not fractures, as a measure of success. But while high bone density usually protects against fractures, it does not always do so. The study was not large enough to compare the effects of different doses and treatment schedules on fracture risk or to be certain that the full protection against fracture lasted. Dr. Gordon J. Strewler, a professor of medicine at Harvard who wrote an article in the same journal commenting on Dr. Bone's report, noted that the optimal duration of treatment had not been established, and said that doctors needed better data about fracture rates in patients taking Fosamax and related drugs for a long |
1565725_2 | You Want Me To Put My Shoes Where? | the conveyor belts should slant down so that travelers don't have to lift their luggage as high. More ambitiously, the whole operation needs systematic analysis -- just like one that an industrial designer would conduct for a car model or can opener. The result could be a radically different configuration of apparatus, queues and sensibilities. The personnel also need a rethinking. The government employees now on duty have better training and demeanors than the hapless private contract workers they often replaced, but they are still set up to control. They engage in a regime of instruction, prohibition and surveillance. Travelers are expected to toe the line: lift that laptop, take off those shoes and make no wrong jokes. The security personnel are not there as helpers. So old people struggle by themselves to get their luggage up, parents herd unruly toddlers through the metal detectors and novice flyers worry about which of their things go where and just when and how they will be retrieved. Having employees help people with their luggage could have security advantages. The security workers could see the stuff and feel the goods -- their heft, sounds and textures. They could observe the faces of the owners and how those faces respond to offers for help. The presence of helpers would also reassure and increase the confidence of those who fumble, causing them to fumble less. And, hardly a small matter, people would have a better time. As security concerns inject more checkpoints into our lives, the same questions of design arise. Will there be detailed caring or only command and control? As accomplished designers know, a good appliance blends machine and person for both functionality and pleasure. Cumulatively, all the little machine-human interactions build into psychological and social states of place and culture. The conditions at airport security checkpoints show that despite having many millions of dollars to invest, the custodians have not come up with a decent design. Given the usual worries of getting to the airport, weather delays and (now) the threat of mayhem in the skies, flying is anxiety-ridden enough. Isn't it time for someone in charge to go out there and redo things? Op-Ed Contributor Harvey Molotch, a professor of metropolitan studies and sociology at New York University, is the author of ''Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are.'' |
1567706_0 | President, Marking Anniversary of War, Urges World to Unite to Combat Terrorism | President Bush sought to rally support on Friday for what he called an inescapable battle with terrorism, telling representatives of 83 nations that they can afford no concession, no sign of weakness and no division. On the first anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq -- a conflict that his critics say weakened the alliances the United States now needs more than ever -- Mr. Bush said the quarrels over how to handle Saddam Hussein should be put in the past. The world might better focus its efforts on bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East and choking off the forces that breed fanaticism, he said. ''There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery and life and death,'' Mr. Bush said. Among those attending were the ambassadors from France and Germany, which opposed the invasion of Iraq, and from Spain, which suffered a terrorist bombing last week. Spanish voters subsequently elected a new government that said it would withdraw its 1,300 troops from Iraq unless the mission there was put under United Nations auspices, raising alarms in political circles here and in Europe. But Mr. Bush was also addressing a domestic audience, as his re-election campaign seeks to paint his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as weak on defense. ''The war on terror is not a figure of speech,'' Mr. Bush said. ''It is an inescapable calling of our generation. The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies -- they are offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands.'' A year after giving the go-ahead for the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush made only a fleeting reference to the primary justification he had used -- Mr. Hussein's supposed possession of chemical and biological weapons and his efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb. No banned weapons have been found in Iraq since the war. Mr. Bush instead emphasized on Friday that success in stabilizing Iraq and nursing it toward democracy was an integral part of the broader effort to defeat militant Islam. He also sought to head off any further defections from the coalition he assembled to provide military, humanitarian and financial support there. ''Whatever their past views, every nation now has an |
1562976_0 | Keeping Seeds Safe | When an American farmer gets ready to plant a crop like corn or soybeans, he has two basic choices. Traditional seeds are the kind farmers have planted throughout history, developed by crossing parents with desirable traits to get a superior variety. Genetically modified seeds, first widely planted in 1996, contain trangenes from other organisms that convey specific advantages to mature plants -- the ability to resist herbicides, for instance. The acreage planted with genetically modified crops has exploded: a third of this country's corn by 2002 and three-quarters of its soybeans. Whatever you make of this trend -- and there are strong arguments on both sides -- one question it raises is whether genes from modified plants might somehow drift into unmodified ones. The answer is yes. In a pioneering study released last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists asked two independent labs to examine samples of traditional corn, soybean and canola seeds. The labs found contamination in half the corn, half the soybean and more than 80 percent of the canola varieties. The study draws no conclusions about when the mingling took place. It could have happened during field tests, after modified crops were widely planted or during shipping and storage. But the genetic purity of at least some traditional seed varieties has been compromised. This is a serious finding. Though the acreage planted with modified crops is enormous, the number of varieties is still very small. But many more modified varieties -- many of them for industrial and pharmaceutical crops -- are being tested. The risk posed to the food supply by contamination from pharmaceutical crops will almost certainly be much greater than it is from genes that have migrated from, say, Roundup Ready corn. But there is a broader point. To contaminate traditional varieties of crops is to contaminate the genetic reservoir of plants on which humanity has depended for most of its history. In 2001, for instance, scientists discovered modified genes in traditional varieties of corn in Mexico, the ancestral home of the crop and the site of its greatest diversity. The need now is for more extensive study, best undertaken by the Department of Agriculture. It's also time to subject genetically modified crops to more rigorous and more coherent testing. The scale of the experiment this country is engaged in -- and its potential effect on the environment, the food supply and the purity of |
1562956_2 | Ulster Attack Linked to the I.R.A. Provokes Anger in Ireland | as attacks between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and would violate the I.R.A.'s cease-fire declared seven years ago. In a landmark speech last October, Mr. Adams said Sinn Fin had a ''total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences.'' ''We are opposed to any use or threat of force for any political purpose,'' he said. The cease-fires in Northern Ireland, whether of the republican paramilitaries who want Ulster to join the Irish Republic or their loyalist rivals who want to stay part of Britain, are notoriously flexible. But the attack on Mr. Tohill, on Feb. 20, stands out, both because the police say he would have been killed had they not rammed his attackers' getaway van with a patrol car, and because of its potential efect on negotiations over Northern Ireland's fragile local government. In London, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, said, ''You cannot be talking about human rights for people one day and beating the human rights out of them the next day.'' The British and Irish governments have been meeting regularly, with Northern Ireland's political parties, over the last month to review the 1998 treaty intended to end the province's 30-year sectarian conflict and set up a local legislature to share power between Protestants and Roman Catholics. In such talks Mr. Ahern has a reputation as a conciliatory negotiator who shies away from direct conflict. Yet his demands for an end to the ''horrific'' violence in Northern Ireland suggest he is losing his patience with the I.R.A.'s slow pace in meeting requirements to disarm and disband. Ulster's local government was suspended in 2002, leaving the province ruled directly from London. The change followed allegations, never proved, that I.R.A. spies operated in the British secretary of state's office. Republicans say the incident was manufactured to damage them. Similarly, Mr. Adams said police officers might have orchestrated the rescue of Mr. Tohill to cast blame on the I.R.A. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist party, threatened to pull out of the faltering talks if Mr. Blair did not take some action against Sinn Fein. The largest Protestant party, the Rev. Ian Paisley's hard-line Democratic Unionists, has remained surprisingly quiet. Like Mr. Ahern, other politicians in Dublin seemed more eager to criticize Sinn Fein, which holds 5 of the 166 seats in the Parliament in Dublin and is expected to make gains in municipal elections. |
1564166_1 | Opinions Vary on Treating Remnants at Ground Zero | there. On Feb. 6, the development corporation said the entire site would be eligible for listing on the national register. But three days later, it issued a document saying the ''significance of the transcending events of Sept. 11 and the aftermath clearly does not depend on the presence of the original, or even the damaged, buildings and structures'' and made a preliminary determination that redevelopment would have no adverse effect on any historical features. Faulting both documents, the trust, an influential nonprofit organization, has joined the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Municipal Art Society, the World Monuments Fund and the Preservation League of New York State in identifying the garage ruins, the slurry walls, the sheared-off steel column footings from the towers and a staircase and escalator structure on Vesey Street as ''features that clearly contribute to the significance of the site.'' They called on officials to consider artifacts removed from the site in assessing its historical significance. Irene Chang, the vice president for legal affairs and counsel to the development corporation, said the agency was committed to keeping parts of the slurry wall visible, allowing access to the column footings and preserving the tower footprints as voids. ''In our view,'' she said, ''the plan recognizes and incorporates the most important elements. While there has been a flurry of letters and a discussion of the process, we really aren't that far apart in substance as to what's important to preserve.'' Ms. Chang said that because the artifacts had all been removed, they could not now be used to assess the significance of the site itself. ''If they were returned, they could contribute to the historic significance of the site,'' she said. Eligibility for national register listing does not convey the protection found in local landmarks laws. And preservationists said they were not trying to freeze the site in time. ''We're certainly not taking the position that the remains of the parking garage have to be left intact,'' Ms. Merritt, the deputy general counsel of the trust, said in a telephone interview. ''It's just that these types of features that have a connection with the attack have to be taken into account in planning how the memorial space goes forward.'' She added, ''The national register issues raised by this site are so unique that it would be appropriate for the keeper of the national register herself to look at the determination.'' |
1564103_0 | 2 Muslim Sites Attacked in France, and Reaction Rankles | A Muslim prayer center in the Alpine town of Seynod was destroyed, and the annex of a mosque in nearby Annecy was damaged in arson attacks before dawn on Friday. The local police said the two fires were purposely set but declined to label them hate crimes. There were no injuries. The Interior Ministry made no public statement about the attacks, and Frank Louvrier, the ministry spokesman, said one was not planned. A spokeswoman at the prime minister's office referred all inquiries to the Interior Ministry. In November, after a Jewish school annex in a Paris suburb was badly damaged by a predawn firebomb, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited the site within hours and said it was ''more than strongly suspected'' to be an anti-Semitic and ''obviously'' racist act. He vowed that those who set the fire would be caught and punished ''with the greatest severity.'' The next day, President Jacques Chirac declared that ''an attack on a Jew is an attack against France'' and approved a plan for tougher policing and prosecution of hate crimes and sweeping urban renewal investments of almost $8 billion to clean up neighborhoods thought to breed Islamic extremism. Mr. Sarkozy has no plan at the moment to visit the Muslim sites, Mr. Louvrier said. The stark difference in the government's reactions has infuriated many Muslims here. Fayik Dag, president of the Islamic Union in France at Seynod, accused the government of a double standard in not condemning the attacks against the Muslim targets. ''Why is there such support toward other communities and not us?'' he said in a telephone interview. ''When something happens against the Jews, there is a show of support. That's very good. It's needed. But why not us?'' France is embroiled in a soul-searching debate over the definition and extent of anti-Semitism in the country. The number of attacks on Jewish schools, synagogues and cemeteries in France peaked in 2002 when a Marseille synagogue was deliberately burned to the ground, and Mr. Sarkozy said last month that the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks in France had fallen by 37 percent in 2003. But Jewish groups are deeply concerned about a new manifestation of anti-Semitism linked to Israel's policies in the occupied territories. They are also concerned that many incidents go unrecorded. Muslim activists and leaders complain that attacks against Muslim targets like mosques and cemeteries often do not receive the same |
1564201_0 | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: State To Allow Same-Sex Unions | A judge in the southernmost state in Brazil, the world's largest Roman Catholic country, has authorized same-sex couples to register civil unions at any public notary office. The decision came after gay rights groups complained of discrimination and local prosecutors sought an injunction on their behalf. ''Notwithstanding the ethical, philosophic, anthropological and religious discussion, the fact is that homosexual relations exist and, therefore, in the name of judicial security, deserve to be regulated,'' the court ruling said. Larry Rohter (NYT) |
1564116_4 | Gay Marriage Licenses Create a Quandary for the Clergy | this historical moment.'' The Rev. Ruth M. Frost, who officiated on Sunday at the Rodrigues-Mason marriage blessing and 14 others at St. Francis Lutheran Church, was herself married on Feb. 13 to another pastor at the church, the Rev. Phyllis Zillhart. The congregation was expelled from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1995 after the two women joined the pastoral staff. ''If these marriages hold up to the legal challenges, it will make it very difficult for churches to censure clergy who participate in them,'' Pastor Frost said. ''This pushes the envelope, and I suspect it will embolden congregations who are sympathetic but have not dared to perform blessings.'' In Santa Cruz, about 65 miles south of San Francisco, much the opposite happened last month when a lesbian couple who had been married in San Francisco attended a Sunday service at the Santa Cruz Bible Church. The couple, Doreen C. Boxer and Cynthia Zapata, left the church in tears after winning a contest recognizing the most recently married couple in attendance. Though they had been to the church several times as visitors, the couple's relationship was apparently unknown to the pastor, the Rev. David Gschwend, until they were the last pair left standing in the newlywed contest. After a moment of stunned silence, the two women were awarded a free dinner at a local restaurant, but Mr. Gschwend later lectured them on the sanctity of marriage. ''We will always have the stand that marriage is for a man and a woman,'' Mr. Gschwend said in remarks posted on the church's Web site. ''We don't apologize for that.'' Ms. Boxer, 33, said she was shocked by the experience. ''I had never in my life been attacked in church,'' she said. ''Since then, we have had hate mail and all kinds of nasty messages on the answering machine. Things like, 'Go to hell' and 'We will stone you' and 'Jesus will stone you.' '' The Rev. Dr. Eileen W. Lindner, a religious sociologist and church historian in New Jersey, said people on each side of the issue should expect other incidents of ''polarization.'' ''This thing started out as one hulking animal plodding through the sanctuary, and has now turned into something that approximates the charge of a herd of buffalo,'' Dr. Lindner said. ''There is no end in sight and the dust is so thick you can't even see the count.'' |
1569527_0 | For Insight on the Way We Act, Read the Philosophers | To the Editor: In ''One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom'' (column, March 23), David Brooks makes an important point, but not the one he intended. If we want insight into the way human beings act, from the sources they derive their hopes, fears, motivations and desires, we need to look not to religion but to philosophy. There are few insights into human behavior found in religion that cannot also be found in the great writings of Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, Hume, Kant and Mill (to name a few), which are as much a cornerstone of our civilization as our religions. And these works are less divisive than religious texts because their insights are not contingent on the acceptance of a particular mythology, are based on reason, not revelation, and are therefore open to discussion and more responsive to the continually changing conditions we find ourselves in. If we look, we'll find philosophy has much to teach us about ourselves, perhaps even more than religion. BRIAN STIPELMAN East Brunswick, N.J., March 23, 2004 |
1569468_0 | A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion | In the first episode of ''The L Word,'' the Showtime cable network's new series about lesbians, two women flirt at a party. ''Have you read anything by Anne Carson?'' one asks, referring to the Canadian-born classicist-poet. '' 'The Autobiography of Red,' '' the other answers, blushing and naming Ms. Carson's best-known work, a retelling of the myth of Herakles' slaying of the red-winged monster Geryon as a gay teenage love story. The woman has also read ''Eros the Bittersweet,'' Ms. Carson's essays on love in ancient Greece. ''I think,'' she says, dreamily, ''those books practically changed my life.'' Over the years Ms. Carson, whose work deals with extremes of passion and eroticism and who creates verse and prose embedded with references to classical scholarship, has acquired a cult following. The director Mike Nichols and his wife, Diane Sawyer, attend her readings. Mr. Nichols has also discussed directing her translation of Euripides' ''Hippolytus,'' about the cursed youth whose stepmother, Phaedra, falls madly in love with him. On Monday Ms. Carson's new translation of Euripides' ''Hekabe,'' also known as ''Hecuba,'' will have a staged reading at the 92nd Street Y, with a star cast that includes Kathryn Walker, Kate Burton, Larry Pine, Paul Hecht, David Strathairn, Mary Beth Hurt and Maeve Kinkead. The idea for ''Hekabe'' came from Ms. Walker, who will also direct the reading. It was written by Euripides sometime in the mid-fifth century B.C., at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which pitted the Spartan and Athenian alliances against each another. The war engulfed the entire Greek world on and off for a quarter of a century and eventually brought about the downfall of Athens. Ms. Walker said she sees parallels between that war and America's war in Iraq. ''The Greeks were sitting in the Assembly debating how the captive population should be treated and what traditional values needed to be compromised,'' she said. ''We're in wartime and facing the same questions.'' In ''Hekabe,'' Euripides used the old story about the Trojan War as a way of commenting on the war raging during his own time. When it opens, the Greeks have defeated the Trojans. Hekabe, Queen of Troy, is a slave. She has witnessed the slaughter of her husband, Priam, and of all but one of her sons. Her daughter Polyxena is dragged off to become a human sacrifice; then she discovers the corpse of Polydoros, the one |
1565407_0 | An Oops Button, or a Tool for Retrieving That E-Mail Note You Sent | THE speed and efficiency of e-mail can present problems for an impulsive person. A message written in haste can be dispatched instantly on a whim (''Sell 2,000 shares''; ''I resign''; ''We should see other people''), and there is no going back once one has clicked Send. At least until now. A new e-mail service means cooler heads have a chance to prevail. Subscribers to the service, called BigString, can retract statements by recalling or changing messages that may have been sent in moments of panic, rage or stupor. A BigString subscriber can also change what a message says or add an attachment. ''It's really giving the sender control, in case you make a mistake,'' Darin Myman, BigString's chief executive, said. The service, which costs $29.95 a year (www.bigstring.com), works by converting subscribers' e-mail messages to simple HTML documents, essentially no-frills Web pages. The documents are then sent to a BigString server, where each one is given a long, complicated address and then stored. The recipient gets an e-mail message with an embedded link that directs e-mail programs like Outlook and Eudora to the Web page where the message is stored. The e-mail software opens the Web page containing the e-mail message, and the recipient can read it as he would any other message. Since the actual message remains on the BigString server, the sender retains control over the document. Working through the BigString Web site, the subscriber can alter or delete the e-mail page from the BigString server; the recipient will see only the latest version. The service also permits the subscriber to set conditions on messages, like limiting the recipient to one viewing (calling it up a second time would display only a blank page), delaying the delivery of a message until a specified time or setting an expiration date for it. BigString offers subscribers more control over the information they disseminate. ''You don't have to worry about things just sitting out there forever,'' Mr. Myman said. For recipients, BigString could represent a paradigm shift and a threat to the sanctity of the In box, which would become less like a storage bin than a bulletin board that can be changed or updated without the owner's knowledge. ''I think that people are still very flexible with how they think of their computer and their e-mail,'' said Larry Clinton, chief operating officer of the Internet Security Alliance, a consumer and |
1565425_0 | Treatment Is Seen to Cut Breast Cancer Recurrence | Drugs that completely block estrogen can lower the risk of breast cancer recurrence in postmenopausal women after surgery, according to the latest study to suggest that some women can improve their chances of recovering from breast cancer with aromatase inhibitors. The study followed more than 4,700 women who took tamoxifen, the most common treatment for preventing recurrences of breast cancer. But women who switched to the estrogen-blocker exemestane two and a half years later cut their chances of developing another tumor by a third. Taking exemestane, which is sold under the brand name aromasin by Pfizer, also provided better protection against developing a tumor in the second breast and carried less severe side effects than tamoxifen. The most serious known risk of aromasin and other aromatase inhibitors is bone loss, a concern for patients with a history of osteoporosis, said Dr. R. Charles Coombes, the study's lead author. One solution, he said, might be to combine the therapy with calcium supplements. The researchers also warned that it was unclear if postmenopausal women should switch to aromasin. ''It seems that the beneficial effects are partially the result of two to three years of tamoxifen first, so at the moment it appears that both drugs should be given in sequence,'' said Dr. Coombes, a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine in London. The findings, to be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, were released a year ahead of schedule. But the study is continuing, its authors said, and it is uncertain whether the drug can save lives. Women are usually advised to take tamoxifen for five years after a breast cancer operation. But half of all recurrences occur five or more years after cancer is first diagnosed, and continuing tamoxifen provides no added protection. Aromasin is one of several drugs that suppress blood levels of estrogen by blocking aromatase, the enzyme that helps to produce it. By choking off the body's main source of estrogen, aromasin and other aromatase inhibitors cut estrogen levels to almost zero. Tamoxifen prevents estrogen from latching onto tumor cell receptors and directing them to multiply. In some patients the drug's effectiveness fades, and serious side effects can result, including uterine cancer. |
1565485_4 | 4 Big Internet Providers File Suits To Stop Leading Senders of Spam | egregious. And you have to filter out spam at the I.S.P. level. It is the combination of methods that will knock these people down and bring us back to a level of sanity we can deal with.'' Many spam experts argue that the single most effective method for reducing spam would be to modify the technical protocols used to send e-mail so that it would be easy to verify the identity of the sender of a message. Most spammers now use false return addresses. Nearly a year ago, the same four big e-mail providers who filed the lawsuits promised to work together to create such a system. But so far they have failed to agree on a common method. America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo are each moving toward developing separate e-mail identification systems. The Internet providers are working together, however, by trading information about spammers. AOL said its case against Mr. Hawke was based on more than 100,000 complaints from its members. Mr. Hawke was the head of the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party, a neo-Nazi organization, before he founded Amazing Internet Products in Manchester, N.H., which has sold pills, vitamins, car warranties and a computer disks with information about how to create false identities. Yahoo said it now had evidence of something that many e-mail users long suspected but had never managed to prove: that spammers take the names of people who ask to be removed from their e-mail lists and sell them to other marketers. An investigator working for Yahoo filled in a Web page from Golddisk asking to be removed from its list, its lawsuit said. That page asked for the user's phone number, and the investigator received phone calls from other marketers. When asked, the marketers told Yahoo's investigator that they bought the addresses from Golddisk, through an intermediary. One challenge to these suits is that much of the activity is outside of the United States. Golddisk is in Canada, and several other of the spammers used computers in foreign countries. But lawyers for the Internet providers said they expected that the Can-Spam Act could still be used against spammers who send mail to people in the United States. ''It is a myth that you can evade the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts by putting a computer offshore,'' Ms. Anderson of Microsoft said. ''Most of the individuals involved in spam live in the United States.'' TECHNOLOGY |
1565455_0 | Ashcroft Weighs the Granting of Political Asylum to Abused Women | The first hint of change came without much fanfare or publicity last month as the Department of Homeland Security quietly proposed sweeping changes in the handling of political asylum cases. But as word trickled across the country, dozens of battered women seeking refuge in the United States felt the first stirrings of hope. In their home countries, the women say, the authorities repeatedly ignored them when they tried to report and escape their abusive partners. The Department of Homeland Security, which took on the function of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, is proposing rules that would allow for political asylum in such extreme cases, opening the door to women fleeing countries that condone severe domestic abuse, genital mutilation and other forms of acute violence against women. If approved, the rules would for the first time recognize severe cases of domestic violence as equivalent in certain instances to more familiar asylum cases involving political and religious persecution. Department officials have passed along their recommendations in a 43-page legal brief to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who will make the final decision. The officials have urged Mr. Ashcroft to allow the department to put in place rules governing such cases and have called for Rodi Alvarado Peña of Guatemala, whose case gave rise to the recommendations, to be granted asylum. Justice Department officials say Mr. Ashcroft is still considering the issue, which has been roiling the immigration courts since a small but growing number of such cases began appearing in the 1990's. Some Justice Department officials indicated that Mr. Ashcroft had initially opposed such rules, but a former senior administration official familiar with the issue said he believed that Mr. Ashcroft would approve the proposal, given the considerable pressure from conservative groups and the Homeland Security Department. More than 36 Democrats in Congress, as well as leaders of conservative-minded groups like Concerned Women for America, and World Relief, an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, have urged government officials to rule in favor of Mrs. Alvarado and women like her. Many battered women are anxiously awaiting the government's final determination. In California, Mrs. Alvarado, who said she fled an abusive husband who had dislocated her jawbone and used her head to break windows and mirrors, said her eyes filled with tears when she learned that domestic security officials had recommended granting asylum to women like her. In New York, Zaide Cinto |
1568485_1 | OBSERVATORY | Nature. The changes coincide with the fish's movement from near the surface, where ultraviolet light is prevalent, to deeper waters, where the light is mostly blue-green. Other creatures alter their color vision by changing the density of cones of different color sensitivity or by changing the chromophores, another element of visual pigments. But the salmon's method, the researchers say, represents a previously undiscovered way to do the same thing. Another Trick of Starlight They don't call it the Milky Way for nothing. In the night sky the galaxy has a certain healthy glow, from the combined light of billions of stars (though sadly, because of light pollution, the Milky Way is less and less visible these days). But astronomers know that the galaxy shines in other ways as well. In particular, the Milky Way is aglow in gamma rays, the shortest-wavelength and highest-energy photons around. Where those gamma rays come from has been a subject of some debate. They could have a diffuse source, from collisions between charged particles and the gas abundant in interstellar space. Or they could be from point sources, mainly black holes and neutron stars. A team of European scientists has sought to end the mystery. The gamma rays, they reported in the journal Nature last week, are almost entirely from point sources. Diffuse processes play, at most, a minor role. Gamma rays are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, so studies have to be conducted at high altitude or in orbit. The European team used data from the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, a spacecraft that was launched in 2002 and carries high-resolution instruments. The researchers aimed the instruments at the galactic center and detected more than 90 sources that would account, they say, for 90 percent or more of the gamma rays from that region. A Heavenly Catalog Maybe you get too many catalogs already. But if you have any interest in astronomy, you should consider one more: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's catalog of 88 million celestial objects, which was released last week. This is the second data release by the survey, the most extensive astronomical mapping project ever undertaken. The catalog has information about all kinds of objects -- spiral galaxies, galactic clusters, quasars -- and spectacular images of them. Even the occasional Earth-orbiting satellite was captured by the camera in the survey's 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Best of |
1568483_0 | A Mountain Railroad Spells Death for Grizzlies and Cubs | Every day, trains climb a steep mountain corridor between the southern boundary of Glacier National Park and the northern boundary of the Great Bear Wilderness. The corridor is at the heart of the continent's wildest landscape, and it is prime bear habitat. In some 24-hour periods, up to 42 milelong trains use the line. Every once in a while, a grizzly runs or wanders onto the tracks and is hit by a locomotive. The threat to the grizzlies has fueled a dispute between the railroad, which says it has done all it can to protect the bears, and some wildlife experts, who say it should try harder. At least 32 bears, including 9 cubs, have been killed by trains since 1980. Three died last year. Dr. Chris Servheen, coordinator of the Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, surmises that the tracks have claimed a disproportionately high number of grizzly cubs because the long trains split family groups. The trains are high enough for the bears to see one another beneath them, and ''we think the cubs bolt across to get to mom and can't go fast enough to avoid getting killed,'' Dr. Servheen said. The number of killed grizzlies is likely to be higher than reported, experts said, because some may be knocked off the trestles, killed at night or remain uncounted because they have wandered away to die. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, which operates the line, says it has taken numerous measures to prevent the grizzlies, a federally protected species, from being killed. The steps include reducing grain spills that attract the bears and cleaning up the spills that do occur, removing dead animal carcasses from the tracks and, in some places, installing electric fences. The railroad says it is impossible to stop the killings completely, and it has applied for a federal ''take permit'' to legalize its actions. ''The railroad has taken very effective steps,'' said Philip Crissman, director of the Great Northern Environmental Stewardship Area in Kalispell, a group that helps the railroad reduce bear deaths. ''Can we totally stop it? That's wishful thinking.'' Some wildlife experts, however, are outraged. ''If I applied for a permit to kill bears, they'd laugh in my face,'' Dr. Charles Jonkel, a grizzly biologist who is president of the Great Bear Foundation in Missoula, said. ''If I killed one, I'd get |
1568520_1 | The 1,776-Foot-Tall Target | architects and engineers of Freedom Tower are working to devise ways to increase the security of the building's future occupants, pondering additional stairwells for escape, new supports that would prevent structural failure and better flame retardants. ''Of high-rise buildings, I believe this is one of the safest,'' said David Childs, one of its principal architects. But when one compares these engineering revisions to the continued proof of radical Islamists' determination to carry out high-casualty attacks, it's hard not to reach the conclusion that the plans for ground zero are profoundly irresponsible. Why would terrorists choose to attack the same place again? Actually, they have left us a large body of evidence about how much those blocks in Lower Manhattan mean to them. When radical Islamists first began to plot violence against America, the World Trade Center was central to their thinking. No later than 1990, El Sayyid Nosair -- the assassin of the radical Jewish leader Meir Kahane -- had written down a call for destroying ''the structure of civilized pillars such as their touristic infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings which they are proud of.'' Federal prosecutors have asserted that this was a reference to the World Trade Center, and that his interest in the site was likely stirred by the sermons of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who has long been one of the radicals' most revered clerics. Mr. Nosair and Mr. Abdel Rahman were members of the jihadist set in Brooklyn and New Jersey that Ramzi Yousef -- the architect of the 1993 bombing of the trade center -- joined when he arrived in the United States. Mr. Yousef would later admit to the F.B.I. that he had hoped to topple one tower into the other and kill 250,000 people. His attack killed only six and was viewed by fellow radicals as a failure. The determination to redress that failure prompted Osama bin Laden and his followers to work for years on the plan that culminated in 9/11. The importance of the towers was clear in Mr. bin Laden's first video message after the attack: ''Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.'' An even taller structure at ground zero, with its message of heroic resolve, will be an even more powerful symbol of American might and values |
1568507_0 | Strokes or Insomnia? A Woman's Hormone Quandary | Ask any woman who has had a difficult menopause if she thinks that Mrs. Rochester, locked in the attic in ''Jane Eyre,'' was actually insane. The answer is likely to be a resounding no. Poor Mrs. Rochester, living in an era before hormone therapy, has been on my mind lately, as I have tried, unsuccessfully, to wean myself off estrogen. Like me, she was probably dazed from too many sleepless nights, frightened by palpitations with no apparent cause and unable to concentrate on the simplest task or read a sentence from start to finish. Hot flashes? No doubt Mrs. Rochester was peeling off clothes and putting them back on, feeling hot and clammy one minute and cold and clammy the next, waking in a tangle of damp sheets. But, chances are, if anyone had asked her, Mrs. Rochester would have said her wayward thermostat was a minor inconvenience compared to being unable to think straight. Being locked in the attic was no picnic, for sure, especially while her husband was fooling around with young Jane. But at least Mrs. Rochester did not have to go to work alongside men who considered her ditzy, women her own age who were sailing effortlessly through their own menopause and those half her age who smugly assumed that this would never happen to them. Pondering Mrs. Rochester's situation led to a eureka moment after months of gathering misery. I wasn't losing my mind, as I had been thinking in recent months. I was in estrogen withdrawal. So, after polling my physicians, I have fallen off the wagon, given into my craving. I need these little pills to have a life. At first, the weaning seemed relatively painless. I cut back by one pill every three days. No problem. When I went to one pill every other day, the hot flashes started, intermittently. I would snap awake, heart pounding, at 3:30 a.m., always the same time. Throwing off the covers, sweat turned to bone-rattling shivering. It lasted but a few minutes. Not such a big deal except for the lost sleep. I could do this! I didn't eliminate the next pill for months, following a doctor's schedule for gentle tapering. I was tired all the time. But what did I expect at 56? So I cut the dose again. One milligram of Estradiol every third day. I was almost clean. And like a recovering alcoholic, |
1570187_0 | Tower of Strength, or a Risky Lure? | To the Editor: Daniel Benjamin (Op-Ed, March 23) states the obvious: skyscrapers are potential terrorist targets. But many civic structures -- town squares, embassies and train stations -- are, too. We would obviously restore these structures should disaster strike, despite their vulnerability to repeat attacks. After all, an essential aspect of coping with tragedy is rebuilding. Israelis have shown remarkable resilience to suicide bombings by returning to bustling streets just hours after a catastrophe. Madrid is working to restore its trains so people can get back to work. In Manhattan, the Twin Towers embodied the audacious spirit of the greatest city the world has ever known. I say: Rebuild both towers bigger and better than ever, with the best safety systems money can buy. And when they are done, reserve me a table on opening night in the new restaurant in the sky. There's nothing, nothing, like dessert above the clouds. KIRSTEN HUBBARD Newton, Mass., March 25, 2004 |
1570085_0 | Recycling in the City | To the Editor: In ''Back to Recycling'' (editorial, March 23), you say that before some policy changes, New Yorkers were ''coming around'' to recycling, and that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg should now persuade them ''to get back on the wagon.'' But why focus on items, like old newspapers, that are only marginally recyclable? New Yorkers avidly recycle when it is worthwhile do to so. Every day they wash and reuse their dinner dishes. Ditto for their clothing. When they buy a new car, they sell the used one rather than trash it. Ditto their condos, co-ops or houses. And New York City continues to boast the world's finest stores for selling and buying used books. Recycling is more common than you think. DONALD J. BOUDREAUX Fairfax, Va., March 23, 2004 The writer is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University. |
1570182_0 | Tower of Strength, or a Risky Lure? | To the Editor: Daniel Benjamin suggests that because terrorists target our symbols of liberty and freedom, it is irresponsible to build them (''The 1,776-Foot-Tall Target,'' Op-Ed, March 23). Perhaps we should put the Statue of Liberty or the Liberty Bell in storage under such logic. On the contrary, we should rebuild precisely because it would demonstrate what Mr. Benjamin calls ''heroic resolve'' in the face of terrific adversity. Mr. Benjamin's concern for human safety is completely valid, of course, but that simply means that the symbols must be guarded with the most vigilant security, and perhaps new security measures must be developed. This will lead to added costs, but the costs are well worth it. RAYMOND A. PSONAK Brooklyn, March 25, 2004 |
1563102_0 | Libya's Vast Pipe Dream Taps Into Desert's Ice Age Water | In one of the largest construction projects in the world, engineers are trying to ''mine'' ice age rainfall, now locked in the sandstone beneath the Sahara, and convey it to Libyan cities and farms along a vast waterworks. The project is almost invisible, except when something goes wrong. Bashir O. Saleh, a Libyan engineer trained at the University of Texas, has devoted his professional life to the project, the $27 billion Great Manmade River. In an interview, he described what had happened repeatedly on the first 500-mile segment of the pipeline system that taps a series of ''fossil water'' aquifers beneath the Libyan desert. Mammoth sections of pipe buried six feet under the desert floor burst out of the sand dunes like submarines breaking the surface of the ocean. Each time it happens, Mr. Saleh said, ''it is a catastrophe.'' Two decades after the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi mounted this multibillion-dollar public works project as ''the eighth wonder of the world'' that would ''create a new society,'' nothing is settled about the best long-term solution for Libya's widespread water deficit. But the option that Colonel Qaddafi chose -- the extensive pipeline and pumping system that bores into the earth to draw down nonrenewable reserves of fossil water -- is now about half completed on a landscape twice the size of Texas and has been delivering water for more than a decade, with occasional interruptions for repairs. Construction is still under way on connecting branches, as it is here near Surt, where a great gash in the desert exposes freshly laid pipeline that looks big enough to support a subway train. The first pipeline blowout occurred in August 1999, and disaster struck repeatedly over the next several years, until engineers figured out how to reduce corrosion that was weakening the pipe and causing it to buckle under the water's enormous force. Each failure started as a rumble, then an eruption, followed by a geyser shooting 100 feet into the air -- a subterranean beast, as one of Mr. Saleh's assistant engineers put it, being flung out of the earth with the pressure of a dam burst. ''Some of these huge pieces of pipe were hurled 50 meters by the force of the water,'' he said. ''It's a mess.'' With each failure, repair crews were dispatched like counterattacking armies of bulldozers and 450-ton cranes. Their work -- digging out the damaged |
1563145_0 | California County Debates Use of Gene-Altered Foods | Els Cooperrider, who owns an organic restaurant and brewery here, decided she had had enough when she could find only genetically modified canola oil for sale. Ms. Cooperrider, a retired scientist who lives in a cabin with no electricity or telephone, began circulating a county ballot measure that if approved on Tuesday would be the nation's first ban on growing genetically modified foodstuffs and animals. The proposal, called Measure H, would prohibit the growing and raising of ''genetically modified organisms'' here in Mendocino County, a rural area some 80 miles north of San Francisco where farming is a $180 million-a-year business. Genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.'s, are plants and animals that have had their DNA altered, sometimes by the insertion of genes from other varieties or species, to achieve what the growers consider an improved product. The agricultural biotechnology industry has put up $525,000 to fight Measure H. Proponents have raised $80,000. ''We've got to have G.M.O.-free zones or we're not going to have organic products anymore,'' Ms. Cooperrider said. Joined by organic farmers and other county residents, she hopes to block genetically modified crops before they are planted because drifting pollen could contaminate other crops and wild plants. Communities in Vermont have passed resolutions opposing genetically modified foods. Last year, a statewide initiative in Oregon that would have required the labeling of G.M.O.'s was defeated. Residents of Humboldt County, north of here, are collecting signatures for a ban. Americans eat genetically modified snacks and sweets, and much of the nation's sweet corn, soybeans and canola are genetically modified. Ms. Cooperrider and her allies say that little is known about the long-term effects of such foods. ''If you no longer completely trust in government and corporations and their lobbyists,'' said Don Schmitt of the Apple Farm, which grows ''heirloom apples'' grafted from older varieties, ''then you should vote yes.'' Mindful of their neighbors, those here who favor the use of G.M.O's tend to be reserved in their advocacy. The county's Farm Bureau opposes Measure H ''because it's poorly written,'' the bureau's president, Peter Bradford, said. With many of its members organic farmers, though, the group has sidestepped the substance of the debate. Mr. Bradford said that bans like Measure H should be a matter for the state or federal government, but that this county rarely yields to a higher authority. The sheriff backs medical marijuana use. The district attorney served |
1563183_0 | U.S. Wants to Place Its Own Inspectors at Airports Abroad | Domestic security officials plan to station American inspectors at a number of airports in Europe, Asia and elsewhere to look for terrorists who may be using fraudulent travel documents, officials said Monday. The plan, still preliminary, is seen as one way of avoiding the kind of repeated flight cancellations that have disrupted travel between Europe and the United States in the last two months. ''Had there been a program like this in place, it may well not have been necessary to cancel flights at significant costs to the airlines,'' Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of customs and border protection, said in an interview. ''We would have had the opportunity to screen passengers who pose a terrorist threat.'' Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have begun discussions with some foreign counterparts to determine whether they would agree to allow American inspectors at their airports to assist in screening passengers bound for the United States. Airports in Amsterdam and Warsaw are considered possible starting points for the program, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Also under discussion are other hub airports commonly used by American-bound travelers, including Heathrow and Gatwick in England, Narita outside Tokyo, Charles de Gaulle in Paris, as well as the hubs in Frankfurt and Mexico City. Six or seven American inspectors would most likely be posted at each participating airport. The plan, first reported Monday in The Wall Street Journal, would essentially revive a pilot program adopted in 2002, but would seek to establish an even sharper focus on stopping terrorists, Mr. Bonner said. The 2002 program, run by what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was credited with stopping nearly 2,800 people around the world who were trying to board flights for the United States with fraudulent travel documents or posed other telltale signs of trouble, officials said. |
1563076_0 | OBSERVATORY | A Scientific Seal If you want to keep a plate of leftovers from drying out in the fridge, what do you do? Simple: cover it with plastic wrap. That's the idea behind a new approach to scanning electron microscopy developed by scientists from Israel and reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The technique allows them to do something that hasn't been done before: obtain good-resolution images of fully wet biological samples. A scanning electron microscope, or S.E.M., can provide stunning detail of even the smallest surface features of an insect, say, or tissue. But because a regular S.E.M. works only on samples in a vacuum, they must be completely dry (otherwise water in them will boil, destroying their structure). And just like those poor women in ''Goldfinger,'' they must be coated with a metal, usually gold, to make them conductive. The Israeli team gets around these limits by sealing the sample holder with a thin polymer membrane -- covering the plate, as it were, with plastic wrap. As little as 50 nanometers thick (0.000002 of an inch), the membrane is transparent to electrons but strong enough to protect the sample from the vacuum. Some newer microscopes allow imaging of wet, nonconductive samples by placing them in a gaseous environment. But the Israeli approach, which they call wet S.E.M., goes further, allowing uncoated hydrated cells or tissue to be imaged, even below their surfaces. Scientists say the images are far better than those obtained with light microscopes. Those Clouds of Smoke You don't have to be a genius to realize that all the smoke from the thousands of acres of land burned yearly in the Amazon can't be good for the planet. But two studies in Science give a more precise picture of the problems that these fires -- most set as a way to clear or clean up farmland -- create for the atmosphere. In simulations, smoke from widespread fires has been found to reduce the formation of cumulus clouds. The smoke absorbs and scatters sunlight, so the Earth's surface stays cooler, evaporation is reduced and fewer clouds form. One study, by scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, analyzed satellite data to see if this concept held true during the Amazon burning season. They found that cloud cover went from 38 percent in nonburning conditions to zero percent when there was heavy smoke. A further |
1563081_0 | E-Mail Doesn't Lie (That Much) | Hype and prevarication may be the rule when it comes to spam. But truthfulness prevails in e-mail messages between people who know each other, a new study has found. Students who tracked their lies for a week reported telling lies in 15 percent of e-mail messages, compared with more than a third of phone calls, 25 percent of face-to-face conversations and about 20 percent of instant messaging chats. Dr. Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell, the lead researcher, cited two possible explanations. For one thing, he said, e-mail leaves a record, perhaps instilling caution. For another, e-mail conversations tend to unfold slowly. ''Previous research suggests that most lies are quite spontaneous and tend to emerge from conversation,'' Dr. Hancock wrote in an e-mail message. ''These types of emergent lies should be much more likely'' in telephone conversations or other give-and-take forms of communication than e-mail. ''Lies are not all bad,'' Dr. Hancock said, ''but we sure do a lot of them on the telephone.'' Dr. Hancock, whose findings are to be presented at a conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Vienna, said that his laboratory was now studying communication modes from another angle, trying to determine which forms of interaction made it more or less likely that people would be fooled. ''What we are finding in our lab is that motivation plays an important role,'' he wrote, adding that highly motivated liars were more likely to be detected in face-to-face conversations and less likely in text communications. VITAL SIGNS: BEHAVIOR |
1570445_2 | Airport Medical Resources Are Far From Standard | study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2002. The devices give voice commands to apply the pads to a person's bare chest, plug in the connectors and press the button to administer an electric shock. At the country's busiest airport clinic, Kennedy Medical Office near the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport, more than 40,000 patients show up a year. They have included a smuggler who swallowed $125,000 that was contained in more than 100 plastic bags; a pilot whose blue-green color blindness caused by Viagra made him misread the control panel; feuding taxi drivers with broken noses; passengers suspected of exotic diseases; and even a cat who perished from smoke inhalation from an airport hotel fire. But the most common passenger complaints at Kennedy are more mundane: chest pains; fevers; upper respiratory ailments aggravated by time spent in airplane cabins; back sprains caused by lifting luggage into overhead bins; and broken toes, fingers and hand sprains that result from carrying luggage. The staff of 60 includes a chiropractor, ophthalmologist, podiatrist and physical therapist. Besides portable vascular equipment for deep-vein thrombosis -- blood clots that can develop on long flights and may be fatal -- the clinic has cardiac-care equipment, X-ray machines, a pharmacy, a rehabilitation workout center and a lab for blood tests. It plans to add a dentist and a mobile mammography unit soon. One big job is giving vaccinations for yellow fever and other diseases. ''Your family doctor will probably be at a loss as to which vaccines are needed for which countries -- these things change so frequently,'' said Dr. Steven Garner, chief medical officer of St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Centers, which owns and operates the clinic. His daily updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, for example, note that visitors to Panama should get vaccines to protect against malaria, yellow fever, hepatitis A and dengue fever. Those heading for rural Japan should be protected against Japanese encephalitis. Dr. Garner says travelers should get their shots at least two weeks before their flights, because it takes time for the vaccine to kick in and because there are often side effects. If you have surgery on your mind, though, head for Europe. The medical clinic in Munich International Airport features orthopedic and plastic surgeons, as well as 13 patient beds and 2 surgery rooms. More than 1,100 surgeries were performed |
1570380_0 | Possible Peril Found in Menopause Cream | A popular cream that eases the symptoms of menopause exposes women to higher levels of the hormone progesterone than has been commonly thought, researchers have found. Pro-Gest, one of more than two dozen creams containing natural progesterone, is a widely used alternative to synthetic hormone therapies that have been linked to a higher risk of breast cancer and heart disease. Millions of tubes of progesterone cream are sold annually. Because they can be purchased over the counter, the creams are generally considered less potent, and therefore less harmful, than federally regulated progesterone pills. But research reported Thursday has raised questions about the creams' safety. A group of women that used Pro-Gest to relieve hot flashes and night sweats and a group that took the hormone pill Prometrium later had the same levels of progesterone in their bloodstreams, said Dr. Anne Hermann, who conducted the study at Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown, N.Y. Dr. Hermann presented the results at a conference of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics in Florida. ''Millions of women are using these creams, thinking that because they're natural and sold over the counter they are safe,'' she said. ''The reality is that they are putting themselves at risk.'' However, Dr. Deborah Moskowitz, director of research and development education for Emerita, the division of Transitions for Health Inc. that makes Pro-Gest, said there was no solid evidence that natural progesterone carried health risks. ''The fact is that progestin and progesterone are different,'' Dr. Moskowitz said. The findings come at a time when hormone use is sharply declining. In 2002, the Women's Health Initiative study found a heightened risk of breast cancer and heart disease among women who used a common hormone therapy. That study looked at synthetic progesterone, or progestin, taken in combination with estrogen to relieve hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause. Natural progesterone is considered to carry some of the same health risks as its synthetic version, ''until research shows otherwise,'' said Susan Cruzan, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration. ''We're asking manufacturers to do further studies,'' Ms. Cruzan said. ''Until we have that information, women who use any of these products should work with their doctors to use the lowest effective dose for the shortest duration of time.'' Dr. Moskowitz said that the Women's Health Initiative ''did not look at natural progesterone, and it didn't even look at progestin by itself.'' |
1564015_1 | Groundbreaking Gene Scientist Is Taking His Craft to the Oceans | research vessel. The Sargasso Sea findings, published online yesterday by the journal Science, represent perhaps the most dramatic example to date of how genomics is beginning to shake up environmental studies. Normally, scientists try to understand microbes by growing them in laboratory cultures, but that has not been possible with more than 99 percent of the world's bacteria. Dr. Venter said his team extracted as much DNA as possible from the creatures without growing them in culture. The gene sequences provide some clue as to how many different species are present and what they might look like. ''Now with these new tools we can see what everyone has missed to date, which is the vast majority of life,'' Dr. Venter said. He said that the 1.2 million genes discovered in the Sargasso Sea exceeds the total number of genes from all species in public databases, though only 70,000 of the genes are truly novel, as opposed to variations on existing genes. Humans have about 30,000 genes. The sequences of all the discovered genes will be put into the public domain, he said. The goal, he said, is ''a catalog of the earth's gene pool.'' The team found nearly 800 new genes for proteins sensitive to light, suggesting that more bacteria than thought might be converting light into other types of energy. The project, conducted at Dr. Venter's Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, was financed in part by the Department of Energy, which hopes to harness microbes to help produce energy or clean pollution. Some oceanographers said that the work so far has not taught them anything new, but has confirmed the variety of ocean life and provide a giant parts list that would be studied for years to come. ''He's allowed us for the first time to see that diversity,'' said Stephen Giovannoni, a professor at Oregon State University who studies microbes in the Sargasso Sea. Dr. Venter has a history of shaking up the scientific establishment and attracting great publicity, such as when his team at Celera Genomics deciphered the human genetic code in a race with a government-sponsored Human Genome Project. His entry into oceanography, for which he has no training, has provoked both admiration and resentment. Some oceanographers have said that Dr. Venter is not collecting enough ancillary data such as water temperature and salinity. They also said that some of the bacteria he found might have |
1568808_6 | Online Swindlers, Called 'Phishers,' Lure the Unwary | have brushed up on their English or hired proofreaders.) Phishers often create Internet addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones. Some have used domains that included ''yahoo-billing.com'' and ''eBay-secure.com.'' How is the typical user to know those are not real, but ''billing.yahoo.com'' is? In response, Microsoft has modified Internet Explorer, the most popular Web browser, to make it harder to fool users and it has more changes planned for the next browser update planned for release this summer. A few Internet companies are going further. EBay and EarthLink have both developed toolbars that can be added to Internet Explorer to warn users if they are looking at known fraudulent sites. But Howard Schmidt, a vice president for security at eBay, acknowledged that these approaches -- and eBay's frequent warnings to its customers and PayPal's -- have their limits. ''Technology can solve 60 percent of the problem,'' he said. ''Education and awareness can solve 20 percent, and no matter how good the industry is, there will be people who fall victims so 20 percent will have to be handled by law enforcement.'' But even the small-time phishers who have been caught show how simple it is to use easily accessible high-technology tools to fool people. In February, Alec Scott Papierniak, 20, a college student in Mankato, Minn., pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He had sent people e-mail messages with a small program attached that purported to be a ''security update'' from PayPal. The program monitored the user's activity and reported their PayPal user names and passwords back to Mr. Papierniak. Prosecutors say that at least 150 people installed the software, enabling Mr. Papierniak to steal $35,000. While most of those prosecuted so far for phishing have been in the United States, eBay, working with the Secret Service, has investigated a series of scams originating in Romania. More than 100 people have been arrested by Romanian authorities. One of them, Dan Marius Stefan, convicted of stealing nearly $500,000 through phishing, is now serving 30 months in a Romanian prison. Mr. Stefan sent e-mail messages that appeared to come from eBay to people who were unsuccessful auction bidders, advising them of similar merchandise for sale at even better prices. To purchase the goods, the message recipients were told to provide bank account numbers and passwords and then to wire money to an escrow site -- a fraudulent one -- Mr. Stefan had set up. |
1566704_2 | New Clues To Women Veiled In Black | genetic. The single gene, 5-HTT, that has been definitively linked to depression is no more common in women than in men. But preliminary research suggests that there are other depression-related genes that mainly affect women. For example, after scanning the genomes of people with major depression in 81 families, Dr. George Zubenko, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, identified 19 regions of chromosomes that were especially common and, therefore, likely to contain genes that promote depression. Four of these regions showed up only in the women and one only in the men, Dr. Zubenko and his colleagues reported last July in The American Journal of Medical Genetics, an online publication. Such findings suggest that more genes may help to set off depression in women than in men, Dr. Zubenko said, explaining in part why more women become depressed. One may be CREB1, a gene that Dr. Zubenko's group has identified as a strong candidate. Especially intriguing, Dr. Zubenko said, is that CREB1 interacts with estrogen receptors. Though the details of the relationship between CREB1 and estrogen are unknown, researchers have long thought that levels of sex hormones play some role in depression. For one thing, the sex difference in depression is most pronounced in women during their reproductive years, when sex hormone levels are highest. Before puberty, boys and girls have roughly equal rates of depression. The incidence of depression climbs in both sexes during puberty, but the climb is steepest for girls. In a national telephone survey of 4,028 adolescents ages 12 to 17, about 14 percent of girls and 7 percent of boys met the criteria for major depression. The survey was published in August in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. In their reproductive years, women are also especially prone to bouts of depression when their sex hormones are in flux -- just before menstruation and just after childbirth. Two subtypes of depression that affect only women -- premenstrual dysphoric disorder and postpartum depression -- occur then. A leading theory is that sex hormones help induce depression in some women by affecting messenger chemicals in the brain that influence mood. Dr. Meir Steiner, director of the Women's Health Concerns Clinic at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, Ontario, who studies the relationship between hormones and mood, thinks that the sensitivity of these neurotransmitters may increase when hormone levels are high or |
1566784_3 | A Road Less Traveled Through Immigration Lines | said. Airport construction has created other challenges. After San Francisco built a new international terminal, for instance, the Inspass kiosks were not hooked up, though Mr. Knight said they would be once network issues were resolved. Although the Inspass program still has financial support for operation and maintenance, Mr. Knight said it was under review and may be replaced by other Department of Homeland Security initiatives. He dismissed rumors that immigration employees were sabotaging the machines. ''Sometimes,'' he said, ''you get negative talk from inspectors because they think the machine is going to replace them, when it's not. This is more for the trusted traveler anyway. You're always going to need inspectors out there.'' Another issue is whether the program was ever cost-effective, especially given its limited participation. But Dr. James Wayman, who does biometric research at San Jose State University and conducted tests of the Inspass system when it was first developed, objects that the program never had enough money or promotion to be judged fairly. ''There's no reason these things can't be made cost-effective,'' he said, ''but you've got to get a lot of people using them.'' The concept may get a better test on the domestic side of the airport. Mark Hatfield, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the agency began work in January on a registered-traveler program for airport security and hoped to have a prototype by late summer. Mr. Hatfield said it would be similar to the Inspass program in that travelers would voluntarily sign up for a card, undergo a background check and possibly submit to some type of biometric scan to expedite the security screening process. Registered travelers would still go through the same initial screening as other passengers, Mr. Hatfield said, but would be less likely to be selected for secondary screening. That would be a welcome change for many business travelers, who are more likely to be chosen for additional searches because they tend toward ''red flag'' behavior like buying a one-way ticket for same-day travel. ''I'm all for electronic screening,'' said Scott Levin, a safety and health consultant who travels abroad weekly and once figured out he waits in nine different lines in the course of a one-way trip. ''If I can shave off 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, over the course of a year I can save 50 or 60 hours standing in line.'' BUSINESS TRAVEL |
1566712_5 | Wolves Come Back (On Their Terms) | animals. Wolves tend to look on these dogs as intruders in their territory. From 1976 to 1991, wolves killed two dogs. In 1998 alone, they killed 11 and injured 4. The payment for a hound has been a maximum of $2,500, although owners have asked for more. If a bear kills a dog that is hunting it, that is simply in the nature of the hunt. If, however, wolves attack the dog as territorial intruders, the hunters must be repaid, perhaps because they are not allowed to kill the wolves. But in a twist, the largest payment so far has been $48,000 for deer that game-farm operators kept in an enclosure of a few hundred acres. The game farms charge hunters who want to kill trophy deer. In a paper in the current issue of Conservation Biology, Dr. Treves and colleagues describe a method to analyze the circumstances most likely to lead to wolf depredation, and they predict where the risk of such events will be high. A predictive tool of this sort, he said, is applicable not only to friction between wolves and people, but also to conflicts with elephants, tigers, wild dogs -- to any situation where the interests of people and animals clash. The study looked at 25 years of information recorded on wolf predation in Wisconsin and Minnesota, a total of 975 incidents. In analyzing the information, Dr. Treves paired sites with a high incidence of depredation against others that were similar in most ways to pick out any significant differences that did exist. The highest risk, he said, was ''at the colonization front'' -- the wolves as the colonists for once -- where an expanding wolf population brought the animals into contact with people who were unused to coping with wolves. In addition, he said, it is young, inexperienced wolves who colonize new territory, while the older, established packs hang onto the territories they have. He found that density of deer, the primary prey, drew wolves to an area and that significant pasture, particularly the interweaving of pasture with wild forest, were also risk factors. The goal of his research, he said, is to enable officials charged with protecting wolves to know where best to put their efforts at control and education and to develop new ideas for control. For example, the less edge, where pasture and forest meet, the better. His findings may also |
1566787_1 | Dominicans And the U.S. Complete A Trade Deal | El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua as part of the agreement. The combined trade of these nations with the United States is about $32 billion in goods a year. After a series of missed deadlines, Mr. Zoellick has signed free trade deals with eight countries in three months: the six in the Central American agreement, plus Morocco and Australia. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, says the trade agreement fails to provide enough protection for workers in all countries. Many Democrats in Congress, citing the same argument, say they will try to block its passage unless additional safeguards are included. The administration disagrees, noting that the accord includes provisions for the nations to make every effort to enforce domestic labor laws. With trade a crucial issue in the presidential election, the debate over workers' rights could doom passage of the measure this year. Mr. Zoellick and Sonia Guzman, the secretary of commerce and industry of the Dominican Republic, announced the accord at a news conference on Monday after a weekend of negotiations over agricultural issues. With the agreement, the Dominican Republic and the Central American nations would open their service areas and agricultural products markets. At the same time, the United States is resisting a full opening of its borders to sensitive agricultural products like sugar. The quotas for American meat and poultry exports to these countries will be phased out over the next 15 to 20 years. The new accord allows the Dominican Republic to increase its sugar exports to the United States by 10 percent, but the sugar quota would remain in perpetuity. This was too great a concession for some lawmakers from farm states, who say they oppose offering any more openings to the American sugar market. The agreement is also intended to create something of a regional textile free trade area and prepare the United States and Central America for competition from China next year, when all global textile quotas are lifted. By lifting all quotas with the countries in the Central American agreement, the administration hopes to create an integrated industry or textile zone to help protect cotton farmers and textile factories. But the accords do not address the $19 billion a year in American agricultural subsidies that underwrite cotton farmers. Nearly three-fourths of the products from Central America already enter the United States duty free under special preference programs. |
1566732_2 | China Aims to Cut Pollution From Scrap Metal Industry | group's director general. Tighter supervision should result in a cleaner environment in China, he said, by making it harder for less scrupulous companies to dump almost anything in containers and send it across the ocean. It will also force companies to do more work in places like the United States and Europe, separating trash from scrap before shipment, Mr. Veys added. ''We are very much in favor of controls,'' he said. The rules may prompt China to shift its imports to rely less on Europe, where regulators have been quick to work with other countries that want to restrict trash imports, Mr. Veys said. He predicted that China might wind up depending on the United States for a greater share of its imports as a result, although trans-Pacific scrap shipments are already causing problems for American smelters that have found it tough to find scrap for their own operations. An environmental crackdown now in China would not be the first in the region. The scrap industry in greater China was centered in southern Taiwan in the 1980's, but shifted to Guangdong Province, up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, as Taiwan tightened environmental standards through the late 1980's. Guangdong, in turn, imposed tighter rules in the mid-1990's and shut many of the smaller scrapyards. This prompted many scrap businesses, though not all, to move 800 miles north to Shanghai, Nanjing and cities along the lower Yangtze River, a region that is also a big center of steel production. Much of the scrap is mixed with pig iron, produced from iron ore, to make the higher grades of steel that China's increasingly advanced economy needs in large quantities, said David P. Garcia, the managing director of Asia Iron Ltd., an iron ore company that has its operations in Nanjing and Australia but is based in Hong Kong. Some in China's scrap industry are skeptical that new government rules will have much effect. David Lo, the owner of one of the largest scrap-processing centers for copper and other nonferrous metals in southern China, said that it would not make financial sense to modernize by installing machines instead of relying on hand labor. The industry provides many jobs, he noted, and is so important to China that he doubted the government would do anything to disrupt it. ''There is a lack of raw materials like copper,'' Mr. Lo said, ''so China needs scrap.'' |
1573621_6 | Despite Cleanup at Mine, Dust and Fear Linger | the matter,' '' she said. There is no conclusive link between any child's disabilities and exposure to lead from the mining wastes, and the lead levels in children's blood here are in fact lower than the national average from 1975. But Ms. Pace keeps what she considers a possible smoking gun: a list trying to correlate the lead levels of 28 children in kindergarten through third grade with their reading skills. The higher the level of lead in a child's blood, she says, the more likely it is that the child has a reading deficit. Of 14 children with blood lead levels of 7 to 18 micrograms per deciliter, 12 had trouble reading and showed no improvement after intensive intervention. Ms. Pace's list, however, has not been deemed scientifically rigorous enough to be admitted as evidence in recent lawsuits on behalf of Picher children. Katy Long had a blood lead level of 9 when she was first tested two years ago; it has since declined to 3, and Katy, a 7-year-old first grader, is now doing second-grade-level reading. Her sister, Molly, 5, was first tested last fall; her blood lead level was 5 micrograms per deciliter, and she also shows no learning problems. Their parents, Tom and Mary, are now expecting a son. Although they live in the home where Mary Long's grandparents were reared, Tom Long said, ''I'd like not to be here when the baby's here.'' 'This Is Not a Safe Place' William Banner Jr., a pediatrician and toxicologist in Tulsa who has been to the site several times, sympathizes with the residents' resolve to move, though he is less concerned about the children's lead levels than he is about the dangers posed by collapsing mines and industrial cleanup. ''This is not a safe place to live,'' he said. Dr. Banner cautioned against drawing direct conclusions between lead exposure and learning skills. ''The relationships of poverty to school performance to lead are so complex that a simplistic look at it like this really is not that helpful in determining causality,'' he said. Others are not convinced that their communities will remain unhealthy. Bill Lake, 43, another lifelong resident who has two small children, vehemently opposes a general buyout. ''My goal is to make Picher a safe place to live,'' he said. ''I don't want people coming to tell me to sell my house when my house is not |
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1574889_3 | Now Can We Talk About Health Care? | increasingly sedentary lifestyle that, combined with a diet filled with sugar and fat-rich foods, undermines our ability to fend off chronic diseases like diabetes. And research is proving that the pollutants and contaminants in our environment cause disease and mortality. It is overwhelming just thinking about the problems, never mind dealing with them. But we have to begin applying American ingenuity and resolve or watch the best health care system in the world deteriorate. Medical Advances The pace of scientific development in medicine is so rapid that the next hundred years is likely to be called the Century of the Life Sciences. We have mapped the human genome and seen the birth of the burgeoning field of genomics, offering the opportunity to pinpoint and modify the genes responsible for a whole host of conditions. Scientists are exploring whether nanotechnology can target drugs to diseased tissues or implant sensors to detect disease in its earliest forms. We can look forward to ''designer drugs'' tailored to individual genetic profiles. But the advances we herald carry challenges and costs. Think about the potential for inequities in drug research. Today, pharmaceutical and biotech companies have little incentive to research and develop treatments for individuals with rare diseases. Never heard of progeria? That's the point. This fatal syndrome, also called premature-aging disease, affects one in four million newborns a year. It's rare enough that there is no profit in developing a cure. This is known as the ''orphan drug'' problem. Genetic profiles and individualized therapies have the potential to increase the problem of orphaned drugs by further fragmenting the market. Even manufacturers of drugs for conditions like high blood pressure might focus their efforts on people with common genetic profiles. Depending on your genes, you could be out of luck. The increasing understanding and use of genomics may also undermine the insurance system. Health insurance, like other insurance, exists to protect against unpredictable, costly events. It is based on risk. As genetic information allows us to predict illness with greater certainty, it threatens to turn the most susceptible patients into the most vulnerable. Many of us will become uninsurable, like the two young sisters with a congenital disease I met in Cleveland. Their father went from insurance company to insurance company trying to get coverage, until one insurance agent looked at him and said, ''We don't insure burning houses.'' Many have worked to get laws |
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1575006_1 | Earlier Start Offered In Special Education | identified as having special needs by their home district's committee on preschool special education are entitled to early intervention programs, like the Children's School for Early Development here. ''There's more awareness of these problems,'' Loraine Chun, assistant commissioner for services for children with special needs at the county health department, said in a telephone interview. About 3,800 preschool age children living in Westchester now receive services. The cost is covered not by parents but by the state and the county department of health, 60 percent from the state and 40 percent from the county. The ARC program, which currently serves about 28 children with autism here at Hawthorne and at nine other sites, has been around for about 20 years. In the last two years the program has adopted a new method of teaching these children. Called applied behavior analysis, it is a system that breaks down specific skills into components that children with autism and pervasive developmental disorder can more readily understand and replicate. ''Applied behavior makes behavior predictable, to be able to teach new behaviors,'' said Christina Burk, the program's behavior analyst. ''We have a strong language emphasis, and are very interested in teaching them functional conversation. Our goal is to have these children move to inclusion, and to be involved with typically developing kids.'' The program costs about $27,500 annually for a child with autism and about $20,000 annually for a child with other developmental disabilities. At the Hawthorne site, the 16 students work with occupational and speech therapists, a behavior analyst, and other professionals besides the teachers. Parents also receive training so they can continue the process at home. Besides the self-contained classes at the Hawthorne site, ARC runs programs in Yorktown, Cortlandt Manor, Katonah, Ossining, Mount Kisco, Tarrytown, New Rochelle, White Plains and Shrub Oak. At the Elizabeth Mascia Day Care Center in Tarrytown, six children in the ARC program were in a class with eight other children, taking part in the breakfast activity and circle time. And like the others, they jumped up when they read their names from flash cards the teacher showed them, followed directions and listened attentively to a story. What ARC has done has met with approval from the school districts where the children ultimately return. Dr. Elizabeth Zuch, the chairwoman of the committee on preschool special education for the White Plains school district, said: ''The children graduate into similar |
1574863_4 | The Highbrow Hijacker | bridged the freebooting era of Francis Drake and the naval expeditions of Captain Cook, ''fusing the piratical plundering and derring-do of the former with the scientific inquiry and meticulous chart and record keeping of the latter.'' Their protagonist emerges as an outstanding chronicler, recording what he saw with obsessive passion (Coleridge furnished the title of this book when he praised Dampier's ''exquisite mind''). Dampier wrote about the weather, the wildlife and the habits of indigenous peoples. He described what he ate, what he saw and what he heard, conjuring the delicate fragrance of a wild mango grove, the slap of pitchy tar on the cedar planks of a hull and a peculiar black-and-white-striped wild ass -- the first English description of a zebra. It was particularly impressive given the fetid, cramped cabins in which he had to stumble around to find his quill pen and a knife to sharpen it, and to make up his ink. Written throughout in clear if workmanlike prose, the book takes as its major theme Dampier's influence on the scientific and cultural zeitgeist, and on that of subsequent generations. Captain Cook and Admiral Nelson studied his navigational methods, and his charts became the prototype for the proliferating maps and globes picturing the trade winds that appeared throughout the 18th century. Both Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin used his observations ''as building blocks for their theories.'' His panegyric on breadfruit led to the dispatch of William Bligh in the Bounty in 1787 (Bligh was under orders to transport breadfruit saplings from Tahiti to the Caribbean). Defoe read Dampier's stories about castaways before embarking on ''Robinson Crusoe.'' And so on. With hindsight, one can see that the time was ripe for Dampier's exotica. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 had heralded greater freedom of thought and expression in England as well as what the Prestons call a ''culture of curiosity.'' But Dampier would have been an eminent naturalist and mariner in any age. Claims in these pages that he altered the literary landscape might be stretching the point, but through his fertile invention of language (he coined the word ''subspecies,'' for example), he certainly had an impact on the development of English. How many other people can claim more than 1,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary? Sara Wheeler's most recent books are ''Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard'' and ''Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica.'' |
1575652_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Italy: A Cleaning For Pisa's Tower | Part of the Leaning Tower of Pisa will be obstructed from view for the next year or so as it undergoes a cleaning. A huge stain on the tower will be lifted at a cost of more than $5 million, a portion of which paid for a special scaffold that will not harm the tower's precarious tilt. The tower, which leans more than a dozen feet, was reopened in 2001, after being closed to the public for 11 years while engineers worked to prevent it from toppling over. Jason Horowitz (NYT) |
1575520_1 | In Soy Food, Kibbutzim Find Manna for a Modern Age | process, and success stories like Solbar and Tivall demonstrate that finding the right industry will allow the kibbutzim to get out of their financial crisis.'' For many of Israel's 270 kibbutzim, which were set up with government grants and have subsisted on farming and small factories for most of the last 50 years, the last 20 years have been marked by intense change. As communities struggled to make ends meet in the face of triple-digit inflation in the mid-1980's, many sought industries that would allow them to become self-sufficient. In 1983, the Lohamei Hagetaot kibbutz, between the towns of Acre and Nahariyya, was earning most of its income by farming and operating a small electric-condenser factory. Gezi Kaplan, a longtime member, was sent to look for another source of income. He first heard of soy-based vegetarian patties from Michael Shemer, a scientist from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who had sold his patent for soy schnitzels to an Israeli frozen foods company. When that company was later sold to Tnuva, an Israeli dairy, the new owner did not want the vegetarian product and sold the business to the kibbutz. ''There was a lot of suspicion in the kibbutz about it,'' said Mr. Kaplan, who had to persuade the 290 members to take out $1 million in bank loans. ''We thought it would be a relatively small business.'' Twenty-one years later, Tivall -- or, loosely, ''all natural'' -- controls 70 percent of the Israeli market for soy foods. As Europeans increasingly reach for alternatives to dairy and meat, the European market for soy-based food and drinks reached 1.3 billion euros in 2002, and is expected to hit 10 billion euros within two years. Tivall is well positioned, said Gerard Klein Essink, a senior researcher at Prosoy Research and Strategy, a research group based in the Netherlands. ''The quality of the Tivall product is outstanding,'' he said. ''It's just a matter of rolling out their concept to a wider audience.'' Tivall quickly became a household name in Israel, but to break into a wider market, the kibbutz teamed up in 1994 with Osem, a Nestlé subsidiary that became the controlling shareholder. Mr. Kaplan, the kibbutz dealmaker, became a deputy manager at Osem, and chairman of Tivall. Now the kibbutz is considering selling an additional 23 percent stake to Osem, a deal that would net the kibbutz some $38 million to be divided |
1575489_0 | One More Reason to Join a Gym | Overweight older women can reduce unhealthy estrogen levels, and perhaps reduce their risk of breast cancer, by taking off fat through exercise, a new study has found. The study's lead author, Dr. Anne McTiernan of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said that fat cells were the main source of estrogen in postmenopausal women and that studies had shown that sedentary women and those with high estrogen levels had higher rates of breast cancer. The new study, published Thursday in the journal Cancer Research, was organized to test whether a program of moderate exercise would affect estrogen levels, she said. The participants, 175 overweight women ages 50 to 75, were randomly assigned to either stretching exercises or a moderate exercise regimen of about three hours a week. After three months, the levels of three different kinds of estrogen had fallen in all the exercising women; no change occurred in the stretching group. At the end of a year, the level of estrogen had fallen even further among the women who had managed to lose 2 percent of their body fat or more. The reverse occurred among those who lost less. Women in the stretching group had modest increases in estrogen levels. Dr. McTiernan said the drop in the group that lost the most weight was comparable to the effect of going on a low-fat diet or perhaps greater. Postmenopausal women used to be advised to take estrogen replacements to protect against heart disease and bone weakness, before studies showed that the risk of breast cancer and stroke outweighed its benefits. ''The beauty of exercise,'' Dr. McTiernan said, is that it lowers excessively high estrogen levels while promoting heart and bone health. VITAL SIGNS: REGIMENS |
1575508_0 | Byzantine Chant, Rich Challenge To Its Gregorian Counterpart | Most New Yorkers, conditioned as we are to the modes and key systems of Western European music, know the sound of Byzantine chant more by reputation than by direct acquaintance. We hear it indirectly, through the Russian Orthodox sacred music that in recent years has found a concert following, or in the music of the contemporary English composer John Tavener. A curious listener could also pop into a Greek Orthodox church to hear it in its natural setting. Judging from the size of the audience that filled the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Saturday evening for a concert by the Masters of the Psaltic Art, a choir from Athens, there is a deep interest in this music, which has some of the qualities familiar from the Gregorian chant that prevailed in Western Europe, as well as distinctive qualities and an otherworldly beauty. And in the performances by this choir of tenors and basses, the music sounded consistently robust, and a good deal more visceral than its Gregorian counterpart. The program, the finale of the World Music Institute's fifth annual Greek Festival, was devoted only partly to Byzantine chant and works based on it. The choir, which is directed by Gregorios Stathis, filed into the cathedral dressed in ecclesiastical robes and chanting ''Megalynarion Troparion,'' an austere, haunting paean to the Trinity by Petros the Peloponnesios, a late-18th-century composer who underpinned the chant with a sung drone. Other works by Petros, including settings of 11th-century liturgical poetry, adorned the chant style with traces of harmonization, if not outright counterpoint, and in some examples what had been the bass drone in the opening chant expanded to form a slow-moving bass line, still hummed wordlessly. Iakovos Protopsaltes, who worked slightly later than Petros, sounded more adventurously ornamental. To ears used to tempered Western scales, some of this music -- including some unattributed and undated early chants -- sounded chromatic and even microtonal, though it is anachronistic to think of this music in those terms. And some of the oldest chants, as well as a recent setting of Psalm 140, composed by Mr. Stathis, also had a melodic shape similar to Jewish cantorial music and suggested the proximity of Byzantine chant to the Jewish milieu from which Christianity sprang. For the second half of the program the choir exchanged its robes for street clothes and their chant books for a collection of |
1577317_0 | Every Passenger Is a Potential Case Study | An airplane cabin is a fertile laboratory for the study of social interaction. One time, the man next to me was drooling and snoring. As usual, in my direction. I let my tray fall with a clunk. I tried adjusting my seat. One passenger gave me that ''I feel bad for you'' pout. Finally when the drool on his chin reached high tide, I nudged him. If I were in bed and this were my husband, I would have my routine perfected. But if I know him only as the guy sitting in 13B, do I have the right to wake him? On another recent flight, my seatmate was coughing and sneezing from the get-go, and out came the arsenal of cough drops and tissues. I was thinking SARS; I wanted to kill him. As we prepared to descend, he apologized and assured me and the woman in the window seat that he was on the tail end of the cold. I'm thinking, ''In 20 minutes we're landing, and now he chooses to apologize?'' Then he proceeds to tell us that his wife just served him with divorce papers and he has to move out after this trip. Suddenly he's transformed himself from annoying to pathetic. And he's put this burden on us: not only are we not allowed to be angry about his cold, but we have to console him about his problems -- which we did. Every detail of his life we were sorting out for him. Miss Window Seat was nicer than I was. Well, she was from Iowa. Pilots, too, have their own style of choosing what bad news they tell you. After a week of brutal weather in Chicago, I was returning to New York and the pilot announced, ''Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Currently the temperature in New York is 3 degrees. You heard me right.'' It's a 6:45 a.m. flight, we're not even awake, and I'm thinking, ''Do I need a forecast?'' I've also been on Chicago-bound flights where the pilot announces that the wind chill there is 20 below, but ''for you lucky people who are continuing on to San Francisco, it's 62 degrees and sunny.'' Once on the way to Honolulu, the pilot told us that one of the wheels didn't want to cooperate. What do you do between California and Hawaii? Hour after hour over water. And I'm thinking, ''You |
1577247_2 | Take Two Aspirin, E-Mail Me Tomorrow | in Boston, 18,000 patients routinely log on to a protected Web site called PatientSite to request prescription refills, write to their doctors or scan personal medical records. ''I mostly write about things that are not extremely urgent,'' said Bruce Male, 62, a retired business leader who periodically sends e-mail to his doctor at Beth Israel. ''I'll use it to tell him I need an appointment that is not my annual physical, and he'll write back saying he'd like to see me.'' Dr. David Ives, a general internist at Beth Israel Deaconess who receives about 30 e-mail messages a day from his patients, said, ''Most physicians are afraid they'll be overwhelmed, but it actually replaces telephone calls for me.'' About a quarter of practicing doctors, surveys show, have communicated with patients through e-mail. But many doctors feel that it means working for free, and some have begun charging for e-mail consultations. In some cases, patients pay a flat rate from $100 to several hundred dollars a year for such services, said Dr. Daniel Z. Sands, an assistant professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School who also practices at Beth Israel Deaconess. ''I think it's reasonable to assume that if lawyers and accountants charge for time, then physicians should, too,'' said Dr. Sands, a co-author of the new journal article. Some health insurers are experimenting with programs to pay for e-mail contacts. Blue Cross of California has a pilot program that treats e-mail messages like visits to the doctor, with co-payments or a modest fee of no more than $10, said Michael Chee, a spokesman for the company. Doctors say they are most likely to read e-mail that is straightforward and concise. Patients writing about prescriptions often receive priority. Someone who sends a three-page message or repeatedly asks the same question, Dr. Ives said, will most likely get a response along the lines of ''see me.'' Long-winded messages and excessive nagging are rarely a problem, doctors say. Patients tend to write e-mail messages more carefully than they would deliver voice mail messages. It is hard not to become flustered or ramble when an ominous beep is seconds away, said Dr. Jonathan S. Wald, director of patient computing at Partners HealthCare of Boston, which runs Patient Gateway. ''Patients have told us that with e-mail they can really take their time, and physicians appreciate the more organized and specific messages,'' Dr. Wald said. |
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