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1127471_7 | Latest in Technology Keeps a Sharp Eye On a Changing Sea; Five Miles Off the Coast of Tuckerton, One of the Most Intimate Looks at the Atlantic | discovered the Titanic on the ocean floor in 1985. Mr. Grassle and Mr. Ballard were featured in a 1979 National Geographic Society movie called ''Dive to the Edge of Creation,'' in which they explored sea life off the Galapagos Islands in a manned submersible. Using manned submersibles and unmanned vessels that were essential in the discovery and exploration of Titanic, Mr. Grassle got a closer look at the deep ocean's ecosystem. But both he and Mr. Von Alt, while working together at Woods Hole, decided what they wanted next was a long-term, continuous look at the ocean. Work began on the nodes in 1994. They were put into place on the ocean floor in 1996, as a partnership between the institute at Rutgers and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The $1.5 million development and installation was financed by the National Science Foundation. The largest contributors to keeping the station running, at $1 million a year, are the Office of Naval Research, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Undersea Research Program and the National Ocean Partnership Program. There are fewer than a dozen observatories in the world with the nodes like these planted on the ocean floor. Woods Hole will put one off the coast of Cape Cod next summer, Mr von Alt said. ''We're trying to sustain a commitment to study one area for a long time,'' he said. ''We tended to get snapshots of areas. The work being done here is absolutely cutting edge, without a doubt.'' The free-swimming torpedo-shaped robots called REMUS, (remote environmental measuring units), which are powered by batteries, are also changing the way the ocean is being studied. The REMUS can be programmed to swim through the ocean for 12 to 14 hours collecting data and taking photographic images. Then, like a well-trained dog, it returns to its starting point. In the next five years, the plan is to have a docking station in the ocean off Tuckerton, where the REMUS can be recharged and reprogrammed to go out on repeated missions without needing to return to a lab or be handled by researchers. Because a REMUS weighs only 65 to 80 pounds, one person can launch one off a boat without special equipment, like a crane, to retrieve it. As REMUS vessels become cheaper to build, oceanographers can also risk sending them out into dangerous waters and losing one occasionally. ''That's where things |
1127677_6 | Plan for Elite School in Westchester Divides Haves and Have-Mores | Joyce among them, have volunteered 40 hours a week for two years to coordinate the findings and reports; their ''war room'' is an office in Greenwich lent by Mr. Cameron, whose investment company is based there. The school also did two mass mailings to explain the project. ''We got frustrated with the misinformation,'' Mr. Blanchard said. ''We'd see letters in the paper or hear things at the church meeting, and we finally decided that, O.K., we have to put something out.'' Another flash point in the struggle is the use of wetland buffers for two of the playing fields. (Buffers are natural areas that serve as a transition from a developed piece of land to a wetland.) Even though the school has enlisted Cornell University turf-management experts to design the fields to be ecologically friendly, there will be some limited use of pesticides and fertilizers. The property borders the Mianus River, which provides drinking water for tens of thousands of residents in lower Westchester and Connecticut, and is two miles upstream from the Mianus Gorge Preserve, the oldest property of the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization. But Rippowam officials contend that the high school development will improve the property. During a tour of the site, Mr. Blanchard depicted it as a scrubby wasteland degraded by years of mining, even as he excitedly pointed out the handsome features. The school says it cannot reduce the number of playing fields without jeopardizing its program, which places a heavy emphasis on athletics. (Originally, the proposal called for 14 fields.) All students are required to participate in intramural or interscholastic sports every season. ''If they come back and say you have to cut the fields by half, sorry,'' Mr. Cameron said. ''Then, well, I guess we'll build some low-income housing or something.'' After all the time and money and effort expended on the high school plan at this site, school officials say they will walk away from the project if the town approves the plan with onerous conditions. That would be fine with Anne H. French, a trustee of the Mianus Gorge Preserve and an alumna of Rippowam Cisqua, whose four children also went there. ''The school has been very dear to my heart,'' she said. ''But the site is not a desolate moonscape, and if we continue to leave it alone, in 100 years the kids would have something really neat to study.'' |
1127612_6 | The World: Out of Control; The Internet Changes Dictatorship's Rules | apocalyptic tendencies are getting ahead of the deprogramming organizations that try to rescue members trapped in mind-altering sects. But on balance, many experts would bet on more opening of minds through interconnectedness. In the Muslim world, the use of mass communications -- including the Internet as well as a new generation of smuggled tapes and the open discussion encouraged by Qatar's pioneering Al-Jazira satellite television network -- is aiding a significant if still disparate movement for re-examination of the basic precepts and writings of Islam. ''The result is a collapse of earlier, hierarchical notions of religious authority based on claims to the mastery of fixed bodies of religious texts,'' Dale F. Eickelman, a Dartmouth anthropologist, said in June in the 1999 Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. ''Quite simply, in country after country, government officials, traditional religious scholars and officially sanctioned preachers are finding it very hard to monopolize the tools of literate culture. The days have gone when governments and religious authorities can control what their people know, and what they think.'' At the same time, it is probably worth remembering that the early totalitarians based a lot of their strategy on mastering what was then cutting-edge communications technology. Manipulating film images and broadcasting propaganda were essential to their efforts to imprison rather than liberate people's imaginations. So their heirs in China may be right to have a special fear of a new, barely understood medium like the Internet -- and of any organization clever enough to master this newest technology. And for the West, the extraordinary success that the Falun Gong has had with cyberspace challenges any optimism that the Internet will promote only rational, enlightened, open-minded patterns of thought. ACCESSIBLE communications, Professor Eickelman and others say, foster the growth of civil society and strengthen dissent in places like Iran or Egypt. But in Muslim nations, as almost everywhere in the world at the century's end, there is still a race on between the forces of liberalizing change and those of reactionary fundamentalism, between those who would expand tolerance and those who preach hate, between the agents of mind control and advocates of a free exchange of political ideas. ''It is important to remember that the Internet can serve government's purposes, too,'' said Ms. Economy. ''It's not always going to be a force for positive change from our perspective.'' |
1131830_0 | France Voices Dissatisfaction With U.S.-Led Bombing of Iraq | France vented long-simmering uneasiness today over the continuing American-led bombing raids on Iraq, setting the stage for what diplomats here expect to be a confrontation with the United States at the United Nations General Assembly next month. Today was the third occasion on which the French Foreign Ministry has taken issue with the American and British bombing raids. The total raids this year have reached two-thirds the number that the United States, France, Britain and other NATO allies flew this spring against Yugoslav military forces in and around Kosovo. French public opinion supported the attacks on Yugoslavia, but there is widespread criticism here of the stalemate in Iraq. Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement has often complained at Cabinet meetings that France should not support a policy that victimizes innocent Iraqi civilians without being able to do anything to shake President Saddam Hussein's hold on power. Since mid-summer France has also been circulating detailed proposals for resolving the impasse. An American diplomat said today that the proposals were not as rigorous as British and American demands, which are that Iraq must agree to let United Nations arms inspectors search for forbidden weapons before there can be any talk of relaxing international economic sanctions. ''We don't really see a way out of this difficulty with Paris until we sit down and talk about it at high level,'' the American official said. ''We're not really on the same track as the French.'' The French say that by the time Iraq threw out the inspectors last year, they had tracked down and destroyed all the existing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capacity they were ever going to find. Now, French officials say, there should be a new monitoring system -- not to try to find whatever banned weapons are still hidden, but to make sure that Iraq does not try to build new factories to make more weapons. As soon as the monitors are in place, economic sanctions can be lifted, they say, 100 days at a time depending on how Iraq behaves. Almost any inspection system, in the French view, would be better than none, and they say there is none now except aerial surveillance, punctuated by bombing raids. The French proposal would replace the United Nations Special Commission that Mr. Hussein expelled with a new ''control commission'' charged, as the United Nations team was, with making sure Iraq did not again become a |
1131904_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE RUSSIA: ARMS RACE WARNING -- Russia and the United States ended a new round of arms control talks with Moscow saying American plans for a missile defense system could start a new arms race in outer space. After three days of talks, the two sides appeared to have made little progress, with the main bone of contention American hopes to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty to permit a limited missile defense. (Reuters) GERMANY: TRANSPLANT FOR MRS. GORBACHEV -- Raisa Gorbachev, 67, the wife of the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, will have a bone-marrow transplant in the next few weeks, with her sister serving as donor, doctors at the University Hospital of Munster said. Mrs. Gorbachev, who has leukemia, has responded well to chemotherapy, the doctors said. Victor Homola (NYT) NORTHERN IRELAND: CATHOLIC PROTESTERS HELD -- Three Roman Catholic men were charged with assaulting police officers during a protest against a march Saturday through their Belfast neighborhood by the Protestant Apprentice Boys. Nineteen officers were injured when they tried to remove demonstrators along the parade route. Warren Hoge (NYT) FRANCE: MCDONALD'S ATTACK -- The police in Millau, in southern France, took a farmer, Jose Bove, into custody to face charges of destroying property in an attack he and four other farmers led on a McDonald's restaurant site on Aug. 12. McDonald's has been a magnet for French protests against American tariffs on French products in retaliation for the European Union's refusal to let hormone-treated American beef be sold here. Craig R. Whitney (NYT) GERMANY: HOLOCAUST CLAIMS -- The reinsurance conglomerate Munich Re announced it was ready to join the international panel working to resolve Holocaust-era claims. The company said it never issued policies to Holocaust victims, but added that it saw ''a moral responsibility emanating from German history.'' Previously, the company had resisted pressure from Jewish restitution groups and American insurance authorities to join the panel. Victor Homola (NYT) THE AMERICAS BRAZIL: ACQUITTALS IN MASSACRE TRIAL -- The first phase of the biggest trial in Brazilian history has ended with the acquittal of three senior police officials accused of commanding the massacre of 19 landless peasants in the Amazon in 1996. An additional 147 officers are to be tried in the next few months, but the initial verdict prompted angry demonstrations in Belem and Brasilia by survivors of the incident who argue that the result will make it |
1131887_0 | LUTHERAN GROUP APPROVES A LINK TO EPISCOPALIANS | The nation's largest Lutheran denomination voted today to enter an agreement for full communion with the Episcopal Church, under which the two churches, which together represent nearly eight million American Protestants, would fully recognize each other's members and sacraments, exchange clergy when needed and join in missionary and social service projects. For the 5.2 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the vote this morning, by its top policy-making body, the Churchwide Assembly, reverses a decision made two years ago, in which the elected assembly narrowly rejected a similar agreement with the 2.4 million Episcopalians. The decision here on a proposal likened more to a marriage than to a merger, because both churches retain their creeds and structures, is a boost for an ecumenical movement among Protestants that had been waning in recent years. It also demonstrates a growing willingness among Christian leaders to establish closer, formal ties in the face of increasing religious pluralism in the United States. But the proposal, subject to the approval of the Episcopalians, will probably be felt beyond the United States, encouraging closer cooperation between Lutherans and Anglicans in Europe, Africa and elsewhere. In the debate this morning, the Rev. Ishmael Noko, a Lutheran from Zimbabwe who is general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, an association of 128 churches, with about 60 million members in 70 countries, told the voting members that whatever they decided were ''also decisions affecting sister churches'' around the globe. He predicted full communion agreements would be established between the fast-growing Lutheran and Anglican churches in Africa within five years. By recognizing each other's members and sacraments, the two churches would allow joint worship services to be held. But a major reason cited by Lutheran and Episcopalian supporters of the proposal was that it would allow the denominations to pool resources, particularly in rural and inner-city areas where congregations are often small and financially hard pressed. An important provision would allow a clergy member in one denomination to be fully accepted for work in the other, such as to fill a vacancy, or to take charge of two struggling churches of different denominations that could not alone afford a pastor. ''Called to Common Mission,'' the proposal for full communion with Episcopalians, passed by a vote of 716 to 317 -- 69 percent to 31 percent, and 27 votes more than the necessary two-thirds majority -- after three days of often |
1131428_0 | Business Travel; It's possible to track airlines flights on a nearly real-time basis through the Internet. | AS the number of airline delays in the United States soars, travelers can go on line to track their flights or those of colleagues. Trip.com (www.trip.com) offers a Flighttracker service that lets travelers check the speed and altitude of a specific flight, the direction the aircraft is heading, and the flight's exact departure and arrival times. This information, which is provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and updated by Trip.com every seven seconds, is displayed either on a topographical map or in a text message. Trip.com also offers an E-mail flight notification service, which automatically sends an E-mail to as many as three people with the exact arrival time of a traveler's flight; before departing, travelers can request that this E-mail be delivered. Both the tracking and E-mail notification services are free. Dimensions International, a privately held software company based in Alexandria, Va., has developed an Internet-based software system called Flight Explorer that uses a topographical map to display all commercial flights in the United States air system, plus select general aviation flights. The software can also track specific flights, and offers detailed air traffic control data as it tracks them. In addition, it can simultaneously display all the flights of one airline, or all flights departing from one city. Flight Explorer updates its information every 10 seconds, also using F.A.A. data. The software rents for $9.95 for 10 hours of use a month; additional hours are extra. Dimensions International's Web site is www.dimen-intl.com. Hotel Update Several new or newly purchased hotels in New York City are offering discounted rates through late summer or early fall. The new Bentley Hotel, a converted office building at 500 East 62d Street at York Avenue, is offering introductory rates through Sept. 6 of $125 a night for a standard room, $140 to $205 a night for a room with a king-size bed, and $325 for a suite. From Sept. 7 through Nov. 30, rates will range from $225 to $325. All rates include breakfast. The 197-room Bentley features telephones with voice mail and computer hookups, cable TV and CD players, and a roof-top restaurant with views of the East River. The hotel is owned by Amsterdam Hospitality Group, a privately held New York hotel company. The new 92-suite Phillips Club, opening Sept. 1 at 155 West 66th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, is offering introductory rates of $270 for junior suites and |
1131437_2 | Rebutting Task Force, Group Urges CUNY to Keep Remediation | Students who require remedial work in one subject graduate at almost the same rate as those who need none. *Although CUNY's six-year graduation rates are below national averages, reflecting financial and other problems of its student body, its eight-year graduate rates are above national averages. The Friends of CUNY also contend that other proposals offered by the Mayor's task force, also known as the Schmidt commission, for its chairman, Benno C. Schmidt Jr., would be counterproductive. The rebuttal said that separating remedial work from other college level courses could hinder student progress, since studies have shown that integrating the two works well, especially for adult students. It also argues against proposals to put more emphasis on national tests like the S.A.T., saying they would discriminate against women, and low-income and minority students, since S.A.T. scores are strongly correlated with family income. The Friends of CUNY also say that CUNY's loose governance structure -- a major target of criticism by the Schmidt commission -- works well. ''In pursuing this 'grass must be greener someplace else' vision, the commission again makes the mistake of assuming another model is right,'' the rebuttal document says. And it maintains that greater financial support is critical to any improvement at the university. Despite their substantial disagreements with the Giuliani task force report, the Friends of CUNY say there are several areas where they agree, including the need for faculty renewal, better data collection and more technology development. Besides Mr. Edelstein, the Friends of CUNY include a former CUNY president, the student and faculty representatives from CUNY's board of trustees, dozens of CUNY professors, and members of other educational and nonprofit institutions who are concerned that CUNY's trustees are trying to limit access to the university to disadvantaged students who need education. One CUNY professor who disagrees with many of the points in the rebuttal document and its efforts to preserve remedial classes in the senior colleges is Barry Latzer, a government professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the executive committee of the CUNY Association of Scholars, which has applauded the trustees' efforts to change CUNY. ''They overlook the destructive effect of admitting remedial students into regular courses,'' he said, adding that putting remedial students into college courses forced professors to water down their material or to fail many students. ''I've been in that situation,'' he said, ''and it's very uncomfortable.'' |
1131430_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | ASIA INDIA: NUCLEAR DOCTRINE -- India should adhere to its nuclear arms policy of ''retaliation only'' while building ''credible minimum deterrence'' with the ability to fire its weapons from the land, air or sea, according to a recommendation by the National Security Advisory Board. The 27-member panel was asked by the Government to suggest a ''doctrine,'' or set of strategic goals, to guide a nuclear buildup. Barry Bearak (NYT) INDONESIA: SUHARTO EXAMINED -- Former President Suharto underwent medical tests as doctors tried to find the cause of his intestinal bleeding. Mr. Suharto, left, who is 78, was in power for 32 years until pressed to step down last year. He was hospitalized on Saturday with an ailment his doctors say is not related to a minor stroke that he suffered last month. (AP) CHINA: MOVE TO BLOCK SECT LEADER -- Beijing asked Britain to bar entry to the leader of the outlawed spiritual movement Falun Gong after he was reported to be planning to attend a conference in Britain later this month. Britain responded that it had no grounds for action against Li Hongzhi, who is based in New York, and that any visa application would be judged against normal British immigration laws. (Reuters) SOUTH KOREA: DOG ON THE AGENDA -- A group of lawmakers introduced a bill to legalize sales of dog meat, arguing that this would allow the Government to oversee slaughtering methods and hygiene. Dog meat was banned during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul out of concern for the country's image, but enforcement has been lax. Samuel Len (NYT) SOUTH KOREA: NORTHERN MISSILE THREAT -- Foreign Minister Hong Soon Young plans to visit Japan on Sunday to discuss joint measures to deal with North Korea's apparent preparations to launch a long-range ballistic missile. North Korea fired a missile a year ago that flew over Japan and into the Pacific, and fears have mounted that it is planning to test-fire another one. Samuel Len (NYT) AFGHANISTAN: U.N. CRITICISM -- Secretary General Kofi Annan strongly condemned the forced displacement of civilians in Afghanistan as a result of the latest offensive by the Taliban militia. The United Nations refugee agency in Geneva said almost 20,000 civilians had fled the fighting and had poured into the capital in recent days, raising the number displaced by the two-week-old offensive to 100,000. (Reuters) EUROPE GERMANY: MEMORIAL FOR JEWISH LEADER -- Ignatz Bubis, the |
1130027_1 | U.S. Changes Policy on Searching Suspected Drug Smugglers | customs from overseas flights, were subjected to some form of search on arrival in the United States. Most of those searched were only patted-down, but about 2,000 people were subjected to more intrusive body searches, including X-ray inspections, monitored bowel movements or examinations of body cavities. A class-action lawsuit filed in Chicago by about 90 black women who had been subjected to body searches said customs inspectors arbitrarily subjected black women to intrusive and humiliating physical searches but found drugs in less than a quarter of the searches. Other lawsuits have been filed against the agency's practice but none are class-action suits. Mr. Kelly said the agency had never had a policy of singling out blacks or other minority members for searches. ''It's not part of our policy,'' he said. ''We want to make certain that is not part of our practices.'' To protect the rights of passengers suspected of carrying drugs, Mr. Kelly said that beginning on Oct. 1, the agency would notify a Federal magistrate anytime a passenger arriving at an airport from overseas is held for more than four hours. Suspects have been held for far longer periods without judicial notification. The Customs Service, which acknowledges that its own record-keeping was sloppy, will begin collecting centralized data that will help agency managers determine the success rate of searches and whether specific groups seem to be unfairly singled out for examinations. Critics of the searches said the changes were a positive but timid first step and that much more needed to be done. Edward M. Fox, a lawyer who represents the 90 black women who were subjected to searches after they landed at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, said, ''It's a good start but they will need to go much further.'' For example, Mr. Fox said, most searches, including what he said were abusive body examinations, were conducted within the four-hour period set by Customs for asking a Federal magistrate to rule on whether there are reasonable grounds to hold a passenger for a personal search. As a result, he said, the decision to seek a magistrate's approval was ''window dressing.'' The changes, some of which have already been put into effect, are intended to increase managerial control over the system, improve its efficiency and eliminate the number of searches that turn up nothing and reduce the perception that the search process is arbitrary, unfair and racially biased. |
1130064_2 | Returning Gleam To Marble Church; Crumbling Piece of City History Is Getting Its Stones Restored | powder, if it remained at all. Blocks could be rocked back and forth by hand. Through stones in the bell tower, one could see blue sky. Church leaders decided to seize the opportunity provided by a strong economy to undertake a more ambitious restoration of their building. ''We want to make sure it can last for another few generations,'' Mr. Rangeler said. ''By that time, some new preservative techniques may have come to the fore.'' ''It's got to be done,'' he said. ''Or else.'' Or else more of the conditions he saw the other day on a not-too-happy tour of the facade given by Ms. Kaese; Timothy D. Henry and Timothy J. Farrell of Henry Restoration, the contracting company from Nesconset, N.Y., and John K. Copelin of the William A. Hall Partnership, the architect for the church. They began along the rooftop balustrade. Ms. Kaese paused. ''It looks like someone poured hot water on a sugar cube and it melted,'' she said, pointing to an 18-inch-high, 4-cusp opening called a quatrefoil. Indeed, it did. The contours of the once-crisp carving had softened into a doughy lump and the surface was the color of a calico cat: white marble, black gypsum crust and orange granules. ''I shouldn't have worn bifocals today,'' Mr. Rangeler said as he peered over Ms. Kaese's shoulder at the deterioration. ''I should have come up blind. I don't want to see this.'' At the base of a spire at the southeast corner of the church, Ms. Kaese was able to stick her finger all the way into a masonry joint because there was so much space between stones and so little mortar. ''Theoretically, that should not be,'' she said. They shimmied their way along the planks and through the narrow network of pipe supports. ''Here, Dwight, I want to show you this,'' Ms. Kaese said, pointing to the arabesque base of a pier on the south facade from which a knoblike ornament known as a boss had simply broken off. ''Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,'' was Mr. Rangeler's appreciative response. Mr. Farrell, the field superintendent for Henry Restoration, kept watch on his crew. One worker was using a chisel to extract old mortar from a buttress. ''Don't bury that shank all the way in or you'll pop the stone, O.K.?'' Mr. Farrell cautioned. At another buttress, Mr. Farrell used a low-tech device called the flat of his |
1131102_2 | A Year After Bombing, Grief Lingers in Ulster Town | in Yonkers in November. A director of the club, Joe Byrne, who is also a mainstream Catholic member of the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast, said this morning: ''As I drove around the town there was a mood of reflection and sadness. People are subdued today. I went to buy the newspapers. No one else was in the shop. Normally it would be crowded.'' An overwhelming majority of republican guerrillas, like the Real I.R.A., which acknowledged that it planted the bomb, are Roman Catholics. So are Donna Marie and Gary; so was Breda; so are 65 percent of the people who live here. Thirty-five percent are Protestant. The police say privately that, after a year of investigation and the questioning of 4,000 people, it is unlikely that the bombers will ever be caught. The Real I.R.A. is one of the Catholic paramilitary groups that opposes the 1998 peace agreement that is supposed to end the violence. But the Catholic dissidents see the agreement as a sellout to Protestants because it does not provide for a union of British Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, to the south. In the months after the blast people were encouraged by visits from President Clinton and Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland and many other politicians. Thousands of people from all over Ireland came here to do their Christmas shopping and pray for the residents. Many people thought that maybe the bomb attack at Omagh would be the last major atrocity of the sectarian fighting, that it would so horrify ordinary people and political leaders that a permanent peace would soon follow with a resolution of disputes between Catholics and Protestants at the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast. But that has not happened. Sporadic paramilitary violence continues in the province. On Saturday Catholics protesting Protestant parades in Londonderry, north of here, threw gasoline bombs at the police and seriously damaged several stores and banks. As the fresh violence adds to the tally of those scarred by this conflict, the people of Omagh are themselves still wounded, still suffering, physically and psychologically. Scores have been unable to return to work, still traumatized by what happened to them and their loved ones. The Bridge, a government-financed trauma center, says 250 people are still being counseled. ''There has been a sense of sadness and painful anticipation of this weekend,'' said the trauma |
1132818_1 | Estrogen May Curb Women's Muscle Pain | of biceps curls. Sex may play an important role in the susceptibility to soreness. ''The animal data are very clear,'' Dr. Clarkson said. In studies, male rats showed much more muscle damage than female rats after exercises that emphasized muscle extensions, which specialists call eccentric contractions. ''Estrogen seems to explain the difference,'' said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a neuromuscular disease specialist at McMaster University Medical Center in Hamilton, Ontario, and the editor of ''Gender Differences in Metabolism,'' published this year by CRC Press. When researchers gave male rats estrogen, they showed less damage, he said. Research is still in the early stages, and it is not known why estrogen might protect muscles. Dr. Clarkson hypothesizes that estrogen ''may be able to insert itself into cells, like muscle membranes, and stabilize them, which would protect them from tearing.'' Human studies are not as consistent as those with animals. In a study reported in the June issue of The Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, Dr. Clarkson found that compared with women who produce little or no estrogen, those on oral contraceptives, which contain estrogen, experienced less soreness after exercise, suggesting that estrogen does have a protective effect. And at an academic meeting of physiologists and biochemists in April, Dr. Tarnopolsky reported on a study in which men showed greater inflammation, an indicator of stress, two days after exercising, although men and women showed similar muscle tearing immediately after exercise. ''The damage was the same for men and women, but the body's response seemed higher for men,'' Dr. Tarnopolsky said. On the other hand, more recent data collected by Dr. Clarkson showed no differences between men and women in the experience of soreness after repeated muscle extensions. The sex difference in soreness, if it holds up, suggests that women may be able to endure longer exercise sessions than men. ''Women may accumulate less damage over the course of a long event, which would enable them to perform better,'' Dr. Tarnopolsky said. Soreness does have a positive side. It means that muscles have been stimulated to grow stronger as well as more resilient. ''A single bout of eccentric trauma prepares muscles for subsequent bouts,'' said Dr. Brent Ruby, an exercise physiologist at the University of Montana. This ''repeated bout effect'' can protect muscles from further damage from similar exercise for up to six months, Dr. Clarkson's research showed. The best way to avoid soreness is |
1132807_0 | Old Phone Cables Open Seabed to Science | Making use of thousands of miles of discarded telephone cables, scientists have begun to wire remote regions of deep ocean floor to create an undersea network of geological observatories. The old cables will serve as deep-sea extension cords running thousands of miles from land-based power stations to sensors, some of which are already sending back continuous flows of data from the ocean floor. Geologists and other scientists using abandoned cables have set out to collect a bonanza of information about earthquakes, underground nuclear explosions, changes in the earth's internal structure and its magnetic field, fluctuations in the high-altitude ionosphere and even whale migration patterns. Although seismometers and other geological sensors have long been operating in most land areas, conspicuous gaps in global seismic coverage exist under the world's deep oceans, and oceans cover most of the planet's surface. But this has begun to change, thanks in part to rapid progress in technology that has made old telephone cables obsolete. Dozens of such cables are still serviceable, said Dr. Rhett Butler, director of a data-collecting network in Washington called Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). ''These cables were built to last,'' he said in an interview, ''and at least some of them, which went into use in the mid-1960's, still function perfectly.'' One such line is a coaxial cable (similar to the cable that carries television programs into private homes) that was laid across the deep Pacific Ocean floor by AT&T in 1964 from San Luis Obispo, Calif., to Makaha, Hawaii -- a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. At the time, it was among the most advanced phone lines in the world, equipped with powered vacuum-tube repeaters every 20 miles to refresh the telephone signals as they traveled along it. The cable, called Hawaii-2, could simultaneously carry as many as 138 conversations. But in 1989 a fishing trawler working in shallow water near the California coast accidentally cut the $30 million cable. The telephone company could probably have repaired the break, but decided instead to abandon the cable; by then, optical-fiber cables had come into use, and the new cables could carry up to a half million conversations with greatly improved sound quality. AT&T announced that it would make the abandoned coaxial cable available to scientists who could find a use for it. ''It took several years for scientists to consider the possibilities,'' said Dr. Alan Chave, a senior scientist of |
1128502_0 | Can We Trust Altered Foods? | To the Editor: Diane Johnson (Op-Ed, Aug. 2) laments ''a lack of information'' about the safety of genetically modified plants. In fact, during the past two decades prominent national and international scientific groups have studied the safety of the new molecular methods of genetic modification applied to plants, microorganisms and animals. Their conclusions have been remarkably congruent: There is no evidence of unique hazards in either gene-splicing or in the movement of genes from one organism to another. Risk resides primarily with the characteristics of the organism and the function of the introduced gene. Gene-splicing is more precise, but it does not differ fundamentally from the kinds of genetic manipulation that have been routinely and safely used for many decades. HENRY I. MILLER, M.D. Stanford, Calif., Aug. 2, 1999 The writer was director of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Biotechnology, 1989-94. |
1128423_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | MIDDLE EAST IRAN: REFORM NEWSPAPER BANNED -- The Special Court for Clergy ordered a five-year ban on the country's leading pro-reform newspaper, Salam, and suspended its publisher, Mohammad Mousavi-Khoeiniha, from journalism for three years. Salam, considered close to the reformist President, Mohammad Khatami, was banned for printing confidential documents. (Reuters) IRAQ: BOMBING DEATH REPORTED -- Iraq said one person died and two were wounded in bombings by American and British warplanes in the northern no-flight zone, state media reported. United States military officials said American planes struck at four antiaircraft artillery sites after coming under fire. (Agence France-Presse) WEST BANK: ARAFAT AT 70 -- Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat celebrated his 70th birthday by turning the other cheek to accusations by Syria's Defense Minister on Monday that he was selling out the Palestinian cause. Mr. Arafat insisted that, despite the comments, Syria had always supported the Palestinians. Syria has sheltered Palestinian groups opposed to Mr. Arafat's peace deals with Israel. (Reuters) YEMEN: BOMB KILLS 3 -- Three people were killed and 33 hurt by a bomb blast in the city of Sanaa, the police said. The explosion came hours after a court confirmed the death sentence for a Muslim militant leader for kidnapping 16 Western tourists and killing 4 in December. (Agence France-Presse) THE AMERICAS CUBA: SANCTIONS ON THOSE WHO FLEE -- While acknowledging that his Government cannot control all unlawful emigration from the island, President Fidel Castro pledged to do what he can to stop Cubans from leaving illegally. In a speech, Mr. Castro said new measures would include denying return visits to Cubans who left the country illegally after 1995, the year United States-Cuban immigration accords were signed. (AP) MEXICO: MINISTER QUITS TO RUN CAMPAIGN -- Esteban Moctezuma Barragan resigned as Secretary of Social Development to join the presidential campaign of Francisco Labastida Ochoa, a government spokesman said. Mr. Labastida is President Ernesto Zedillo's preferred candidate for the nomination of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mr. Moctezuma will be Mr. Labastida's campaign manager. The party will select its candidate in a Nov. 7 primary. Sam Dillon (NYT) PARAGUAY: PLEA TO ARGENTINA -- Paraguay submitted a formal extradiction request to Argentina, asking that Lino Oviedo, a retired army general suspected of masterminding the murder last March of Paraguay's Vice President, Luis Maria Argana, be turned over. General Oviedo has been granted political assylum in Argentina, where a judge turned down |
1128411_2 | In Days, India, Chasing China, Will Have a Billion People | health care. Despite its considerable problems, often worsened by population pressures, India has increased life expectancy to 63 years, from 39, in less than half a century, and has cut its fertility rate from 6 births for each woman of child-bearing age to 3.1. The latest population estimate is built on an array of such birth, death and fertility statistics, with further adjustments for migration. There are other big numbers that tell a less happy story, World Bank experts have found. India has a large majority of the world's illiterates, nearly 500 million. It has more than 320 million abjectly poor people unable to muster an income equivalent to the $1 a day that is needed to buy basic foods. Development experts and demographers say India is in danger of being overwhelmed by numbers as gains made in fields like education, health and agriculture fail to stay ahead of the surging population. While poverty rates decline steadily in India, the World Bank found, the actual number of people living in poverty continues to rise. ''Poverty imposes an oppressive weight on India, especially in the rural areas, where almost three out of four Indians and 77 percent of the poor live,'' the World Bank said in its last report on poverty in India, in 1997. An update now being completed does not show much better results, World Bank officials say. At the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, an independent research organization, Lester Brown, its president, said in an interview that population growth ''has put pressure on all of India's resources.'' Underground water supplies are shrinking as more farmers turn to pumps when surface irrigation fails or is unreliable. Indians have sunk eight million wells and are using them to water fields where double-cropping has been introduced for higher food production. ''Well before it reached a billion people, India was using water at an unsustainable rate,'' he said. ''You have to wonder, what in the world happens when you add another half billion? To formulate an intelligent population policy, you have to know something about hydrology. I have the feeling that the population policy in India is put together in a vacuum. ''After a while the Government -- trying to educate young people, trying to find them jobs, trying to deal with environmental fallout -- gets stretched so thin it just can't respond. I think the Government is already suffering from demographic fatigue.'' |
1128440_2 | Monsanto Faces Growing Skepticism On Two Fronts | to improve its standing with investors and the public. The company would like to convince consumers that genetically modified foods are not just safe but critical to feeding a growing population by raising crop yields and reducing waste and the need for harmful pesticides, executives say. In recent weeks, executives at DuPont have said that Robert B. Shapiro, the chief executive of Monsanto, has had discussions with Charles O. Holliday, the chief executive at DuPont, about joining forces to hold public meetings as part of an effort to shore up the acceptability of genetically modified crops. Monsanto executives are also trying to convince investors that as the company transforms itself into a life sciences company, it will double its earnings in the next few years. Despite an array of obstacles, Mr. Shapiro says he likes the challenges. Monsanto is now the No. 2 player in the seed market, he said, and genetically modified crops are growing all over the country. ''This is the single most successful introduction of technology in the history of agriculture, including the plow,'' Mr. Shapiro said in a telephone interview last week. ''The fundamental question investors are asking me: Is the public's acceptance going to slow down the commercialization? And that's a perfectly good question. The only appropriate answer is, 'Let's see.' '' In Europe, however, consumers have reacted negatively to genetically engineered foods. Buoyed by the media storm in Europe, activists in the United States have stepped up their assault on biotechnology in recent months, with groups like Greenpeace painting an ugly picture of Monsanto and the industry. One Internet Web site, for instance, has even taken to calling the company ''Mutanto.'' Partly in response, the Department of Agriculture, which has generally supported biotechnology, announced last month that it was setting up an independent scientific review of its biotechnology approval process, largely to shore up public confidence and insure the safety of consumers. Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental activist, says Monsanto and other biotechnology companies have failed to properly address concerns about the environmental impact of such crops, particularly the risk that altering the genetic makeup of plants could accidentally foster genetically altered weeds and pests that could be impossible to thwart. ''Agricultural biotechnology is unraveling, and Monsanto has staked its future on biotech,'' said Mr. Rifkin, author of ''The Biotech Century'' (Penguin Putnam), ''There are a lot of problems and there will be lots of |
1128361_0 | What I Did On My Summer Vacation; Some Teen-Agers Parlayed Computer Skills Into Jobs With Signing Bonuses, Travel and Executive Perks | WHEN 18-year-old Eamon Walsh and two of his high school friends get together, they chat about summer concerts, the heat and -- more often than not -- their marketing plan. Instead of rising at noon and heading to the pool, Mr. Walsh backs his car out of the driveway before 7 A.M., picks up his friends -- Tamara Metz, 18, and Thomas Purtell, 17 -- and heads to work at Evolve, an Internet company in Vienna, Va. Evolve hired the students to create a company to develop and sell a new piece of software that allows users in different locations to work on one document at the same time. Evolve is sending them to England for a week this month, all expenses paid, to learn from other companies. ''We thought that was pretty cool,'' Ms. Metz said. Nice work, if you can get it. Yet, Mr. Walsh and his friends are hardly the only teen-agers with computer skills to take summer jobs that come with lavish perks and hourly wages well over the Federal minimum. All over the country, computer-savvy students in high school or their first few years of college are landing summer jobs that look a lot like professional, full-time employment. Some are making enough money to cover most of their tuition at private colleges. Others are receiving signing bonuses simply for accepting summer employment. ''Increasingly, the pool of students that companies look at is creeping back, is becoming younger,'' said Mark Oldman, co-founder of Vaultreports.com, an on-line publisher of internship and job information. Companies are desperately seeking young people who know their way around computers, Mr. Oldman said, and they know they are missing out on talent if they focus only on college juniors and seniors. In some cases, the students receive job offers before they even start looking for them, receive raises before the summer is over and are asked to stay on part time throughout the fall and winter. Some are taking home more money than they know what to do with. ''I'm mostly just sticking it in a mutual fund now,'' said Xan Charbonnet, 18, who has been working at Vtel, a digital video-conferencing company in Austin, Tex., for two summers now. Internships can pay anything from $4,000 to $10,000 for a summer. The phenomenon has emerged over the last few years, employers say, as Internet start-up companies have proliferated and established software and |
1128450_0 | North Korea's Dangerous Missiles | North Korea threatens to escalate tensions in Asia and heighten its own isolation if it goes ahead with another long-range missile test in the next few weeks. The Taepodong 2 missile, first tested last August, has a range of 3,700 miles, which makes it capable of hitting Alaska and Hawaii as well as Japan and American military targets throughout the Western Pacific. A second test would rightly be taken as a return to belligerent behavior by a country that recently seemed to be signaling an interest in more constructive relations with the outside world. The United States, Japan and South Korea have warned North Korea not to go ahead with the test. All three countries have been exploring improved relations with Pyongyang through diplomatic encounters, trade discussions, humanitarian relief projects and tourism. Such efforts would be stopped short by a missile test. Further, Japan could be pushed to strengthen its air force and add missile defenses, which some of its neighbors, including China, might find troubling. Unfortunately, North Korea has learned to use threats of menacing behavior as a bargaining tactic to extort economic and diplomatic rewards. That approach began in the early 1990's when Pyongyang appeared ready to reprocess nuclear reactor fuel into bomb ingredients. Washington responded imaginatively to that crisis by negotiating a useful agreement that committed the North to abandon reprocessing. In exchange, the United States, South Korea and Japan agreed to finance fuel-oil imports and construct a new, more safely designed reactor. But North Korea later renewed its threatening behavior. Last year it began excavations for what appeared to be a new reprocessing plant and then demanded increased food assistance for allowing inspection of the suspect site. As it turned out, no new reprocessing plant had been built. Now the North may be trying to win new concessions with its missile test preparations. In both earlier cases, North Korea backed off in time to avoid a crisis. But if it now proceeds to a missile test, it should get a very chilly response. Washington should withdraw its recent proposal offering the North an end to most economic sanctions and steps toward diplomatic recognition. That offer is conditioned on constructive North Korean behavior and is not compatible with long-range missile tests. In addition, Seoul should suspend its new tourism arrangement with the North and Tokyo should block payments home from North Korean citizens living in Japan. America's |
1128501_0 | Can We Trust Altered Foods? | To the Editor: The idea that genetic engineering is somehow ''natural selection, just speeded up,'' is a false and dangerous one that is sure to lead to food crises far more serious than the sick Monarch butterflies that transgenic crops have already produced (Op-Ed, Aug. 2). As a consumer I have a reasonable assurance that two edible strains of potato, when crossbred, will produce a safe new strain. I have no such assurance about a strain of potato like Monsanto's New Leaf that, thanks to its new bacterial genes, creates its own insecticide. The Food and Drug Administration must demand testing of transgenic foods that contain food additives before they enter the marketplace. And the Environmental Protection Agency should insure that the crops are safe to grow as well as eat. DEREK FOX Somerville, Mass., Aug. 3, 1999 |
1134350_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL A3-10 Clinton and Senate Allies Gird for Test Ban Battle The White House and Senate Democrats say they are preparing for a pitched battle with the Republican-controlled Senate to save a treaty banning nuclear testing, one of the top foreign policy goals of President Clinton's Administration. A1 Pressure Rises in Brazil The political pressures on President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil continue to mount as strikes and protests spread and support for the Government slips in the polls and in Congress. Protesters of every stripe appear to have been emboldened by the Government's handling of a dispute with truckers. A3 East Timor Begins Vote The people of East Timor, emerging from their locked homes, refugee centers and the forests where they had fled, began to vote on whether to end 24 years of occupation by Indonesia. The outcome of the vote will not be known for about a week. A3 Pushing for Kosovo Democracy The new American Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, met Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders and urged them to help build the free, law-abiding and democratic society they say they want and that the NATO alliance went to war to provide. A6 Turkish Leader to Visit U.S. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit of Turkey will visit Washington on Sept. 28 for talks that will probably lead to more American aid for earthquake relief, diplomats said. A10 Ulster Teens Hide From I.R.A. Four Catholic teen-agers from Northern Ireland have been forced into hiding to escape death threats by the Irish Republican Army. The development provoked new calls from Protestant officials for the expulsion of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., from peace talks that are due to resume in a week. A9 France Split on Nuclear Energy France's Green Party, emboldened by a good showing in the recent elections for the European Parliament, has threatened to pull out of the Government coalition if Prime Minister Lionel Jospin approves a new generation of nuclear power stations. A9 Whopper Meets the Mideast Burger King's franchise in the West Bank has become the focal point of a heated political confrontation and a public relations nightmare. Burger King International had asked its Israeli franchise holder to remove the company's brand name from a stand in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The Israeli company said that it refused to do so. A7 Hutus Attack Burundi Capital Ethnic |
1134325_2 | Greens Say They'll Quit French Government if It Plans New A-Plants | plants with new ones, or do we start to opt out of nuclear energy, like Belgium and Germany? If the decision is for new plants, we will pull out of the Government.'' The Greens have also renewed their demand that a national referendum be held on the country's energy strategy and the future of nuclear power. To make sure they will be heard, the Greens say they are planning a series of protests against nuclear power, matching the campaign of Germany's Greens, who have been pressing the Government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder to phase out nuclear energy use more quickly. The French environmentalists see the experience of their German counterparts as a warning sign. German Greens have become angry and frustrated as Mr. Schroder's promised effort to shut down nuclear power plants has stalled after pressure from business leaders. Officials say an informal consensus is forming that France will reduce, though not eliminate, its nuclear power plants. They say that if anti-nuclear pressure heats up, the Government can afford to postpone any key decisions until after the presidential election of 2002 -- for which the Socialists want to keep the Greens as allies. But the tension over the issue underscores the rising influence of the Green movement. After long seeming indifferent to environmental questions, France is now among the European countries where Greens have gained support and moved from the political fringes closer to the center of power. As their neighbors fared better, France's Greens long remained marginal in political life because of infighting and splits over ideology. Their position improved after Mrs. Voynet took charge in 1993. Among other changes, she allied the Greens with the Socialists. But unexpected success came in the European parliamentary elections in June, when the vote for the Greens surged to close to 10 percent from less than 3 percent in the last European election, in 1994. In the Paris area alone, the Greens scored almost 20 percent. The increases have prompted them to fight for greater influence in future local elections. In the meantime, to their annoyance, their new popularity has not translated automatically into more political power. Mrs. Voynet and other party members have openly said that their 10 percent vote should have earned them more seats in the Cabinet than the one they now have. Party leaders also sound clearly frustrated that they have not gained greater say over policy decisions. |
1134335_2 | Four Youths Threatened By the I.R.A. Flee Ulster | on one another. Fearful that a peace settlement might cost them control of their areas, the paramilitaries have directed brutal enforcement tactics ranging from kneecapping to killings in their own neighborhoods. The parents of the Groogan brothers defended their sons in television interviews tonight, saying that neighborhood rumors that they were vandals, drug dealers and ''joy riders'' of stolen cars were false. The boys' mother, Roseanne, said that the men who had forced her sons from home were ''big men with masks, but with masks off, what are they? Nobody.'' Father Quinn told the BBC that people in the housing project where they lived were happy to see the youths gone. ''The reaction in the community when the news broke, I hear on the ground, was one that it was overdue,'' he said. ''In no way am I justifying anything, but the reaction in the community was surprising, that it was overdue.'' The faltering effort to put into effect the April 1998 peace settlement was suspended last month when the Ulster Unionists refused to join the new power-sharing Cabinet with Sinn Fein that is called for in the accord unless the I.R.A. began turning over its weapons. A formal review of the situation will begin in Belfast on Sept. 6 under the direction of George J. Mitchell, a former United States Senator who led the talks that produced the original settlement. Groups taking part in the talks are bound by pledges of nonviolence known as the Mitchell Principles. Protestant politicians say Sinn Fein has violated those conditions and forfeited its place at the negotiating table because of fresh acts of violence authorized by the I.R.A. In her ruling last week, Ms. Mowlam agreed that the I.R.A. was involved in two recent violent episodes -- the killing of a 22-year-old taxi driver accused of having been a police informer and an illicit arms deal with suppliers in the United States. But she concluded that they did not constitute an explicit decision by the I.R.A. to end its cease-fire. Her decision was widely seen as an effort to keep Sinn Fein involved in the search for peace. Mr. Trimble said today that the Ulster Unionists would meet on Tuesday to determine whether they can take part in the review if Sinn Fein remains a party to the talks. ''The behavior of this summer, this week, shows that that is impossible,'' he warned. |
1129075_0 | The Body, Ever the Subject, Never Out Of Style | WHEN the Whitney Museum of American Art dropped ''The Great American Nude'' from its schedule, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield picked it up, renaming it ''The Nude in Contemporary Art.'' (One advantage the Aldrich had over the Whitney is that it can show art from outside the Americas.) Given what led up to its staging in Ridgefield, the exhibition would seem to be a hot potato, but there is little in it that is indeed lurid, lascivious or even erotic. The nearby Katonah Art Museum is featuring what might be a sister show on the contemporary treatment of the age-old subject of flowers, and the two exhibitions give off about the same amount of heat. This does not mean the show lacks interest, for every work in the present show carries the imposing weight of the long history of the nude in art. In selecting works for the show, Harry Philbrick, director of the Aldrich, was assisted by Richard Klein and Jessica Hough of the the museum. The result proves that they examined the controversial subject every which way. If anything raises eyebrows, it is the number of representations of elderly people in the show. This is signaled before a viewer enters the museum by a billboard mounted on an exterior wall. Melanie Manchot has photographed her mother nude, at least from the waist up, against a backdrop of the Swiss Alps. The setting reinforces the idea that the woman is at the peak of health. The full image is inside the museum; on the billboard it is cropped below the model's neck. John Coplans's self-portraits are a staple of the contemporary scene; actually Mr. Coplans gets his lumbering body into an awkward pose and an assistant takes the picture. In a sylvan environment reminiscent of Ms. Manchot's, Andres Serrano has photographed a mature couple holding hands. The most startling photographic depiction of an old person is by Manabu Yamanaka. His female model resembles a gnarled tree trunk. John O'Reilly is middle-aged rather than old; balding and bespectacled, however, he bears little resemblance to the identities synonymous with Western beauty he assumes through the magic of photo montage, among them a Greek statue of Apollo and a woman in a Turkish bath by Ingres. Clothed, he converses with an aged Walt Whitman. If age is a touchy subject in our culture, weight is even more so. But |
1129068_5 | For the Island's Icon, A New Lease on Life | razed in 1948 and replaced by a steel tower. Other lighthouses suffered from neglect, decay, vandalism, fire and the ravages of storms. Some are still in jeopardy. But as nonprofit groups have mobilized and taken control of lighthouses, they have been refurbished. Lights that were extinguished have been turned on again at Fire Island, Horton Point and Old Field. The Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society raised more than $1 million to reopen that lighthouse. The Southhold Historical Society runs the Horton Point light and the adjoining museum on the North Shore. And the East End Seaport and Marine Foundation raised money to rebuild the Long Beach Bar light in 1990. Among those who have been drawn to the effort to save the Montauk Lighthouse is the singer Paul Simon, who lives in view of the lighthouse and last Monday gave his annual concert here to raise money for it. Montauk Point may have been used for signal fires lit by native American Indians to summon tribal meetings, historians say, and by the British Navy to alert its ships in the blockade of Long Island Sound. The lighthouse became one of the first public works of the fledgling republic, authorized by the Second Congress in 1792. An ambitious young architect and builder, John McComb Jr., narrowly won the contract with his low bid of $22,300, just $200 under the nearest bid. He later won fame as the designer of buildings like City Hall in Manhattan. The lighthouse proposal originally provoked local opposition. Herders objected that it would encroach on their livestock's grazing pasture. Captains in Sag Harbor petitioned officials to move the lighthouse to Fisher's Island. And some who scavenged shipwrecks felt threatened by the prospect of safer shipping. Despite resistance, the project went forward, with some 50 masons, carpenters, blacksmiths and laborers. The octagonal tower was finished in five months, in the fall of 1796. But, underscoring the need for the light, a storm grounded the ship carrying the lantern oil and window glass for the lighthouse. It did not began operating until replacements arrived in 1797. From the project's beginning, erosion gnawed at Montauk Point. Foresighted forefathers placed the tower 297 feet from the bluff's edge, calculating that it would take 200 years for erosion to catch up, a pretty accurate estimate. When Federal officials considered eliminating the lighthouse in the 1960's, the publisher Dan Rattiner launched a crusade |
1129061_2 | A Special Camp Just for Special Children | are having difficulty in an academic setting, they are going to have the same difficulty in a social setting,'' said Cara Greene, founder of the camp and director of Social Services at the Sid Jacobsen J.C.C. in Roslyn, which runs the camp as a beneficiary agency of U.J.A. Federation. ''We really work on helping them develop social skills. We are a social-skill-building camp.'' Often, Mrs. Greene said, her campers have difficulty making friends, have never been invited on a play date or to another child's birthday party. ''A camp director's nightmare is when a parent calls and says please send my child home on another kid's bus,'' she said. ''For us, that's the most rewarding thing that can happen because they've made a friend. They're being accepted.'' Kehilla is the Hebrew word for community. And for high-functioning special-needs children, the emotionally safe environment cushions children from the cootie calls and other taunts they might encounter in a mainstream camp. While the special-services program doesn't include therapy, the environment is decidedly therapeutic. ''The bottom line is I had a special-needs child,'' Mrs. Greene said. ''I swore if I was ever in the position, I would make a camp for kids like him.'' At regular camps, she said, he ''always just squeaked by,'' adding: ''His sports skills weren't great. If there were 10 kids in a bunk, he'd be the last one to be picked for a team.'' Her son, Justin, has attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities. Now 24, he is a first-year medical student. At the group of picnic tables that serves as the camp's learning center, children were playing Junior Scrabble, dominoes and doing tangrams, unwittingly reinforcing math and reading skills by playing games. Griffen Roche-Tilden, 9, was chattering about his awesome chess game as he challenged Matthew Kruger, 8, in yet another round of Connect Four. Over in the grove where the campers gather for lunch, Jenn Yadegari, 19, of Roslyn, a counselor and a junior majoring in psychology at SUNY Binghamton, was having a serious discussion about friendship with Matthew Scholnick, 11. A little later, under a shady tree beside the ball field, surrounded by her bunk mates, Jessica was taking some last licks from an ice pop. ''The camp looks a little boring, but surprisingly it is fun,'' she said. ''I've made a lot of friends. At my school, they made fun of me. They said |
1129127_1 | What's New in Power Tools | charged only for that amount. The only way to erase the memory was by running the tool continuously to discharge the battery, then recharge it. This problem was caused by impurities in the nickle-cadmium electrolyte. Using advanced refining methods, manufacturers are now able to remove these impurities in the nickel cadmium and eliminate the memory problem. Nickle-cadmium batteries present another problem, because the cadmium in the electrolyte can be harmful to the environment. For this reason, many European tool manufacturers are switching to nickel metal hydride (abbreviated Ni-MH) as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries. Nickel metal hydride is easier to dispose of, but it does not always make an efficient battery. It is ideal for devices with low current requirements, like cell phones, but batteries with nickel metal hydride cannot always deliver the high currents needed for power tools. Nickel metal hydride is also temperature-sensitive and the batteries lose power at low temperatures. For this reason, manufacturers of nickel metal hydride batteries often recommend that the user keep a spare battery pack in his pants pocket as he works outdoors on a cold day. The rationale is that body heat will keep the unit warm enough to retain most of its power. For these reasons, American manufacturers are committed to using nickle cadmium as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries, at least for the foreseeable future. To address the pollution problem, they have set up recycling centers throughout the country so users can dispose of the spent battery packs safely. Recharging a power pack produces a significant amount of heat in the cells, which is detrimental to the electrolyte and will eventually shorten the life of the battery. Some manufacturers have introduced a soft-pulse battery charger that minimizes heat build-up by charging the batteries with numerous short bursts of electricity rather than a continuous charge. In addition, this process produces a more efficient charge and extends battery life beyond 1,000 charges. Another significant modification in battery packs is the concept of interchangeable modules. For many years, battery power packs were designed for specific tools and could be used only on that tool. Recently some manufactures have created modular power packs that can be switched from a drill to a circular saw or to a work light. The heart of any power tool is the motor. It must be large enough to deliver enough force for the task at hand, yet small |
1128984_11 | ISLAND OF FORBIDDEN FRUITS | year for humanitarian reasons -- can go to Cuba, spending up to $100 a day for expenses. Or travelers can apply for a license to go if they have a religious or educational purpose, for example. Anybody else is banned from spending money under the Trading With the Enemy Act. No more than $100 worth of goods (such as cigars and rum) can legally be brought back from Cuba. Because transactions are in cash (Americans cannot use credit cards issued by American banks), visitors often go over the spending limit with little risk of being caught. And Cuba enables illegal travel by waiving boating fees at marinas and not stamping passports. Although sailing to Cuba itself is not prohibited, paying for expenses is; passengers returning by air or vessel can be investigated by the United States Customs Service, Federal officials said. Penalties for violating the travel restrictions are up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines for an individual, although few Americans are prosecuted by the Government for traveling to Cuba illegally. Getting There Because of the embargo, getting to Cuba is not a simple matter of calling an airline and booking a flight. It is probably best and easiest -- though by no means easy -- to work with an agency that specializes in travel to Cuba. Marazul Tours has a Web site, www.marazultours.com, and several offices in the United States, including one in Weehawken, N.J., (201) 840-6711. It arranges legal, Government-approved trips and can, for that reason, book direct charters from the United States. Havanatur, a Cuban agency, has several offices outside of Cuba through which an American can arrange a trip. One is in Nassau, the Bahamas, (242) 394-7195. The agency, which books flights and hotels and therefore gives discounted package rates, requires payment in money orders, cash or traveler's checks. Indeed, for Americans, trips to Cuba are just about all-cash endeavors; no Cuban hotel, restaurant or store will accept American credit cards. Some hotels and restaurants may honor traveler's checks, except those issued by American Express, but I never tried to use traveler's checks while I was there. Furthermore, there is essentially no way for Americans to get extra cash in Cuba. Getting Around In addition to Havanatur, Cubatur can help with excursions and guided tours within Cuba, and has an office in Havana, (53-7) 334-155, as well as desks in some of the |
1129104_2 | Summer School for Managers | ending: After even more self-improvement, our erstwhile urchin gets his first ''real'' job. As simplistic as it sounds, this short book is an entertaining cultural artifact that offered inspiration to generations of young Americans. Indeed, as Mr. Trachtenberg reminds us, the writer Nathanael West once proclaimed that Alger was to America what Homer was to the Greeks. Mr. Brawer says that may be stretching it a bit. But he points out that ''they both worked in established myth; that's the key here.'' A novel like ''Ragged Dick'' is fascinating, he says, because it makes plain the beliefs Americans have unconsciously absorbed. Even today, ''it's in a strange way typical of the illusions we harbor,'' he said. ''We want to believe that in an era of self-interest and me-first, the traditional virtues are very much alive and will get us where we want to get.'' ''THE FINANCIER'' harbors no such illusions. (Published in 1912, it is available as a Meridian paperback at $14.95.) Based on the life of Charles Yerkes, a 19th-century financier and transportation magnate convicted of stealing city funds in Philadelphia, this gripping novel both celebrates and excoriates the ruthless self-interest of its fictional hero, Frank Cowperwood, a born businessman who becomes an unstoppable force in the time of the robber barons. This isn't Dreiser's best book. Both ''Sister Carrie'' and ''An American Tragedy'' are arguably better reads. But it is powerful nonetheless -- an obsessively detailed account of the corruption and the charisma of its main character, who first appears as a young boy intoxicated by the financial frontier of the Gilded Age. ''It's almost the polar extreme of Horatio Alger,'' Mr. Brawer said. ''Here's Dreiser looking at what really makes success in American business.'' The book is ''absolutely contemporary,'' he said, in its description of the social Darwinism in business culture. And Dreiser's genius, he added, ''is that he makes us like Cowperwood despite ourselves.'' THIS brings us to ''Babbitt,'' Sinclair Lewis's 1922 satire of a smug, conformist real-estate salesman ensconced in a comfortable middle-class life in Zenith, ''the best ole town in the U.S.A.'' (The Penguin paperback, with illuminating commentary by James M. Hutchisson, is $9.95.) Today, the novel's denouement -- Babbitt's slow realization that his shallow life is meaningless -- is less relevant than the characters' choice of discourse: Reflecting on the prosperous 1920's, the book skewers America's obsession with brand names, advertising slogans and |
1129128_1 | What's New in Power Tools | charged only for that amount. The only way to erase the memory was by running the tool continuously to discharge the battery, then recharge it. This problem was caused by impurities in the nickle-cadmium electrolyte. Using advanced refining methods, manufacturers are now able to remove these impurities in the nickel cadmium and eliminate the memory problem. Nickle-cadmium batteries present another problem, because the cadmium in the electrolyte can be harmful to the environment. For this reason, many European tool manufacturers are switching to nickel metal hydride (abbreviated Ni-MH) as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries. Nickel metal hydride is easier to dispose of, but it does not always make an efficient battery. It is ideal for devices with low current requirements, like cell phones, but batteries with nickel metal hydride cannot always deliver the high currents needed for power tools. Nickel metal hydride is also temperature-sensitive and the batteries lose power at low temperatures. For this reason, manufacturers of nickel metal hydride batteries often recommend that the user keep a spare battery pack in his pants pocket as he works outdoors on a cold day. The rationale is that body heat will keep the unit warm enough to retain most of its power. For these reasons, American manufacturers are committed to using nickle cadmium as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries, at least for the foreseeable future. To address the pollution problem, they have set up recycling centers throughout the country so users can dispose of the spent battery packs safely. Recharging a power pack produces a significant amount of heat in the cells, which is detrimental to the electrolyte and will eventually shorten the life of the battery. Some manufacturers have introduced a soft-pulse battery charger that minimizes heat build-up by charging the batteries with numerous short bursts of electricity rather than a continuous charge. In addition, this process produces a more efficient charge and extends battery life beyond 1,000 charges. Another significant modification in battery packs is the concept of interchangeable modules. For many years, battery power packs were designed for specific tools and could be used only on that tool. Recently some manufactures have created modular power packs that can be switched from a drill to a circular saw or to a work light. The heart of any power tool is the motor. It must be large enough to deliver enough force for the task at hand, yet small |
1128994_23 | Prodigy's Return | wouldn't have come. On the other hand, with it, relations among us are strained. Prolonging the suspense, Van Cliburn, unchanged after all these years except grayer, gives a speech, and I'm struck when he says that a musician prepares intensely with nothing tangible to show for it at the end, meaning that one can never really be sure what will happen onstage. Coming from a great pianist who abandoned the concert stage for years and still plays only rarely, this seems a particularly poignant remark. Then Marcus Raskin, a public policy specialist who came to prominence in the Kennedy Administration (he's a fellow competitor: Bach and Beethoven were his choices for the first round), gives a speech about community versus competition. I realize we are a community, all 92 contestants, improbable as it seems. We include a French judge, a hairstylist from Denver and a former Miss Minnesota. Greg Fisher installs glass in Oklahoma. He once sold his piano to buy crack. Later he went to jail for burglary. Taking up music again helped him recover. Len Horovitz, the doctor, had an extra thumb at birth and had to have it removed. He learned the piano, overcoming his disability, then turned to medicine, which had given him the chance to play. At one point he asked another contestant, a Cambridge philosophy professor named Dominic Scott, why the Greeks connected music with medicine. Scott told him that the Greeks thought music healed the soul the way medicine healed the body. Skeptics today talk about a dwindling interest in serious music, but looking around I'm amazed to see 91 other people from all over the world for whom playing Chopin, Bach and Beethoven is so vital that they have paid their own way to come to Fort Worth for a 10-minute performance before a crowd of strangers. Every journalist writing about the competition has used the word overachiever, not meaning to be nasty but making it sound as if we shouldn't be so ambitious. Overachiever implies somebody whose reach ultimately exceeds his grasp. Genghis Khan was an overachiever. We're pianists who do something else. One woman says she is here because she would always regret not having come; it's her chance to answer the eternal question, What if? That probably motivates many of us, but for all of us I'm sure it's essentially about making music, something so satisfying that we've put |
1129129_1 | What's New in Power Tools | charged only for that amount. The only way to erase the memory was by running the tool continuously to discharge the battery, then recharge it. This problem was caused by impurities in the nickle-cadmium electrolyte. Using advanced refining methods, manufacturers are now able to remove these impurities in the nickel cadmium and eliminate the memory problem. Nickle-cadmium batteries present another problem, because the cadmium in the electrolyte can be harmful to the environment. For this reason, many European tool manufacturers are switching to nickel metal hydride (abbreviated Ni-MH) as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries. Nickel metal hydride is easier to dispose of, but it does not always make an efficient battery. It is ideal for devices with low current requirements, like cell phones, but batteries with nickel metal hydride cannot always deliver the high currents needed for power tools. Nickel metal hydride is also temperature-sensitive and the batteries lose power at low temperatures. For this reason, manufacturers of nickel metal hydride batteries often recommend that the user keep a spare battery pack in his pants pocket as he works outdoors on a cold day. The rationale is that body heat will keep the unit warm enough to retain most of its power. For these reasons, American manufacturers are committed to using nickle cadmium as an electrolyte in rechargeable batteries, at least for the foreseeable future. To address the pollution problem, they have set up recycling centers throughout the country so users can dispose of the spent battery packs safely. Recharging a power pack produces a significant amount of heat in the cells, which is detrimental to the electrolyte and will eventually shorten the life of the battery. Some manufacturers have introduced a soft-pulse battery charger that minimizes heat build-up by charging the batteries with numerous short bursts of electricity rather than a continuous charge. In addition, this process produces a more efficient charge and extends battery life beyond 1,000 charges. Another significant modification in battery packs is the concept of interchangeable modules. For many years, battery power packs were designed for specific tools and could be used only on that tool. Recently some manufactures have created modular power packs that can be switched from a drill to a circular saw or to a work light. The heart of any power tool is the motor. It must be large enough to deliver enough force for the task at hand, yet small |
1127813_1 | France's Fickle Appetite | on products like Dijon mustard in retaliation for Europe's efforts to ban hormone-treated American beef. ''No hormones in foie gras country,'' read posters slapped on the windows of a French McDonald's last week by irate farmers. The French say that genetically modified foods are not environmentally safe, that they're an attempt to enslave poor farmers in developing nations by creating a need for them to buy American seeds each year (because genetically modified plants are sterile), that eating them may be like eating poison. They mention the recent finding that the caterpillars of monarch butterflies are killed by pollen from genetically altered corn. To explain French reaction, one might blame a rising anti-Americanism, the sensitivity of the French Government to the concerns of French farmers and an atmosphere already jittery about foodstuffs. The mad-cow disease that terrified England has turned up, in a few cases, in France, Switzerland and other countries. More recently, there has been dioxin contamination in Belgium and a scare about toxic cans of Coke. And over it all has been the intransigence of the American Government in insisting on the right to sell hormone- and antibiotic-treated beef to Europeans despite their belief that these substances are harmful. Thus the anti-Americanism of the French merges with their anti-Europeanism, with their resistance to the bureaucrats of Brussels who want them to pasteurize their Camembert (the same bureaucrats who have proclaimed their resistance to the Latin American bananas exported by American companies, which are too curved or something). But above all, the French opposition to genetically modified foods seems to be driven by the new direction of French foreign policy, which sees France, with other European powers, as creating a counterbalance to American power. Some analysts have speculated that this reflects their chagrin at Europe's failure to act effectively in the Balkans without American leadership. Yet if the issue is complicated by cultural divides and intercontinental politics, there is a simple common denominator as well: a lack of information, all around. At first, to an American, the European reactions to our harmless soybeans and corn seem extreme. We tend to think of genetic modification as a process akin to natural selection, just speeded up. Even if we ourselves might wish to avoid the hormones and antibiotics in beef (and more and more people do, at least in California), the American public is not up in arms about soybeans and |
1127829_0 | Patents; Reducing the cost of snail mail by printing advertisements on the outside of envelopes. | ELECTRONIC mail has become an indispensable mode of communication for many people these days. Not only is it speedy, but it is free for frugal souls in exchange for putting up with advertising taglines at the bottom of their E-mails. But what if someone were to take the same concept -- advertiser-subsidized correspondence -- and instead apply it to snail mail? That is what Joshua J. Reiter, a management consultant in Baltimore, has done. He recently patented a way to reduce the costs of mailing an old-fashioned stamp-and-envelope letter -- by printing advertisements directly aimed at a specific household on the outside of mail delivered to that household. ''Originally, I thought about doing this on the Internet,'' Mr. Reiter said, ''but too many people were doing something similar and so I thought there was no way I would get a patent on it. ''Then I thought, well, regular mail is still going to be viable for many years,'' he said. ''People are still going to be sending regular letters. The U.S. Postal Services handles 190 billion packages and letters a year, and that number seems to still be going up. I couldn't believe no one had thought of putting advertising on the outside of envelopes before.'' Mr. Reiter's patent covers a computer system that tracks the individual tastes and interests of vast numbers of households and then prints advertisements tailored to specific households for mailers who want to save on postage. So, for example, a credit card company wanting to shave a few cents for each monthly statement it sends out would allow advertising for other companies to be printed on its envelopes. A family with small children might see an ad for a toy company on the outside of their monthly bill, while a globe-trotting elderly couple might receive an offer for a discounted cruise-ship excursion. And an athletic middle-aged bachelor might be exhorted to buy a new pair of running shoes. ''Since the message is on the outside of the letter or parcel, it must be seen by the recipients,'' Mr. Reiter said. ''They can't discard it, as they might with an advertisement inside an envelope.'' Mr. Reiter is quick to play down any Big Brother overtones to his invention. ''Advertisers have all this information already,'' he said. ''We know a lot about who lives in a particular household. Today with bar-coding information, you can identify who the |
1132680_1 | Corporations Battling to Bar Use of E-Mail For Unions | particularly the cyberspace surrounding corporate offices and factories -- will be for the labor movement. While some union officials have been emboldened by the settlement and the Government's decision to side with the suspended employees, others say they will tread lightly until there is a greater consensus about the rules for contacting employees via corporate E-mail addresses. And all the while, companies are fighting to keep their systems off limits. E-mail has become common in many workplaces that unions are eager to organize, including those at software companies and in other high-technology industries. And unions have found it an unusually effective organizing tool, one that combines the intimacy of a conversation, the efficiency of mass-produced leaflets and the precision of delivery by mail to work forces that are often widely dispersed. ''It saves time, it saves money,'' said Michael Blain of the Washington Alliance of Technical Workers, or Washtech, a affiliate of the Communication Workers of America that is trying to organize software workers in the state of Washington. ''We can reach 1,300 people by just hitting 'send.' '' The union leaders at Pratt & Whitney, a unit of the United Technologies Corporation, who ultimately failed in their drive to organize the Palm Beach plant, said they had used E-mail to respond quickly to management statements. ''If you get the information out quick, the bureaucracy has to be more accountable,'' Mr. Coolidge said. Companies may find it galling to see unions capitalize on corporate E-mail systems to organize workers. When nonemployees send E-mail to organize, some say, that should be considered trespass, and when employees receive union E-mail at work, it will invariably be read on company time, a practice that they say labor law should prohibit. ''E-mail from unions does interfere with employers' expectation that work time is for work,'' said Frank C. Morris Jr., a lawyer who represents management in labor disputes. ''The unions are trying to make extraordinary use of a tool that didn't exist until recently for their benefit.'' Companies also contend that any mass E-mailing, even if about work conditions or union organizing, is an intrusion comparable to the ''spamming'' done by commercial outfits. Intel recently persuaded a California Superior Court judge to order a former employee, Ken Hamidi, to stop sending E-mail messages to its employees by invoking common law about trespass. (Mr. Hamidi has appealed the ruling.) According to court papers, Mr. Hamidi |
1132722_0 | Genetic Crop Testing Angers Many Britons | British farmers who have offered some of their land to the Government for the test-planting of genetically modified seed crops have become the target of bitter protests. Although the genetic modification of food has been a relatively unquestioned phenomenon in the United States and Canada, there has been widespread opposition to the idea in Europe. In Britain, in particular, genetically altered food has set off alarms and united demonstrators into a powerful protest movement against what they call ''Frankenstein food'' and the multinational companies promoting it. Article, page A3. |
1132701_2 | Britons Skirmish Over Genetically Modified Crops | of the British public think that genetically modified crop testing of the kind Mr. Fiddaman has agreed to should be stopped. Major food manufacturers, supermarkets and fast food chains have already announced the removal of all genetically modified ingredients from their products sold in Britain. The Government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, though on record as in favor of genetically modified foods, has been forced by political pressure to impose a set of largely unenforceable regulations on food outlets demanding that they identify on menus items that may have traces of genetically modified soya or wheat. One of the central tenets of Mr. Blair's self-described ''modernizing'' program is the determination to see Britain become a country in the forefront of technological innovation, and he has been caught out by the furor over genetically modified food. The British press has seen the issue as one for crusading journalism, and the scare headlines and wide publicity given to selected scientific studies alleging danger prompted Mr. Blair to accuse newspapers and broadcasters of fomenting ''hysteria'' and ''skewing'' coverage away from the more numerous studies finding no fault with genetically modified food. It has been a moment where the Blair Government's vaunted ability to capture the public mood has failed it, in the process reinforcing some underlying concerns about the otherwise popular Government -- that it is cocky, beholden to big business and subservient to the United States. The issue of scientifically altered food is the subject of a growing political dispute between Europe and America. Last month, Washington imposed tariffs on food imported from members of the European Union after the Europeans banned the importation of American hormone-treated beef. The World Trade Organization has declared the European ban unjustified because there is no scientific evidence that hormone-treated beef is unhealthy. Monsanto, the American food company behind much of the genetically modified food in Britain, has seen a large public relations program aimed at halting its demonization by the British public have just the opposite effect. The genetic modification at issue is a way of adding genes that confer resistance to insect, fungal and viral pests to plants that might otherwise die or require heavy doses of pesticides. It can also, as in the case of Mr. Fiddaman's crops, foster herbicide-resistance, meaning that weeds can be killed with a single spray that leaves the crops standing. Objections to genetically modified food rest on the |
1132688_2 | Patents; A way to use electric power lines to provide wireless telecommunications in poor countries. | Kline envisions that this could mean clusters of homes or businesses could also be isolated via his wireless telecommunications terminals. The terminals would be able to ''multiplex'' the signals from different buildings, according to his patent filing. Thus, the system could carry more than one user in each transformer cluster. Mr. Kline hopes that one wireless terminal for several customers would make his invention even cheaper to use. The wireless terminal is also connected to a power meter, so that energy use can be transmitted to a power company. Mr. Kline received patent 5,937,342. Help in Finding That Lost Document The frustrating search for a single document in a ream of papers or a room full of files may be over. Marvin Isaacman and Denis McGreivy, two California inventors, have patented a system that uses radio signals to pinpoint a piece of paper on its precise shelf or drawer. Office files are usually labeled and stored alphabetically, numerically, by color or bar code. But those systems don't help when a folder is misfiled or lost. In their patent, the inventors say a recent study found that ''an average U.S. executive spends around $10,000 a year searching for missing files.'' Hoping to eliminate this waste, the inventors first tag files or documents with a passive radio frequency code. The tag is made up of a small coil or antenna that collects energy and an integrated circuit bearing an identification code. When someone wants to locate the document, a computer-controlled transceiver transmits the coded signal via an antenna in first one, and then a second, radio frequency. The tags pick up energy from the transceiver; when a match is made, the relevant tag is activated and sends a signal back to the transceiver. Since the signal is a radio frequency, it does not require direct line-of-sight between the transceiver and the tagged files. So documents can be stored in a box, cabinet or drawer. Antennas set up on shelves or in drawers can extend the signal. Once the correct signal is received, the computer then automatically names the shelf or drawer where the document can be found. Mr. Isaacman, from Los Angeles, and Mr. McGreivy, from Laguna Niguel, Calif., received patent 5,936,527. Patents may be viewed on the Web at www.uspto.gov or may be ordered through the mail, by patent number, for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. |
1134089_0 | The World: Heartburn; Fearful Over the Future, Europe Seizes On Food | FIST raised, mustache bristling, Jose Bove looked defiant as he handed himself in to French police in the southern town of Montpelier a few days ago. ''My struggle remains the same,'' this farmer declared to an appreciative crowd, ''the battle against globalization and for the right of people to feed themselves as they choose.'' A Parisian-turned-sheep-farmer who moved to southwest France 20 years ago, Mr. Bove emerged this month as a sort of Subcomandante Marcos of the French countryside, the leader of a self-styled, anti-imperialist revolt over food. His crime, committed on Aug. 12, was to lead the ransacking and demolition of a McDonald's restaurant nearing completion in the southwestern town of Millau. It was only the most conspicuous of a rash of recent protests against McDonald's, targeted not so much for anything the company has done but as a symbol of the United States and of what Mr. Bove has called ''the multinationals of foul food.'' His efforts have struck a chord. French labor unions, ecologists, Communists and farmers have joined to demand his immediate release, burying other differences in a shared politico-gastronomic outcry. An army, Napoleon noted, marches on its stomach, and the European forces gathering this summer in protest against what is seen as American-led globalization have abruptly focused on food. Where it was once the deployment of American nuclear missiles that caused alarm, it is now McDonald's, Coca-Cola, genetically modified American corn and American beef fattened with growth hormones that have Europeans up in arms. ''Behind all this lies a rejection of cultural and culinary dispossession,'' said Alain Duhamel, a French political analyst. ''There is a certain allergy in Europe to the extent of American power accumulated since the cold war's end, and the most virulent expression of that allergy today seems to be food.'' Of course, it is not just culture or the kitchen that is at stake. Enormous economic interests are also involved. Large quantities of American corn and soybeans, to name just two crops, have been genetically modified over the years -- that is, rendered more productive, more hardy, less vulnerable to fungal and viral pests through scientific alteration, including the addition of genes. No discernible harm to Americans has occurred. But if Europe and possibly other parts of the world reject or ban such products, the economic consequences may be measured in the billions of dollars. Already, a federal judge in Brazil |
1134089_1 | The World: Heartburn; Fearful Over the Future, Europe Seizes On Food | in protest against what is seen as American-led globalization have abruptly focused on food. Where it was once the deployment of American nuclear missiles that caused alarm, it is now McDonald's, Coca-Cola, genetically modified American corn and American beef fattened with growth hormones that have Europeans up in arms. ''Behind all this lies a rejection of cultural and culinary dispossession,'' said Alain Duhamel, a French political analyst. ''There is a certain allergy in Europe to the extent of American power accumulated since the cold war's end, and the most virulent expression of that allergy today seems to be food.'' Of course, it is not just culture or the kitchen that is at stake. Enormous economic interests are also involved. Large quantities of American corn and soybeans, to name just two crops, have been genetically modified over the years -- that is, rendered more productive, more hardy, less vulnerable to fungal and viral pests through scientific alteration, including the addition of genes. No discernible harm to Americans has occurred. But if Europe and possibly other parts of the world reject or ban such products, the economic consequences may be measured in the billions of dollars. Already, a federal judge in Brazil has banned sales of the Monsanto Corporation's Roundup Ready soybean seeds -- gene-altered to resist fungus and weeds -- and Japan has announced that it will require labels on genetically modified food. E UROPE seems to be gripped right now by a kind of collective madness, and we don't want that to spread to the rest of the world,'' said Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, the head of the Senate agricultural committee, who was in Germany this month. ''In the United States, we have not seen a scintilla of ill effects, and on my farm alone we've been modifying corn and soybeans since the 1930's, raising productivity by a factor of three.'' Behind the ''madness'' several factors appear to lurk. The specter of nature being rendered more uniform by scientists in America has meshed with a wider fear of an increasingly undifferentiated planet where national distinctions fade. Europeans see on the horizon a uniform, global culinary culture dominated by multinationals -- a Hollywood of the kitchen drowning any European distinctiveness with sheer marketing muscle. At the same time, a rash of health scares -- including the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain in 1996, and the discovery |
1134080_1 | Strategies for the Genetically Disposed | volatile, and investors may want to use big movements as trading opportunities, but basically, those who believe the thesis may want to own these stocks almost regardless of how expensive they become. And those who don't believe it, of course, may want to stay away. Shares of two of the biggest gene merchants have been on a tear as investors have reacted to several gene-related discoveries announced by Human Genome Sciences Inc., based in Rockville, Md. Shares of Human Genome, the early player and the only one to take its own drugs into clinical trial, are up 89.5 percent since Jan. 1. They closed on Friday at $67.375, nearly three times their 52-week low of $22.75 last September. The stock of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, Mass., has tended to follow that of Human Genome, even though Millennium has yet to develop drugs of its own. But it has reaped over $1 billion from corporate partnerships and plans to acquire a drug later this year. At $59.3125, it has more than doubled since Jan. 1 and is up sixfold from its September low. The other two big genomics stocks are in companies that sell genetic data bases to major drug companies. In comparison to those in the first category, their shares seem like value stocks. Celera Genomics Group of Rockville, Md., was spun off from the PE Corporation, formerly the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $21.3125 a share in May; it closed on Friday at $25.50. Shares of Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., closed at $25.375 Friday, down 32.1 percent since Jan. 1, largely because of the perception that an independent Celera poses a threat to its core business. Michael Murphy, editor of the California Technology Stock Letter, recommends a basket of Human Genome, Incyte and Celera. ''Own all three, because what you want to do here is get a position in what will clearly be the basis of medicine in the 21st century,'' Mr. Murphy said. He thinks Human Genome could hit $150 by 2002 but he has not established targets for the others. Mr. Murphy excludes Millennium from his portfolio because it has diversified into agriculture and diagnostic sectors, and he no longer sees it as a pure genomics play. But that assessment is not universal. Viren Mehta, an analyst with Mehta Partners, a health care stock research firm, |
1134143_4 | New Trade Threat For U. S. Farmers | foods are unsafe. But the crops are so new that there is not enough evidence to prove the foods' safety to a minority of scientists who say further studies need to be done. Dan Glickman, the Secretary of Agriculture, said that the consumers' concerns seemed to be spreading like ''an infectious disease.'' ''This technology,'' he said, ''got a little bit ahead of the politics.'' He and Federal trade officials have spent the summer pressing European leaders and agricultural ministers to reconsider what is essentially the European Union's moratorium on new types of gene-altered crops. They have threatened some countries with intercession by the World Trade Organization, arguing that restrictions on these foods run counter to the current science supporting their safety. Genetic engineering is a process in which scientists splice one organism's genes into another. For example, scientists created the pesticide-producing corn by inserting a gene from a bacterium. Most of the corn and soybeans have been altered to either produce their own pesticides or to be resistant to herbicides. The first gene-altered seeds were offered to farmers in 1996, and growers snatched them up, quickly making the new biotechnology into a multibillion-dollar business for the seed companies. The biotechnology companies say that the food companies are caving in to pressure from environmental advocates who have written letters saying that consumers do not want these products. ''Consumers are turning away from these foods in enormously smaller numbers than the activists would have you believe,'' said L. Val Giddings, a vice president for food and agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group of more than 800 companies in Washington. Still, farmers and trade officials point to new problems. In Mexico, which bought $500 million of American corn last year, Grupo Maseca, the company that is the leading producer of corn flour, said recently that it would avoid importing genetically modified grain. The flour is made into tortillas, the Mexican staple. In South Korea, another large importer of American grain, corn-processing companies said they were considering buying corn from China instead of the United States because of concerns about the altered crop. And, in Japan, the Government passed a law requiring food companies to label products that have been genetically engineered. (In the United States, Federal officials have only recently said they will consider voluntary labeling.) Preparing for awareness generated by the labeling in Japan, a subsidiary of the Honda |
1134085_3 | The Race to Cash In On the Genetic Code | his goal for completion, too; he now expects a rough draft of the human genome by next spring and a complete genome a year later. The acceleration of the public and private efforts has already led to a rough winnowing of the genomics field, with some companies disappearing in mergers and others trading at such low share prices that their ability to raise capital and remain independent is doubtful. A couple of broad strategies have emerged, meanwhile, among the best-capitalized companies. Human Genome Sciences and Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., intend to sell drugs, developed with capital raised in a few high-value deals with pharmaceutical companies. Two others, Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., and Celera, in Rockville, sell only data that others use to identify potential drug targets. Shares in Human Genome and Millennium have soared this year, while Incyte, once the market leader, has fallen, primarily because of the perceived threat from Celera, which has deep pockets and a similar business model. ''The human genome is going to be sequenced, with absolute certainty, within the next two years,'' said Dr. Eric Lander, director of the federally financed Whitehead/M.I.T. Center for Genomic Research in Cambridge and a founding scientist at Millennium. ''The game has moved on. Now it's: How do you add value to the genome?'' The Code as a Cure Perhaps the most obvious way to add value to the genome is to turn genetic discoveries into drugs, but so far Human Genome Sciences is the only company that has done so. The stainless-steel fermentation vats at its 80,000-square-foot manufacturing plant here in Rockville would be a common site at a traditional biotechnology company, like Amgen or Genentech, but they are unique among the genomics players. These vats produce the proteins that are Human Genome's first two drugs. One, intended to protect blood-forming cells from the toxic effects of chemotherapy, is being tested in women with breast and ovarian cancer. The other is being tested as a wound-healing agent. Both are in the second of three phases of trials typically required of new drugs by the Food and Drug Administration; that means that they are at least two or three years away from the market. But it is Human Genome's third drug candidate that provides a glimpse of the real promise of genomics. Using a gene injected directly into a diseased area, it prompts the body |
1133947_5 | Program for Disabled Children Ends Abruptly | Hamilton. For more information, parents may call the department at (877) 258-6585. Cynthia Newman, the supervisor of early intervention programs in central New Jersey, criticized administrators for failing to warn the state of the closing. ''How an agency after 25 years could operate like that -- just close their doors -- is mystifying to me,'' Ms. Newman said. ''It just really makes you wonder about their commitment to children and families.'' She said the agency's failure could be laid partly to poor business decisions like hiring expensive consultants to cover gaps in full-time workers. For parents, the reaction has been frustration and disappointment. David Richards's coordination has improved through games with physical therapists, like ''The Itsy Bitsy Spider'' and hand-clapping. Ms. Richards says she will continue therapy on her own until David is moved to a new program. Michelle Cassitta of Brick, whose 20-month-old daughter, Patrice, is deaf and cannot walk yet because of a balance problem, has been waiting for a physical therapist since February, and is furious that she will have to wait longer. ''There is so much red tape involved to get these kids help,'' Ms. Cassita said. ''There should be no waiting for anything. If a child needs something that is going to help her later on, she should get it. Maybe in 15 years she'll have a job instead of a collecting disability from the state for the rest of her life.'' Ms. Cassitta has applied for state-subsidized health insurance through New Jersey Kidcare to seek treatment privately. Marie Woodruff of Forked River, whose three children have all received Early Intervention services, said she was concerned that her 20-month-old son, David, whose speech and language are delayed, will lose valuable progress. In previous weeks, speech therapists from the program had taught him to use basic sign language and to mimic sounds like boo. Before that, he had been able to say only mama and dada but did not associate the words with his parents, Ms. Woodruff said. Speaking of the speech therapist, she said, ''Who knows what he could be saying now if she could only come?'' Ms. Richards said: ''I just feel terrible for these kids. The youngest, most voiceless people in our society are absolutely being taken advantage of.'' But, she added: ''At this point I don't care whose fault it is. I just want my children to get back into services.'' SCHOOLS |
1129921_3 | WORLD BRIEFING | West African peacekeepers. The kidnappers were former Government soldiers who had been allied with Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front, but said they felt that they had been forgotten in the recent agreement to end the country's eight-year war. Norimitsu Onishi (NYT) ANGOLA: GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN ON RADIO The police arrested the director and two journalists for a Roman Catholic radio station, for the second time this week, after the station broadcast an interview with the UNITA rebel chief Jonas Savimbi. Radio Ecclesia is one of the few independent sources of information in Angola, where the Government has imposed a blackout on news about the fighting with the rebels since the beginning of the year. (AP) NIGERIA: LAWMAKERS' ALLOWANCES PROTESTED Hundreds of demonstrators waved placards and jeered at legislators who have demanded a raise in cash allowances for their home furniture. The demonstrators, members of a trade union coalition, criticized plans by President Olusegun Obasanjo to give $25,000 to $35,000 to each lawmaker moving into new Government residences in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. The lawmakers, however, have maintained that the proposed allowances are too low. (Agence France-Presse) CONGO: BATTLE AGAINST CHILDHOOD POLIO A lull in the fighting in Congo may allow a child polio vaccination campaign to be carried out from Aug. 13 to 20, the United Nations said. The goal is to vaccinate 10 million children against the disease in Congo, formerly Zaire, which the United Nations says has the most intensive virus transmission in the world. A cease-fire deal was signed last month by six African governments involved in the fighting, though the main rebel group has yet to sign. (Reuters) ASIA SOUTH, NORTH KOREA: BODIES TO BE RETURNED North Korea agreed to accept the bodies of two North Korean flood victims that washed into the South during heavy floods last week, South Korea said. They were the first bodies of drowned citizens that the North has agreed to accept since 1996. The bodies of eight flood victims that washed into the South since then were cremated and buried in the South. Samuel Len (NYT) UZBEKISTAN: U.S. TEAM AT CHEMICAL ARMS BASE A team from the Pentagon arrived to study environmental damage to an area near a former Soviet chemical weapons plant. The Soviet Union carried out many tests with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Central Asia during the cold war, and the United States has assisted the impoverished region |
1129902_2 | Business Travel; United Airlines moves to all but eliminate the expiration date for its frequent-flier miles. | members must register and make the specified flights by Dec. 31, 1999. Also under the United program, all miles in a member's account for 1999 will be valid until Dec. 31, 2002, after which they will expire unless the member earns or redeems miles between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2002 Electronic Convenience Airlines may have done little in recent years to enhance passenger comfort, but they have made substantial improvements in some other aspects of the air travel experience. For example, code sharing and alliances, whatever their actual or potential drawbacks, have made it more convenient for passengers to buy one ticket for travel on two or more airlines, to check baggage through to their final, distant destination and to earn free tickets faster on the partner airlines. Now another air travel improvement will soon be in the works. I.B.M. and the International Air Transport Association are scheduled to announce today that they plan to develop a service linking the electronic ticketing systems of their 266 member airlines and other interested carriers. The service is expected to begin in the middle of next year and allow passengers to buy an electronic ticket on one carrier that will also be valid for other carriers' connecting flights. Bargain Fares Friday the 13th is a lucky day for bargain hunters. Most airlines have extended until this Friday their sale fares valid for travel this fall and winter. These are the fares that include an additional 10 percent discount if purchased through an airline's Web site. Friday is also the last day to purchase discount flights on Japan Airlines for travel beginning by Sept. 20 and ending no later than Dec. 16. For example, round-trip fares start at $648 for travel between Los Angeles or San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; $945 between Chicago and Beijing; $748 between New York and Taipei, Taiwan, and $798 between Las Vegas, Nev., and Singapore. Air New Zealand is offering more than 25 percent off round-trip fares this fall from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to New Zealand for tickets purchased by Friday. Those who buy tickets by Aug. 31 can fly round trip on Korean Air Lines to Hong Kong or Beijing from the West Coast from $600, or from New York, Chicago, Dallas and other cities from $700. Flights to Bangkok and Singapore start at $620. Travel must be completed by Sept. 30 |
1081437_7 | Tower of Romance, Tower of History | Department of Environmental Protection, the four years before the tower became the property of the state took a great toll. ''There was a lot of vandalism,'' he says. ''A lot of the furnishings were destroyed. To make the interior accessible to the public, the state also had to destroy part of the interior design of the tower as a private home. The elevator and a single staircase were taken out and replaced by a double staircase, to comply with fire safety codes. Unfortunately, the new staircase also required taking out the fireplaces on each level that contributed so much to the grandeur of the interior. In the middle of the 1980's, a nonprofit organization, the Friends of Heublein Tower, was created to help restore the tower and grounds for public use. The tower is open on weekends in the spring, starting in mid-April, then daily from June 1 through Labor Day, then going back to weekends until November. And the tower is well visited, even though it means a hike of about a mile and a quarter from a parking lot along Route 185 in Simsbury. The last yearly count of visitors was about 130,000, from 46 countries, says Kathryn Hoidge, a president of the Friends of Heublein Tower organization. When visitors start arriving in April this year, they will be in for a new treat: The tower, or at least the exterior, will be as it was in its golden years, topped off by a cupola. The original cupola disappeared sometime during World War II. Mrs. Hoidge says it is believed it was weakened by the hurricane of 1938 and then blown away during a windstorm a few years later. The Friends organization raised $100,000 to have a new aluminum and copper cupola made, using original architectural blueprints as a guide, and it was hoisted into position several weeks ago. In addition, the state has spent $458,000, to put a ventilating system in the tower, to restore the exterior and make it waterproof by using the same kind of roof tiles originally used (which had been replaced by asphalt shingles years ago). One day last week, Mrs. Hoidge and Edward Adagian, the other president of the Friends organization, looked up at the structure in all its new-old majesty. ''It's just a wonderful building,'' said Mr. Adagian. ''There's no building like it,'' said Mrs. Hoidge. Except, of course, in Germany. |
1081346_0 | Cruise Lines' Mantra: More, More | DURING the Persian Gulf war almost a decade ago, cruise lines hastily improvised alternative itineraries while moving their ships as fast and as far away from the war zone as possible. Within days, the Mediterranean was being referred to in cruising circles as the Dead Sea. But last month's bombing of Iraq by the United States and Britain created scarcely a ripple. This time most ships had already moved from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean for the start of the winter cruise season, and the sustained bombing of Iraq lasted only a few days. If peace prevails, a record number of cruise ships are expected in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in Europe this year, including the 2,600-passenger Grand Princess, the 2,000-passenger Norway, the recently lengthened 1,748-passenger Norwegian Dream and the 1,800-passenger Legend of the Seas. And if the economy cooperates, the industry is likely to achieve its 10th consecutive year of ever-increasing numbers of passengers. Indeed, even taking into account the recent stock market jitters, a recent forecast by cruise analysts at Bear, Stearns & Company estimates this year's passenger growth at 10 to 11 percent. If that turns out to be the case, that would put the number of passengers at about six million -- and within hailing distance of the seven million passengers in 2000 forecast by the Cruise Lines International Association. Still unclear is what effect the several setbacks last year will have on the industry this year. These included a fire aboard Carnival's Ecstasy last summer (in which there were no casualties), the Monarch of the Seas' striking a reef in St. Maarten harbor in mid-December and having to cancel 12 cruises (she is scheduled to resume sailing March 14) and postponement of the inaugural voyage of the Disney Wonder, Disney's second ship, from March to Aug. 15, toward the end of the traditional summer cruise season. (Delivery of the first Disney ship, the Disney Magic, was postponed twice last year, forcing cancellation of 40 cruises.) The industry was also shaken by two recent articles in The New York Times. The first, published in November, examined the growing concern about crime -- particularly allegations of sexual assaults by crew members -- aboard cruise ships, which operate largely outside the laws of any one country. The second, published early this month, detailed how Royal Caribbean knowingly broke the law by dumping oily waste into the ocean, then |
1081569_3 | The World; One Defense Against Quakes: Build Homes of Wood | and the area around Charleston, S.C. The competition to keep home costs low is clearly a reason, though some experts insist that quake-proofing adds only 5 percent or so to the cost of a newly built home. Richard Cardoza, director of architectural production at Kaufman and Broad, the largest homebuilder in the West, said that complying with the latest Los Angeles earthquake codes might add between $1 and $2.50 per square foot to the price of a home, which translates into an extra $2,000 to $4,500 to the cost of a typical new three-bedroom home of 2,000 square feet. Existing homes can also be retrofitted, at various costs. Some older masonry homes in Los Angeles have had steel rods put through them from wall to wall between stories. But simple and inexpensive steps like strapping the water heater to a wall can also make a big difference, Mr. Kim said. Still, even adherence to building codes is no guarantee. For one thing, the codes are generally designed to prevent loss of life by keeping buildings from collapsing. They are not meant to prevent all damage. Moreover, each earthquake seems to show that the existing code is inadequate. ''Each time we have an earthquake we learn more'' said Dr. Henyey. Building codes have been strengthened in light of the Northridge quake, which had a magnitude of 6.7. Mr. Reitherman said that of 10,193 buildings deemed unsafe to occupy after that quake, 91 percent were made of wood. TO be sure, most of the 25 deaths from building damage (there were 61 deaths overall) were at apartment buildings, particularly two- or three-story structures in which the first floor was used for parking. In such buildings, the bottom floor was not sturdy enough to support ones above once shaking began. But single family homes still suffered more damage than expected. The Institute for Business and Home Safety estimates the insurance industry has paid $15 billion in claims, far higher than it had foreseen. Mr. Reitherman's consortium recently embarked on a three-year, $6.9 million study, most of it financed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to find ways of designing safer wood-framed buildings without substantially raising the cost. Mr. Reitherman said that most wood-framed buildings are designed by architects rather than structural engineers. And tools for analyzing the forces on wood-framed structures are not very advanced. That is because good as wood might be |
1081351_5 | Cuba Draws the Curious, Despite the Law | and some seem to be falling apart. Lodging with a family and taking meals at ''paladares'' -- private restaurants in the owners' homes -- can offer higher quality at lower prices than hotels and bigger restaurants. And because of a thriving black market, it is possible to get Cuban cigars at bargain prices. (Almost every Cuban one encounters claims to know somebody at a cigar factory, but the product can be junk, and tourists are often warned to buy tobacco only at Government stores.) Before the Communist revolution, Americans made up the largest tourist bloc visiting Cuba. Now Canadians and Europeans have filled the void. Tourism, which the Government began building up in the 1990's, has steadily increased to 1.4 million visitors in 1998, according to officials of Cuba's Tourism Ministry. If an ambitious target of two million visitors by the year 2000 is reached, they said, Cuba will have nearly doubled its tourism since 1996. ''We're bringing more tourists and the tourism infrastructure is also growing,'' said Manuel Garcia-Crespo, a tourism spokesman. The infrastructure is key at this point for an industry that is still in its infancy but that has become the largest source of foreign currency for Cuba, contributing about $1.8 billion a year to the island's economy, officials said. To accommodate the two million visitors Cuba hopes to attract at the turn of the century, it needs to increase hotel rooms to 34,000 from the current 28,000, Mr. Garcia-Crespo said. Among the earliest and biggest private investors in Cuba's tourism industry is Spain's Sol Melia hotel chain, which co-owns with the Government four upscale hotels and manages several others; its investment on the island surpasses $55 million. Carlos Pereda-Navarro, general manager of Melia Las Americas in Varadero, considers Cuba an attractive investment because of Government support and the potential for growth. He said this more than compensates for such extra costs as having to import most goods. ''We're just beginning,'' said Mr. Pereda-Navarro, who has worked in Cuba for the past nine years. The potential would be even greater, he added, if Americans were free to travel to the island. Mr. Garcia-Crespo said American travel was up but still relatively negligible. Under regulations enforced by the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, travel to Cuba without a specific license is generally limited to Government officials and representatives of international organizations, journalists and those |
1081504_1 | M.B.A. Magic Is a Fiction | the work done.'' This isn't to say that going after your M.B.A. was a waste of time. ''We would clearly consider people who do not have market research experience,'' said Gary Newman, a human-resources manager at Information Resources Inc. in Chicago. Someone with an M.B.A. who has business savvy and experience in other disciplines can be an asset, he noted. ''In this labor market, you cannot just find the people who have the exact experience you want.'' Part of the problem, Mr. Newman said, may be your expectations. People who are moving into new disciplines ''are still going to have to pay their dues,'' he said. That may mean newcomers have to accept low starting salaries, particularly at small, highly competitive research firms. ''You have to be able to prove that you can produce,'' said Mr. Morton. ''You have to have a proven track record or be willing to come in at perhaps an entry-level salary.'' Once your foot is in the door, he added, you can show the company what you're really worth. ''If you can do the job, your salary can go up very quickly,'' he said. ''It's not unusual for someone to double their salary in two or three years.'' Another strategy is to consider a job with the client side of the industry -- the big companies that commission and buy market data from the research firms. These corporations tend to focus less on your track record, said Kevin Waters, research director at Cheskin Research in Redwood Shores, Calif. To maximize your appeal, Mr. Waters advised, ''focus on research-related jobs within the insurance industry or related fields -- finance, health care.'' This, he said, would let you ''leverage your degree and your previous work experience.'' Once you have experience buying and managing research data for a client firm, experts say, it should be easy to slide over into the supply side of the business. After that, Mr. Morton said, ''there are so many companies that are looking for good people that you can hopscotch from one to the other and quickly move up the ladder.'' Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. Each week, she responds to readers' questions about career and workplace issues. Send them by E-mail to working@nytimes.com or by mail to Working, Money & Business, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. WORKING Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. |
1081583_2 | Ideas & Trends; Probing Disease Clusters: Easier to Spot Than Prove | a chance occurrence. And chance is hard to ignore. Clusters will naturally appear even when events occur at random, said Dr. Persi Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University. ''There was a famous example of this when bombs were hitting London during World War II,'' he said. ''People were sure they were targeting individual places and they made up the most elaborate scenarios'' to explain how the bomb targets were selected. But in the end, when the pattern was analyzed, the bombing turned out to be random. ANOTHER problem is how to draw the boundaries of a cluster. Dr. James Robins, a statistician at Harvard University's School of Public Health, said it is a natural tendency to draw boundaries around groups of events to make clusters happen. If there are three children with cancer on a single block, you may draw your circle around the block -- making that a cluster -- rather than around the town as a whole, which may show no cluster. Say you do find a cluster. Unless you identify, say, black lung or mesothelioma, statisticians say, the next question is: How can you decide if the cluster was caused by blind random clumpings of cases, with no environmental cause, or by a toxin in the environment? Why would only one town have a disease cluster, some experts ask, while other places with the same pollutants in the air or water do not? One possibility might be an unidentified chemical in a mix of pollutants that is unique to the town. But that, of course, raises questions of how to find it. Finally, there is the indirect exposure problem. If there is no direct link between chemicals and a disease, the tendency is to look for other exposures. Could the fathers, for example, have had their sperm affected when they were growing up? Or could the mothers have been exposed to chemicals during pregnancy? Some statisticians say that if people look hard enough and slice the data enough ways and an association will emerge. What it means is another question. Others are optimistic. Suzanne Condon, the director of the bureau of environmental health assessment at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said that in an unpublished study her department found that in the Woburn case, women who drank water from certain wells when they were pregnant were more likely to have children who developed leukemia. ''We believe |
1081571_2 | Editorial Observer; Brazil's Economy: Moscow on the Amazon? | hidden in that apparent success. The President put off many badly needed reforms. Brazil's public sector is bloated, with too many well-paid employees doing too little, while there remains great poverty in some areas. The Government's debt grew and the real became overvalued. Then the world changed. Foreign investors, burned in Asia and Russia, began to flee. Efforts to get Brazil's fiscal house in order -- efforts that would have been hailed a year earlier -- seemed to be too little too late and met political resistance. At first, Brazil -- its coffers filled by what was supposed to be a reassuring bailout by the International Monetary Fund -- tried to brazen it out without devaluing the real. When that failed, it tried a little devaluation, then a bigger one. It said it would let markets fix the value of the currency, but then intervened. It pushed interest rates to the sky and then balked at paying such rates. The real is down 41 percent. The Government and I.M.F. now face the difficult task of trying to figure out what to do next. There are no guarantees that even serious fiscal reform will bring investors back. But it is clear what has not worked. High interest rates are like some drugs: In moderate doses, they can cure, but huge doses kill. The country must get rates down. If that leads to a further fall in the real, so be it. That will hurt those who rely on imported goods. But it will also make Brazil's exports more competitive. In fact, it might be that the real, which now appears undervalued, would not fall very far, or at least not for very long. Capital is fleeing because investors fear the Government will default. But many Brazilian stocks have held their international value, as some investors bet those companies will prosper when things calm down. Unlike in Russia, the Brazilian banking system is reasonably strong. And unlike in Asia, most corporations are not burdened by foreign currency debt they will be unable to pay after devaluation. International aid will be needed, both to offset the damage to the poorest Brazilians and to help some companies that will be in deep trouble as a result of the local recession and the currency devaluation. The priority now should be to keep the money available for those needs -- not for propping up the currency. |
1081584_1 | The Nation: Reprising Zero Tolerance; History Shows That Tough Talk Is Cheap | caught with small amounts of drugs, regardless of whether they were the owners. But within 18 months, the program had been revised three times, evolving into a relatively lenient approach in which people were cited and released without any confiscation of their property. (Federal agents still use forfeiture laws, but mostly against large-scale drug dealers and money launderers.) It was a chaotic time, Mr. Weart recalled. ''The simplest incident could evolve into something very serious,'' he said. One incident involved a college student who had driven his father's Ferrari to a party in Mexico, he recalled. Trying to reenter the United States, the student realized that the small amount of marijuana in the car might be enough to get it seized. So he tried to evade inspectors by roaring through the Customs entry lanes. ''It matured into something very serious,'' Mr. Weart said, including charges of marijuana possession and endangering a Federal agent. When applied to boats, the policy seemed to exaggerate the disparity between the seriousness of the crime and the severity of the punishment. Within weeks of the introduction of the policy, authorities had seized the Ark Royal, a $2.5 million yacht, after finding less than one-tenth of an ounce of marijuana on board. NOT long afterward, Federal agents confiscated the country's premier research vessel, the Atlantis II, owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, because a tiny amount of marijuana had been found in a crew member's shaving kit. The boat was not formally returned to Woods Hole for two months. And a multi-million-dollar vessel owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California was seized after dogs found a small amount of marijuana hidden in the berth of a low-ranking crew member. Those and other high-profile seizures brought as much attention to zero tolerance as criticism. But notwithstanding the problems, Mr. Weart said, the program sent a strong message. It pleased criminal justice conservatives, but enraged scores of motorists and boat owners -- not to mention civil libertarians -- who made the same criticisms that are now being raised about New York's drunk-driver policy. They complained that such Draconian steps entangle law-enforcement and court personnel in time-consuming wrangles when they could be better deployed elsewhere. Since the nation's earliest years, Federal authorities have used forfeiture laws to seize the property of people who violated Customs and tax laws, said Sandra Guerra, a professor at the University |
1081555_0 | Rocky Path To Market For Edible Foe Of Cholesterol | TT had all the makings of a fairy tale. A small company in an obscure corner of Finland discovered a natural substance that can lower cholesterol levels. The company devised and patented ways to extract it from wood pulp, make it flavorless and dissolve it in food. A new margarine made with the magic ingredient was an instant, runaway hit. But then the Cinderella company bumped up against a slow-moving American partner and a stubborn Food and Drug Administration, a combination that may have cost it a chance to profit happily ever after beyond its home market. The sky seemed to be the limit for Raisio Group in 1995, when its Benecol margarine was introduced in Finland. The cholesterol-fighting properties of the magic ingredient, stanol ester, promised to transform the quiet maker of margarines, french fries and flour into a food processing powerhouse. Plans were made for worldwide marketing of Benecol and stanol ester, which could also be used in ice cream, hamburgers, cookies, pasta and a host of other foods. Rather than trying to crack foreign markets with its own limited resources, Raisio signed a deal last year with the McNeil Consumer Products division of Johnson & Johnson to market Benecol outside Finland. The idea was to enlist McNeil's worldwide marketing muscle, freeing Raisio to concentrate on a crash program to build new plants in Finland, France and South Carolina to keep up with sharply climbing demand. Enthusiastic investors bid Raisio's stock up from $1.21 in early 1996 to $20.63 last May, adjusted for a 10-for-1 split last year. But the deal with McNeil has cost Raisio precious time. McNeil has done little with the marketing rights it owns in Europe, where Raisio could have moved ahead without a partner. Meanwhile, in the United States, McNeil pondered whether to market Benecol as a conventional food or as a dietary supplement. As a food, it could go on sale quickly, but with no health claims allowed. As a supplement, Benecol could trumpet its main selling point, the cholesterol effect, in ads, but only after a longer and more rigorous review by the F.D.A. McNeil eventually chose the latter, but it failed to win approval and wound up settling last week for what it could have had last year: approval as a food. Disappointed investors hammered Raisio's stock, which closed at $7.98 in Helsinki on Friday. ''Let us say we've had |
1074234_3 | Paths of Bears and People Increasingly Crossing | bears,'' especially since hunting would take place just before hibernation, when the animals have grown thick coats and layers of fat. Even as wildlife officials report increasing complaints from lakeside communities like this one, a survey cited in its bear management plan found this vicinity to be overwhelmingly hospitable to bears. Of 300 residents in northern Sussex and Passaic Counties, just 28 said the local bear population should be reduced and 15 favored a hunt. When asked if they had had ''encounters'' with bears, 217 said yes, and of those, 185 said the experience was positive. At Ariane's Restaurant here, the owner, Steve Imbarrato, said bear sightings in the area had become common only in the last four or five years. ''I think they're cool,'' he said. ''People who want to hunt bear -- that mystifies me. Well, a lot of people will shoot Bambi, too.'' Theodore Muller, a semiretired carpenter and handyman who had stopped for coffee, said he heard recently about a bear breaking into a house and polishing off fresh-baked pies. But when asked if he could support a hunt, Mr. Muller, who moved here in 1947, said, ''Oh, I hate to see anything get killed.'' This sentiment is persuasive to the Commissioner of Environmental Protection, Robert C. Shinn Jr. When the fish and game division proposed the hunt in its bear-management report in 1997, Mr. Shinn responded with a letter saying that that was ''not the department's plan.'' ''I didn't think we had exhausted other solutions,'' Mr. Shinn said in an interview. In the department's subsequent hearings on the issue, he said, the public was ''very significantly'' against hunting. ''I'm not closed to a hunt,'' he said in an interview, ''but I think it has to be a last resort.'' Animal-rights advocates would rather limit development than bears. ''They don't overpopulate,'' said Angi Metler, director of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance. ''We do.'' Since bear hunting was prohibited in 1971, the bear and human populations have burgeoned in the same places: Sussex, Warren, Passaic and Morris Counties. The wildlife agency projects that by 2006 the state's bear population will exceed 900 -- a number that it says can be supported by the environment but not by human neighbors. The agency places the ideal bear population at about 300. Mr. Eriksen said bear country had already spread south from Interstate 80 to Interstate 78. One bear |
1074387_1 | SOVEREIGN ISLANDS: A special report.; Gaps in Sea Laws Shield Pollution by Cruise Lines | incident occurred even though the company knew it remained under Federal investigation for other discharge incidents. An examination of the criminal investigation, plus new details about the latest incident, shows how difficult it is for authorities to police the booming cruise industry as it launches ever larger ships, and how determined the industry is to make itself exempt from American regulation. The review offers strong evidence that the dumping of oil and other wastes by cruise ships, which can create lasting pollution problems in oceans and coastal areas, is more common than previously known. And it reveals an influential industry that has assembled an international lobbying force to plead its case. Royal Caribbean's included two former United States Attorneys General, Elliot L. Richardson and Benjamin R. Civiletti. In defending itself, Royal Caribbean, a Liberian corporation with its headquarters in Miami, made what the Justice Department described as an unprecedented claim: that a private company doing business in the United States was immune from criminal prosecution because its ships fly foreign flags. All major cruise ship owners -- including Disney, which launched its first ship, the 2,200-passenger Magic, last summer -- sail their ships under foreign flags. By registering with so-called flag countries in exchange for substantial fees, the owners avoid American corporate taxes and can pay lower wages to foreign crews. Financial documents show that Royal Caribbean saves approximately $30 million a year in United States taxes by registering its ships in Norway and Liberia. Critics say the savings come at the price of muddied jurisdiction and lax enforcement by the flag countries, one of the most prominent of which, Liberia, has been devastated by ethnic warfare and divided government most of the last decade. One Federal study found that foreign countries took action in only 2 of 111 dumping cases referred to them by the United States. Generally, flag countries have jurisdiction over ships in international waters and the United States asserts jurisdiction in its territorial waters. These questions are raised just as concern is deepening that the industry's explosive growth is posing new threats to the environment, from the popular Caribbean to the pristine coastline of Alaska. Royal Caribbean officials said the company had instituted tough new environmental compliance procedures. But the company did not succeed in having the case against it closed with its guilty plea. Instead, the company's discharge practices remain under investigation by Federal grand |
1074033_0 | In Toulouse, a Blast From Past and Present | TOULOUSE, the city of ancient pink-brick churches and stately homes on the Garonne River in southwestern France, may be noted for foie gras, but it is just as proud to be the aerospace capital of Europe. The first regularly scheduled airline flights in France took off from the Toulouse airport in the 1920's, and now long-range passenger planes of the Airbus consortium, Boeing's most important rivals in world markets, are assembled in a vast hangar in the suburb of Colomiers; the National Center for Space Research has been centered in Toulouse for 30 years. When the Mayor, Dominique Baudis, launched an air and space museum, La Cite de l'Espace, which opened on the eastern outskirts of the city in mid-1997, he hoped it would attract 160,000 people in its first year. ''We wanted a place where the general public could come to learn what space exploration was all about, and how it's done,'' said Jean-Noel Plachez, who worked with the Mayor and conceived the museum's exhibits, overseeing their design and construction in a bit more than three years. Space City succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In its first 18 months, nearly half a million visitors have flocked to see it, spending an average of five and a half hours a visit, lingering over scores of interactive computer displays that let you find out what it's like to program the launch of a satellite into orbit, how satellites are maneuvered in space, and how they send the information they gather back to Earth. Mechanical displays give a realistic sense of how difficult it must be to close a valve on a space station in conditions of weightlessness, or how easy to lose a satellite in space by putting on a burst of speed at the wrong point during a launch. Life-size structural models abound, both inside, where a huge Soho solar observation satellite hangs in midair, and in the grounds outside, you can walk through part of the Mir orbital station built by the Russians. The dials and controls look curiously like something you might put together from a kit in your basement, not high-tech at all. As Mir is replaced in space by the new international space station whose first two stages have now been assembled, the museum will develop exhibits on that, too. ''The idea behind the museum is that people will come out of here a little more |
1074043_4 | Hello, HAL | present and future. This is a book for computer enthusiasts, science fiction writers in search of cutting-edge themes and anyone who wonders where human technology is going next. But the question must be asked: How seriously are we to take all this breathless compuhype? Will the 21st century really see machines acquire mentality? There is naturally a lot of talk in these books about the possibility of machines duplicating the operations of the human mind. But it is vital to distinguish two questions, which are often run together by our authors: Can machines duplicate the external intelligent behavior of humans? And can machines duplicate the inner subjective experience of people? Call these the questions of outside and inside duplication. What is known as the Turing test says in effect that if a machine can mimic the outside of a human then it has thereby replicated the inside: if it behaves like a human with a mind, it has a mind. All three authors are partial to the Turing test, thus equating the simulation of external manifestations of mind with the reality of mind itself. However, the Turing test is seriously flawed as a criterion of mentality. First, it is just an application of the doctrine of behaviorism, the view that minds reduce to bodily motions; and behaviorism has long since been abandoned, even by psychologists. Behavior is just the evidence for mind in others, not its very nature. This is why you can act as if you are in pain and not really be in pain -- you are just pretending. Second, there is the kind of problem highlighted by the philosopher John Searle in his ''Chinese Room'' argument: computer programs work merely by the manipulation of symbols without any reference to what these symbols might mean, so that it would be possible for a human to follow such a program for a language he has no understanding of. The computer is like my manipulating sentences of Chinese according to formal rules and yet having no understanding of the Chinese language. It follows that mimicking the externals of human understanding by means of a symbol-crunching computer program is not devising a machine that itself understands. None of our authors even so much as consider this well-known and actually quite devastating argument. Third, to know whether we can construct a machine that is conscious we need to know what makes us |
1074343_0 | Word for Word/Help-Wanted Ads; If You're Tired of the Same Old Grind, It's Time to Bone Up on Your Pushtu | WHAT better moment than the dawn of a new year to start scanning the horizon for a new job, a new career, a new life? Sooner or later nearly everybody fantasizes about a fresh beginning. Even the smartest and most accomplished -- executives and academics, government ministers and department heads -- must occasionally find themselves wondering what color their parachutes are. It may be hard to picture the power elite in their pajamas, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a pencil, ready to circle the want ads and massage the resume before taking it down to Kinko's to be photocopied on vellum stock. But it must happen, if the following job postings in recent issues of The Economist are any guide. Why The Economist? With offices in 19 cities around the world, and its focus on the what's-really-important -- politics and money -- the magazine is what every plugged-in global villager is reading. If you were looking to hire a weapons of mass destruction research fellow, where else would you advertise? For many ads the requirements are -- to put it mildly -- obscure, with the pool of ideal candidates on the planet probably totaling, oh, seven people. The jobs are real, though, demonstrating that even globe-trotting wonks and power brokers scan the want ads, and that the most prestigious-sounding positions can somehow go begging for applicants. The ads suggest strongly, too, that after ants, bureaucrats rule the Earth. LAWRENCE DOWNES Job title: Economic growth adviser for Mongolia Duties: Helping the United States Agency for International Development to promote the Mongolian Government's ''economic reform agenda.'' Pay: mid-$50,000 to mid-$60,000. Qualifications: At least five years experience managing programs in macroeconomic policy, privatization, trade and investment, economic growth or private sector development. ''Previous work experience in Mongolia or in the former Soviet Union and knowledge of Mongolian language are desirable.'' Job title: Dean, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Duties: Overseeing the standing faculty of nearly 200, associated faculty of 65, 11 academic departments and 18 research centers. Also oversees the school's degree programs. Pay: unspecified. Qualifications: ''The dean should have a record of distinguished scholarship and professional achievement; significant academic leadership or executive management experience is required.'' Job title: System expansion planner, Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority Duties: Updating Abu Dhabi's master plan for electricity and water, which analyzes past and projected demand for |
1075720_0 | Unanswered Questions in a Fatal Police Shooting | The last hour of Tyisha Miller's young life in this ''all-American city'' began with a flat tire and a stranger's act of kindness in the early morning darkness three days after Christmas. It ended in a burst of police bullets, Ms. Miller's death and a blizzard of unanswered questions, not only about what happened and why, but also about race and justice. Protesters have marched, police officers have been put on leave, much of the city is shaken and so far the investigation has mainly led to more questions. One development this week was a new, detailed account of the events leading up to the shooting, provided by a lawyer for Ms. Miller's family, based on the accounts of a friend who was with Ms. Miller that night and of a cousin who witnessed the shooting from about 40 feet away. The police have not been able to interview the friend, leading to frustration and perhaps some skepticism. The account also does not explain perhaps the most important factor leading to the police shooting -- a gun in Ms. Miller's lap. On Dec. 28, shortly before 1 A.M., Ms. Miller, a 19-year-old black woman, was driving her aunt's Nissan Sentra home with a 15-year-old friend when a tire went flat, said the lawyer, Andrew I. Roth. Ms. Miller had spent the day partying and shopping with several girlfriends. They went to a mall, a Taco Bell and an amusement park. Earlier in the day, said Susan Taylor, the mother of one of the girls, they also did some drinking. Initial toxicology tests made public by the Riverside County Coroner put Ms. Miller's blood-alcohol level at 0.13 percent. The legal limit for driving in California is 0.08 percent. ''Tyisha was at my house 45 minutes before she died,'' Mrs. Taylor said, ''and the kids admitted that they had been doing some drinking early in the day. But I didn't see any alcohol or smell any alcohol on her breath. When she left here she was not drunk.'' When the tire went flat, neither Ms. Miller nor her passenger, a girl whom Ms. Miller's family will identify only by her nickname, Bug, was able to fix it, so they asked a white man coming out of a store for help. Although the man was a stranger, Mr. Roth said, he rolled up his sleeves and changed the tire. But the spare was |
1075648_2 | Very Espresso Philosophy | Roy distributed a sheet with quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, Plato, Aristotle and Mo-Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, along with Hammacher Schlemmer catalogues and a recipe for Omelette Louis XV for 12 (24 ortolans, 18 pheasant eggs, 6 whole black truffles . . .) No one quite agreed on what excess is, but the discussion careered along nonetheless. Are the virtues of the mind inherently loftier than the virtues of the body? Is a consensual communal orgy valuable excess, or is it inherently laden with dark gender issues? Is Elvis Presley serious art? Can Dvorak compare to Mozart? Most of the thought played out on the comfortable axis of acceptable New York liberalism, with a fur-clad veteran of a Tibetan monastery setting much of the tone for the discussion with denunciations of capitalism, consumerism and particularly the herd instincts that drive people to sports events -- ''circuses,'' she shuddered, ''where people think they're having a good time, but are they really having a good time or are they just salivating when they're told to salivate?'' Her foil turned out to be Jason L. Smilovic, a 24-year-old networking consultant who was favorably disposed toward football, Bruce Willis's life style and other heresies so extreme that one woman began looking at him as if he were a yak with two heads. ''Where did you go to school?'' she asked at one point. ''These arguments are so -- I can't even think of the word. You are such an apologist for the status quo, it's unbelievable.'' After a few minutes of further squabbling, others objected to the ad hominem turn of the discussion, and it drifted back toward broader questions about excess, consumer culture, elevator music and Nietzsche, who led Herbert Marcuse, John Stuart Mill and Aristotle by far as the most frequently cited philosopher. Things ended with relative comity, though Mr. Smilovic, a first-time philosophe, still felt a bit beleaguered. ''I thought some people had fair and just opinions and other people were just immersed in elitist snobbery,'' he said. Still, most of the participants found the session a good one overall and the excesses par for the course. ''It's just one of the hazards of the business,'' said Will Fisk, the bioethicist. Even Mr. Smilovic seemed to think so. He figures he'll be back again, perhaps on Jan. 21 for the next session, on ''The Selfishness or Unselfishness of Sympathy.'' THINK TANK |
1080746_0 | The Cordless Options | Cordless phones act as small radios, sending signals between the handset and the receiver. For many years, cordless phones operated on frequencies around 49 megahertz in the radio spectrum. When that part of the spectrum grew crowded, manufacturers began making phones that send signals at 900 MHz, a less congested frequency. Cordless phones can also be analog or digital. The difference isn't in what part of the radio spectrum they use -- it is in how the sound information is packaged for transmission. Here are the cordless options: ANALOG -- Analog cordless phones are what most people have at home; they are the most basic and least expensive cordless phones on the market. Most operate around 49 MHz, but 900-MHz analog phones are gaining. Prices are dropping steeply. You can buy a 900-MHz analog cordless phone for as little as $30. Analog phones translate sound waves into radio waves and back again, which does not require computer chips. But they are susceptible to electronic interference and eavesdropping from radio scanners. But if you intend to use your phone 100 to 200 feet away from the base and security is not a big concern, then a 49-MHz analog phone should be fine, said Eldon Chuck, a product manager at Thomson Consumer Electronics. DIGITAL -- Digital cordless phones convert the sound going to and from the handset into a stream of digital signals; they are reconverted into analog signals before they are sent down the phone line. The additional circuitry makes digital phones more expensive. But they are more secure than analog phones. Digital cordless phones, which operate at 900 MHz, are not very popular because they cost more than analog phones but offer few advantages. DIGITAL SPREAD SPECTRUM -- These phones are another matter entirely -- and the most expensive cordless phones on the market. If privacy or long range is important to you, you should consider buying a 900-MHz digital spread-spectrum phone. Digital spread-spectrum phones provide extra security because once the sound information is converted into digital signals, the signals are sent over a wide range of frequencies and jump from one frequency to another, making eavesdropping virtually impossible. A spread-spectrum phone can cost as little as $79, but the average price is closer to $100. The new 2.4-gigahertz phones are all spread spectrum. Spread-spectrum phones are best for people who live in cities. The phone's added power expands its |
1080886_2 | As On-Line Trading Increases, So Do Complaints | are generic to all investing. The majority of them can be addressed through better education and investors insuring that they have done their homework.'' By the end of this year, 10 million brokerage accounts are expected to be able to trade on the Internet, nearly twice the number now. The stunning growth of on-line trading has already transformed Wall Street, sharply cutting commission costs, increasing the speed of trading and making stock trading more accessible than ever before. But like the proliferation of sport utility vehicles, the explosion of on-line trading has prompted a certain complacency that can be dangerous. The flood of complaints hitting both the securities firms and regulatory agencies comes in large part from angry investors who had mistakenly thought that the ability to trade almost instantaneously through their PC's put them on an equal footing with seasoned Wall Street traders. Yet in part the problems being encountered demonstrate that technological advances in PC's and the Internet trail the advances made at the stock exchanges. For example, the stock price that consumers see on their screens may bear no resemblance to the actual real-time price at the exchange -- particularly when the stock is volatile or during periods of heavy volume. Those lags have become common with hot new Internet issues, whose prices can soar or plummet in a matter of seconds. Mr. Levitt said in an interview today that some problems were rooted in investor misunderstandings about the new technology. Other problems have been caused by the growing number of neophyte traders, many caught in the speculative fever of recent months. Through the new technology they are able to buy and sell in an instant, without any understanding of the risks associated with such highfliers. The more than 100 brokerage companies now on the Internet have taken different approaches to resolving client complaints. In certain circumstances some companies have been willing to undo the trades, but standards vary greatly from firm to firm and are highly dependent upon the specific circumstances -- and status of the client. And the wave of filings at the regulatory agencies demonstrates that in many cases the companies are not reimbursing customers. Instead, to reduce the problems and also try to insulate themselves from possible liability, many brokerage firms post warnings about trading problems on their World Wide Web sites that may be caused by stock volatility and high volume. Those |
1080859_2 | No Currency Devaluation, China Reiterates | money exchanges have been eliminated.'' He said as well that many of China's trust and investment companies would be reorganized. These financial institutions have been blamed for fueling wild speculation in stock and property markets, often creating liabilities that far outweigh assets. Yet Mr. Dai was vague about plans, described by other bankers in recent weeks, to reduce the number of trust and investment companies to about 40 from 240. ''Some will be preserved; some will be merged,'' he said. ''The restructuring will be based on commercial principles.'' International bankers were recently surprised by bankruptcy proceedings against the Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation, or Gitic, where local officials said loans might not be repaid at all. Gitic was shut down in October with $4.3 billion in debts and assets of $2.6 billion, and the Government placed the company in bankruptcy earlier this month. The move put foreign banks at the end of a long line of creditors seeking repayment. Yet Mr. Dai said Beijing would like to see Gitic reorganize its debts rather than face its creditors in court. ''If they can, through negotiation, agree on a restructuring scheme, the central bank would be very glad to see that,'' he said. He added that creditor claims would be decided by the Guangdong Supreme Court, though in China most courts take advice from Beijing on important cases. But it was Mr. Dai's comments about China's currency that drew the most attention from traders and analysts in markets around the world. Only when China faces a large international payments deficit, Mr. Dai said, would the authorities be forced to consider a devaluation. China currently runs a healthy balance of payments, even though exports are faltering and foreign investment is slowing. The trade surplus last year reached a record $43.6 billion, while foreign-exchange reserves are still at a robust $145 billion. Mr. Dai said a devaluation would hurt foreign investment, increase the country's foreign debt burden and cause instability in other Asian financial markets. He also reaffirmed Beijing's support for the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the United States dollar. Surveying China's larger economic situation, Mr. Dai said that the economy was likely to grow around 7 percent this year. In 1998, the economy grew by 7.8 percent. China's consumer price index, he predicted, would increase by 4 to 5 percent this year. The index fell eight-tenths of a percent last year. |
1080754_5 | Lost in Cyberspace: How to Hold On to Your Address | with several students with the same name. * Check out the various E-mail services on the Web. All of them promise free E-mail and forwarding. Of course, promises aren't necessarily permanent in an ever-shifting corporate world. Hotmail, Yahoo, Geocities, Bigfoot and Netscape are just some of the more stable Web-based E-mail sites. Providing the service is relatively inexpensive for them, and the companies can often make money selling advertisements that they show you when you read your mail. * The best solution is to gain control of your own domain name. Steven King, a programmer, is another former Digital Express customer who also must worry about disappearing on the Web among the many references to the writer of the same name. He told me he doesn't worry as much about his E-mail because he now largely uses an address tied to a domain name he controls. Still, he had been having all his mail forwarded to his Digex address. ''Now I have to look for a new dial-up provider,'' he said. ''It's going to cost me about $300.'' Many people own the domain associated with their last name. Ralph Merkle, a cryptographer and nanotechnologist, controls merkle.com. Pete Loshin, an author and former Byte magazine editor, controls loshin.com. Unfortunately for me, wayner .com is already owned by someone else. Moreover, this solution is not inexpensive. Network Solutions, the company that controls the registration of domain names ending in .com or .org, charges $70 for two years of service. Other countries around the world are running competing services. And once you own the domain name, you must arrange for some computer to answer all requests for that domain. There are already many companies offering what is known as domain hosting for fees that range from $5 to $50 a month. Most of these plans are aimed at companies that need a place for their Web site, but they usually include E-mail as part of the package. The fees are often determined more by how many people visit your Web site than by how many E-mail messages you get. Since I already control a few domain names, I have moved my E-mail address to one of them, flyzone.com, which I created after signing up with Digex, and I have also registered a name at Bigfoot. Assuming no major changes are afoot for the domain system, you can reach me at pcw@flyzone.com. I hope. |
1079183_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE ITALY: POLITICAL SHAKE-UP AVERTED -- A new political shake-up was averted after a key member of the ruling center-left coalition failed to withdraw his party's support. Francesco Cossiga had urged his centrist colleagues in government to resign, but Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, left, dissuaded them. ''The Government is working well and cannot be exposed to these continuous tensions,'' he said. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) BRITAIN: PINOCHET CASE CONTINUES -- The Law Lords, Britain's highest court, were told that England's State Immunity Act did not protect Gen. Augusto Pinochet from arrest because the crimes against humanity with which he is charged cannot be considered the functional acts of a head of state. The argument was made by Ian Brownlie on behalf of Amnesty International on the fourth day of a rehearing of the former Chilean dictator's plea to be freed from house arrest and permitted to return home. Warren Hoge (NYT) FRANCE: A WARNING TO GERMANY -- Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said France would demand damages from Germany if Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's new Government went ahead with plans to cancel contracts with a state-run French company, Cogema, for reprocessing waste from German nuclear reactors. Cogema has estimated the possible losses at $5.3 billion over 10 years if Germany goes ahead with plans to close all its nuclear power plants. Craig R. Whitney (NYT) FRANCE: AWARD TO SATIRICAL WEEKLY -- The European Court of Human Rights told France to pay the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine more than $12,000 in damages and legal costs for violating its right to free speech. French courts fined the Parisian weekly $1,200 in 1993 for publishing the tax forms of Peugeot's president, Jacques Calvet, during a strike for higher wages, revealing that his salary had increased by 50 percent over a two-year period. (NYT) GERMANY: U.S. EMBASSY SNAG -- A dispute over rerouting two streets running past the planned United States Embassy in Berlin could further delay its construction. The United States requires a minimum distance of 100 yards between the embassy and the street to protect it from car bombs. The Berlin traffic authority said accommodating such demands would mean cutting into the city's Tiergarten park as well as land set aside for a planned Holocaust Memorial. (NYT) RUSSIA: NEW DRIVE ON CORRUPTION -- Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov began a new crusade against corruption, saying it threatened Russia's economic foundations. Mr. Primakov said the |
1079222_0 | Forest Workers Protest Logging | Hundreds of United States Forest Service employees have signed an E-mail petition calling for strict limits on logging in the pristine back country of the national forests. The petition comes just as the chief of the service, Michael P. Dombeck, a Clinton Administration appointee, is nearing a decision on a hotly debated new approach governing forests where there are no roads for logging. The policy is expected to make millions of acres of roadless areas off-limits to logging trucks, to close some existing roads and to otherwise restrict logging on some environmentally sensitive lands. But environmental advocates have argued that the Administration's proposals do not go far enough. The petition supporting stricter limits was circulated this month by the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, a private group that is often critical of official forestry policies. Some agency supervisors warned employees that they risked disciplinary action if they used Government computers or E-mail accounts to sign the petition. But this week Mr. Dombeck wrote to all the employees to say they had broken no rules. ''I support the open and frank exchange of views and ideas and truly appreciate hearing what my employees have to say about these and all other Forest Service issues and proposals,'' Mr. Dombeck wrote. The petitioners said they were ''deeply concerned about road management and the protection of unroaded areas.'' Andy Stahl, the executive director of the employees group, said more than 500 employees had signed so far. The employee group programmed its computers to prowl the agency's Web sites and find the E-mail addresses of 27,000 service employees, to whom the petition was sent. Supervisors in the Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot National Forests, both in Washington State, the Lolo National Forest in Montana and the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, among others, had warned employees that they were forbidden to use Government E-mail for such purposes and that they could be punished for doing so. |
1075922_6 | The Empty Net; A Strong Back and a Long Memory Won't Help a Bayman if the Fish, and the Freedom to Haul Them In, Grow Scarce | gotta take a nap,'' he told the young feller, who bundled him in a tarp. He left the wheel to the greenhorn and it was dark and the boat was lost and the old man was in a deep sleep. The young man grew afraid. He was a long way from the shores of Ireland. He considered grounding the tri-hull. He thought about what his friend had said: ''Boy, this is gonna be it, the last one.'' He thought perhaps that Milt had come out to die. ''Get up, old guy! Get up!'' he shouted from the wheelhouse. The old guy rose in a half-slumber, guided his boat to shore and tied her to a cleat. He did it all as if he were sleepwalking. The sky was very dark and purple. The young feller drove home, made the old man a cup of tea and put him to bed. The next evening, the men ate chicken for dinner. When Fish Were Many And Regulations Few A bayman or inshore fisherman may concern himself with clamming or oystering, net-fishing, trapping, duck hunting or setting pots for crab and lobster. He may do one of these or he may do all, but a full-time bayman does it year round. The water is his exclusive source of business. The offshore fishermen run in larger boats, usually 60 foot or better, and drag the ocean bottom year-round, mostly for dogfish, whiting and squid. Because the boats are more expensive and the fuel costs higher, these people must constantly work their rigs, from five days to a month straight, regardless of weather or tide. They do not fish inshore and cannot be thought of as baymen, but many baymen hire on as hands on these boats. What's more, they have a common enemy: the government. The regulations -- Federal, state and town -- are complex and fishermen complain that when jurisdictions overlap, they are expected to follow the more stringent guidelines, making it all the tougher to keep a business afloat. For instance, New York is allocated a certain tonnage of commercial fluke a year (780,000 pounds this year). There are perhaps 480 commercial fluke permits in New York, and the quota may change from 200 pounds of fluke a day to 70 pounds to none when the quota is met. And the net mesh must have five-inch gaps. ''That's like putting a hose |
1076175_0 | January 3-9; A Tiny Opening to Cuba With Little Political Risk | The Clinton Administration took steps to allow more American money, airplanes, food and mail flow into Cuba, with an eye toward the day when Fidel Castro no longer rules the isolated island. But the White House, which is wary of the political power of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans, rejected calls for creating a national commission that would study the 37-year-old American economic embargo that has stifled Cuba's economy. TIM WEINER |
1077660_0 | BOOKS IN BRIEF: NONFICTION | THINKING WITH HISTORY Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. By Carl E. Schorske. Princeton University, $24.95. Carl E. Schorske examines why he thinks we have abandoned history; why, in this modern world, we think without history. For Schorske, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, the decisive moment came in the 19th century when economic and political changes proved so profound that the past appeared increasingly irrelevant. One group of thinkers sought to restore the importance of history by reforming modernity. Men like Coleridge and Disraeli adopted a nostalgic historicism, a deep longing to return to a golden age of social justice and harmony. But in a clever analysis, Schorske illustrates how their own sensibilities were shaped by modern reality; ironically, their defense of the past belies how unbridgeable the gap between past and present had become. Thus, their historicism was as useless as the medieval finery adorning Victorian Gothic railway stations. In contrast, modernists sought to wrest consciousness away from history, the outmoded categories now impediments to the rich possibilities created in the present. But they paid a price for their originality -- they missed the coherence that a sense of history brings to reality. Schorske, whose books include ''Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture,'' illustrates the efforts of modernist pioneers like Mahler and Freud to find new categories of meaning, new foundations for thought. They, too, met with disappointment; Schorske ends this subtle, important book with an examination of Freud's reliance on the culture of ancient Egypt. Even his retreat to within, the most successful response to this new quest for meaning, required a grounding in history. Douglas A. Sylva |
1077706_5 | Smoldering Emotion Kindled by Motion | choreographer. It sounds pretentious, but I kept a diary, noting down what I would put into future ballets.'' Although virtually all choreographers have been dancers, Mr. Eifman had performed only as a student and started choreographing for a group he formed at 15. In 1966, he entered the newly formed choreography department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Even before graduation in 1972, Mr. Eifman had opportunities to choreograph for television, ice shows and even Kirov ballerinas like Natalia Makarova. ''She called me a boy, so I grew a beard and have kept it since,'' Mr. Eifman said. From 1970 to 1977, he was the official choreographer of the Vaganova Academy, the Kirov school. ''If you did what you were assigned, you were looked upon with favor,'' Mr. Eifman said. In 1979, two years after forming his company as an adjunct of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Mr. Eifman used Western rock music (then under attack) and expressed freely what he calls contemporary male-female relationships. Anthony Austin, a correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow, wrote of Mr. Eifman's success, although Mr. Austin noted that the authorities had just clamped down on writers in the ''Metropol'' affair, an attempt to publish an anthology without Government censors. Mr. Eifman said that after Mr. Austin's article appeared, he was questioned by the K.G.B. ''I wasn't in that dissident milieu,'' he said. ''But they began to say I was not doing Soviet art and that I should emigrate. I did not.'' THE paradox was that Eifman ballets continued to be both produced and attacked by the cultural authorities. He was accused of encouraging desertion in ''The Duel'' because it showed a soldier's breakdown. His ballet treatment of Mikhail Bulgakov's ''Master and Margarita'' shocked by depicting Jesus onstage. A ballet based on the Song of Songs in the Bible was deemed too erotic. Perestroika opened up touring, and the company appeared in the West for the first time in 1989. Mr. Eifman, who is married to a former dancer and has a 4-year-old son, has been busier than ever, but he has not changed his basic belief about dance: ''I have always been drawn toward dramatic ballet, not pure dance. It comes naturally to me. What has changed is the technique, as I have developed it. But as you grow older, your inner emotions grow stronger; you could say there are stronger passions in my choreography.'' DANCE |
1077682_1 | Carry-On Squabbles Plague Airlines | our customers so they can bring aboard the baggage that they have,'' said Julie Gardner, a Continental spokeswoman. Continental is spending $14 million, or about $80,000 a plane, to install deeper overhead bins on all but its oldest planes. The bins are 2.7 inches deeper, and provide enough extra room that most bags with rollers can slide in bottom first, instead of having to be turned sideways. In a move that drew wide attention to its policy of accommodating passengers with roller bags, Continental sued Delta Airlines on Nov. 24 for strictly enforcing tough carry-on baggage rules at Lindbergh International Airport in San Diego, where Delta controls Continental's security checkpoint. Delta, which said the suit lacks merit, uses a Plexiglas template to restrict the size of bags that pass through its X-ray machines. United, which has jumbo bins on its 777 long-haul jumbo jets, is considering larger bins on its short-haul 737's, said Joe Hopkins, a spokesman. That is a sharp change from a year ago, when United experimented with a rule limiting passengers on discount tickets to one carry-on, which drew so many complaints that it was quickly ended. But United has not given up on trying to persuade more passengers to check their bags. ''We are trying to improve on-time departure performance,'' Mr. Hopkins said, ''and we think we can do that by not having to check so many items at the last minute.'' The Association of Flight Attendants, which represents 42,000 members at 10 airlines, has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt a uniform rule on carry-on baggage so that its members do not get caught in disputes between airlines and passengers. The union fears that members could be disciplined unfairly, said Chris Witkowski, a union spokesman. The flight attendant union wants carry-on bags limited to 45 linear inches, which is the sum of the height, width and depth of a bag. A bag 14 inches high, 22 inches wide and 9 inches deep -- a total of 45 inches -- would qualify. The union is also concerned with safety issues. In a survivable crash the overhead bins may fly open, with heavy bags becoming potentially lethal missiles. And in numerous emergency evacuations, as when a Tower Air 747 ran off a runway at Kennedy International Airport in New York in December 1995, people had to climb over baggage strewn in the aisles and were slowed |
1077686_0 | Footnotes | Resources, references and the back story behind the story. |
1080124_1 | French Are Gearing Up to Join In Dousing the Flames of Kosovo | take 100,000 European and American troops to impose peace in the war between ethnic Albanian separatists and Serbian forces in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, according to officials in Paris. Although France is eager to avoid getting dragged into fighting in Kosovo, it has lined up behind the threat of American-led NATO bombing to force Serbia to make good on promises to withdraw military and police units from the province and negotiate with the rebels. A French military spokesman said that the aircraft carrier Foch would sail Monday from the Mediterranean port of Toulon for the Adriatic Sea with 14 jet fighter-bombers, four reconnaissance planes and helicopters to be ready to strike next week against Yugoslav targets if NATO decides to use force. Defense Minister Alain Richard has said that France would also have about 40 fighter planes in Italy by the end of next week ready to fly NATO missions if Mr. Milosevic continued to defy international pressure to stop attacks against Albanian civilians. Pressure and outrage have been mounting since the of the murder of 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak in southern Kosovo. The province is part of Serbia but had political autonomy until Slobodan Milosevic, now President of Yugoslavia but then President of Serbia, rescinded it a decade ago. ''We will share our part of the responsibility at the heart of Europe and the Alliance,'' Mr. Richard said. France's apparent willingness to go ahead with bombing without a new explicit mandate for it from the United Nations Security Council, where Russia is opposed and could veto air strikes, contrasts with the French refusal to join Britain and the United States in bombing Iraq last month. French officials said President Jacques Chirac had ordered a complete review of French and allied strategy for trying to keep violence in Kosovo from breaking into open warfare as it did on Bosnia, where 30,000 American-led NATO peacekeepers now patrol the uneasy peace Mr. Milosevic and other Balkan leaders forged in late 1995 after an allied bombing campaign. French officials doubt whether bombing alone would be enough to make Mr. Milosevic agree to negotiate a restoration of autonomy for Kosovo, as the United States and its allies want. Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine has also been sharply critical of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose troops are fighting not for autonomy but full independence, a goal no Western country supports. |
1080044_0 | Economic Calendar | MONDAY Existing-Home Sales Dec. TUESDAY Consumer Confidence Jan. WEDNESDAY None Dec. THURSDAY Weekly Jobless Claims Durable Goods Orders Dec. FRIDAY G.D.P. 4th Qtr. |
1074532_1 | A Surge in Popularity of Software That Unlocks the Code | ''At the start of 1998, the question was would there be an economic model that would sustain the success of this open-software movement, and I think that question has been answered,'' said Robert F. Young, chief executive of Red Hat Software, which provides services and support for a free computer operating system called Linux. ''The question for this year is how rapidly is this going to deploy?'' Open software programs like Linux, (rhymes with ''cynics'') a variant of the Unix operating system, are not owned by any company or individual. Instead, a global network of programmers and users manage and upgrade them, typically without being paid directly to do so. Their motivations vary. Many have built formidable reputations with their contributions to open-source programs, and those reputations can translate into lucrative job offers. Others profess an almost moral commitment, arguing that open-source development simply works better than the traditional closed, proprietary environment of commercial programming. Linux, the star of the open-source movement, is seen as a competitor to Windows NT, Microsoft's industrial-strength operating system. Indeed, perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the potential of open source to rattle the balance of power in the computer industry came recently from Microsoft itself. In two internal memorandums that found their way to the Internet, a Microsoft engineer described Linux as a ''mind-share threat'' and suggested ways to compete with and co-opt open-source development. Open-source has its roots in venerable programs like Sendmail Inc.'s software that Internet servers around the world use to relay E-mail to its intended destination, and Perl, the programming language that was used to fashion many of the the World Wide Web's interactive features. The growth of the Internet has fostered such projects, broadening the universe of potential contributors and allowing for nearly instant distribution of constant upgrades. Open source began to gain support last year from blue-chip technology companies. I.B.M., for instance, became a major contributor to Apache, an open-source program for creating Web pages used by the vast majority of Internet service providers. In a new commercial twist on the theme, Sun Microsystems Inc. agreed to make its popular Java source code available to developers who license it. Sun is also retaining PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit the process of who determines which new functions can be added to the language. Perhaps the most widely publicized move in this trend was when the Netscape Communications Corporation released the source |
1074535_1 | Chips Are Hidden in Washing Machines, Microwaves and Even Reservoirs | the chips that control microwave ovens or Furby, the fuzzy electronic stuffed animal with an attitude. Moreover, the microprocessor is an important consideration for personal computer buyers. Embedded chips, by contrast, barely make their presence known. ''You don't say, 'I bought a new Whirlpool washer with a Motorola processor,' '' Mr. Turley said. The market for such hidden computer chips has long provided a refuge for semiconductor companies that lost out to the Intel Corporation to provide the brains of personal computers. Motorola Inc. is the largest player in embedded processors, followed by the NEC Corporation of Japan. Texas Instruments is the leader in one type of chip known as a digital signal processor, which is used in cellular phones and consumer electronics devices. Smaller companies like Integrated Device Technology Inc. and Quantum Effect Design Inc., both of Santa Clara, Calif., have found niches for their embedded processors, because such chips tend to be more specialized than those for personal computers. Now, however, some of these more specialized computers are starting to pose a direct challenge to the personal computer. The biggest attractions at the Comdex computer trade show in November were so-called information appliances. These include electronic organizers, digital televisions, digital audio recorders and small Web-surfing devices. Some pundits are saying that the world is entering the post-PC era. The International Data Corporation, a market research firm, estimates that sales of information appliances that can connect to the Internet, such as video games, smart phones, hand-held computers and digital set-top boxes, will exceed sales of consumer personal computers in the United States by the year 2001. There are also growing markets for such hidden computers well beyond information appliances. Tom Starnes, an analyst at Dataquest, estimates that the typical American home has about 63 processors, and the number could grow to 280 in five years. These chips are found in everything from video cassette recorders and microwave ovens to washing machines, sprinkler controllers and auto-focus cameras. The figure includes the 15 or so processors the family car may have, controlling the fuel mix in the engine, the anti-lock brakes, the air bags, the remote keyless entry, the radio and the dashboard displays. Some luxury automobiles have more than 60 processors, doing such things as raising or lowering the volume of the radio as the speed of the car varies, or adjusting the speed of the windshield wipers automatically depending |
1074547_0 | U.S Role as World Savior: A Delicate Balancing Act | Markets and governments around the world operated under an unshakable assumption throughout the economic turmoil last year: if things really got bad, the United States would be there to engineer a bailout. After all, as everyone from President Clinton to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin kept declaring, the future of the United States was inextricably linked to the fate of the troubled emerging economies. That was how Washington justified its $5 billion commitment to the bailout of South Korea led by the International Monetary Fund. It was why the Treasury persuaded America's allies to pony up $17 billion in additional aid for Russia in July -- money that failed to stabilize the country but that made it a lot easier for some rich oligarchs to convert their fast-falling rubles into dollars, which were immediately parked in Europe. And it was the justification for the American commitment to aid Brazil, an effort whose success is still an open question. But the unstated assumption that the United States will always be ready to step in is a risky one. The failure of the Russian bailout was a searing experience, opening the Clinton Administration to the criticism that it had wasted billions on a government that was never as committed to change and capitalism as Mr. Clinton contended. And if the instability around the world continues, a likely bet in the minds of many in the Administration, the question of whether America should serve as the savior of last resort seems likely to come under increasing scrutiny from all sides. ''Russia was the turning point,'' conceded one senior Administration official who has been an advocate of aggressive economic intervention by Washington. ''When it went bad, and it became clear that the U.S. and its allies were not about to pour more money into the place, it led to the two scariest months we have seen in markets around the world.'' And yet, the official noted, ''the political tolerance for continued American contributions, particularly in countries that are resisting major reform programs, clearly has some limits.'' The problem is one of the most complex in modern American foreign policy. On the one hand, the United States feels a mounting obligation to help stabilize the world economy, to act as what Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright calls ''the indispensable nation.'' That urge reached its zenith this fall, when the United States engineered a series |
1074546_4 | 5 Problems Tarnishing a Robust Economy | 1970's, productivity has been crawling along at a 1 percent annual clip, taking about three times as long to double. The productivity numbers have improved recently, but there is scant evidence that the new numbers will be permanent. It is one thing for an economy, as is currently the case, to operate close to capacity, thereby reducing unemployment and driving up employment and wages. But to keep wages rising thereafter requires harnessing technology to expand the economy's productive capacity. On this score, the lessons of history are sobering. For much of the last 100 or so years, productivity has been rising at the seemingly slow pace of about 2 percent. The fast pace of the 1950's and 1960's was anomalous. At the very least, it would take stiff increases in savings and corporate investment to return the economy to fast growth, but, according to Mr. Wolff's data, Americans appear unconvinced that they need to make such sacrifices. EDUCATION GAP -- Investing in training and education is a possible cure for sluggish productivity and rising inequality. Indeed, the hiring practices of employers increasingly reward employees with college-level verbal and math skills, a trend caused by skill-biased technology. In 1978, male college graduates 25 to 34 earned about 15 percent more than recent high school graduates. Now the gap is about 50 percent. Yet college and, therefore, access to high-income jobs remain beyond the reach of many families. In 1992, about 40 percent of high school seniors from the 25 percent poorest families did not enroll in post-secondary education. By contrast, only 10 percent of students from the 25 percent richest families failed to enroll in college or other post-secondary education. Employers are turning increasingly to college-educated workers. Over the last 20 years, the number of full-time workers who are college graduates has risen from about 20 percent to almost 30 percent. Many unskilled male workers have become so discouraged that they have dropped out of the labor force, increasing the fraction of nonworking male high school dropouts from about 25 percent in 1975 to 35 percent in 1995. The current employment rate of high school dropouts, 40 percent, is only about half that of college graduates. Given the huge earnings increase associated with college attendance, it is no surprise that college enrollments are rising. About 65 percent of whites in this country now acquire some college education. But black attendance rates |
1074559_2 | 2 Industries Unite to Pave the Way for High-Speed Internet Access | modems rather than the telephone technology known as asymmetric digital subscriber line, or A.D.S.L.) Over all, somewhere around 45 percent of the nation's 100 million homes have computers, and only about half of those, or around 22.5 million, are on line at all. U S West Inc. has been the most aggressive of the Bell local phone companies in deploying A.D.S.L. technology, planning to sign up as many as 25,000 customers by the end of last year. Michael Rouleau, a U S West vice president for marketing, estimated that about 10 percent of cyberspace-using homes would pay extra for high-speed access. Thomas A. Jermoluk, the chairman of the At Home Corporation, the cable-modem venture backed by many of the nation's large cable system operators, said his company's business plan was to win 20 percent of any given market's on-line homes as customers after four years. Split the difference at 15 percent and the potential market today -- at $40 a month a home, which is roughly what both the telephone and cable companies are charging -- comes to about $1.6 billion. In the communications world, that is not a large number. Mr. Anderson of the Yankee Group, however, believes that fully half of the on-line homes would pay $40 a month for high-speed Internet access. If that were true, and if, in a few years, the proportion of United States homes that had computers rose to 60 percent and if the proportion of on-line homes also rose to 60 percent, then the market opportunity would be a much more significant $8.7 billion. But even that is just the entrance to the potential gold mine. That $40 a month just covers basic access to cyberspace. What the telephone and cable companies may try to do is to leverage that relationship with users to sell them additional services, ranging from E-mail to clothing shopping to video games. Of course, standing in the way of such incremental revenue are some very daunting fixed costs. It generally takes around $700 to upgrade each phone or cable line to provide high-speed data access. (Additional options, like offering Internet-based phone service over a cable line, cost even more.) So, for instance, because At Home's affiliates serve about 60 million customers, Mr. Jermoluk said, it would cost a staggering $42 billion to get all of them on line using cable modems. And so the deployment goes slowly. |
1074543_0 | Good News for Consumers Is Bad for Many Exporters | Oil is about $12 a barrel, near its lowest level in 12 years. Copper is 66 cents a pound, its lowest price in 11 years. Aluminum is $1,241 a metric ton, the least expensive it has been in almost five years, and, like other commodities, still falling in price. The major commodity indexes are at or near their lowest levels in more than two decades. And analysts are not predicting a turnaround soon. That's great for consumers. Gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation, are the lowest they have been since the 1950's. Those low prices are even better than a tax cut at stimulating spending, economists say, and they have been a major contributor to the continuing decline in inflation here and in other developed economies. ''No doubt, the collapse of commodity prices provided an important spur to U.S. disinflation,'' said John Lipsky, the chief economist at Chase Manhattan Bank. He is forecasting an inflation rate of just 1 percent this year. But low commodity prices are bad for much of the developing world -- for Russia, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia and Zambia. And they are not so good for some major developed nations, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada. These countries depend on commodity sales to spur economic growth, and many of them also count on the revenue to pay for a major portion of their government spending. The price declines mean they have less of both. Russia and Latin America will be especially hard hit. About 60 percent of Russia's export earnings are from oil, natural gas and precious and base metals. And a major portion of the revenue for the Russian budget comes from these sales and taxes on them. In Latin America, 50 percent of Venezuela's government revenue, 30 percent of Mexico's and 25 percent of Ecuador's come from oil. The collapse in commodity prices since October 1997 has been dramatic and has been one of the major ways the Asian financial crisis, which began in Thailand in July 1997, has spread around the world. The collapse of the economies in Asia, whose people had been major consumers of oil, copper, timber, cotton, textiles and other commodities, sent prices tumbling. Since the autumn of 1997, prices have plunged 45 percent for oil, 44 percent for natural gas and 30 percent for copper. ''I have no optimism about the demand for industrial commodities in the first half of |
1078921_1 | The Big City; Phat City Just a Passing Fashion Fad | layers of Thinsulate and Polartec. Why, in an age that worships thinness, have young males in New York (and their imitators across the country) brought back the obese look? Perhaps the best answer comes from Jose Ysa, a 21-year-old clerk at Dr. Jay's, who is accustomed to customers admiring the jackets by murmuring, ''Yo, the Face is phat.'' In this instance, Mr. Ysa believes, fat is phat. ''Guys like jackets because it makes them look big,'' he explained. ''It's a street thing. You want to look tough and pumped up.'' This jacket-as-steroid theory jibes with a variety of other phenomena in biology and fashion. Males of all types, from prehistoric animals to 16th-century courtiers to modern businessmen, have prepared for confrontations by making themselves look bigger. That's how the puffer fish got its name; that's why a bull displays its flank to a matador. Gorillas thrust out their chests in what's called a ''broadside display,'' which can provoke the ''looming effect,'' a surge of fear in the beholder that's triggered by the sight of a large object nearby. THIS broadside display is evident in the modern business suit. The length of the jacket, the padded shoulders and the flare of the lapels all make the upper torso look larger and stronger. By wearing a tie along with it, the man avoids a classic display of vulnerability, the exposed neck. The bubble jacket's padded body and high, thick collar achieve these same effects, but more dramatically. The jacket brings to mind a coat of armor -- or, more precisely, the 16th-century fashions that evolved from outfits of armored soldiers. Fashionable courtiers in the Renaissance adopted the doublet, a jacket that had originally been worn as a protective layer beneath a suit of armor. The cotton padding of this jacket, called bombast (the source of the term for inflated verbiage), was gradually increased to give courtiers the pumped-up look. ''The puffy doublets gave rulers like Henry VIII the broad-shouldered outline of a soldier in armor,'' said Anne Hollander, an art historian and the author of ''Sex and Suits'' and ''Seeing Through Clothes.'' That look, she said ''persisted among kings and courtiers even as armor itself was becoming outmoded. Like today's bubble jacket, the clothes were a social armor. They sent a powerful, menacing message: don't trifle with me.'' The fashion-conscious of the 16th century put slits in their clothes (mimicking damage inflicted |
1078967_2 | Scaffold in Times Square Collapse Was Built Improperly, U.S. Says | other safety violations in the death of a carpenter, Charles Robbins, in an earlier accident at the Conde Nast site, which is known as 4 Times Square. The city's report may not be completed until May 1, said Gaston Silva, the city's Buildings Commissioner. ''We have not completed our investigation,'' Mr. Silva said yesterday. ''But we will look at OSHA's findings and incorporate them into our findings.'' The collapse of the scaffolding last summer cast a pall over what was supposed to have been a triumph for the developer, Douglas Durst, and a symbol of the rebirth of Times Square. Mr. Durst was building the first new office tower in Manhattan since the recession in the early 1990's. But on the morning of July 21, the scaffold and an elevator tower that had been erected next to the 48-story tower buckled at the 21st floor as the sound of tearing metal echoed across midtown. The scaffolding above the 20th floor dropped about eight feet, wrenching the elevator tower, which snapped off and fell. A 50-foot section of that tower pierced the roof of the Woodstock Hotel across 43d Street, knocking a concrete slab onto Thereza Feliconio, 85, and killing her as she sat in her top-floor apartment. Traffic in midtown was disrupted for the better part of a week as city officials, fearful that the scaffold would plummet to the street, blocked off large portions of the Times Square area to traffic. Workers spent the next two months dismantling the twisted aluminum beams piece by piece and transporting the pieces to a pier in Brooklyn, where the scaffold was reassembled for examination by forensic engineers looking into the causes of the accident. Yesterday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration contended that the scaffold, one of the tallest used for skyscraper construction, had not been built in accordance with the plans of a professional engineer and that the structure was not capable of bearing the maximum weight required by safety regulations. There were also support braces missing from floors 15 through 24, as well as disconnected braces on the 25th floor and a cut brace on the 26th floor, according to the citations. ''Everyone in the industry is keenly awaiting the reports by top technical professionals in the business to determine if any design, installation or inspection procedures should be modified or added to hoist and scaffolding construction,'' said Richard M. |
1078944_2 | State Officials Add to U.S. Criticism of New York City's Food Stamp Program | was violating the law by denying poor people the right to apply promptly for food stamps, inadequately screening families for emergency needs and mistakenly requiring the poor to search for work before receiving help. Mr. Wing's letter and the Federal report, which was prepared by the Agriculture Department, were presented as evidence yesterday in a Federal class-action lawsuit filed by lawyers for the poor on behalf of people denied access to applications. And in a hearing in that lawsuit yesterday, Judith Bernstein, a state official assigned to monitor the city's welfare operations, testified that her office identified the delays in distributing food stamp applications ''as a problem, as an issue'' last June. State officials also learned last June that the city was failing to offer emergency food assistance to poor families as required before the Federal report. And Patricia Smith, the executive deputy commissioner at the city's Human Resources Administration, described the problem in even greater detail yesterday, saying that some city workers were mistakenly directing poor people to food pantries instead of processing their applications for emergency food stamps. Ms. Smith said she investigated the problem in December after the class-action lawsuit was filed. And she testified yesterday that some city workers also mistakenly denied access to food stamp applications if people showed up for interviews without their family members. Lawyers for the city argued that the problems were isolated, not systemic. And state officials said the city has already agreed to address the problems, to develop a new application form, to improve the screening process for emergency food needs and to allow food stamp applicants with children under the age of 6 to forgo the job search requirements. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani assailed the Federal draft report, calling it ''more of a political document than a valid, substantive government document.'' And he said Federal laws that require welfare offices to promptly offer food stamp applications appeared to conflict with Federal rules that allow states and cities to discourage people from applying for welfare. Agriculture officials disagree, saying that food stamps play a critical role in the new welfare-to-work efforts because they keep the working poor off welfare and keep the newly employed from slipping back on. But even as officials bickered over the Federal report, Ms. Bernstein was acknowledging in court that state officials feared they were too shorthanded to monitor city operations and to correct its problems. |
1078863_2 | Easy Way to Face Down a Grizzly: On Line | bear species, including the sloth bear of Asia, sun bear, spectacled bear and giant panda, all of them rare; Asiatic black bear, and the more familiar brown, black and polar bears. Links explore such controversial questions as the usefulness of bear bells (are they a warning device or just noise pollution) and pepper spray (you don't want to get close enough to find out). ''Media, including the recent movie 'The Edge,' usually portray bears in unrealistic and anthropomorphic ways,'' Mr. Middleton wrote by E-mail. ''I hope that people extensively studying my site will see bears for what they are -- majestic pinnacle predators who should be left alone for the most part, only studied from a distance and also harbingers or sentinels of the sustainability of our last remaining wilderness areas.'' The Bear Den also pays homage to the need to talk about one's bear feelings. A sample from the Quotes About Bears page comes from John Muir, the pioneer: ''Bears are not companions of men, but children of God, and His charity is broad enough for both.'' Another is from John Murray: ''Those who have packed far up into grizzly country know that the presence of even one grizzly on the land elevates the mountains, deepens the canyons, chills the winds, brightens the stars, darkens the forest and quickens the pulse of all who enter it. They know that when a bear dies, something sacred in every living thing interconnected with that realm . . . also dies.'' That verges on religion, but something meaningful often does happen in bear encounters. John W. Uhler has put together a Bear Story site on the Total Yellowstone Page (www.Yellowstone-Natl-Park.Com /bearstor.htm), a selection of up-close-and-personal accounts. James Musgrove's recently updated site on the American grizzly bear (home.att.net/jrmusgrove/index .htm), provides a look at current legal disputes and government action regarding the often lopsided battle between friends of the bears and the logging, mining and ranching interests. A running death count shows 23 grizzlies killed in and around Glacier National Park in 1998). Lloyd W. Hofmann, creator of a short guide called Bear Facts (www.planet.eon.net/homac/bear .html), wrote: ''You honestly have a better chance of being struck by lightning than suffering from a bear attack.'' Finally, a rich Eastern site is Bear Manners: Getting Along in the Backcountry (patc.simplenet.com/bear man.html) by Dean Ahearn, an homage to the black bear in Shenandoah National Park. SCREEN GRAB |
1078980_0 | E-Mail and a Closer Family | To the Editor: The story, ''But Did You Get Her E-Mail Address?'' (Jan. 14), was a good one. I'm experiencing something that I suspect is going on in many families -- a knitting together of relatives who are widely scattered geographically, as a result of almost daily E-mail exchanges. I feel more a part of my family than I have since I left home for graduate school, half a century ago. SISTER MARY ELIZABETH, CHS New York, Jan. 18, 1999 |
1078974_0 | Another Portable Way To Get Access to E-Mail | E-mail users who cannot bear to be without the service when they leave the office now have another way for messages to follow them around. Research In Motion, a wireless modem maker, and BellSouth introduced a new E-mail-ready pager called Blackberry this week. Unlike other wireless systems, this one does not require a separate E-mail account for messages. The software instantaneously forwards E-mail addressed to a user's regular desktop computer account to the pager, which is roughly the size of a credit card and the thickness of a AA battery. A user can send replies, which, in turn, are stored in a Sent Items folder back in the office machine. But the pager's itty-bitty keyboard, however, will discourage long-winded messaging. Also stuck in the pager are several personal digital assistant functions -- calendars and the like -- that can be synchronized with the big brother computer. The Blackberry sells for $399 and flat-rate monthly service costs $39.99. The system works only on desktop computers connected to a network running Microsoft Exchange software. IAN AUSTEN NEWS WATCH |
1078365_1 | Children With Cancer Found Well Adjusted | they seem to function better socially and do as well emotionally as healthy children. This is what a medical team from three universities found when they examined how well or poorly 76 children functioned while receiving chemotherapy for a variety of cancers. The children, 8 to 15 years old, all attended regular schools during the course of their treatment. Their social, emotional and behavioral adjustment was measured by comparing them with 76 healthy children in the same classrooms. The findings were reported this month in the journal Pediatrics by Dr. Robert B. Noll of the department of hematology and oncology at the University of Cincinnati and five coauthors. To avoid prejudicing the results, teachers and students were not told the real purpose of the study when they were asked to evaluate all the children in each classroom. Teachers rated the children with cancer as more sociable and less disruptively aggressive than the healthy children in their classrooms. Their peers, too, gave the children with cancer high ratings. Rather than shunning children on chemotherapy, many of whom had lost all their hair and were less active physically than the healthy children, their peers rated them as being better liked than other children. When the children themselves were tested for symptoms of emotional disturbances, no differences were found between those with cancer and the healthy children on measures of depression, anxiety, loneliness and self-concept. About the only distinction between the two groups of children lay in personal satisfaction with their current athletic ability, which not surprisingly lagged in the cancer group, probably because the treatment made them unusually tired. Parents, too were interviewed and reported nothing unusual about the children undergoing cancer treatment with respect to behavioral problems, emotional well-being or social functioning. The researchers said their study's findings differed from impressions gleaned from previous research perhaps because earlier studies were small, lacked a comparison group of healthy children and relied on only one source of information, typically the child's mother. In addition, previous studies were usually conducted during clinic visits or hospitalizations, rather than while the children were participating in normal daily activities. The current study examined nearly every child with a diagnosis of cancer in the Cincinnati area, excluding children with cancers of the central nervous system, since these cancers sometimes cause emotional and behavioral disturbances apart from the effects of treatment or the knowledge that a person has cancer. |
1078366_0 | Q & A | Greek Fire Q. Was there a secret Byzantine naval weapon called Greek fire? A. Historians agree Greek fire existed, but debate its nature. In a new introduction by Bert S. Hall to the classic 1960 book ''A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder,'' by J. R. Partington (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Kallinikos of Heliopolis gets credit for building fire-spouting ships that defended Constantinople from the Arabs in 678. Greek fire was described as a liquid that burned even on the sea surface, with smoke and whooshing sounds. Candidates for ingredients include petroleum, resin and quicklime, plus a secret ingredient, possibly saltpeter, which would make Greek fire an important precursor of gunpowder. Dr. Partington, a chemist, was skeptical of theories that saltpeter was added to unrefined petroleum, arguing that the Byzantines instead used some form of distillation to make kerosene or gasoline. However, Dr. Hall, associate professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, says that later researchers have rejected Dr. Partington's ideas. One newer theory suggests that undistilled petroleum, collected in the cooler months so that its volatile fractions were less likely to evaporate, was kept in heated containers on board ship. Another theory holds that the weapon was a kind of flame thrower mixing a petroleum product with an oxidizing agent, probably saltpeter. C. CLAIBORNE RAY Readers are invited to submit questions by postal mail to Questions, Science Times, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036-3959, or by E-mail to: Question@nytimes.com |
1077019_0 | Identity Checks; High-Tech Help for Frequent Travelers Entering U.S. | AFTER a flight to the United States, most travelers want to grab their luggage and go to bed, not wait in line at the airport. But wait they do, sometimes for an hour or more as Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors check passports and ask questions in their efforts to stop criminals and unauthorized foreigners from entering the country. But now, by using what looks like a automated teller machine, some travelers can be on their way in a flash. People enrolled in a Immigration and Naturalization Service program called the Passenger Accelerated Service System, or INS-PASS, can avoid the bureaucracy by simply inserting an identity card into the machine and placing a hand into an identity analyzer. Then, if all goes well, the traveler walks through an open gate. The program is open to frequent business travelers, who are considered a low-risk group, from the United States and 28 other designated low-risk countries. ''Sometimes the lines are so full,'' said Yoko Omae, a flight attendant from Japan who was using the INS-PASS machine at the Los Angeles International Airport recently after working on a flight from Tokyo. ''During Christmas, New Year's and summer, it takes an hour to go through. This system is a great idea.'' It took Ms. Omae only about 40 seconds to be allowed entry. The computer examined a national database to find out if she was wanted by the police and verified her identity using a relatively new technique called hand geometrics. To prove that she was authorized to enter the United States, Ms. Omae followed the instructions on a view screen, putting her right hand inside a slot on the console. Within a few seconds, the computer compared data from her hand with similar data entered a year ago, when she enrolled in the program. Once cleared, she received a receipt from the computer, went to pick up her luggage and walked past United States Agriculture and Customs inspectors. If she had been rejected entry, either because of a criminal alert or an error, a message would have appeared on the screen telling her to wait in line to see an inspector. Nearly 75,000 people have enrolled in INS-PASS. It is available at an increasing number of airports, including Kennedy, Newark and San Francisco International Airports. Applicants must generally travel to the United States at least three times a year, submit to an interview |
1077111_0 | Overseas Internet Users Protest High Cost of Access | Internet users in Brazil said on Wednesday that they would stage a cyberstrike: They pledged to refuse to log on to the Internet for the day to protest the high cost of Net access. The cyberstrikers in Brazil join Web surfers who have engaged in ''Internet strikes'' in Germany, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, China and Poland. Often organized by students and academics, the strikes are meant to protest high access charges, which can mount to hundreds of dollars in monthly Internet bills. In Brazil, supporters said that as many as 500,000 of 2.2 million Internet users would participate in the boycott, The Associated Press reported. In most countries the protests are aimed not at the service providers, but at the national telecommunication companies, which are sometimes state-owned monopolies. In China, protesters there said they would boycott the Internet every Sunday this month. The monthly cost of basic access in China runs $30 to $43, which is more than a quarter of the average monthly income, according to The Guangzhou Daily, a newspaper. NEWS WATCH |
1076987_2 | An Art Book For Browsing The Internet | may help (web.uvic.ca/grs/bowman /myth/index.html). Besides a timeline of Greek history, it has images and texts for each Olympian god. Classical Myth's links include the Perseus project (www.perseus .tufts.edu), a digital library of resources for studying the ancient world that includes texts and translations, maps and art images from more than 70 museums. You can also, for example, take a walk around ancient Athens (click on Starting Points, then on Sites and click on any triangle to see a photograph from that vantage). Animals can also be artistic symbols, but the Internet references in this category will not help. The Butterfly Site, at www.mgfx.com /butterfly, is charming, however, with illustrated information on the butterflies of every state and other places, plus links to sites-in-the-making on hummingbirds, birds and dragonflies. The book's Chapter 10, on art historical periods, offers many good sites. In one example, readers are directed to an ancient-art site maintained by the University of Wisconsin's art history department. And if you backtrack to the department's main site (www.wisc.edu/arth) and look under ''course materials'' for various classes, not just ancient art, you will find Assyrian, Renaissance, French and Asian art images. Better yet is the department's ''Find an Image'' section, which lets you sample the work of an artist, architect, period or site around the world. And there are other sites covering early civilization to the present. It would be a real aid to find information about contemporary artists on line since they are by definition less known. ''Art Information on the Internet'' first sends readers to galleries, then suggests Worldwide Books on Line (www.worldwide .com). But you will find little to see here. Go to ''Artist Index'' and you can browse the names of some 6,000 artists, with not much more than a roster of books or their catalogues. Using the Extended Search option will bring up a description of the book, but no images. Another section of the book, ''Pronunciation,'' in Chapter 11, looked promising, perhaps the key to finding out at last the correct way to say Ingres or Caillebotte. Alas, no; it recommends a CD-ROM. Still, the section does direct readers to a French-English dictionary that works for single words, but not phrases (humanities.uchicago.edu /formsunrest/FR-ENG.html). And so ''Art Information on the Internet'' goes, reflecting the spottiness of Web sites themselves. The publisher, however, posts updates to the book on its Web site (www .oryxpress.com/artupdate). SCREEN GRAB |
1080234_1 | Movement May Offer Early Clue to Autism | when rolling over, sitting up, crawling and walking, Dr. Teitelbaum said in a telephone interview. But, he cautioned, the results are still preliminary. Researchers need to look at many more babies, he said, to see exactly which movement abnormalities can predict autism and which suggest developmental disorders like schizophrenia or attention deficit disorder. ''I think he's on to something,'' said Dr. Dan Geschwind, a neurogeneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles and scientific adviser to Cure Autism Now, an organization based in Los Angeles run by parents of autistic children. ''He's got a very intriguing piece of preliminary data which, if it turns out to be true, will be very important.'' Temple Grandin, a highly functioning autistic woman who is an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and an authority on animal behavior, said: ''He's on to something really good and I fully support it. I like the fact that he is objectively measuring something that is biological.'' It may be, she cautioned, that Dr. Teitelbaum has discovered general problems in the nervous system that are not unique to autism. But even that, she said, is a benefit for doctors, parents and teachers, who now have nothing to go on before children are 2 or 3 years old. Dr. Anne Donnellan, a professor of rehabilitation psychology and special education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said: ''Teitelbaum's work is important because it reflects a reality about autism that has been missed. We tend to think it's a problem with the mind. But now that we are really beginning to see how the brain works, we know that the mind is embodied. Body is part of mind and there's no way to separate them.'' Dr. Teitelbaum said that he got the idea of looking at autism as a movement disorder partly because of his work with brain-damaged animals. As they recover, he said, they go through predictable stages, for example recovery of movement, that reflect fundamental aspects of brain organization. Because human babies also pass through predictable stages of development, he theorized that defects in the brain might be reflected in early movements. A few years ago, Dr. Teitelbaum sent out word to parents of autistic children through various national organizations that he was looking for videotapes of babies before their autism was diagnosed. He received 17 tapes that showed the babies |
1080247_1 | Software to Compute Women's Cancer Risk | sisters, the number of breast biopsies she has had, the biopsy results and the woman's race. The result is a reasonable estimate of risk, researchers say, though they said the program omits some essential questions, which might result in an underestimate of risk for some women in high-risk families. For instance, the program does not take into account the age of onset of breast cancer among relatives, or the history of breast cancer in the father's side of the family, which may be important in families carrying genes for breast cancer. Dr. Kathy Helzlsouer of Johns Hopkins University described a case in which the disk indicated a relatively low risk for a woman whose mother had had breast cancer. But the woman's grandmother, and six of the grandmother's sisters, had also had the disease. The program was not designed to identify those cases, which Dr. Helzlsouer said indicated a much higher risk. Other doctors also said that risk assessments carried out in person went into more detail. When women who are worried about developing breast cancer consult Dr. Patricia Ganz, who heads a program for high-risk women at the Jonsson Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, she discusses the factors on the software, but others as well, such as being overweight and drinking alcohol regularly. Obesity, regular alcohol consumption, early menstruation and late or no childbearing all heighten risk by increasing lifetime exposure to estrogen, which can stimulate the growth of malignant cells in the breast. Some risk factors can be modified, Dr. Ganz said: women can exercise and try to stay lean, and cut back on alcohol. For women who want to take replacement estrogen to quell hot flashes, insomnia and other symptoms of menopause, Dr. Ganz said studies had indicated that using the hormone for less than five years did not add substantially to the risk of breast cancer. But many women may want to take it longer, because it is thought to protect against heart disease, the leading killer of women, and the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis. These women must weigh these benefits against the added breast cancer risk of long-term use. Dr. Ganz said she recommended that women at high risk for breast cancer take other drugs to lower cholesterol or prevent bone loss. But it is not known if the other drugs work as well as estrogen. But some risk factors cannot |
1080244_0 | In Breast Cancer Data, Hope, Fear and Confusion | When they are asked to identify the greatest threat to their health, most American women name breast cancer. Most of them are wrong. Women overestimate their risk of getting breast cancer, researchers say, and they also overestimate the odds that the disease will be fatal. Few feel anywhere near the same dread of heart disease, even though it kills far more women, and few realize that lung cancer surpassed breast cancer 10 years ago as the leading cause of death from cancer in women. Though some women have genes that greatly increase their risk of contracting the disease, the majority do not, and doctors worry that, over all, excessive fear of breast cancer may lead women to neglect the other conditions that are much more likely to kill them: to be cavalier about smoking or lack of exercise, for instance, or to refuse estrogen replacement therapy after menopause. Even though estrogen is strongly recommended for women at risk for cardiovascular disease, some who would probably benefit from it turn it down, preferring to take their chances with a heart attack or stroke rather than accept what so far appears to be a small increased risk of breast cancer linked to the hormone. Advanced heart failure ''sounds like something you can live with, even though it's a fatal disease,'' said Dr. Barbara Weber, director of the Breast Cancer Program at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center in Philadelphia. ''It sounds less painful than breast cancer. And taking blood pressure medicine and nitroglycerin doesn't sound so bad. But chemotherapy is frightening.'' A study published this month reflected the lengths to which women would go in hope of avoiding the disease: The study included 639 women at high risk who chose to have both breasts removed while they were still healthy. The surgery, not commonly performed, did yield an 80 percent to 90 percent reduction in cases and deaths from breast cancer -- but only 18 lives were saved, meaning that many of the women who had their breasts removed may have survived without the drastic procedure. Of course, some fear of breast cancer is still not unreasonable. The numbers are daunting: 178,700 new cases in 1998, 43,500 deaths. Nearly every woman knows someone, or knows of someone, who died of breast cancer. In women's minds, the disease and the treatments for it are inextricably tied to disfigurement, suffering and death. Women also |
1080236_0 | OBSERVATORY | Scouring Space for Dust Space may look pristine, but the part of it near Earth, at least, is really quite trashy. In orbit is the weightless flotsam of human exploration -- a used package of Tang here, a spent rocket stage there -- as well as enough dust to make a housekeeper weep. The larger debris is generally accounted for and tracked, for even a lost spacesuit glove whizzing along at an orbital speed of 17,000 miles an hour can damage a satellite or other object in its path. But dust bombardment can cause damage as well, and less is known about the scope of the dust problem. An instrument being carried aboard an unclassified Air Force satellite is designed to get some answers. The experiment, kind of a white-glove test in space, will measure the mass and speed of individual dust particles, as well as their trajectory, in order to determine their origin and distribution. Some dust particles are left behind by comets; others are the result of human activity. And by continually colliding with and abrading larger orbiting objects, dust begets more dust. Speed is an indicator of origin, as cometary dust travels faster than the human variety -- about 25,000 miles an hour. But the experiment, designed and monitored by scientists at the University of Chicago, should also be able to determine whether the dust is uniformly distributed, or concentrated in clouds. It may even discover that the Earth has a dust ring, like a junior version of Saturn. Looking for E.T. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has usually involved the ears, not the eyes. Most such projects collect and analyze radio emissions from the heavens for patterns or other signs that may indicate an alien origin. There have always been a few diehards, however, who have argued that an otherworldly civilization may be just as likely to use light waves as a means of signaling their existence to the rest of the universe. In fact, some of these proponents argue, given Earth's technological history, an advanced civilization may be more likely to use a laser, say, than a more-primitive radio transmitter. Now, the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group that has long backed the hunt for alien life, is sponsoring three new optical SETI programs. Two projects -- one at the University of California at Berkeley, the other at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- |
1075263_0 | French Premier Assails U.S. Over Iraq Air Strikes | France's Prime Minister criticized American and British air strikes against Iraq in an interview published today and said that France would soon be ready to propose ways for ending the impasse with Saddam Hussein. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin told Le Monde, ''The United States often acts in a unilateral way that undermines its ambition of mobilizing the international community.'' ''That was clear in the conflict with Iraq,'' he said. ''What's the reality after the Anglo-American strikes? We've gone from a situation where the entire international community, with the United Nations, was reminding Iraq of its obligations, to a direct confrontation between the Baghdad regime and our American and British friends. I don't see how that's progress.'' France, he said, was working on ideas to end the crisis in a way that would insure ''lasting regional security'' but permit Iraq to resume oil exports. ''In general,'' Mr. Jospin said, ''I believe there is a need for France to assert itself more on the international scene, not because of its power or wanting to teach anybody lessons, but because it has a different way of seeing a certain number of international realities.'' ''France, a friend of the United States, does not automatically share that great country's point of view,'' he explained. President Jacques Chirac and other French officials expressed disappointment at the British and American decision to bomb Iraq last month after it stopped cooperating with United Nations arms inspectors, but the official French reaction held Mr. Hussein to blame for the crisis. Mr. Jospin, a Socialist, observed in the interview with Le Monde that presidential pronouncements on policy did not carry the same weight now as they did when Mr. Chirac's conservatives controlled both the presidency and the Government, from 1995 to mid-1997. Mr. Jospin is widely expected to run against Mr. Chirac in the next presidential election in 2002. Put on the defensive by Le Monde about what effect his Government's plan to move to a 35-hour workweek would have on France's 11.5 percent unemployment rate, Mr. Jospin replied that joblessness stood at 12.6 percent when he was elected, with 190,000 more people on the unemployment rolls than at the end of last year. Healthy economic growth stimulated by Government measures created 350,000 jobs in 1998, he said. As for the 35-hour week, he said it would encourage negotiations between workers and managers at all levels of the economy on |
1075331_0 | Small Changes Could Improve Police Hiring, Panel Says | Though it does a good job weeding out people with criminal backgrounds, the New York Police Department could improve the overall quality of its officers by administering polygraph tests to new recruits and more aggressively investigating their backgrounds, a mayoral panel said yesterday. Current rules require the Police Department to check the backgrounds of incoming officers by interviewing their neighbors, past employers and college and high school officials. But the panel found that the department relies too heavily on written responses to questions and recommended that investigators depend more on face-to-face or telephone conversations with people who can vouch for the recruits. ''The department is not making sufficient effort to follow up and make the personal contact,'' said Richard J. Davis, the chairman of the special panel, the Commission to Combat Police Corruption, which Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani created in 1995 after a series of corruption scandals engulfed the Police Department. Under current regulations, the Police Department is required to examine the previous five years of each recruit's past, Mr. Davis said, mainly by interviewing the recruit's personal and professional contacts. But the commission found that the department conducted most of its inquiries through written forms and required personal interviews only when it had uncovered derogatory information about a recruit it might hire or had already hired, he said. In conducting its nine-month study, the commission examined the backgrounds of 115 Police Academy candidates screened by the department, of whom 95 were hired. Relying on written investigations has its limitations, the study found. For example, of the 95 officers hired, the department received all the requested information in only 35 cases. Of those, 22 had missing or inconsistent information, and the department often failed to follow up in getting the responses. In contrast, the Los Angeles Police Department, to get a more rounded opinion of recruits, requires face-to-face interviews with supervisors and co-workers from past employers. Despite the criticism, the report found that of those recruits studied, the department had done a good job of selecting the right candidates and eliminating potentially troublesome ones. In April 1997, the report said, the police hired 1,300 recruits out of more than 8,200 applicants screened. ''We didn't find that the people they're getting are problem children,'' Mr. Davis said. ''What we're saying is that they could increase their ability to get the best candidates if they take these steps.'' At a news conference |
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