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1252219_0 | IN choosing their investments, most people regard balance and diversification as a matter of choosing the right mix of stocks, bonds and mutual funds to match their goals. But a growing number of economists say investors are overlooking one of the most important elements of their financial portfolios: their jobs. Workers, these scholars argue, need to assemble portfolios that reflect their professions and the reliability of their earnings. Those with union contracts in stable industries should not allocate their investments in the same way as entrepreneurs who do not know what they will earn from one year to the next, or managers who receive much of their compensation in stock. New financial tools to help investors limit those risks are in the works, although their success is not assured. Robert J. Shiller, the Yale University economist known for his well-timed criticism of the excesses of the stock market, hopes to introduce securities that would let workers hedge against downturns in the nation's economy or their own professions. For those on the highest rungs -- executives and company founders who receive huge chunks of stock as part of their annual compensation -- a form of such hedging is already available. Investment banks allow them to use their restricted stock -- shares they cannot promptly sell -- as collateral for loans, so they can diversify their holdings. Employees should be as careful as top executives to hedge their job risks, according to Deborah Lucas, chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office and a finance professor on leave from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. ''Jobs are assets, but risky assets,'' Ms. Lucas said. ''People need to understand that risk.'' Here is a way to start: Think of your job as part of your investments, and look at how risky or safe, how stable or undependable, your income from it may be. As Geert Bekaert, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, put it, ''A job generates income, just as a stock generates dividends and bonds generate interest.'' In broad terms, the stability of their earnings can be a gauge of how aggressive investors should be in choosing asset allocations. The more predictable the wages, the riskier other investments can be. A tenured professor, whose earnings are as consistent as the income from a high-grade bond, can afford to be largely in growth stocks. But an investment banker may have compensation (mostly | Playing Your Career Against the Market |
1252080_3 | biphenyls, toxic chemical compounds once widely used in viscous liquid form as insulators in electrical equipment; for chlordane, a chemical once commonly used for termite control; and for seven organochlorine pesticides including DDT and its breakdown products. The pollutants, which remain in body fat for long periods, are suspected carcinogens and also have estrogenic properties that could affect the breast. The researchers found that all the women had comparable levels of the contaminants in their body fat whether they lived in Nassau, Suffolk or New York City. With the exception of one type of PCB, they found no association between the levels of contaminants and breast cancer risk. Dr. Stellman said the findings were consistent with other recent studies based on current amounts of contaminants in women's bodies. ''But I would by no means be reassured by these findings,'' he said. ''If anything it underscores the urgent need to develop better ways of estimating exposures that took place over a long period of time.'' ''Breast cancer takes many years to develop, and looking at what is in your body today does not necessarily tell you what the level was in the past,'' Dr. Stellman said. ''Someone could have had a high level 20 years ago and gotten rid of it in one way or another.'' He said that rapid weight loss, breast feeding and major illnesses reduced levels. A study that is a centerpiece of the Long Island project will look for associations between breast cancer and DDT as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, chemical pollutants caused by incomplete combustion that are found in diesel fumes and cigarette smoke. The study involves 3,000 Long Island women, half of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer during the same one-year period. Some participants have permitted the collection of dust, water and soil from their homes and yards. The National Cancer Institute said the study's findings would be released within the next several months. Dr. Clare B. Bradley, the commissioner of Suffolk's Department of Health Services, said the Stellman study ''doesn't close the book on these issues.'' ''It is another study that didn't show an association in that instance,'' she said. ''I am sure we will learn more from other studies moving forward.'' Suffolk County is currently preparing to seek bidders for an epidemiological study of abnormally high breast cancer rates among women under age 55 on the South Fork and in the | Breast Cancer Groups Question New Study |
1252080_5 | Riverhead and Westhampton Beach areas. At the same time, the Stellman study has raised concerns among the Long Island groups about other studies, part of the Long Island breast cancer project, that have yet to be completed. ''I am starting to become very leery of these studies,'' said Geri Barish of Baldwin, the president of One in Nine, a breast cancer group. ''I only hope they are doing them in enough depth to get good results. There is something out there we are eating and ingesting. I can't believe we are this far down the road and we still haven't come up with any good answers.'' Dr. Susan Sieber, the deputy director for communications for the National Cancer Institute, said that in the absence of a proven and direct relationship between breast cancer and the pollutants looked at in the Stellman study, ''we have to fall back on general health measures that we hope will provide a protective effect.'' She said these included prudent diet, exercise, no smoking, and drinking only in moderation. She said a leading theory among cancer researchers involved what she called the gene-environment interaction and how it may determine how environmental conditions increase cancer risks. The Long Island groups said they agreed with the general health measures but objected to any implication that breast cancer rates on Long Island were higher principally because too many women failed to follow such guidelines or had genetic makeups that made them susceptible to breast cancer. Dr. Stellman and the leaders of the breast cancer groups agreed that a geographic information system, which is being set up as part of the Long Island breast cancer project, would be valuable. The system will seek links between breast cancer rates and current and past exposures to a variety of environmental conditions. These include contaminated drinking water, hazardous waste sites, electromagnetic fields, pesticides and toxic chemicals, and indoor and outdoor air pollution, including aircraft emissions. The National Cancer Institute said that the information system was ''in its infancy'' and would be a challenge to implement. The Long Island groups said the urgent need for maps that correlated environmental risks and breast cancer cases should overcome objections of local communities not wishing to be identified as breast cancer hot spots. ''All across the country, people have committed to saying, 'Let's find out about the risk in our own community,' '' said Karen Miller, the | Breast Cancer Groups Question New Study |
1252352_0 | Sarah, a fifth grander, remembers watching her classmates learn to read and spell while she was left behind. ''It's like trying to climb a mountain,'' she says. ''I had all the equipment I needed, but I couldn't get over the mountain without help.'' George (above), also in fifth grade, recalls his frustration: ''I used to talk like a tough guy, walk like a tough guy, I felt so bad about myself. Then I got help. Now I feel very secure and happy.'' Sarah and George - inquisitive, articulate, chrismatic - are but two of the children striving to lead normal lives, both in and out of the classroom, in ''Disney Channel's Learning for Life: Kids and Learning Differences,'' a documentary that has its premiere on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Produced by Laurie Meadoff, a pioneer in youth communications, and the Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple, the special was intended to build awareness about children's learning disabilities, including hyperactivity, dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Through their research, the filmmakers discovered a virtual Pandora's box filled with frustration, guilt, shame and, all too often, defeat. ''The problem that faces parents is the complexity of what your child needs,'' Ms. Meadoff said. ''Someone said that getting through the day with a learning-different child is like going through a home Olympics. We've hoped to show that there is light at the end of the tunnel.'' To the end, Ms. Meadoff and Ms. Kopple focused on programs like those at the Churchill School in Manhattan, which helps children understand that a learning difference is not a sign of weaker intelligence and that asking for help is nothing to be ashamed of. ''So many years ago, people considered these kids not to be bright, and they were just written off,'' Ms. Kopple said. ''Now people are learning that's not the case at all.'' It is a scenario Ms. Meadoff knows all too well, having suffered the stigma of deyslexia as a child. ''We wanted to show that people have different ways of getting up the mountain and coming down the other side,'' she said. ''You have to do it the way that works for you.'' - Kathryn Shattuck FOR YOUNG VIEWERS | Learning With a Difference, One Step at a Time |
1251993_0 | NO national law bars a hotel from refusing to take children as guests. According to Kara Peterman, a spokes woman at the Department of Justice, Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act says hotels may not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, but makes no mention of family status or age. And hotels are not covered under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. So travelers who want quiet in the corridors, a haven for romance without reminders of the potential consequences, or those who simply do not like children should be able to find a place to accommodate their tastes. And while many hoteliers acknowledge that such tastes represent a niche market, hotels that aspire to be child-free are dodgy about saying so. None seems as bold as Las Brisas-Acapulco, which in the late 90's had the motto, ''Where children are seldom heard but are often made.'' Zagat's 2001 Top U.S. Hotels, Resorts and Spas, for the first time since this volume's debut in 1987, has an index labeled ''Children Not Recommended.'' Nina Zagat, who heads the organization with her husband, Tim, said that Zagat's creates indexes when it detects new undercurrents, and this one has just emerged. As the directories are being put together, she said, editors discuss whether a category is worth adding. On the children issue, when Zagat's did its follow-up questionnaires to the hotels, she said, ''They were not so ready to say they don't welcome children as others are to describe their child programs, baby-sitting or meals.'' The results were confirmed by phone, she said, though Zagat's recommends that potential guests call first to get details. Out of the new volume's total of 1,907 hotels, resorts, hotel chains and spas, 20 places are listed in the category ''Children Not Recommended,'' in contrast to 99 under ''Child/Family Friendly.'' Separating Kids and Couples Beyond concierge or executive levels, which may have clublike rules for entry, a number of hotels otherwise segregate their no-child areas. Las Brisas, which has casitas with private or semiprivate pools as well as rooms and suites, currently accepts children in 183 of its 253 units. Children under 12 stay free in the parents' rooms. Closer to home, the Inn at Mystic, Conn., with 68 rooms, accepts children in its motor inn section, but not in the area up the hill from the road, where the rooms, some | At Some Hotels, It's Adults Only |
1259319_0 | MOST consumers seem to have decided that their tires are maintenance-free, according to a telephone survey by the Rubber Manufacturers Association. In the survey of 400 households, 32 percent of respondents volunteered a tire-related task -- checking the pressure or the tread, or rotating the tires, for example -- when asked about parts of the car that required periodic maintenance. In contrast, 71 percent said changing the oil. In the survey, conducted Oct. 12-19, a time of extensive publicity about Firestone tire failures, 78 percent of the respondents said they knew the correct pressure for their vehicle's tires, but only 45 percent listed a correct place to find it: in the owner's manual or on a door column. Twenty-seven percent said the tire sidewall, but that is where the tiremaker lists the maximum pressure, not where the carmaker lists the pressure that is best for a given vehicle. Maintenance was more routine in the past, when tires were more on motorists' minds -- because they often blew out or wore out. Now some people never think about them. The president of the Rubber Manufacturers Association, Douglas B. Shea, said: ''I am now on my second leased vehicle, and I have never bought a tire. I have never come in contact with a salesperson who would say, 'Make sure you take care of the tire pressure.' '' MATTHEW L. WALD | Check the Tires? Few Remember |
1259443_0 | Starting today from Barcelona, Spain, six mega-catamarans will set out upon a round-the-world challenge called, simply, The Race. The only real certainty is that a gun will sound and the boats will go. But what happens afterward is anyone's guess, for in the 30-year history of globe-circling sailboat racing, no one has seen anything quite so audacious or ambitious as The Race. With crew rosters of 12 to 15 sailors each, and lengths ranging from 88 to 125 feet, the competing cats -- some of which were recently launched and have undertaken the slightest of sea trials -- are easily capable of prolonged speed runs of more than 30 knots. The first boat back to the finish off Marseille, France, is expected to smash by at least a week the record of 71 days 14 hours for the fastest nonstop circumnavigation under sail. But while every boat in The Race is an unquestioned speedster, what remains to be seen is the overall durability of the radical fleet. The English skipper Pete Goss, who had planned to compete, lost his 120-foot boat at sea during a qualifying sail less than three weeks ago. PlayStation and Club Med, the two pre-race favorites, have each survived some harrowing moments in trials. And never before has a group of professional sailors pushed so wild a collection of multihulls through the Southern Ocean under boat-versus-boat racing conditions. While The Race will no doubt add a significant chapter to the annals of marathon offshore sailing, the odds that all six boats will make it around the course seem long indeed. The Race is the creation of the French multihull sailor Bruno Pey ron, who hatched the idea while concluding the first sub-80-day circumnavigation aboard Commodore Explorer in 1993. Peyron foresaw a fleet of a dozen or more behemoths literally and figuratively charging into the dawn of the new millennium. As it happened, economic reality sidetracked the numbers in Peyron's romantic vision, and the actual running of the event was in jeopardy as recently as three months ago. Critics of The Race, citing the potential danger of sending an ill-prepared fleet into harm's way, called for a postponement of anywhere from a month to a year. But Peyron weathered the storm, as did the six boats scheduled to start today, listed here in order of how they could fare. CLUB MED -- The New Zealand skipper Grant | Mega-Cats Compete In Race Around World |
1259393_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Wall St. Goes Hunting for Treasure in China'' (Dec. 17), which brings to light many aspects of Wall Street firms' escalating interest for lucrative business deals in China: Some deals could have disastrous effects on China's environment. A case in point is the underwriting of $830 million of bonds by several Wall Street firms, including Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, to the China Development Bank for the Three Gorges dam. The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River with a reservoir about 400 miles long will displace 1.2 million people and cause myriad ecological problems, according to a recent report by the World Commission on Dams. Both the World Bank and the United States Export-Import Bank have refused to support it in part because of these problems. As the proponents and beneficiaries of the free-flowing global economy, investment banks need to look beyond the bottom line and incorporate meaningful environmental and social criteria into their investment practices in China and elsewhere. PAMELA WELLNER Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 21 The writer is a campaigner for the International Rivers Network, an environmental group. | China and the Environment |
1259071_4 | with what had always been the glamour associated with displays of contemporary art.'' Though Haskell does not stress the point, it is evident that his subject here is part of the story of the displacement of contemporary art as the primary reference for art appreciators by the art of the past, and so part of the story of the invention of modernism as an ideology of the contemporary. Early exhibition organizers were happy to show painted and cast reproductions of famous paintings and sculptures. On the other hand, the development of photography, which first made it possible to document an artist's complete works, suggested the assembly of a representative selection of originals. What allowed this to happen over time was the ''radical change'' that took place around 1900 ''in the relationship between private collectors, museums and exhibitions'': not only did taxation prove more powerful than revolutions in moving art from private homes into museums, but ''after 1918 . . . museums began to lend pictures to international exhibitions on a regular basis,'' eventually producing the shifting global gallery of the present moment. Whatever the art-historical ambitions for definitiveness of judgment enshrined in the catalogs and symposiums that accompany these shows, in real life ''every Old Master exhibition is the result of a series of unplanned compromises.'' While pictures may be carefully chosen, just as in war and politics ''developments in taste and scholarship'' are, as in war and politics, ''subject to accident,'' dependent on the whims of collectors, the ambitions of local and national governments and the financial interests of any number of people. A fascinating example, to which Haskell devotes a chapter, is the exhibition of Italian masterworks put on in England in 1930, organized by Ivy, Lady Chamberlain, wife of Sir Austen Chamberlain, the foreign minister in the Conservative government. Capitalizing on Mussolini's desire to stay on good terms with the British government, Ivy got him to force Italian museums and collectors to supply her with such pictures as Botticelli's ''Birth of Venus.'' Today, the pressure to lend pictures, ''which in the first half of the 20th century was political,'' more often ''comes from the demands of publicity and finance from within the museums themselves.'' At all times, it seems, aesthetic questions cannot in practice be separated from other social interests. Paul Mattick, who teaches philosophy at Adelphi University, is completing a book of essays on modern art. | Hanging Up the Past |
1259139_0 | I NEVER believed in tarot cards or astrology,'' Dawn Zimmerman said. ''Reincarnation is another story. Now I'm on my second life.'' The 40-year-old Ms. Zimmerman said her transition from hawking junk bonds in Beverly Hills to championing disabled children in East Hampton ''is proof that no one knows what life holds in store for them, and anything is possible.'' Another milestone comes on Wednesday, when her Child Development Center of the Hamptons, a preschool, launches a new entity in the state charter school system. Like the preschool, the new charter school will integrate equal numbers of regular-education students and those with special needs in kindergarten through fourth grade. Children from 11 school districts on the East End are eligible to enroll. Initial enrollment is 24, and in September the school will begin adding a grade each year up to 12th grade. The charter school, Long Island's second, will offer programs in computer literacy, drama, dance, yoga and farming, and Ms. Zimmerman said that most of its teachers hold master's degrees. But that doesn't fully explain why a school with a focus on helping the disabled -- the staff is augmented by specialists in occupational, speech and physical therapy -- would draw non-disabled students as well. ''Parents are attracted to the school,'' Ms. Zimmerman said, ''because many of them believe that developing tolerance and empathy is just as important as learning math and reading. And empathy is what happens when non-disabled kids learn and play with kids who are in wheelchairs or have autism or wear hearing aids.'' Steven Berman, the principal of the charter school and a former principal in Manhattan for 18 years, said that the school's curriculum ''will meet all of the state's learning standards, but with a thematic approach, taught in modules lasting 6 to 8 weeks.'' He explained that if oceans were being studied, teachers of all subjects would use oceans as a topic. ''With this method,'' he explained, ''children on different levels within the same class can be easily taught, and it fosters cooperation and collaboration among teachers.'' Money to operate the charter school, which is temporarily located at East Hampton Indoor Tennis for a rent of $65,000 per year, comes from the per-pupil cost that follows each child from his school district, as well as federal Title I funds for special-ed children and private fundraising. Ms. Zimmerman is in the process of raising $3 | Trading In Junk Bonds for a Charter School |
1253994_0 | Through an expanded program this fall, the county's recycling of leaves is expected to double to 20,000 tons this year over last. Leaves are being recycled at commercial composting sites, where they are turned into topsoil, potting soil and other natural reusable gardening products. So far, 12 municipalities have chosen to participate in the county's organic waste recycling program -- five more than last year. Municipalities load the leaves left at neighborhood curbsides into large transport trailers for delivery to composting centers outside the county. To date, 400 truckloads, or approximately 8,000 tons of fall leaves, have been transferred. ELSA BRENNER IN BRIEF: ENVIRONMENT | LEAF RECYCLING |
1254128_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Concern Rising Over Use of Juvenile Prisons to 'Warehouse' the Mentally Ill'' (news article, Dec. 5): Instead of warehousing children in juvenile justice settings, it would behoove the nation to focus on improving the quality of treatment for children and provide the necessary financial and organizational resources needed to develop long-term, integrated programs. Such programs offer the hope for diverting children away from a harsh correctional system that is all too often ill equipped to provide successful outcomes for those with mental illness and mental retardation. Get-tough rhetoric and policies may work for some, but not for those needing the continuous and compassionate forms of care required to adapt and become productive members of society. SCOTT PROVOST Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 6, 2000 The writer is associate director for research, Center for Quality Assessment and Improvement in Mental Health. | Care for the Mentally Ill |
1254039_0 | To the Editor: Regarding ''From Classrooms to the Trenches,'' the cover article on Nov. 5, about special education directors, the writer ended up with the same limited focus most people -- and school districts -- have when looking at the special services department. Why is it that lawyers, state officials, parents and all who are all unified in a desire to make sure that special-needs children are included in the general school population as much as possible, do not recognize the fact that the special-services department is just that: one department in a school district? The special-services department, along with teams of professionals, plus parents, students and advocates of special-needs children, develops a a plan to address the needs of a classified student. This legal document explains how, with specific accommodations, the degree of success for each individual can be significantly increased. When the document is completed, it is then placed in the hands of other professionals. This fact is lost on all the above-mentioned parties. When a case comes down to litigation, are the president of the school board, the district superintendent, and other administrators present in any courts? The department of special services developed the plan. However, it can only monitor its implementation and evaluate its effectiveness. The department does not control financing, scheduling and hiring of staff to ensure the plan will be implemented as written. KEVIN W. AHEARN Carteret The writer is director of special services for the Carteret School District. | Special-Needs Departments Do Not Work in Isolation |
1254090_0 | To the Editor: Re your Dec. 5 Sports pages article about the decision of Swarthmore College to discontinue football: The comments of alumni decrying the decision were articulate and passionate, no surprise for Swarthmore graduates. But it is hardly the case that athletics is undervalued in American society or higher education. Compare press coverage of, say, the Heisman Trophy announcement to the naming of Rhodes or Marshall scholars. Intellectual rigor, artistic innovation, social engagement and civil discussion -- the core of a Swarthmore education -- are less well understood and less celebrated than achievements on the gridiron. But not at Swarthmore. The division between valuing athletics and intellect is ancient, going back to the roots of Western civilization. Consider Sparta and Athens. Swarthmore has always stood with the Athenians. Who now remembers the won-lost record of the Spartans? NANCY Y. BEKAVAC Claremont, Calif., Dec. 7, 2000 The writer is a member of the Swarthmore board of managers and president of Scripps College. | Swarthmore vs. Sparta |
1253934_1 | extensive collections on special education issues. But the Learning Center, which was developed largely by parents in the community like JoAnne F. Steiner and Karen Mendelowitz, is the only place where all the information is collected in one place. Mrs. Mendelowitz, who has two children and is a teacher with a special education background, said: ''If a parent is told, for example, that her child has A.D.D., she can come to our file, which is a starting place. It's a way of getting out information, and another way to access information. The Learning Center is also a safe haven for parents to do their research. It's a nice way to start, in a nonthreatening way.'' Deb Donaldson, a library assistant who handles many of the daily responsibilities for the center, said: ''Now people tend to go to the Internet first, but we have all the files, and parents could come here and actually put their hands on some books. The library director has been very supportive. Our acquisitions come out of the library books budget.'' Although the area is modest in size, it is ambitious in scope. There are books on topics like Tourette's syndrome, pervasive developmental disorders, attention deficit disorder, meeting the needs of gifted and talented students, and Down syndrome. For those with visual impairments, there are large-print books. And there are also videotapes on those subjects, along with magazines and newsletters, bulletin boards alerting parents and educators to conferences and meetings, and a file cabinet full of articles on learning disabilities. ''Parents need any information, and as much information as they could get,'' said Dana Fisher, a Chappaqua resident and special education teacher in the Pleasantville public schools, who also works as a special education tutor. ''I think it's an excellent idea, and would tell parents to use it.'' On a recent afternoon, Lenore Dweck, a Chappaqua resident and a behavior-management education consultant for school districts like Ardsley, Dobbs Ferry and Brewster, found her way to The Learning Center. ''This is great to have in a library,'' Ms. Dweck said. ''When parents hear that their child may have a learning disability at a conference, it can be very shocking and scary. Parents are always asking teachers where they can go for information, and usually I refer them to the Internet. This is more specific than the Internet. I've never seen anything like this in a public library.'' | One-Stop Information On Learning Issues |
1253958_0 | PILES will soon be driven deep into a patch of former industrial land along the Hudson River here for a mixed-use enclave called the Promenade that is being designed as a throwback to an old-fashioned downtown Main Street replete with residences above shops. When completed by 2002, the development, which is to cost more than $75 million, will include 160,000 square feet of stores as well as five restaurants topped by 325 one- to three-bedroom rental apartments. There will also be two hotels with a total of 360 rooms, 20,000 square feet of space for professional offices, a public riverfront walkway and 1,500 parking spaces on the 15-acre site. It is just north of Gorge and River Roads in this Bergen County community at the base of the Palisades' cliffs, not far from the George Washington Bridge. The mix of uses will be in two rows of interconnecting brick buildings each with varying elevations of three to six stories. Three mainly interconnected structures on each side will face a central landscaped boulevard extending from River Road eastward to the river. The parking garage will be mostly below grade and accessible to the street-level commercial activity by escalator or to the residences by elevator. There is also limited street-level parking. The Promenade project is being designed by Barrett Ginsberg of Denville, N.J., and developed by Starwood Heller Properties, a joint venture between Starwood Capital Group of Greenwich, Conn., and G. Heller Enterprises of Edgewater. Already in place are 162 modularly constructed rental and condominium apartments that the developers put up in the last 20 months on a pier jutting 800 feet into the water. Most of those units have been sold or leased. In addition, National Amusements of Dedham, Mass., recently completed a 16-screen movie theater on 15 adjacent acres it purchased earlier from Starwood Heller. The theater is to open next Thursday. The project is the latest addition to the resurgent mile-long waterfront of this former factory town. In the last several years numerous new rental and condominium buildings have been built or are being constructed with a total of up to 1,600 residences. The borough's population has increased in the last decade to 6,300, from 5,001 in 1990. This activity has caused some worries in the community, intensified by a fire this summer that destroyed an unfinished apartment complex, nine houses and 12 cars and left 45 people homeless. | In the Region/New Jersey; Edgewater Mixed-Use Project Has Traditional Look |
1257213_1 | risk of serious accidents may not be so high, but researchers don't doubt there is some risk. Whatever the toll may be, politicians operate on the principle that one death is one too many if they can get on the evening newscasts by promising to prevent it. The remedy becomes irresistible if it costs them nothing (no money out of their budgets, no interference with their phone calls from the back seats of chauffeured cars) and might even yield financial benefits (like campaign contributions from headset manufacturers). But the cost-benefit analysis looks quite different to Robert W. Hahn, the director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. He and two other economists at the center have published a paper in the journal Regulation examining proposals like the ones before the City Council. By looking at spending on cell phones, and at research showing that 60 percent of all cell phone calls are made while driving, the economists calculate that American drivers put a value of $25 billion annually on the calls from their cars. That's about five times the social costs of the accidents involving cell phones, according to the economists' calculations. Putting a dollar value on injuries and deaths appalls many people, but the figure is based on what Americans say they are willing to spend for extra safety measures. And the figure reflects the economists' calculations that a total ban on cell phones would reduce the number of accidents by less than 1 percent. Even the more modest ban on just hand-held phones flunks the economists' test. They estimate that the costs of the headsets and other hands-free equipment would still slightly exceed the value of the extra safety. And it's still an open question, they say, whether these devices actually do as much good as their promoters say. WE simply don't know very much about the effectiveness of hands-free devices in preventing traffic accidents,'' Dr. Hahn said. ''They show some promise, but we don't yet know enough to mandate them.'' By rushing to regulate, Dr. Hahn said, politicians could end up increasing other risks on the road. Fewer cell phones in cars, for instance, could mean longer delays in summoning lifesaving equipment to accident scenes. If drivers are unable to use cell phones to call for directions, they might resort to reading maps and sending e-mail while driving 60 miles per hour. Or, if | The Big City; Gabby Drivers Have Nothing On Regulators |
1257199_0 | A growing number of America's children are being identified as having learning disabilities that affect their ability to use written or spoken language. In 1987, a federal task force concluded that approximately 5 to 10 percent of the population had this sort of condition. Today about one out of every eight school children (a little more than 12 percent) is enrolled in programs for the learning disabled, and the rate of participation is increasing. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of students enrolled in special education in New York City more than doubled. In Greenwich, Conn., 19.8 percent of students are learning disabled. And the Dalton School in New York City found that 36 percent of its kindergartners had learning problems. Critics use these statistics to charge that the ''learning disabled'' label has become a fad, a classification that is being overapplied. They complain about the expense. Special education costs between two and three times the amount of traditional programs. They cite a rising tide of litigation as parents battle with schools to get their children proper support. They criticize the unfairness of such programs, since affluent families are more likely than less wealthy ones to take advantage of accommodations for the learning disabled, like time extensions on standardized tests. And critics charge that mainstreaming of learning disabled students -- the trend toward including them in traditional classes -- creates disruption. The critics are wrong. What we are witnessing is not a fad, which will pass or whose excesses will be corrected. We are witnessing the start of a revolution that will transform American education forever. It is part of a revolution we are undergoing in every other aspect of American life. The United States is shifting from an industrial society to an information society. Among other things, this means there is less emphasis on mass production and more customization of products and services. We can see these changes in retailing, for example. In the clothing business, stores are offering their customers personal shoppers to assist them in creating wardrobes, traditional off-the-rack shops are promising customized clothing built to the body of the shopper, and online software allows a shopper to create a computer scan of his or her body and then use that image to customize 25,000 fashion design details into purchasable clothing. Web sites even permit shoppers to examine, in fine detail, the button design, stitching and fabric | Tomorrow's Education Made to Measure |
1258533_5 | a family so badly, and if that's what it takes, they'll do it.'' Ms. Searle said caseworkers in Utah had the discretion to list children who were too young or too disabled to make such decisions. ''Some part of the public is really against public recruitment, and all of us are innately against it,'' she said. ''But we are also against kids growing up in foster care.'' ''It's one of those balancing acts,'' Ms. Searle added, ''where you're trying to play God -- which nobody wants to do, but somebody has to do it.'' Larry Sinnett, program administrator for the Colorado Department of Human Services, said it was important to remember that the adoption process itself had not been made easier. ''We are only using the Internet as a way to expose adoptable kids to possible parents,'' Mr. Sinnett said. ''We have not modified the process of adoption.'' The Colorado agency lists children through the Adoption Exchange and its site (www.denvergov.org/DenverChildren). Mr. Sinnett said that when his agency decided to use Web listings, some people had been concerned that the information might expose the children to possible harm. But since the adoption process, which generally involves a series of meetings with social workers in the home, is unchanged, that risk is no different than before, he said. Still, to ensure that children on the sites cannot be traced, photographs are usually cropped so nothing in the background suggests where they live. In the written descriptions, location information is general (listing only what state the child lives in, for example), last names are not included and birth dates are often not used. Some adoption experts said that even with these restrictions, listings on the Internet should be used cautiously. Jeannine Lifrieri, director of information for the National Council for Adoption in Washington, said: ''How much information should be posted? There are things a prospective parent should know, but if they are orphans, should that be listed? There are stigmas and that is confidential information in this country.'' There are other issues, said Ms. Johnson, of the National Adoption Center. ''There is concern on the part of psychiatrists that by listing specific diagnoses, it is a violation of privacy rights,'' she said. ''We believe you need to be honest with families about the children, and if they have attention deficit disorder or depression, it would be misleading to describe a sunny little | Going Online To Build a Family |
1258622_1 | and size, winnowing the nation's population by millions -- and likely to continue for years. Europe's highest-fertility country just a decade ago, Russia today is right down there with Spain and Italy as the lowest. New births last year in Russia occurred at the rate of 8.4 per 1,000 people, compared with 13.4 in 1990. Put another way, Russia's fertility rate -- the average number of babies a woman is expected to bear -- was just 1.17, down from 1.89 in 1990. The outlook, then, is for a shrinking, aging population when there is a crucial need for young people to rejuvenate Russia's farms, re-energize industry and rebuild the economy. The twin trends -- rising deaths and declining births -- are both rooted in the social and public-health upheavals that have swept the nation since the Soviet Union entered its death throes in 1991. Both trends have confounded experts, who expected them to be neither as serious nor as prolonged as they have been. The country's health care has collapsed in the last decade, along with the people's health. Public hospitals and clinics are short of money and medicine; doctors earn near-poverty wages; infectious diseases like tuberculosis are epidemic. No one doubts the decay has fed a rise in mortality unparalleled in recent peacetime history. And no one believes this is merely a medical issue. Rather, it is a signal that poverty and stress are eroding the government's ability to care for its own. Experts, including some at United States intelligence agencies, fear deteriorating public health could lead to political upheavals at worst, or aid emergencies at best. Low fertility is the norm in many Western nations, of course, thanks largely to women's emancipation and widespread birth control. Even in Russia, birthrates crept slowly downward for decades before the 1990's. But the latest plunge is different: driven not by women's broader choices, but by the fact that many of their options -- marital, medical, social, financial -- have been all but obliterated by the earthquake that destroyed the Soviet Union. Some turnaround surely will occur, but when, nobody knows. Experts once believed that Russia's mothers would start bearing children again after the upheavals of the early 1990's. Instead, Russia's birthrate fell another 10 percent. By all estimates, the population will continue to shrink. Russia has already lost 3.3 million people since its population peaked in 1992. It will lose tens | For All Russia, Biological Clock Is Running Out |
1258169_0 | After menopause, it is common for women to begin taking estrogen to prevent osteoporosis, the potentially disabling disease characterized by bone loss. But should men follow suit? A new study by Mayo Clinic researchers, published in this month's Journal of Clinical Investigation, reports that loss of estrogen, the dominant sex hormone in women, also appears to play a major role in bone deterioration in men. Although testosterone, the so-called male hormone, was also found to play a role in preventing bone resorption, as bone breakdown is known, estrogen proved to be important as well. The researchers, led by Dr. Sundeep Khosla, an endocrinologist, studied 59 elderly men and called the findings surprisingly clear. Less clear is what to do about them if they are confirmed. A straight course of estrogen therapy for men would be a problem, because of its feminizing effects, like breast enlargement. But other treatments may provide an estrogenlike effect on the skeleton without the side effects, the researchers said. Resorption occurs throughout life, the researchers said, and in people's younger years the bones are replenished. But in women, estrogen drops off sharply after menopause, leading to substantial risk of osteoporosis. In men, estrogen and testosterone taper off much more gradually, and testosterone had been assumed to be the more important of the two in regulating bone resorption. VITAL SIGNS: PREVENTION | Of Men, Estrogen and Brittle Bones |
1258254_4 | goal of preserving a million acres of land, and say that on her watch about 60,000 acres have been lost to development each year. Still, more than 250,000 acres of open space and farmland have been protected since 1994, nearly as much as in the prior three decades combined, officials say. Governor Whitman has spoken frequently of the need to control growth by steering new development to urban areas, redeveloping old industrial sites and reining in suburban sprawl. Yet her administration has supported two projects that would further cut into New Jersey's remaining wetlands: a 200-acre retail development in the Meadowlands, and an eight-mile highway connector through Middlesex County. The federal Environmental Protection Agency opposes both. The Whitman administration has also been at the vanguard of interstate and international efforts to reduce air pollution, although attempts to reduce in-state emissions have led to embarrassing failures. New Jersey's environmental protection commissioner, Robert C. Shinn Jr., played a crucial role in persuading the Midwestern states to bear responsibility for the air pollution they were exporting to the East, said Ned Sullivan, who was Maine's top environmental official and now runs Scenic Hudson, an advocacy group in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ''The Midwestern states had never, until then, admitted that their emissions from dirty, coal-fired power plants were causing the pollution and health problems that we experienced in New Jersey, New York and New England,'' Mr. Sullivan said. ''Gaining that consensus, based on an analysis of the science, was the critical achievement.'' The multistate agreement led to the E.P.A.'s 1998 order requiring power plants in 22 states to curb such smog-forming pollution, to lawsuits against those power plants filed by New York, New Jersey and other states, and ultimately to settlements such as one announced last week by the Cinergy Corporation, a utility in Cincinnati that said it would clean up 10 electric generating plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. Mrs. Whitman's efforts to comply with the federal Clean Air Act in New Jersey, however, gave rise to a managerial disaster. The governor chose to enhance the state's automobile-emissions inspections to detect more pollutants. But the contract was delayed for two years, ran about $100 million over budget, and, when it finally opened in freezing temperatures last year, proved a nightmare of frozen equipment, lines dozens of cars deep, poorly trained workers and the occasional mangled tire. That the contractors included several Republicans with ties | Two Grades, One Record |
1258228_0 | Until this year, Habitat for Humanity affiliates in Arizona and Colorado never felt a need to get involved in a political fight. But in the fall they jumped into a battle against a seemingly unlikely foe: the environmental movement. In one of the most far-reaching efforts yet to curb suburban sprawl, ballot initiatives in both states proposed giving voters an unprecedented level of power to designate wide swaths of land off limits to new housing. Officials with Habitat, which builds low-income housing for needy families, feared that the measures would drive up the cost of land and ''basically shut down our ability to acquire land and lots for growth,'' said Chris Wolf, the organization's director in Phoenix. So the Habitat affiliates joined with developers to oppose the initiatives; in Colorado, opponents even made a television commercial highlighting Habitat's objections. Nobody argues in favor of suburban congestion. But increasingly the debate over sprawl has turned to whether laws intended to fight it are playing a role in driving up housing prices, at a time when housing affordability in many parts of the country has dipped to its lowest level in almost a decade. The success of anti-sprawl efforts is evident in the increasing number of communities that have adopted measures like low-density zoning, moratoriums on building permits or voter-approved growth boundaries. Although the Arizona and Colorado initiatives were defeated last month, many similar local proposals in California passed, and battles over anti-sprawl laws continue to rage in suburbs outside Washington, Atlanta, Dallas and other big cities. Although the battles have been concentrated in the rapidly growing South and West, sprawl has been a concern in the densely populated Northeast as well. Only two years ago voters in New Jersey approved borrowing $1 billion to help preserve about a million acres of farmland and woodland. As anti-sprawl measures proliferate, developers have enlisted affordable-housing advocates to promote the view that the restrictions make higher home prices inevitable, in effect amounting to a tax on prospective home buyers that hits the working and middle classes hardest. ''One of the unintentional byproducts of efforts to control sprawl is to restrict the amount of land available for housing,'' said Nicolas P. Retsinas, a former Clinton administration housing official who is director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, at Harvard University. ''When you restrict supply in the face of increased demand, what a surprise! Prices go | Efforts to Restrict Sprawl Find New Resistance From Advocates for Affordable Housing |
1258238_1 | rights, that fundamentally takes away from their civil liberties.'' Taken together, said Lucas Guttentag of the American Civil Liberties Union, the laws passed in 1996 added up to ''the most sustained attack on immigrants' rights in modern times.'' Other laws from the same year have sharply curtailed prisoners' opportunities for federal court review of their conviction or the conditions of their confinement. Federal habeas corpus petitions were restricted by the 1996 counterterrorism law to those cases in which a state court was not only wrong, but unreasonably wrong. In many death penalty cases, federal habeas corpus petitions have been where a prisoner raised, for the first time, claims of ineffective counsel or other procedural issues. But under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, such claims no longer merit a federal hearing, because it would not be unreasonable for a state court to have failed to take into account an issue that was never raised. While conservative groups say the law has done no more than cut back on the overuse of habeas corpus petitions, liberal groups say it gutted a cornerstone of constitutional law. During the Clinton administration, new legislation has also cut back the role of the federal courts in ensuring that state prison systems meet constitutional standards. Over the last three decades, federal courts have overseen dozens of state and city prison systems where inmates have shown evidence of such brutality, abuse and inadequate living conditions as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The Texas prisons, for example, have been under federal oversight for 20 years, since a federal judge ruled that the inmates were sleeping on floors, receiving inadequate medical care and being abused by guards. And with the huge growth in the nation's prison population during Mr. Clinton's presidency, crowding in many prisons has become a more serious issue. But federal oversight has become rarer, since Mr. Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996, limiting the power of federal courts to require improvements in state prison conditions. The law limits prisoners' ability to have their cases considered in federal court, and also provides that consent decrees requiring improved prison conditions automatically expire after two years in the absence of a new trial finding ongoing constitutional violations. Federal oversight has already ended in several state and local prison systems, while others, including Texas, are still in court seeking to free themselves from federal control. | Curbs in Immigrants' and Inmates' Rights, Too |
1255148_4 | differences between its sequence and the public one. But for many companies, the real emphasis is to find the function of the genes, which could provide the basis for patents. Ceres Inc., a biotechnology company in Malibu, Calif., says it has filed for patents on many thousands of Arabidopsis genes. ''It's a significant proportion of the genome,'' said Richard Flavell, chief scientific officer. He said the company was making its information public but -- assuming the patents are granted -- people using those genes commercially would need a license. But Dr. Somerville of the Carnegie Institution said so much information had been in the public domain it might be hard for companies to get patents. The National Science Foundation, meanwhile, has started a 10-year project to determine the functions of all the genes and how they work together. The ultimate goal is a ''virtual plant'' -- a computer model that could, say, predict the response of the plant to different environmental conditions. Scientists say that knowledge of the genome will permit genetic engineering that can change the entire architecture of a plant, rather than just add a single trait like pest resistance, which is done now. Detlef Weigel at the Salk Institute put an Arabidopsis gene controlling when plants flower into aspen trees, causing the trees to flower in a few months rather than 8 to 20 years. The technique could speed up plant breeding and allow crops to be grown twice in a year on the same plot of land, he said. But Margaret Mellon, a critic of agricultural biotechnology at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said knowledge from the genome project should be used instead to improve conventional breeding or determine ideal planting conditions. ''A deeper understanding of plants could lead to some really clever and useful ways of increasing yields and getting rid of pests other than strong-arming plants by moving genes into them,'' she said. Another public effort is already at work on the rice genome, which has about 430 million base pairs, a relatively small number. It is expected to serve as a further model for other grains like wheat and corn, which have genomes that are so large and full of nonfunctioning DNA that they are considered impractical to sequence. Corn has about 2.6 billion base pairs and wheat more than 16 billion, several times the size of the human genome. TECHNOLOGY | First Complete Plant Genetic Sequence Is Determined |
1255234_0 | ASIA CHINA: PLACES OF WORSHIP DESTROYED -- Local officials and newspapers in the southeast city of Wenzhou said hundreds of unauthorized churches and temples in the surrounding region had been demolished or closed this month. Officials say they are fighting dangerous and illegal superstitions in this area, where unregistered Christian groups as well as unapproved ancestor worship and traditional sects have flourished. Erik Eckholm (NYT) TAIWAN: TRAVEL BAN EASED -- Taiwan announced rules, effective Jan. 1, to permit limited travel and trade between its outer islands of Quemoy and Matsu and mainland China, using only Taiwanese boats. This would be the first easing of Taiwan's longstanding ban on direct links to the mainland, but is far short of the broad opening of commercial ties both sides say they want. Beijing has refused to negotiate any issues with Taiwan unless it accepts the ''one China'' principle, and it is not clear if the mainland will cooperate with the new rules. Erik Eckholm (NYT) THE AMERICAS GUATEMALA: SPAIN REJECTS CHARGES -- Efforts by the Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu to pursue genocide charges against eight Guatemalan officials were set back when Spain's High Court refused to accept jurisdiction. The ruling was in response to a prosecutor's request to investigate the role that three former military leaders and five aides played in attacks on Spaniards in Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Lawyers for Ms. Menchu said they were considering appeals. David Gonzalez (NYT) ECUADOR: 8 DIE IN PIPELINE ATTACK -- At least 8 people were killed and 19 were wounded in the second attack this week on Ecuador's only oil pipeline. An explosion just off the highway in the Amazon jungle province of Sucumbios hit a bus and ruptured the line, spilling three thousand gallons of oil. Colombian guerrillas are known to operate in the area, and have often dynamited oil pipelines in their own country, but government officials said they could not yet say who was responsible. Larry Rohter (NYT) EL SALVADOR: NO TRIAL IN PRIESTS' DEATHS -- A judge has decided not to try former President Alfredo Cristiani and six generals in the killings of six Jesuit priests in 1989, saying the statute of limitations has run out. The priests, five Spaniards and a Salvadoran, were shot to death by army commandos along with their housekeeper and her daughter. They were killed at a time when Roman Catholic lay and religious workers | WORLD BRIEFING |
1255092_3 | of the San Francisco Partnership, a pro-business nonprofit group, defended the dot-com industry, saying that the slow-growth advocates unfairly vilify an industry that helped pull San Francisco out of a punishing recession in the 1990's and created some 40,000 local jobs. ''The Internet industry has become a scapegoat,'' she said, ''partly due to a mythology that's built up about young, latte-swilling, S.U.V.-driving dot-com millionaires.'' Ms. Brazer predicted that the slowdown in the nation's economy and deflation of the dot-com boom that appear already to be under way will curb city growth. Across the country, dot-com layoffs in November were up 55 percent from October, according to a survey conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a national employment service. The slow-growth movement is particularly ardent in San Francisco, Ms. Brazer said, because of its geography. The city is just 47 square miles, and it is bordered on three sides by water, so there is limited room for growth. ''Everybody wants to see the city preserved just as it was when they fell in love with it,'' she said. Proposition L's defeat does not appear to have ended the movement. Organizers of the measure have been working with sympathetic members of the Board of Supervisors to draft legislation that would accomplish what Proposition L had proposed. ''And if that all fails,'' said Debra Walker, a Mission District painter and co-chairwoman of the ''Yes on L'' committee, ''we're ready to get new signatures and go back as soon as we can on a special election.'' On the night of AK Press's eviction party, Susan Schwartzenberg, 49, a photographer, stood on its warehouse's back patio, projecting her photographs of demolished neighborhood landmarks and artists' studios on a cement wall. The images illustrated the book ''Hollow City'' (Verso), written by Rebecca Solnit. Ms. Schwartzenberg has been evicted twice in the last two years. In 1998, she lost her work studio when an Internet firm leased the entire building. Next month, she will vacate her studio at Market and Seventh Streets -- ''the last vestige of skid row,'' she calls it. The eight-story building was bought by a Michigan-based real-estate development firm. ''The whole flavor of San Francisco is changing so drastically,'' Ms. Schwartzenberg said. ''New condominiums spring up overnight. I remember old bookstores or some curmudgeonly writer who used to live up there and I think: What happened to him? What happened to that bookstore?'' | Artists vs. Dot-Coms: Fighting San Francisco's Gold Rush |
1255104_0 | First came accusations of domestic spying, then the firings of top officials said to have been involved in the torture of political prisoners many years ago. Now the Brazilian government's intelligence agency is coming under increasingly heavy fire for what appear to be violations of its charter and a return to some of the more odious practices of the past. The director of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, Col. Ariel Rocha de Cunto, has been dismissed. News reports last month that his agents were spying on an opposition governor, reporters, a prosecutor and even the president's son were quickly followed by charges that at least two of his senior aides supervised the torture of dissidents during the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In a sworn deposition to federal prosecutors last week after he stepped down, Colonel de Cunto identified some of the many entities that his agency has had under surveillance. Among those were the environmental group Greenpeace, the human rights organization Americas Watch, the Monsanto chemical company and the religious sect led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The responses of those named have ranged from puzzlement to indignation. ''The money spent to obtain this type of information would be better employed in investigations of the various accusations we have made of industrial pollution, illegal commercialization of genetically modified food and the destructive exploitation of the Amazon Forest,'' said Roberto Kishinami, executive director of the Brazilian branch of Greenpeace. For President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist with a social democratic philosophy, such disclosures, especially those relating to torture, strike especially close to home. He was himself forced into exile during the military dictatorship and had friends who were jailed or even killed by the state security apparatus. ''I have a loathing of anyone who has links to torture,'' Mr. Cardoso said this month. Nevertheless his government has been placed in the awkward position of having to fend off demands to abolish the intelligence agency while simultaneously curbing the abuses that have come to light. The agency, known in Portuguese as ABIN for short, was established a year ago this month as the successor to the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, created in 1990. The predecessor of both agencies was the notorious National Intelligence Service, or SIN, which was in charge of all aspects of state security during the military dictatorship, when an estimated 3,000 Brazilians disappeared. | Spy Agency In Brazil Is Accused Of Abuses |
1255136_3 | did say that the United States would work more closely with Ireland and Britain to coordinate counterterrorism efforts. On the second day of his trip to the region, Mr. Clinton held several hours of closed-door meetings on the future of the peace effort with David Trimble, the Protestant first minister in the new Northern Ireland government, Seamus Mallon, the government's senior Roman Catholic, and Mr. Adams of Sinn Fein. He also met the British prime minister, Tony Blair. The leaders said they emerged from the sessions committed to preserving the peace. ''I do not intend to let the ship of peace sink on the rocks of old habits and hard grudges,'' Mr. Trimble said. Mr. Mallon cited the first sectarian killings since the Good Friday accord -- a Protestant from Belfast and a Catholic from Dungiven -- and urged his country to endure no more such violence. ''We must build our new, shining city on the hill,'' he said. ''We must not limp along in uncertainty, in a world of blame allocation and broken commitments.'' Mr. Clinton, who later headed to a dinner with Mr. Blair tonight at the prime minister's country residence in Chequers, urged the people not to forget the way things had been for so long, not too long ago. ''How many children are alive today in Northern Ireland because deaths from sectarian violence are now a small fraction of what they were before the Good Friday Accords?'' he asked. ''How many days of normality have you gained because honest people can go to a pub or a school or a church without the burden of a search or the threat of a bomb?'' Privately, the president met with 15 people, Protestants and Catholics alike, who had lost loved ones and even limbs in ''the troubles,'' as the three decades of violent conflict here is euphemistically called. ''You have spent so many years mourning your losses,'' he said later. ''I hope you will now celebrate with pride and defend with passion the progress you have made.'' During his speech, the president was interrupted once by a heckler, who shouted out as the president made the case for peace. But Mr. Clinton handled the disruption deftly, declaring to the young man: ''I'll make you a deal: I'll listen to you if you let me finish.'' When the man continued, Mr. Clinton said, ''I think he rejected the deal.'' | Clinton, in Ulster, Confronts Warring Passions Head-On |
1255053_0 | Q. What is Bluetooth? I keep hearing the term but have no idea what it means. A. Bluetooth is a radio-technology standard developed in 1998 that allows electronic devices that are equipped with it to wirelessly share information. It has been possible for a few years now to ''beam'' files between hand-held computers or to print documents to a printer through infrared ports, but the two communicating devices usually need to be quite near each other, and often pointed at each other. The short-range capabilities of Bluetooth wireless technology allow for a greater distance between the devices, usually about 30 feet, and relatively fast transmission speeds. (The name Bluetooth comes from Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century Viking king who united Norway and Denmark.) The developers of Bluetooth -- which include large technology companies like I.B.M., Ericsson, Nokia, Intel and Toshiba -- would no doubt like it to become the standard technology that could allow a laptop to communicate with a cell phone or other hand-held device. Information available on a Bluetooth network, like flight information or sale announcements, could be delivered to your Bluetooth-enabled devices when you are within the network's range. Products equipped with a Bluetooth chip are slowly starting to become available, mainly in the form of cell phones and laptop cards. The technology is still relatively expensive, but it is expected to come down in price as it is more widely adopted over the next few years. For more information on Bluetooth, the official Web site is at www.bluetooth.com. For news and updates on the wireless world in general, the site at www.allnetdevices.com is quite helpful. Q. Is there an easy way to convert my address book from one e-mail program to another if I decide to switch mail software? A. There is usually at least one way to convert an address book file for use in a different e-mail program. The ability to convert or ease of conversion usually depends on which programs are involved. The documentation that comes with a new mail program may provide some tips. If you cannot find the information you need there, try the eMailman site on the Web at emailman.com. It is a thorough compendium of information about e-mail and includes a section devoted to converting mailboxes, address books and other data to different mail programs. On the Conversions page, there are links to shareware programs that will let you do | Bluetooth, Addresses And Irksome Warnings |
1255153_2 | some of the hardest square miles to provide service in the country,'' said Adam Zawel, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group, referring to the blocking and dropping of radio signals caused by the city's high-rise buildings. ''It is up there with the Grand Canyon.'' The canyon effect is the most commonly cited explanation for the city's cell phone woes, particularly in Manhattan. The towering skyline makes it tough for radio signals to find their way around, even with the thousands of antennas that have been attached to facades and rooftops as relays. Inside buildings, callers face the same obstacle of too much steel, brick and mortar. But there is more to it. As in so many things in New York, too many people live, work and visit here, and with hundreds of thousands of cell phones being used every day, there are simply too many people chasing too few connections. And unlike Finland, which has the highest per-capita cell phone use in the world, New York carries the burden, shared across the United States, of having competing digital technologies. In Europe, a common digital standard is pre-eminent; in the United States, wireless carriers are split among three rival standards, which so far are largely incompatible. ''I am in London now, and I can travel around Europe and my phone works everywhere,'' said Rod Hoo, president of LGC Wireless, a company based in San Jose that specializes in making wireless connections more reliable in big buildings like airport terminals and office towers. ''When you are in the United States, you don't get that kind of coverage.'' Or that kind of wireless craziness, for that matter. Cell phones are a European obsession. People riding mopeds in the Roman rush hour, their mouths and ears wired with headsets, refuse to surrender a syllable to the congestion. In Paris, a lawyer recently told of being invited with his wife to dinner at the home of a wealthy client, who kept his cell phone on the finely adorned table throughout the meal (''The teaspoon, the soup spoon and the cell phone''). Not only did the host receive calls throughout the evening, he also once even excused himself to make one. In Eastern Europe, the craze arrived late but is growing the fastest. The Czech Republic, which has 3.9 million fixed phone lines, already has 3 million cell phone users, up from 500,000 just three | Two Continents, Disconnected; Europeans Are Finding New York To Be a Backwoods for Cell Phones |
1253167_0 | Government investigators have received complaints linking 29 more deaths to the failures of Firestone tires, including 4 people killed since the company announced a huge recall four months ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said today. The agency said it had reports of 148 fatalities involving tire-tread separations, up from the 119 it reported on Oct. 17, the last time it updated the figures. As of today, there have been more than 4,300 complaints about the tires, involving 525 injuries, the agency said. On Oct. 24, the totals were roughly 3,700 complaints and about 500 injuries. As to the four deaths since the recall announcement of Aug. 9, it was not clear today whether the vehicle owners were simply not aware that their tires had been recalled or whether they just had not replaced them, an agency official said. The manufacturer, Bridgestone/ Firestone Inc., whose parent company is the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan, announced a recall of 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires on Aug. 9 amid reports of accidents linked to tread separation. Most of the tires subject to recall were original equipment on the Ford Explorer, with many of the fatalities occurring when vehicles rolled over after tires failed. The new figures, made available as part of the federal agency's updating of its complaint database, will surely not be the last chapter. More complaints will come in, although the agency says it has resolved any duplications on deaths reported. The faulty tires have also been linked to several dozen fatalities in Venezuela and the Middle East. Two months ago, investigators warned consumers that an additional 1.4 million Firestone tires not under recall had a high failure rate and could be a danger. Five of the 148 deaths were associated with those 1.4 million tires. | 29 More U.S. Deaths Linked to Firestone Tires |
1253267_0 | Bishop George West Barrett, a former leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, who ordained four women as Episcopal ministers in 1975, before the Episcopal Church had approved ordaining women, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 92. The cause was renal failure after he decided to take himself off kidney dialysis, said Robert Williams, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. The diocese said, in its announcement of his death, that Bishop Barrett had performed the 1975 ordination, in Washington, D.C., because he thought his church had not been progressing toward formally accepting the ordination of women after 11 other women had been similarly ordained in 1974 in Philadelphia. Soon after the ordination in Washington, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church banned Bishop Barrett from acting as a minister for a time. It also censured three other bishops who had carried out the 1974 ordination. But in 1976, the ordination of women was formally recognized by the Episcopal Church at its General Convention. Current estimates are that about 2,000 of the 12,000 active members of the church's clergy are women, as are six of its bishops and three of its suffragan bishops. One of the 11 women ordained in Philadelphia in 1974, the Rev. Suzanne R. Hiatt, a retired professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said that the 1975 ordination had been ''critically important,'' because it established that such ordinations would continue until the church acted. One of the four women whom Bishop Barrett ordained, the Rev. Lee McGee, a former professor at Yale Divinity School, said the 1975 ordination had been ''absolutely pivotal in moving the leadership of the Episcopal Church to change its canon law'' to permit ordaining women, and that ''this was borne out in the rapid action of the church in 1976.'' But the leader of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, Bishop Michael W. Creighton, said: ''My hunch is that it did not in a sense force the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church. I think that was going to happen anyway. It was moving in that direction.'' Dean George L. W. Werner, the president of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church, which is one of the two houses of its legislature, said that Bishop Barrett was an early voice in talking about the ordination of women, as early as the | Bishop George W. Barrett, 92; Fostered Women's Ordination |
1253278_13 | Explorer's center of gravity actually rose slightly. The Trade-Offs Along With Benefits, Design Liabilities Automobile design is a matter of trade-offs. And often, dealing with one problem only adds to another. For instance, using the Ranger's underbody for the Explorer gave Ford the image it wanted, with the budget it needed. But while the Explorer looked roomy, its design actually limited the weight it could safely carry. By extending the passenger compartment and installing a second row of seats, Ford made the Explorer more than 600 pounds heavier than the Ranger but did not upgrade the suspension and tires to carry the bigger load. That meant a typically equipped Explorer could carry 1,025 pounds, even less than the 1,100 pounds for a Taurus. Many Explorers are built to carry as little as 900 pounds --a 150-pound person in each of five seats and 150 pounds of cargo. Sport utility vehicles are more prone to roll over when heavily loaded because the seats and cargo area are above the vehicles' center of gravity. By contrast, the stability of cars and minivans is less affected when they are full because the passengers and cargo are situated at roughly the cars' and minivans' center of gravity. Whether overloading played a role in the Firestone tire failures is not clear. Some of the Explorers that crashed were stuffed with people and luggage; some were not. In general, though, overloading ''can really affect your stability and handling,'' said Donald F. Tandy, an engineer who oversaw much of the early work on the Explorer. Another trade-off involved the tires. Ford chose the same size tires it had long chosen for the Ranger. Those tires had the lowest possible rating for withstanding high temperatures. And when the company lowered the recommended tire pressure in 1989 to increase stability and soften the ride, it also further reduced the tires' ability to carry weight without overheating. Tire pressure became an issue in the Firestone controversy, with Firestone arguing that the lower recommended pressure -- 26 pounds per square inch, compared with 35 for the Ranger -- had contributed to the tires' failure, especially where Explorers were being driven at high speeds in high temperatures. For its part, Ford pointed out that Goodyear tires inflated to the same pressure almost never failed on Explorers, and that Firestone had endorsed the recommendation for nearly 10 years, until it recalled 6.5 million | RISKY DECISION/A special report.; Study of Ford Explorer's Design Reveals a Series of Compromises |
1253232_3 | new round of SALT -- changing the acronym's meaning to Strategic Admissions Limitations Talks -- to deal with the pressure created by increasing numbers of students' applying under early action programs. Duke rewrote its application this year, giving students less room to list the number of their extracurricular activities, and more room, instead, to describe why those activities mean something to them. ''My biggest worry is, the ages of 15 through 18 are critical years for kids to have a balance,'' said Charles A. Deacon III, dean of admissions at Georgetown. ''The ones who are driven into these top schools and are in certain top prep schools or affluent public schools don't have it.'' The Harvard paper chronicles parents hiring consultants to teach 3-year-olds to make eye contact and demonstrate ''both leadership and sharing'' in play sessions where preschool directors judge them for admission, and others hiring college consultants for their middle school students. Rod Skinner, a college counselor at Milton Academy, a highly competitive preparatory school outside Boston, tells of a father who took a year's sabbatical from his job to manage his daughter's college application process. The fear is that the process has grown increasingly inequitable, with the advantage accruing to those students able to afford tutors, test preparation courses, elaborate summer camps or consultants to help shape their college essays. And admissions officers say applicants seem to have become less genuine; at Penn, the dean of admissions, Willis J. Stetson Jr., tells of a father calling to ask if 500 hours of volunteer service is enough. As Martha C. Lyman, director of college advising at Deerfield Academy, another Massachusetts preparatory school, pleaded to admissions officers at the College Board meeting: ''Your applicants are our children. They are stressed, they are sleep deprived, they are depressed.'' Pressure has always existed, the colleges say. But now they see it wearing through more on students when they arrive on campus. Harvard, among other places, increased its provision of mental health services last year, prompted by concerns about student stress, often resulting in binge drinking or eating disorders. ''We don't imagine this as a new phenomenon,'' said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions at Harvard. ''It's just that we see more of this clearly articulated stress, pressure, feelings of inadequacy, comparing oneself to all these other extraordinary people.'' Colleges advising high school students to relax, of course, is a little like | Ease Up, Top Colleges Tell Stressed Applicants |
1253123_1 | from Egreetings Network (www.egreetings.com). ''My one-night stands last longer than your relationships!'' Cybercards, however, give some people pause. Isn't it just a bit callous to send a dressed-up computer message in the wake of a sorrowful occasion or for a special one like a marriage proposal? The companies that offer electronic greeting cards say they don't see electronic cards as a substitute for paper cards but as an enhancement to e-mail, which is known for its brusqueness. ''What we're providing is a better e-mail experience,'' said Andrew Moley, the president and chief executive of Egreetings. ''This is an enabler of sentimental communications.'' Some people do not have an easy time expressing themselves. Men, in particular, ''are more comfortable in the e-mail medium,'' Mr. Moley said. ''It's easy, fun and efficient,'' Mr. Moley continued. ''On our site, you can add humor and music and let the card speak for you. You don't have to use your words.'' Senders of electronic cards tend to be younger than the senders of paper greeting cards, and their ranks include a higher proportion of men. Forty percent of e-cards are sent by men, compared with only 10 percent for paper cards. ''What counts is that you were thinking about them and wanted to let them know,'' said Gordon Tucker, a former president of Egreetings. ''It is really important in terms of relationship management. The fact it is convenient and free does not mean the sentiment is any less heartfelt.'' Or does it? ''Some people will be offended if you send something cheap or free, while, conversely, the most impressive gift is one someone made,'' said Marty McKolskey, the president of 1001 Postcards (www.postcards.org). ''If you go to the drugstore and pick up the first card you see,'' Mr. McKolskey said, ''does that count as more effort than going through the 10,000 images on our site and picking the music and putting together a full production? Someone may spend hours going from site to site trying to find the perfect message.'' The appropriateness of an electronic card depends in large part on the relationship between the sender and receiver. Ms. Scully spends much of her workday at her computer running Praxis Marketing, which does marketing for technology trade shows. Over the years, she has received electronic cards for her birthdays and on other occasions. ''I got a couple when my daughter was born,'' she said. ''That | Sorry for Your Loss, But Not That Sorry |
1256583_5 | each other very well when vulcanized, a process in which a tire is heated and squeezed to fuse the various layers. Decatur's machinery for mixing rubber compounds produced pellets, the engineers said; the machinery at Firestone's other factories produced sheets of rubber. In each case, the pellets or sheets would be sprayed with a lubricant to keep the rubber from sticking together in huge globs. According to the engineers, the pellets' greater surface area meant they were exposed to larger quantities of lubricant. When Firestone burned the rubber from the recalled tires' belts and measured the chemical properties of the ash, it found that 1 percent to 1.5 percent of the ash from tires made in Decatur consisted of lubricant -- two to three times the amount found in ash from other tires. Extra lubricant makes the belts stick to each other less. To address the finding, Firestone has begun shipping rubber sheets from its other plants to Decatur, where the pellets are being used only in less critical manufacturing processes, the engineers said. Besides the design and manufacturing flaws, the Firestone investigation found that many tires involved in property damage and injury claims showed signs of customer abuse. These tires were twice as likely as the average recalled tire to have been repaired, usually for a puncture, and two-thirds of the repairs were done improperly, the engineers said. Punctured tires should have the hole plugged and the liner patched, but most often only one of these was done. The tread separations would not have been so deadly if most of the Explorers had not rolled over when their tires failed, but Firestone has not analyzed the vehicle's stability, the engineers said. A computer analysis earlier this fall by The New York Times of the federal government's database of all fatal crashes nationwide over the last nine years found that rollovers were a factor in 97 percent of tire-related deaths in Explorers. Rollovers were a factor in 84 percent of the 377 tire-related deaths that occurred in all other sport utility vehicles during those years, but in only 38 percent of such deaths in cars. One of the first big regulatory decisions facing the incoming Bush Administration will be whether to order a broader recall of Firestone tires. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has said that it will try to conclude its own review of the tires by March. | Firestone Engineers Offer a List of Causes for Faulty Tires |
1256595_0 | To the Editor: Two articles (''Gene Altered Foods: A Case Against Panic'' (Dec. 5) and ''Golden Rice in a Grenade Proof Greenhouse'' (Nov. 21) state that genetically engineered golden rice will help alleviate vitamin A deficiency, a common cause of blindness among children in developing countries. Nutrition science, however, suggests that golden rice alone will not greatly diminish vitamin A deficiency and associated blindness. Golden rice is engineered to contain three new genes that together cause rice to produce beta carotene. Beta carotene is a precursor of vitamin A; it must be split by an enzyme to be active. Beta carotene and vitamin A are fat-soluble, meaning that they require fat in the diet to be absorbed through the intestinal wall. Conversion of beta carotene to vitamin A, and transport in the body to the tissues that use vitamin A, require diets adequate in fat and protein. People whose diets lack these nutrients or who have intestinal diarrheal diseases -- common in developing countries -- cannot obtain vitamin A from golden rice. Golden rice represents sophisticated genetic engineering. But it will not conquer the main causes of vitamin A deficiency -- malnutrition and poor sanitation. Conquering these problems requires more challenging interventions than a single high-tech product. DR. MARION NESTLE New York The writer heads the nutrition and food studies department at New York University. | Gene-Altered Food |
1256469_0 | Motorola spent billions to create the Iridium satellite telephone system, allowing anyone almost anywhere to make a phone call. Unfortunately, not many people found much reason to lug a cumbersome phone to a remote place and pay several dollars a minute for the service. Scientists, however, found a very good use for it. With the help of Iridium's constellation of more than 70 satellites circling 470 miles above the ground, the scientists have collected a bounty of information about electric currents in the upper atmosphere, data they could not have obtained otherwise. ''We need measurements to make the invisible visible,'' said Dr. Brian J. Anderson of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, who led the effort. The sun spews out charged particles traveling at a million miles per hour known as the solar wind. The bombardment of the solar wind would be deadly to life on Earth, but Earth's magnetic field deflects the streams of charged particles -- electric currents, in essence -- and either deflects them around the planet or channels them toward the North and South Poles. The currents themselves cannot be seen, but they power the colorful, flickering nighttime display of the aurora borealis -- what in the Northern Hemisphere is known as the Northern Lights -- and the aurora australis in the south. When the sun sends out a strong puff of charged particles, these auroral currents can disrupt radio signals, damage power grids and puff out the Earth's atmosphere to drag down satellites. The new knowledge should help scientists better understand such ''space weather.'' The orbits of the Iridium satellites pass directly over the North and South Poles, providing an ideal downward observing perch of the polar regions. Several years ago, Dr. Anderson realized that the magnetic sensors that the Iridium satellites use to orient themselves are sensitive enough to detect the 1 percent fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the auroral currents. Since February 1999, the operators of the Iridium system have been shipping the magnetic field data to Dr. Anderson and his collaborators, who then calculate the position and strength of the currents. The large number of satellites means they can detect fairly quick shifts in the currents. A second, ground-based system provides a complementary snapshot of the auroral currents. Eight radar dishes in the Arctic known as the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network, or SuperDARN, measure the electric | New Assignment for Satellite System |
1256481_0 | Last week, more than a decade after the federal government allowed the first release of a genetically engineered organism into the environment, researchers concluded that scientists still cannot say with any precision what the ecological effects -- either good or bad -- of such genetically modified organisms might be. The findings, published in Science, raise questions about why so little is known and whether some key questions about risk are, in practical terms, answerable. For example, some scientists have estimated that answering just a single question of risk for a single organism -- whether a type of biotech corn harms the monarch butterfly -- would cost $2 million to $3 million, more than the Agriculture Department typically grants each year for the study of environmental risk. And if questions cannot be answered, where do we go from here? Questions about risk first emerged when genetically engineered organisms started making their way out of the laboratory and into the public consciousness in the late 1980's. Men in spacesuits were assigned to release the first genetically engineered organisms into the wide world: bacteria sprayed on strawberries to protect them from frost. Soon afterward uneasy shoppers shunned the first genetically engineered crop, the ill-fated Flavr Savr tomato, whose only crime was a foreign gene for longer shelf life. Today such organisms seem almost quaint as biotech salmon grow to market size in half the normal time and genetically modified goats make human blood proteins in their milk. And an international debate has sprung up over the value of these organisms, with participation from such unlikely quarters as the Vatican and Prince Charles. But while biotechnology has raced ahead, scientists' ability to predict potential environmental consequences apparently has not, according to the new Science paper, a review of scientific literature by Dr. LaReesa Wolfenbarger and Dr. Paul Phifer. The study of the highest profile of environmental risks, the potential threat of genetically modified corn to monarch butterflies, is a case in point. Questions about corn and monarchs first arose in the spring of 1999 when Cornell researchers showed that monarch caterpillars died in the laboratory after eating pollen from genetically engineered corn. The corn, given a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, then produced a toxin that killed the European corn borer pest. Corn and monarch butterflies are two of the best studied organisms on the planet. How difficult could it be to determine | What's Next for Biotech Crops? Questions |
1254872_4 | and countertops made of recycled tires and soda containers. He sometimes also works on SoundWaters' 80-foot schooner. ''I ended up doing something which I dreamed about,'' he said. Another client, W. C. Bird, said farewell to his responsibilities as vice president for human resources at S. D. Warren, a division of Scott Paper, to buy and run Ash Mill Farm, an 11-acre bed-and-breakfast in Holicong, Pa. He remembers telling Mr. Redmond of New Directions, ''I don't have a clue what I want to do. I want you to prod me, poke me and give me every test.'' Yet another client, Chris Ridley, departed WGBH, the Boston public TV station where he was vice president for corporate communications, to start For the Birds, a Concord, Mass., backyard wild-bird store. ''I can't believe anyone can make a living doing this -- to have a job this fantastic, this much fun,'' he said. While no official statistics exist on how many people embark on new vocations, counselors say demand for career advice is surging. Susan Eubanks, associate executive director of the National Board for Certified Counselors in Greensboro, N.C., says the number of requests for referrals has shot up to about 300 a month today from 30 to 40 eight years ago. And Juliet Miller, executive director of the National Career Development Association in Columbus, Ohio, says, ''It used to be that you just sent out a resume, and you'd get a job. Now we're really helping people look at who they are, what they really want to accomplish in their life.'' Ian Summers, a career consultant, helps clients ranging from marketing directors and graphic designers to a fighter pilot and a small-town Indiana ear, eye and nose doctor who was ''bored out of his mind'' until he took up writing novels about doctors. Mr. Summers's workshops in a renovated barn in Stockton, N.J., often begin with his burning incense and asking participants to begin ''vacuum cleaning the universe'' -- scanning the world for jobs that match their interests, not their skills. Sometimes that even means staying put. Several years ago, he counseled a renowned economist who was thinking about leaving his profession. ''I helped him to evaluate what he stood for,'' Mr. Summers recalled. After attending a two-day workshop, he said, the economist decided to remain in his field. After that, Mr. Summers said, he ''approached his work from his heart.'' MANAGEMENT | Changes of Scenery Taken to the Ninth Degree |
1254761_3 | most of the public land in Utah. ''We can quickly put out an e-mail alert and energize people around the country and ask them to react in some fashion,'' Mr. Reberg said. About 10,000 people are hooked up to the alliance's e-mail alert system. The group usually sends out at least one alert a month, although in crises there can be three or four alerts a week, sometimes focusing on specific Congressional districts nationwide. ''We've been able to respond very quickly to these sneak attacks,'' said Kevin Walker, a volunteer who cobbled together the group's Web site and e-mail alert system using software programs he wrote himself. A former professor of mathematics, Dr. Walker moved to Utah's canyon lands 10 years ago because ''it's probably the wildest place left,'' he said. He also set up an internal Web page that the group has used for coordinating hundreds of volunteers who have fanned out across the state to visit and document remote areas to add to the alliance's proposals for wilderness protection. For Dr. Walker, this personal connection to the place through the Web is the most important asset. ''We see our members as a valuable grass-roots resource,'' he said. ''We don't just look at them as a source of money. We're looking for a long-term interaction to help us month after month, year after year.'' JoAnn M. Valenti, a professor of communications at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the alliance had been effective in its use of new technology. She is on the receiving end of the group's e-mail alerts because she specializes in environmental communications. E-mail helps the group spread its message exponentially, she said, in a way that advertisers call viral marketing. Dr. Valenti sometimes forwards the messages to people in her address book, and she sometimes finds the group's messages coming from other sources, like a colleague or a former student in case she didn't see it. But she doesn't mind. ''There's value in repetition and constant presence,'' she said. Although the alliance's system might seem like a well-oiled machine, Dr. Walker acknowledged that his homemade design was ''a little helter-skelter.'' So the group is working with a volunteer Web site designer, Devina Pallone of Design Wrench in Salt Lake City, to overhaul the site. Mr. Reberg hopes to make it easier for people to join the alliance anywhere in the site. He would also | Using the Internet to Sell Their Love of a Canyon |
1254766_0 | SETH GODIN remembers when the dot-com people laughed at him. Mr. Godin had formed Yoyodyne, one of the early companies trying to promote Internet start-ups through the online equivalent of direct mail, which is usually referred to as junk mail. A lack of glamour and a stench of spam -- the dreaded mass-e-mailed sucker bait of get-rich-quick schemes and online nostrums -- have long accorded e-mail declasse status among the technoids. Mr. Godin recalled that when he pitched professionally written and targeted e-mail as a low-cost, efficient and effective way to reach the online audience, the response was less than enthusiastic. E-mail is boring, he was told. But guess what: now it's Mr. Godin who is laughing, along with other champions of lowly e-mail, who have watched as Internet advertising companies have flamed out after spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl commercials and spectacular multimedia online advertisements. That is because in these times of dot-com belt-tightening, e-mail looks like a bargain. Sending out a catalog mailing can cost $1 a customer, while a personalized e-mail is 5 cents, according to a report issued earlier this year by Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. What's more, while the rate at which consumers ''click through'' to read banner advertisements has plummeted in the last year to less than 1 percent, the response to e-mail messages was measured in the January Forrester survey at about 10 percent, with a quarter of those actually buying something. (Because this was a one-time survey, Forrester could not determine whether the response rates are rising or declining -- but more on that later.) Direct e-mail marketers see these as positive numbers. So, apparently, do advertisers. A Forrester survey of 50 e-mail marketing managers found that they planned to triple their e-mail spending by 2004, the year that the analysts predicted that American marketers would send almost 210 billion e-mail messages. For consumers, such a blitz could be hellish or heavenly. To those who feel inundated by unbidden electrons and try to guard their privacy against the commercial world, no amount of online coupons will seem anything but menacing. But for those who enjoy receiving bargain tips, who zip through their morning e-mail messages without complaint, the new age of personalized, targeted messages promises to bring information and deals they want, when they want them and where it is most convenient -- be it a home PC, hand-held | Marketers Turn to a Simple Tool: E-Mail |
1256962_3 | the past 10 years,'' said Jay S. Stowsky, associate dean for school affairs and initiatives at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. In particular, he said, the number of applicants with engineering backgrounds has risen, to 27 percent last year from 18 percent the year before. ''That's probably because of all these people who decided to try their luck in the dot-com world,'' he said. Still, over time, he said that he expected to see a trend toward younger students as older people switch to programs focused on working professionals. Applicants and admissions officers say that part of the reason for the increase in demand for the M.B.A. is the result of the perception that a graduate degree is necessary. ''What we're seeing now is that it's just become a presumption that in certain industries you have a graduate degree in order to advance,'' said Mr. Anderson of Kaplan. ''It's necessary to make the next step,'' said Ms. Muetzel, who hopes to work overseas for a strategic consulting firm. Most young people who rise in big organizations like the consulting firms that interest her have graduate degrees, she said. Unfortunately for applicants, the quality of applications has increased sharply, making this a highly competitive year for a spot in next fall's class, said Alex L. Brown, associate director of admissions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Students have more varied and stronger backgrounds, he said. ''There are some really cool people applying to business school right now,'' he said. ''That's a good thing.'' Joshua Gold, a victim of recent layoffs at the e-business consultant MarchFirst, has one of those interesting backgrounds. Mr. Gold, 27, graduated in 1999 from Georgetown University with a degree in finance; he grew up in Puerto Rico, moved to Israel when he was 14 and served in the Israeli army for three years. At MarchFirst, he helped manage a team responsible for designing a Web site for a financial company. The different experiences are useful fodder for his application essays, Mr. Gold said. ''It's so hard to differentiate yourself nowadays,'' he said. ''They have a lot of bankers and consultants.'' His plan is to apply to several top-ranked schools in the United States as well as at least one in Europe. Afterward, he said, the entrepreneurial life still appeals to him -- but not at a dot-com. | More Experienced Applicants at Business Schools |
1256900_3 | will probably be preceded by the relatively simple smell experience. A handful of companies, including Trisenx and DigiScents of Oakland, Calif., are working on peripherals that will emit synthesized scent. The taste business will be a logical offshoot of the scent business, Mr. Ivey said. Dr. Carol Christensen, a vice president at International Flavors and Fragrances in New York, said, ''Fragrances are definitely going to come first.'' The smells of gunshots and burning rubber would probably be first, Dr. Christensen said, enlivening many computer games. Next would be perfumes. ''A lot of cosmetics companies want to offer sample fragrances over the Internet,'' she said. ''They want to tap people's sensory systems.'' Flavor will take longer, Dr. Christensen said. ''But,'' she added, ''I can see getting on a food company's Web site and being able to smell or literally print out the newest flavor in nacho chips on a piece of paper.'' Mr. Ivey said, ''One of the problems international companies have in coming up with new flavors is that a group in New York working with a formula can't transmit that formula instantly to Italy or Japan.'' He said he hoped to study the problem by transmitting formulas electronically and printing out the taste solutions from a Web site. In the future, he and others working in the food and fragrance industries may have more choices, as biological research develops products engineered far more precisely for particular smells and tastes. Dr. Mark Zoller is vice president of research at Senomyx of La Jolla, Calif., which is trying to identify and patent genes that make up scent and taste receptors. Scientists at Senomyx, working with researchers at the University of California at San Diego, Dr. Zoller said, have identified all 25 of the human receptors for the bitter taste, 3 for the sweet taste and about 350 receptors for smell. Such research, he said, should let company fine tune very precisely for taste and smell. ''Right now people in the food and fragrance area work empirically with existing molecules,'' he said. ''We'll eventually be able to identify which receptor recognizes each compound. Then we'll be able to adjust smell or taste, for instance, blocking a bitter aftertaste.'' In the meantime, Mr. Ivey is making do with standard flavors. Dr. Christensen, who has tried some of his wares, said, ''This was one time where you could literally eat you words.'' WHAT'S NEXT | A Sense of Taste Online, But First Take a Sniff |
1256964_0 | Several big oil and mining companies have agreed to principles meant to safeguard human rights while protecting employees and property in remote parts of the world, the State Department said today. The department announced that the companies, human rights organizations and the governments of the United States and Britain have agreed to a set of voluntary guidelines after months of negotiations. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said she was pleased with the accord, which she said embodied precepts ''that we hope and expect will become the global standard in the oil and mining industries.'' Human rights organizations said that the rules of conduct were an encouraging step, but that their voluntary nature meant there was still no formal regulation for the conduct of the companies abroad nor a system for monitoring possible abuses. The guidelines address situations that were once little noticed but that, with the global economy and instant communications, have become more common and more publicized. Diplomats and others who have studied the problems said today that they arose when residents near mines, drilling fields or pipelines resented their government leaders and law enforcement officials and saw the companies as being in league with them. In such cases, explosive ingredients are present, they said. The countries of greatest concern include Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Colombia, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia and Nigeria. Oil exploration in Nigeria, for instance, has seen deadly pipeline explosions that have killed hundreds of people. Oil companies and the government have faulted vandals for pipeline breaks. But some people fault the government for not enforcing safety codes. Under the guidelines, companies agree not to hire security forces implicated in human rights abuses, and they have to ensure that police equipment provided by the companies is not used to violate citizens' rights. The accord states that companies should pressure governments to make security arrangements ''transparent and accessible to the public.'' When there are reports of human rights abuses, ''companies should actively monitor the status of investigations and press for their proper resolution,'' one guideline states. An assistant secretary of state who heads the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Harold Koh, said, ''The global marketplace is a tremendously powerful tool for promoting freedom.'' ''No government, even the most committed, can promote human rights alone,'' Mr. Koh said. Those agreeing to the guidelines include BP Amoco, Chevron, Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold, Conoco, Shell and Texaco, | Oil and Mining Leaders Agree to Protect Rights in Remote Areas |
1257005_2 | a long-held suspicion that at least two Orthodox women in Israel had been secretly ordained as rabbis in private ceremonies conducted by supportive Orthodox rabbis. One of the defining features of Orthodox Judaism, compared with the other, more liberal branches, is the insistence on strict distinctions between men and women. In Orthodox synagogues, men and women sit separately, either divided from each other by a wall called a mechitza or with the women looking down from a balcony. Only men are counted in the minyan, the quorum of 10 required for public prayer. Women are expected to dress and behave modestly. Orthodox Judaism has several streams within it. Most of the advances for women have been initiated by modern Orthodox Jews, who observe Jewish laws while engaging with the secular world. (Senator Joseph I. Lieberman is one of the best- known examples.) The ultra-Orthodox, who include the black-hatted Hasidim, tend to segregate themselves from secular society. They have either ignored or denounced the Orthodox women's movement. But even to many modern Orthodox Jews, the changes brought by the women's movement are a breach of Jewish law, or Halakha. The women, and the rabbis who support them, argue that every step they have taken is in keeping with Halakha. The opposition, far from undermining the movement, appears only to have galvanized it. One indication is the spread of the women's prayer groups. Three years ago, a rabbinical association in Queens, N.Y., issued a resolution prohibiting the women's prayer groups, known as Tefillah groups. They had been around for as long as 20 years, but what prompted the rabbis' condemnation was the news that a bat mitzvah girl would be publicly reading from the Torah at a Tefillah group in Queens. ''Since that group of rabbis in Queens came out with that statement -- talk about your reverse psychology -- it's been an explosion since then,'' said Jennifer Ann Horowitz, a trustee of the Women's Tefillah Network. The number of groups has increased in three years to more than 60 from about 40, she said. There are women's prayer groups in 15 states, and even in conservative Orthodox communities in Skokie, Ill., Merion, Pa., and Los Angeles. There are groups in Israel, Canada, England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, South Africa and Australia. The women's prayer groups are not always welcome in synagogues, so they meet in living rooms, at Jewish schools and on | Women Taking Active Role To Study Orthodox Judaism |
1257029_0 | The Department of Agriculture today announced final adoption of the first standards that the federal government has ever imposed for the labeling and processing of organic foods. The new standards, which were ordered by Congress and then took the department more than a decade to produce, ban the use of irradiation, biotechnology and sewer-sludge fertilizer for any food labeled organic. The department planned to allow the use of all three methods when it introduced proposed regulations in 1997. But after comment from almost 300,000 people protesting their inclusion, the agency withdrew that proposal and started over. Other major provisions of the rules issued today ban synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in the growing of organic food, and antibiotics in meat labeled organic. These bans were a part of the earlier proposal. At a news conference held in the produce aisles of a local Fresh Fields store, one of a nationwide chain of natural-foods supermarkets, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman called the new regulations ''the strongest and most comprehensive organic standard in the world.'' Katherine DiMatteo, a spokeswoman for the organic foods industry, welcomed the regulations. ''The long wait for the final rule was worthwhile,'' said Ms. DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association. ''U.S.D.A. has delivered a strict organic standard that is a great boost to the organic industry. In no way is this final rule less than what the industry wanted.'' The regulations come at a time of soaring popularity for organic foods. Domestic sales have increased more than 20 percent annually each year since 1990, and reached $6 billion last year. The niche has become significant enough that large conventional-food companies have been buying up smaller organic companies. General Mills owns Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen Tomatoes; Heinz owns Earth's Best Baby Food; J. M. Smucker sells Santa Cruz and Knudsen juices. Organics have also become an increasingly important factor in overseas sales, although until now the European Union and Japan have made it difficult for American exporters of those foods to do business, because they do not want to deal with the 44 different state and private organic certifying agencies in the United States. When the new rules take effect, starting on Feb. 19, they will have to deal with only one: the Agriculture Department. (Similarly that existing patchwork of standards will be superseded by the new regulations in the domestic market as well.) ''The rule will assist | U.S. Imposes Standards for Organic-Food Labeling |
1254356_1 | set up as a graduate school project by Jerry Yang and David Filo. And yet typing www.yahoo.com today elicits a Web site that looks remarkably similar to their first draft. ''From the very beginning, we saw the Web as a tool and wanted to let users get the information they wanted in the quickest, most straightforward way,'' said Henry Sohn, a longtime Yahoo producer who is now a vice president in charge of much of the site's design. In test after test, Yahoo executives find, for example, that users are much more likely to click on underlined text links than on graphically more attractive buttons. Indeed, the brief history of the Web is filled with complex solutions to simple problems that attracted more publicity than users. Consider credit card security. Initially, fear of fraud kept millions of people from shopping online. Banking organizations developed an elaborate system using the latest security technology that would prevent nearly any known source of fraud. But it required every user to download and configure an electronic wallet. Few did. Eventually, tens of millions of people became comfortable typing their credit card numbers onto retailers' Web pages -- most of which use an automated security system built into browser software that, it seems, is good enough. Or recall another early high-buzz Web technology: collaborative filtering. Sites like Firefly (since bought and dismantled by Microsoft) invited users to type in the titles and artists for all their favorite music, for instance, in order to learn what else they might care to listen to, based on users with similar tastes. No one but a few graduate students bothered. Collaborative filtering does thrive, but only in a form that requires not a key stroke of extra work by users. Amazon.com, uses it to automatically suggest book and CD titles to customers, after comparing their purchases with the selections of other Amazon customers. In theory, the advent of high-speed broadband connections will popularize some of the uses of the Web that have been nothing more than excruciating teases, like watching video. But the experience so far shows this is not how people are using their high-speed lines. ''We already have lots of users in the workplace where they have 10-megabit connections,'' Mr. Sohn said. ''They don't want a lot of whiz-bang features. They just want the same site to work even faster.'' COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE WEB: SIMPLICITY | In Search for Online Success, 'Easy Does It' Is Good Theme |
1258824_0 | When 3,000 philosophers get together in one place, you might expect them to focus on some of the hotter philosophical issues of the day: Bush versus Gore as seen through the eyes of Kant; a post-empiricist critique of the validity of counting dimpled chads; an Aristotelian analysis of the chances of a recession. But a stroll yesterday through the seminar rooms and informal gossip sessions of the 97th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, found that philosophers are not given to instantaneous reactions to the course of human events, and they are certainly no longer king. George Matthews, an instructor at the Pennsylvania College of Technology -- where, he said, it is not uncommon to be teaching philosophy to welding students -- said that the problem with the gathering was ''the problem philosophy professors face every day.'' ''The reputation of philosophy,'' he said, ''is that it is difficult and useless, as my students tell me every day. Unfortunately, this is not the best grounds for disproving that.'' The association, with 10,000 members, is meeting for three days, through tomorrow, at the New York Hilton. It is the philosophical world's big meeting of the year, though there are smaller meetings of the Central and Pacific divisions at other times. If one thing united these philosophers, from the association officers to the lowliest adjunct professor, it was a passion for their calling, their inferiority complex and uncertainty about the economic and intellectual future of their subject. In theory, 21st-century philosophers, much like Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece, could be speaking out on the great issues of the day, putting a more sophisticated spin on them than, say, priests, rabbis, lawyers, politicians and newspaper reporters. Roger S. Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, pointed out that it was the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich who said that God is whatever is of ultimate concern. So religious leaders and philosophers, Professor Gottlieb added, ''are really working the same beat.'' Yet preachers loom large in American society, while the public profile of philosophers has shrunk steadily since John Dewey (1859-1952), a leader of this very association, brought reforms to education, Mr. Gottlieb said. Even at this conference, the stars of the philosophical world -- Peter Singer, Richard Rorty -- were represented by their books, rather than in person. Pristinely impractical, the association didn't even attempt to make | The 4th Day of Christmas: 3,000 Philosophers Thinking |
1252639_0 | Stroller Potatoes Q. I see children old enough to walk being pushed around in strollers. Can this stunt development? A. Experts suspect that the problem is not that tired parents are using strollers while shopping, but rather that they may be preventing their children from moving enough the rest of the time. Child development specialists think that freely crawling, cruising and toddling are a normal progression in a child's physical and cognitive development. But as soon as babies can move independently, they tend to be confined much of the time to strollers, infant seats, highchairs, playpens and walkers. According to Dr. Martin I. Lorin, a pediatrician, who wrote ''The Parents' Book of Physical Fitness for Children,'' this can mean that ''young muscles languish away for want of exercise.'' In 1997, research at Case Western Reserve University found that walkers, in which children can ''walk'' without seeing their feet, are likely to impair motor and mental development, apparently because movement is limited and children cannot freely explore their environment. Many experts recommend encouraging more activity for very young children, not necessarily with formal exercise but by allowing normal walking, running and climbing -- within the limits of safety -- and playing games as simple as catch, tag and chase. C. CLAIBORNE RAY Readers are invited to submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036-3959, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com. | Q & A |
1252731_0 | Preserving A Landmark | |
1252676_2 | pays between $3,000 and $10,000 for a container with 25 tons of clothes that might yield $14,000 once the truly unusable goods are sifted out and shredded for rags. Mr. Schefren describes his company as a small-margin ''penny business.'' If so, the pennies add up. The sale of used clothes for export accounts for at least $250 million a year, according to Commerce Department statistics, although Mr. Dawson said the actual figure might be at least three times as high. More than half a million pounds of used clothes are processed weekly at Noamex. Packed in half-ton bales, they are loaded on 18-wheel trucks, onto containerships and then sent to countries like Canada, Japan, Nigeria, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Perhaps 45 percent of the clothes cast off by Americans -- who purchased 17.2 billion articles of clothing in 1998 -- is destined for sub-Saharan Africa. In a period when Western designers make careers out of recycling used garments (the online fashion magazine Hintmag.com recently referred to Imitation of Christ's wildly successful appropriations as ''bargain bin bricolage''), it should not be surprising that the third world has become as sophisticated as the first in its relationship to the global glut of clothes. Used clothes, said Karen Tranberg Hansen, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, are now ''a vital part of fashion as it is understood anywhere.'' Ms. Hansen has studied the fate of used clothes that Americans donate to charity, tracing a trajectory of old T-shirts and jeans, not to mention bizarre polyester shirts with four-inch collars, through the salvage houses of North America to the Zambian bazaars known as salaula, a word that, in Bemba, means ''to rummage through a pile.'' But rummaging scarcely describes the atmosphere of the African markets, Ms. Hansen said. ''People in Zambia deal with the clothes in a manner that reconfigures their tired dimensions,'' she said. ''They construe them as new.'' Zambians, Ms. Hansen said, find no particular stigma in using ''our tired clothes'' -- no more than do Americans who wear euphemistically labeled ''vintage'' goods. At the open air markets of Lusaka, she said, clothes fresh from the importers' bales are displayed on hangers, wrinkles and all, to dispel any suspicion that the clothes are ''thirdhand,'' or previously owned by other Zambians. From amid the welter of wild patterns and crazy plaids, of Chicago Bulls shirts and polyester stirrup pants, locals select | Old Clothing Never Dies, It Just Fades Far, Far Away |
1252640_0 | Ask American consumers whether they support the use of biotechnology in food and agriculture and nearly 70 percent say they do. But ask the question another way, ''Do you approve of genetically engineered (or genetically modified) foods?'' and two-thirds say they do not. Yet there is no difference between them. The techniques involved and the products that result are identical. Rather, the words ''genetic'' and ''engineer'' seem to provoke alarm among millions of consumers. The situation recalls the introduction of the M.R.I. (for magnetic resonance imaging), which was originally called an N.M.R., for nuclear magnetic resonance. The word nuclear, which in this case referred only to the nucleus of cells, caused such public concern, it threatened to stymie the growth of this valuable medical tool. The idea of genetically modified foods, known as G.M. foods, is particularly frightening to those who know little about how foods are now produced and how modern genetic technology, if properly regulated, could result in significant improvements by reducing environmental hazards, improving the nutritional value of foods, enhancing agricultural productivity and fostering the survival worldwide of small farms and the rural landscape. Without G.M. foods, Dr. Alan McHughen, a biotechnologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told a recent conference on agricultural biotechnology at Cornell, the earth will not be able to feed the ever-growing billions of people who inhabit it. Still, there are good reasons for concern about a powerful technology that is currently imperfectly regulated and could, if inadequately tested or misapplied, bring on both nutritional and environmental havoc. To render a rational opinion on the subject and make reasoned choices in the marketplace, it is essential to understand what genetic engineering of foods and crops involves and its potential benefits and risks. Genetics in Agriculture People have been genetically modifying foods and crops for tens of thousands of years. The most commonly used method has involved crossing two parents with different desirable characteristics in an effort to produce offspring that express the best of both of them. That and another approach, inducing mutations, are time-consuming and hit-or-miss and can result in good and bad characteristics. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, involves the introduction into a plant or animal or micro-organism of a single gene or group of genes that are known quantities, genes that dictate the production of one or more desired elements, for example, the ability to resist the attack of | Gene Altered Foods: A Case Against Panic |
1257579_0 | Alamo Rent A Car's center at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas has added a new service: travelers returning their cars can pay an extra fee to check their bags and get boarding passes for certain airlines' flights at the counter before riding the van to the terminal. The service is available now for only America West, Canada 3000, Delta, Southwest, Sun Country and Virgin Atlantic, but the companies involved say negotiations are in progress with other lines. The check-in link is provided by a company called Caps, or Certified Airline Passenger Services, which has received Federal Aviation Administration approval to ask questions of passengers and provide secure storage for luggage from off-airport sites until it is in an airline's hands. Each adult passenger is charged $6 for the bag checking, regardless of the number of bags. Children under 12 are free. Alamo is the first car-rental company to link up with Caps; it joins these Las Vegas hotels that have Caps counters in their lobbies: the Imperial Palace, the Flamingo, Bally's, the Hilton, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Paris, Sahara and Aladdin. Jerome Snyder, the Caps company's chairman, said he expected to start a Caps program in Los Angeles soon; Alamo will be included. Luggage checking at the 38-acre Alamo center in Las Vegas must take place at least an hour before flight time. The deadline at the hotels is two hours in advance. BETSY WADE TRAVEL ADVISORY | Now, Airline Check-In At Car Rental Counter |
1257543_1 | says as she sets up a slide projector and dims the lights. ''We don't know anything if we don't know why.'' She takes the remote control in hand and runs through the prevailing theories. Click. ''Obesity. Our kids are getting too fat.'' This is the only cause on which researchers seem to agree -- that heavier girls enter puberty earlier. Click. ''Cow's milk. If I say that too loud, the dairy industry will be on me, but there are a lot of powerful hormones in milk.'' Click. ''Estrogen simulators in the environment, chemicals and plastics, I'm not a biochemist, but. . . .'' She pauses. ''There are also some brand-new studies out saying that in households without biological fathers, girls seem to go through puberty earlier. Wow, that one is really interesting.'' Click. The last slide is of a jeans ad from a magazine. The female reproductive system is exquisitely sensitive to external influence, she says -- as college women who room together know well, because their cycles often mysteriously fall into sync. ''Can visual images also have a biological effect?'' Herman-Giddens asks. ''Does constant exposure to this sort of thing act as a premature trigger? I certainly think we need to find out.'' Though the scientific method, with its emphasis on reproducible results, strives for purity, there rarely is such a thing. ''Research does not always emerge from the laboratory; it emerges from the society'' that surrounds that laboratory, says David Rosner, a professor of history and public health at Columbia. Rosner points to silicosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of sand. Little attention was paid to the disease in medical circles until the Depression, when unemployed sand-blasters started using silicosis ''as a route to compensation.'' Soon there were hundreds of medical-journal articles on the subject, but by the 1940's, as employment picked up again, research into the disease had all but stopped. Similarly, the current debate over the efficacy of mastectomy versus lumpectomy is in part a function of the women's rights movement and the consumer-patients' rights movement, says Dr. Barron H. Lerner, author of ''The Breast Cancer Wars,'' to be published in the spring by Oxford University Press. Scientific research, he says, is always the result of ''a multiple confluence of forces -- growing medical knowledge plus political will, plus thinking you can get it funded because it's trendy.'' In other words, what we know | The Making of an 8-Year-Old Woman |
1257630_8 | England Journal of Medicine found that talking on a phone while driving quadrupled the risk of an accident and was almost as dangerous as being drunk behind the wheel. But many law enforcement agencies do not yet collect data on whether use of a cell phone contributed to an accident. Ronald Silber of Bellport needs no data to support his cause. In 1993, Mr. Silber was involved in a head-on collision on Route 25 in Southold. He discovered later from testimony that the other driver was reaching for her cell phone mounted below the dashboard of the Ford Explorer. She lost sight of the road, and the resulting crash left Mr. Silber partly paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. His daughter has a metal rod in her leg and his wife has pins in her ankles, he said. ''It should be a national law, and little by little it's happening,'' said Mr. Silber, whose injuries forced him to retire from his job at supervisor of traffic safety for the Town of Babylon. He appeared with Mr. Cooper in support of the Suffolk County law at several hearings this year. At least 27 states have considered bills banning the use of cell phones while driving, including New York, but none have passed any. Mr. Cooper said he wrote his bill after studying other legislation across the country that failed to become law, either because it conflicted with motor vehicle laws or with bans on stereo headphones in cars, complicating the hands-free exceptions to the bill. He also spoke to consulates in about a dozen or so countries that have banned hand-held phones. Then he sought the support of his fellow legislators. Mr. Cooper said he was barraged by phone calls and faxes from phone company lobbyists ''begging me to stop.'' He calls himself a reformed car phone user. Between his manufacturing company and his five children, he still spends 2,000 to 3,000 minutes on the cell phone every month, he said. But now uses a hands-free device in the car. ''I admit I've been on the L.I.E. holding my phone with one hand and taking notes with the other, steering with my knee,'' he said. ''My kids told me what I was doing was crazy. They were right, and I've reformed and I've been hands free for eight months now.'' ''The first step is admitting you have a problem,'' he said. Statistics are scant | Hands Off! |
1257955_4 | him a success out of all proportion to its sales of just over 1,000 copies (64 years later, the book still sells 2,000 a year in Britain: a 1945 reprint in the United States has sold 300,000). It was one of those books that galvanize a whole generation. Ambitious undergraduates commonly read it at a sitting. Their elders were appalled. When students tried to discuss the book at an Oxford seminar, the Master of Balliol flung it through the window. Ayer was denounced by a housemaster at Winchester School as the wickedest man in Oxford. Asked what came next, the young iconoclast said cheerfully: ''There's no next. Philosophy has come to an end. Finished.'' Ayer belonged to an empirical, anti-authoritarian generation in vehement revolt against an enfeebled, overblown and contaminated metaphysical tradition. Far from laying down the law, he sought to streamline, modernize and cut back the role of philosophy. He insisted it had no business offering guidance on moral or ethical choices. Logical positivism was to be the scientific and functional equivalent of Bauhaus design in engineering and architecture. It responded to the brutal political realities of the 1930's in ways more conventional thinking could not manage. Wittgenstein, spoken of in some quarters as a second Christ or Pythagoras, was its secular high priest. Readers were exhilarated by the intellectual boldness, lucidity and vigor of ''Language, Truth and Logic.'' ''Never has philosophy been so fast, so neat,'' Rogers writes. The boy who had taught himself to tap-dance brought to philosophy many of the qualities -- phenomenal agility, discipline, daring and confidence -- that made Fred Astaire a genius. Friends watching Freddie Ayer glide over the dance floor in a soft-shoe shuffle sometimes felt he might at any moment shimmy up the walls and along the ceiling. Ayer's professional peers in the 30's and 40's tended to agree. His future colleague Richard Wollheim mistook him at their first meeting for the dancer and choreographer Frederick Ashton. After World War II Ayer ran the philosophy department at University College, London, as his power base, eventually acceding to Oxford's Wykeham chair of logic and becoming an elder statesman of the fashionable left. He had three wives (four if you count one of them twice), three children and countless lovers. ''Some men played golf. Freddie played women,'' said Dee Wells, whom he married and remarried as his second and fourth wife. His energy, | The Wickedest Man in Oxford |
1257873_5 | for a highway to the tourist resort under development at nearby Lake Chaohu -- a project that is unlikely to benefit Yuejin. ''I couldn't pay it, and now I still owe them $179,'' Mr. Lei said, displaying the tax card for 2000 on which his debt was listed. ''I already told the village I'm going to have to delay payment again.'' After his wife died in 1990, he could not afford the $39 a year it cost to keep his two older daughters in school, Mr. Lei said. Both quit during junior high school and moved away to work, but have been unable to send much money back. He is now struggling to keep his third daughter in junior high school, where fees will be reduced slightly this year, to $33. Officials in Beijing are trying to reduce the chaos in rural taxes with a new system in which each farm family pays a single tax and no added fees. That cannot make up, however, for local deficits. The real answer is to increase productivity in the countryside, said Wen Tiejun, an economist with the Ministry of Agriculture and author of a new book on rural development. In part, this means promoting crops such as fruit and vegetables, which have a higher cash value. The centerpiece of plans now under discussion is to channel large new investments to medium-size towns and smaller cities across China, in the hope of creating millions of nonfarm jobs. ''We want to avoid the problem of urban slums seen in Latin America,'' Mr. Wen said. ''The goal is for people to find employment in their own locales.'' Such an effort will require a reallocation of investment, from cities to the country. Perhaps the most sensitive issue is the future of family-run farms. The current division of the land into tiny plots -- even a family's acre is often fragmented -- is an obstacle to mechanization and efficient production of cash crops. Some Western and Chinese economists have advocated granting private ownership rights, so land can be sold and consolidated. That is out of the question, Mr. Wen said, because these plots provide the only safety net in rural areas. ''The land has increasingly served as a guarantee of subsistence for farmers,'' he said. What experts like Mr. Wen are now discussing is a system of cooperatives, in which village lands are pooled, with each family | In China's Heartland, the Fertile Fields Lie Fallow |
1257791_1 | coverage that are all sources of aggravation for consumers,'' Mr. Richman said. Most of the problems reflect an industry that is still in flux. The networks and infrastructure of the wireless service providers, analysts say, cannot fully support the vast and rapidly increasing number of customers. A cell phone customer, they say, should understand that he cannot simply buy a phone, sign a service contract and expect the phone to offer the same service as a traditional phone mounted on the kitchen wall. But consumers can take steps to find the kind of services that best meet their needs. First, experts say, they should understand something about the technology and how it works -- or doesn't -- with various carrier service plans. Many users, for example, may not know the difference between a digital and analog phone. (The analog system, which is being phased out, breaks conversation into sound waves that are carried over radio signals. The newer digital method, which provides clearer calls with greater security, breaks a voice message into a binary computer code and sends it in short bursts.) And consumers also may not understand what is meant by ''anytime minutes'' -- basically, no restrictions for calling times. Consumers may complain about costly roaming fees, which wireless providers charge when customers use their phones outside their service area. They may not realize that their phones may be set on ''roam'' even when they are not traveling outside their service area. To save money, they can simply shut off the roaming feature, said Scott Relf, a senior vice president for marketing and product development for Sprint PCS, based in Kansas City, Mo. And because of technological incompatibilities, he added, different carriers' equipment may not be interchangeable. Consumers should also check the fine print of the plans -- and there are many from which to choose. For example, CellularOne in Boston -- soon to be absorbed into Cingular Wireless -- offers 13 plans, ranging from $19.99 a month for a basic analog plan to $174 a month for a digital plan that offers 2,500 ''anytime'' minutes. The costs depend on several factors, including whether the customer has signed up for local or national service, or has opted for ''bundling of minutes,'' a combination of the two. Another catch phrase is ''buckets of minutes.'' ''Some providers will offer you so many minutes per dollar amount, whether that's local or long | Those Black Holes in Your Mobile Phone Service |
1257780_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Two Studies Report No Links to Cancer in Cell Phones' Use'' (front page, Dec. 20): As a neurosurgeon who has operated on nearly 6,000 brain tumors in a 25-year career, I hope that the new studies showing no correlation between cell phone use and cancer are correct. But the occurrence of brain tumors is on the rise; in the United States alone, 185,000 people will receive the diagnosis this year. The only way to cure a cancer is to find it and treat it early, before symptoms arise. We have grown accustomed to regular checkups for breast, colon, prostate and other cancers, so why not brain cancer? Affordable brain scans are available; we just have to increase public awareness of the importance of checking for this deadly cancer before it is too late. PATRICK KELLY,M.D. President, Brain Tumor Foundation New York, Dec. 20, 2000 | It's Time to Screen For Brain Cancer |
1255564_1 | decade ago, its population has been 20 million larger than France's and its economy a third bigger. It also stands at the heart of what is sometimes called the new Europe, a continent no longer divided that is engaged in a long-term quest to draw all countries into the European Union. Whereas Berlin will be situated squarely at the center of the new European Union, Paris fears becoming marginalized. The French concerns were clear at the recently concluded European Union summit meeting in Nice, where Mr. Chirac refused to accept a German request that its greater population should be reflected in the weighting of votes at European ministerial meetings. Germany, Mr. Schroder argued, should have more votes than France. Under proposed reforms designed to accommodate the enlargement of the Union to 27 members from 15, more decisions would be made by majority votes in ministerial meetings. The German request was therefore significant, but Mr. Chirac balked, saying in effect that history dictated parity between France and Germany. It was a stand that made clear how far Paris and Berlin now diverge in their views. Whereas France sees Germany through the prism of Europe's tragic 20th-century history and expects Helmut Kohl's romantic attachment to Franco-German relations to be eternal, an intensely pragmatic Germany sees itself gradually growing out of that history. Officials close to Mr. Schroder said that the chancellor remains deeply committed to the critical bond with France, but could not accept an unchanging bond. They said Mr. Schroder told a cabinet meeting after the Nice summit meeting that ''a new arrangement of the Franco-German relationship is necessary.'' Mr. Schroder, like many Germans, is tired of having Nazi history used as a means to curb what he sees as the country's right to pursue its interests as any other state. German ministers often complain that the habit French ministers have of not so subtly reminding them of the past has become tiresome. Still, Germany remains deeply committed to European integration and knows that a lasting rift with France would present an insurmountable obstacle to this objective. In Brussels, officials said the reform of the voting system at European Union meetings outlined in Nice may have to be recalculated slightly because its aims had not been fully met. ''We have to get out our calculators again,'' one said. But any change would not alter the voting parity between Germany and France. | New Europe's Changing Landscape Strains French-German Ties |
1255657_0 | All forms of the hormone estrogen, including those used in birth control pills and in hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women, should be included on the government's list of cancer-causing substances, a panel of scientific advisers said yesterday. The recommendation reflects information that has been known for 20 years: women who take estrogen by itself, without the hormone progesterone, have an increased risk of uterine cancer. In addition, some studies, but not all, have linked estrogen to a slight increase in the risk of breast cancer. But panel members and other doctors said the recommendation does not imply that women should avoid the hormones. They emphasized that the addition of progesterone eliminates the increased risk of uterine cancer. And for many women, doctors say, the benefits of estrogen outweigh a small potential increase in breast cancer risk. ''The best thing that can come of this is that women will read the little label that goes inside the package and pay more attention to it and make wiser decisions about what they're doing, and I think that's good,'' said Dr. Christopher Portier, the acting associate director of the National Toxicology Program, which convened the expert panel and compiles the nation's list of carcinogens. The toxicology program, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is part of the National Institutes of Health. The recommendation was the result of an 8-to-1 vote by the panel, which included experts in toxicology, epidemiology and cancer. A final decision on the recommendation will not be made for a year or more, Dr. Portier said. About 16 million American women take estrogen replacement therapy to ease symptoms of menopause like hot flashes, and to reduce the risk of the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis. Millions of others take birth control pills that contain estrogen. Various forms of estrogen are already on the list of substances that are either known or ''reasonably anticipated'' to cause cancer. The new recommendation would add steroidal estrogens, which are similar to the ones that occur in the body and are found in many prescription drugs that contain estrogen. Dr. Michelle Warren, a professor of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University and the medical director of the university's Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders and Women's Health, said that the panel's recommendation should not frighten women. ''There are so many who need the therapy and benefit from it, that would be a real shame,'' she | Scientists Say Estrogen Belongs on Cancer List |
1255614_4 | received by Pope John Paul II in 1994. Aides said it would not conflict with Senate ethics rules. B5 Religion Journal B6 Neediest Cases B2 EDUCATION Bilingual Class as an Option Chancellor Harold O. Levy will ask the New York City Board of Education to end automatic assignment of students with limited English skills to bilingual classes, leaving that decision up to parents, officials say. A1 SCIENCE/HEALTH Hormones and Cancer Risk All forms of estrogen, including those used in birth control pills and in hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women, should be included on the government's list of cancer-causing substances, a panel of scientific advisers said. But it did not recommend discontinuing use. A14 OBITUARIES B9 Edward H. Ahrens Jr. The medical researcher who showed that saturated and unsaturated fats in the diet have opposite effects on blood cholesterol levels was 85. B9 BUSINESS DAY C1-16 Trouble for EToys The online toy retailer said sales were substantially lower than expected, and that if it failed to attract additional investment, it would probably be out of money by April. C1 Guilty Plea by Device Maker LifeScan, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $60 million in fines for selling defective blood glucose monitoring devices to diabetics and submitting false information to regulators. C1 S.& P. 500 Hits Low for Year The S.& P. 500 fell 28.78 points, or 2.2 percent, to 1,312.15, its lowest close this year. The Nasdaq, which dropped 75.24 points, or 2.8 percent, to 2,653.27, barely escaped the same fate. The Dow dropped 240.03 points, or 2.3 percent, to 10,434.96. C3 Business Digest C1 SPORTS D1-8 Big Man on Campus The Lakers star Shaquille O'Neal, 28, received his bachelor's degree from L.S.U., eight years after leaving early to play in the N.B.A.. D1 ARTS & IDEAS B11-22 EDITORIAL A18-19 Editorials: The Bush foreign policy team; another setback for vouchers; Topics. Columns: Anthony Lewis. Bridge B21 TV Listings B22 Crossword B17 Weather C15 Public Lives A12 Correction: February 4, 2001, Sunday An article on Dec. 16 about the release of Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian immigrant who was held in a Florida jail on the basis of secret evidence, referred incorrectly to the area in Gaza where he was born on June 4, 1957. At that time Egypt controlled the territory; it was not occupied by Israel. This correction was delayed by an editing lapse. | NEWS SUMMARY |
1254575_2 | Catholic Falls Road for a groundbreaking public encounter with Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. Even the bakery has changed in a way that gladdens those seeking to coax entrepreneurship from a region still dependent on handouts from London. In the president's honor, the bakery's new owner, Kerry O'Connor, has renamed her establishment Clinton's Hot Food Sandwich Bar and Bistro, serving quarter-pounders, fries and scones. ''In the past people didn't start up because they were afraid they couldn't make money,'' said Ms. O'Connor, 31, a former waitress who took a $20,000 bank loan to take over the establishment five months ago and spruce up its interior with bright mauve and yellow decor, bedecked with Irish and American flags. ''There are better opportunities now,'' she said. ''More people have got jobs. They spend more. And I think everybody has put the troubles behind them.'' In a telling counterpoint, on the troubled mainly Protestant Shankill Road where rival paramilitary groups run fiefs that compete for the spoils of conflict, another woman running a small business lowered her voice to a nervous whisper and declined to be identified by name when asked to talk about how business was going. ''There's no peace dividend here,'' she said. Indeed, said Sir George Quigley, the chairman of Ulster Bank, the province's second largest, until the peace has proved its durability, ''you are going to get some potential investors who say that until it's all hammered down, we are not going to take a decision'' on risking money here. Much of what Northern Ireland puts on display is eerily reminiscent of the successes of the Irish Republic: low wages, a high proportion of young, skilled people and corporate incentives. Unemployment now is at a low of 6.1 percent compared with its peak of 16.8 percent in 1986. That is higher than in the rest of Britain or in Ireland, but lower than European averages and no longer makes the region the sickly laggard among Britain's most depressed areas. The province's growth, indeed, local dignitaries say, is the fastest within Britain, while foreign investment has boomed to record highs, 80 percent of it in high-technology industries. In the 1990's, the provincial economy created 90,000 new jobs. And since a ceasefire in 1994, foreign investment has totaled $3.2 billion, rising and falling in step with the fortunes of peace efforts. Along | After Violence, Possibilities Of Renewal; As Conflict Recedes in Northern Ireland, Economy Tries to Wean Itself From Britain |
1254651_0 | There were funerals here this weekend for a Protestant taxi driver and a Catholic construction worker killed in tit-for-tat sectarian murders, grim evidence on the eve of President Clinton's return to the province that the promise of the peace settlement he helped broker is still far from fulfilled. Mr. Clinton will make his third visit to Northern Ireland as president on Tuesday and Wednesday at a time when efforts to put the peace accord into full effect are stalled and another deal-threatening showdown looms between Sinn Fein, the party representing the Irish Republican Army, and the Ulster Unionists, the dominant Protestant party. ''We don't expect any great breakthrough,'' Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson said in an interview tonight. ''President Clinton doesn't have a magic wand and doesn't pretend to, but sometimes it takes a big player to remind people of the big picture.'' That big picture is currently cluttered with disputes between the Protestant and Catholic parties that are blocking progress in the struggle to produce political solutions to a conflict that has cost more than 3,600 lives in the last three decades. The increasingly hard-line Ulster Unionists are putting pressure on their leader, David Trimble, to pull out of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the power-sharing home rule legislature that he heads as first minister, to protest the refusal of the I.R.A. to start disarming. They hope to force Britain to suspend the new government and restore direct rule from London as it did in a similar situation in 1999. Mr. Trimble kept himself in power in a ruling council vote of confidence in late October by banning Sinn Fein from attending official meetings with its counterparts in the Irish government unless the I.R.A. re-established lapsed contact with an international commission charged with organizing weapons turnovers. The I.R.A. has not done that, and Sinn Fein is challenging the Trimble action in court this Friday. In addition, Sinn Fein accuses Britain of failing to keep its peace agreement promises to replace the heavily Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary and to cut back its military presence. The British Parliament last month passed a law creating the new Police Service for Northern Ireland, but Sinn Fein argues that it will not attract the Catholic recruits it needs. As for demilitarization, Britain has reduced its uniformed forces, closed bases and eliminated border crossings, but Sinn Fein complains that it still keeps heavily armed forces in | Clinton Due in Ulster Where Both Sides Will Petition Him |
1254678_0 | To the Editor: The Personal Health column on Dec. 5 correctly notes the potential of genetically improved food to help feed the world and reduce the need for pesticides. But many are needlessly concerned about negligible risks posed by this technology. Genetically engineered food is thoroughly regulated by at least three federal agencies. Superstition and fear should not interfere with this technology, which has so much to offer those who suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Unfounded concerns about hypothetical risks are far outweighed by the real benefits that will soon be realized, if scientific research and development of genetically modified agriculture is allowed to proceed unhindered. DR. GILBERT ROSS New York The writer is the medical director of the American Council on Science and Health, a group financed by foundations, trade associations, companies and individuals. | When Food Is Modified |
1254576_1 | of Roche Holding, for Xenical, while losing clients like H & R Block and the United States Army. At the same time the United review starts, Y.& R. Advertising is beginning a search for a successor to Ted Bell, who has served as worldwide creative director since 1993. Mr. Bell, 53, officially left in May to pursue interests that included writing. Now, the agency says that Mr. Bell, who has moved to Palm Beach, Fla., will not return. Matthew Triaca, a spokesman for United in Elk Grove Village, Ill., confirmed a report this week in the trade publication Advertising Age that the airline would consolidate the account at either Fallon, part of the Publicis Groupe S.A., or Y.& R. Advertising, part of the Young & Rubicam unit of the WPP Group. There are reasons to consider a consolidation besides cost savings, Mr. Triaca said, listing the chance to communicate with a united brand voice, no pun intended, and the opportunity to build what he described as a ''long-term partnership'' with a single shop. The domestic assignment handled by Fallon is about 65 percent of the account and the international assignment is about 35 percent. Spending could grow if the proposed acquisition of US Airways by United is approved by federal regulators. Proposals from Fallon and Y.& R. Advertising are expected in a couple of weeks, Mr. Triaca said, with a final decision early in 2001. Four years ago, when United dismissed its longtime worldwide agency, Leo Burnett in Chicago, and divided the account between Fallon and Y.& R. Advertising, Fallon had no global network; Y.& R. Advertising adapted the American campaign Fallon created, carrying the theme ''Rising,'' for international use. But now Fallon is part of Publicis, giving the agency access through its parent to international resources. And Publicis executives have discussed plans to expand Fallon to other countries, forming a network of offices. Also, Y.& R. Advertising recently began creating a campaign of its own for United, with the theme ''Life is a journey. Travel it well.'' United executives have considered a consolidation at least once before, going so far as to ask Y.& R. Advertising for ideas for a global campaign. But the executives decided against the move when they received recommendations from Mr. Bell and other creative executives to revive the decades-old theme ''Fly the friendly skies'' by adopting a theme like ''Making the skies friendly again.'' | United Airlines is reviewing its two agencies to choose one for a global outlook. |
1254677_0 | To the Editor: The Personal Health column on genetically modified foods promotes the misconceptions it warns of. The portrayal of current genetic ''engineering'' as precise and well defined is inappropriate today. Few genes are ''known quantities'' and the process of introducing a foreign gene into an organism produces uncertainty about both the gene's function and the function of the DNA into which it is inserted. Genetic engineering techniques are abysmally primitive, akin to swapping random parts between random cars to produce a better car. Yet our ignorance will fade; biological engineering will become a reality relatively soon. But it is difficult to discuss this impending development when the public believes that the details are already understood, especially when mistakes are so publicly discussed. The conflation of ''engineering'' and such failures can only suggest a subtext that the problem is beyond hope and that further work will produce dire consequences. ROB CARLSON Berkeley, Calif. The writer is a research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute. | When Food Is Modified |
1256373_2 | could get better care if they let him go to a specialized program -- but not without reservations. ''Both our mother and father had ambivalent feelings about putting Jerry in a group home,'' Ms. Banegas-Nobles said. ''They felt that no one could provide the level of care that they had.'' Eventually they knew they had no choice. They settled on the program at Vernondale because of its reputation for service to severely impaired adults and its location near Ms. Banegas-Nobles, who lives in New Rochelle. When Mr. Banegas first came to the program, he was unwilling to help with small tasks needed to prepare a meal, because he thought the staff should do it for him. ''He was explosive,'' said Claudia Rubicco, who oversees services at the program. ''He would go from being silent to yelling and walking out of the room.'' Now, he sets the table and helps the staff tend to other residents by pushing wheelchairs and performing other tasks. ''He has really blossomed,'' Ms. Banegas-Nobles said. ''The biggest change has been his ability to take care of himself.'' The program is designed to help the developmentally disabled learn how to take care of themselves and, if possible, take on paying jobs. Whenever a resident and staff members set a new goal -- for Mr. Banegas, recent ones have included learning to transfer clothes from the washing machine to the dryer and to make his bed -- they start small and take incremental steps. Each goal can take a year or more to reach. The teams of social workers and doctors first determine what a person is capable of doing, then create a program to help him or her do it. At Vernondale, Mr. Banegas lives with a roommate and has a girlfriend. He said he liked the group home ''because everybody's here, friends.'' Ms. Banegas-Nobles, whose mother died in 1990 and whose father died in 1997, said she was very pleased with the progress her brother had made. ''My only regret is that my parents are not alive to see the person he is now,'' she said. HOW TO HELP Checks payable to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund should be sent to P.O. Box 5193, General Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10087, or any of these organizations: BROOKLYN BUREAU OF COMMUNITY SERVICE 285 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217. CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF NEW | The Neediest Cases; Learning How to Live, and How to Thrive, One Step at a Time |
1256255_0 | If snail mail is an endangered species, what happens to the post office? That is a question that alarms the United States Postal Service, which is watching as the world of mail delivery is transformed before its eyes, thanks to the rapid spread of e-mail messages and other Internet transactions. Its answer -- that the service will join the move to electronic commerce rather than fight it -- has already spurred opposition from some of its competitors in the worlds of postal delivery and electronic transactions. These competitors worry that the post office will use its status as a quasi-governmental body to unfair advantage. But from the post office's perspective, not only is the move into electronic commerce driven by irresistible economic imperatives, it is as natural an evolution as abandoning the pony express for the mail train, the railroads for airmail. At its heart, the post office's problem is this: the rapid growth of the Internet, electronic communications and electronic commerce is now eating into its core business, which is delivering first-class mail. The service expects the trend to accelerate, leading to substantial declines in first-class mail volume and huge losses in revenue. The trend is largely to blame for the revenue shortfall this year, after five years of sound performance, which led the service recently to seek a penny increase in the price of a first-class stamp, to 34 cents. The increase is set for January. Of the 880 million Social Security checks, tax refunds and other payments delivered last year, 68 percent were sent electronically, depriving the service of $180 million in revenue, according to a report published in September by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress. Mailings by banks to customers dropped 18 percent from 1996 to 1999, another big drain. And more consumers are paying their bills online every year. Bills and bill payments are the most common form of first-class mail, the type of mail the service handles most efficiently and profitably. Offsetting the decline in first-class mail, online sales of merchandise are expected to increase substantially over the next few years, bringing about a big increase in parcel shipments, many of which could be carried by the post office as priority mail. But the service faces well-established competition from FedEx and United Parcel Service -- not to mention emerging competitors like local messenger and grocery delivery services. Online sales notwithstanding, | Post Office Is Full of Ideas to Survive an E-Future |
1256352_1 | for a visit to Canada today, appeared to have fared no better in talks on how Russia might recover past investments in Cuba by taking stock positions in Cuban enterprises. Russian officials have concluded that the most profitable of Cuba's industries -- oil, nickel, cigar exports and telecommunications -- already have sufficient foreign partners. Still, there are dozens of small and medium-sized state factories in Cuba operating on Russian designs with Russian machinery and Mr. Putin's entourage expressed the hope that this trip had laid the groundwork for a Russian return to the Cuban market, though the Russians were under no illusions about how difficult this might prove to be. Though neither side has yet publicly announced the decision on the fate of the nuclear power station, it is certain to be welcomed in the United States, where the Clinton administration, members of Congress and a number of environmental groups have expressed concerns about whether the plants could be operated safely by Cuba's state-run electrical authority. Since 1996, Russia and Cuba have been seeking third-country financing to complete the plant. Its foundations were 90 percent complete when work was halted in 1992, and about 40 percent of the heavy machinery had been installed. Some Russian press reports have said that at least one of the reactors -- without nuclear fuel -- and its steam turbine set were delivered to Cuba. The Soviet Union signed the agreement to build the twin reactor plant in 1976. The V.V.E.R. design, which was the most advanced at the time, was the first to be exported by Moscow for use in a tropical climate. It differs from the Chernobyl-style design in that the radioactive core and fuel elements are contained within a pressurized steel vessel. Work began in 1983, after which Cuban engineers encountered significant problems in meeting construction targets. Russian engineers had taken over the project by the early 1990's. The decision on what to do with the Juragua plant was a major item of unfinished business between Havana and Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Mr. Putin was said to be keen not to announce Russia's desire to back out of the project until Cuban officials first expressed their own desire to walk away. In this manner, the officials said, Moscow felt it would no longer be liable for millions of dollars in costs required to maintain the incomplete installation. | Cuba and Russia Abandon Nuclear Plant, an Unfinished Vestige of the Soviet Era |
1256329_0 | A blue-ribbon biotechnology committee formed by the United States and the European Union is expected to recommend that Washington strengthen regulation of genetically modified foods and move toward mandatory labeling, according to some panel members. The report, scheduled to be made public today at a summit meeting in Washington between President Clinton and leaders of the European Union, says that consumers should have the ''right of informed choice'' about what they eat. It recommends that ''at the very least,'' the United States and European Union ''should establish content-based mandatory labeling requirements for finished products containing novel genetic material,'' according to an excerpt read by one panel member. Critics of bioengineered foods, who have started learning of the recommendations, are hoping the report will put new pressure on the Food and Drug Administration, which does not require such foods to be labeled. ''I'm quite surprised that the U.S. contingent would sign off on it,'' said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists. But it is unclear how much weight the report will carry, especially with the administration changing in Washington. Moreover, the wording of the document leaves room for interpretation. One committee member said that the reference to ''content-based'' labeling referred pretty much to what the F.D.A. is already doing -- requiring labeling only if the content of the food is changed significantly, not merely because genetic engineering was used. The panel, known as the Biotechnology Consultative Forum, was established after the last United States-European Union summit meeting in May to discuss biotechnology-related issues that have led to trade tensions between Washington and Brussels. Two panel members said the report recommended mandatory regulation of genetically altered foods. It contains language about foods not being let on the market until after they have been found to be reasonably certain of causing no harm, one member said. | Panel Backs Stronger Rules For Some Food |
1256305_6 | a George Rathmann version. On the other hand, when we go into the clinic and we find out that 30 percent of the patients don't respond, if we can find out what the genetic link is, wow! You take a study of 10,000 patients that might be required when you've got a 30 percent noise level, and you can get it down to 500 patients, very likely. And that is going to happen. Q. The big issue next year in Washington is expected to be high and rising drug prices. Is biotechnology contributing to high prices? A. You bet it's going to be contributing to the cost of pharmaceuticals. But unfortunately the equation is never worked out as fully as it should be. If you find out that you've avoided hospitalizations, you can in many cases establish that there's been an economic gain, not an economic loss. Q. Should there be some sort of pricing restraint by biotech companies? A. We ran that experiment in 1994. We were talking to the Hillary task force, and some pretty smart guys said to us: ''Look, we have to have price controls. Congress will not buy national health care on the risk that costs are going to go way out of sight.'' And what did it do? We just about drove every biotech company out of business. Our stock dropped by 82 percent in a six-month period. Companies are not going to be able to fund the research and development to make new drugs. It's not so clear for the pharmaceutical industry. You don't know, if they have a windfall from a big successful product, that they necessarily are going to put it back into R & D. In fact, the favorite criticism by congressmen is that they put it back into advertising. So you have all of this castigation of the industry. But I know where biotech puts it. We won't survive. You can't do R & D without investment that believes there's going to be a return. Q. Do you see any resolution of the controversy about genetically modified foods? A. I'm not very well informed there. The problem up until now has been that the benefits, which eventually accrue to the consumer, are still kind of trickle-down. I'm doing something that's going to be good for the farmer. But it's not something so tangible as saving your mother's life, which | TALKING BIOTECHNOLOGY WITH: George Rathmann; An Industry Patriarch at the Forefront As Genomics Science Comes of Age |
1256328_2 | great ally in the event of a problem -- and may save you time and money. Day of Departure * Be informed. Check your flight's status before heading to the airport. Automated telephone services or airline Web sites often provide more up-to-date information than do ticket agents. The Federal Aviation Administration's Web site, www.fly.faa.gov, has real-time information on operations at the biggest airports. * Pack defensively. Take along a change of clothes and a toothbrush in your carry-on bag. If traveling with an infant, take 24 hours' worth of diapers and extra formula. When possible, avoid checking luggage, in case you need to switch flights or carriers. Ship your gifts ahead. * Educate yourself. Find out what your airline promises to do for passengers in the event of a delay. Print out a copy of the policy from the airline's Web site, and carry it with you -- in case the airline representatives need a reminder. If a Flight Is Delayed * Keep your cool. Becoming angry at airline personnel is counterproductive. Sympathy for their plight will sometimes produce results. * Don't stand in line. To get on another flight, it is often more effective to call the airline from the airport than to wait at the ticket counter. Carry a cell phone; if delays are widespread, public telephones may be in demand. * Check the competition. If another airline has seats to your destination, ask your airline to endorse your ticket to the other line. * Get what you paid for. If you paid full fare or are a high-mileage frequent flier, let the airline know. Your odds of getting a seat on the next flight out will increase, or the airline might pay for your hotel, if you are delayed overnight. * Consider driving. If the last leg of your flight is a 200-mile hop, renting a car might be a better choice than waiting out a delay. Getting Even * Write a letter. The airlines have pledged to respond to consumer complaints within 60 days. They almost always offer a refund, reimbursement of expenses, a discount on your next ticket -- or all three. Be sure to save the relevant paperwork. * Make it a federal case. Send a copy of your letter to Washington. Complaints are charged against each airline in the Transportation Department's monthly Air Travel Consumer Report and serve as a basis for rule | For Air Travelers, a Holiday Survival Guide |
1256277_0 | When Bridgestone/Firestone announced the recall of 6.5 million tires on Aug. 9, it set off a panic. Most of the tires had been installed as original equipment on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles, and Explorer owners mobbed tire dealers across the nation. Firestone, a unit of Bridgestone of Japan, initially said it would take a year to replace the tires. But ample supplies of tires became available by the end of November. By Dec. 6, regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had received complaints of 148 deaths linked to Firestone ATX and Wilderness tires of various sizes. The safety agency said it would try to wrap up its investigation by February or March. 2000 HIGHLIGHTS | At Firestone, Recall, Then Inquiry |
1256837_1 | can emit. In a published statement, the commission explained that while the federal government continues to assess research on cell-phone safety, studies have led ''expert organizations to conclude that typical RF exposures from these devices are safe.'' The cancer institute's study, directed by Dr. Peter Inskip and Dr. Martha S. Linet, involved 782 patients with brain tumors or with benign tumors of the lining of the brain or of the acoustic nerve, which connects the brain to the ear. The researchers compared their cell-phone use with that of 799 patients who were of the same sex, age and race but who did not have brain tumors. The other, smaller, study, led by Dr. Joshua E. Muscat of the American Health Foundation, a private, nonprofit research organization in Valhalla, N.Y., compared the cell-phone use of 469 brain cancer patients with that of 422 patients who were of the same age, sex and race but who did not have brain cancer. Both groups of investigators found that no matter how they analyzed the data, there was not even a hint that use of a cell phone was linked to brain tumors. The patients with brain tumors were no more likely to use cell phones. Those who used cell phones for longer periods were no more likely to get brain tumors. And brain tumors were no more likely to occur near where the cell phone was held to the head than on the opposite side of the brain. ''Based on the published evidence to date, I don't think there's any evidence that cell phones cause cancer,'' Dr. Inskip said. Dr. Mark G. Malkin, a neurologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who was an author of the smaller study, said, ''We think this is reassuring news.'' Dr. Malkin noted that cell phones had not been in widespread use for many years and that cancers could take years to develop; thus, he said, it might be worthwhile to repeat the studies in years to come. But, he said, he uses a cell phone and continues to do so. And, he said, he tells his brain cancer patients not to worry about using the phones. Scientists said a study from Denmark, to be published soon in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, provided equally reassuring news. Danish researchers identified thousands of cell-phone users from telephone company records, then reviewed medical records to | Two Studies Report No Links to Cancer In Cell Phones' Use |
1251586_0 | EUROPE VATICAN: CRITICIZED ON HAIDER VISIT Israel criticized John Paul II's plan to receive the Austrian far-right leader Jorg Haider at the Vatican, calling the head of the Freedom Party ''a politician who is ostracized by the enlightened world.'' Mr. Haider, who has spoken favorably about some Nazi policies, is expected to bring the pope a giant Christmas tree from Carinthia, of which he is governor. The St. Peter's Square tree comes from a different region every year, and the pope traditonally meets its bearers. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) AUSTRIA: UNION'S OPPONENTS Austrians opposed to the European Union have begun a nationwide campaign demanding a referendum on Austrian membership. The campaign must gather 100,000 signatures before Dec. 6 in order to compel Parliament to start an official debate on the issue. Austria joined the union in 1995, but recent polls showed support for membership had slipped to about 33 percent. Victor Homola (NYT) RUSSIA: TAX POLICE PATRON SAINT The Orthodox Church has named St. Matthew, the apostle, as patron saint of the tax police, the newspaper Sevodnya reported. The tax police, who are known for storming buildings in black ski masks to conduct an audit, have had a public relations problem, as did the tax collectors of ancient Rome, of which St. Matthew was a member. Sevodnya quoted a police spokesman as saying that the agency had won the support of the church in part by helping to renovate a cathedral. (Reuters) FINLAND: LEGALIZING GAY PARTNERSHIPS Finland plans to legalize homosexual unions, officials said. The law would give gay and lesbian couples many of the same legal rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples, but the unions would not have the status of marriage, nor would the law allow homosexuals to adopt children. If the law is passed, Finland would join Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and the Netherlands in legalizing homosexual unions. (Reuters) SPAIN: YOUTH TERRORISM Parliament approved legislation that would double jail sentences to 10 years for youths over 14 who are convicted of terrorism. The law is aimed at young supporters of the armed Basque separatist group E.T.A. who carry out acts of street violence in the northern Basque region almost every weekend. Basque legislators voted against the bill, which now goes to the Senate. Benjamin Jones (NYT) CROATIA: JOINING THE W.T.O. Croatia became the 140th member of the World Trade Organization after seven years of negotiation. After ratifying its | World Briefing |
1251727_0 | An article by The Associated Press on Monday about conservative Anglican archbishops from around the world who gathered in Pennsylvania to express disagreement on social issues with liberals in the denomination's American branch, the Episcopal Church, misstated its position on homosexuality. Last July the American church's policy-making body discussed the ordination of gay men and women and the blessing of same-sex unions, but it did not decide to permit them. The national body has taken no action against bishops or local clergy members who carry them out. | Corrections |
1252933_0 | A federal advisory panel concluded yesterday that there was a ''medium likelihood'' that the genetically engineered corn known as StarLink is a potential allergen, a finding that could hurt the food industry's quest to have the corn temporarily approved for human consumption. But the panel of outside scientific experts also concluded that there was only a low probability of significant allergy problems arising in the American population because there is little StarLink in the food supply. The advisory panel report is intended to help the Environmental Protection Agency decide whether to allow StarLink to be in human food for four years. Until now the corn has been approved only for animal use because of concerns it might cause allergies. But the corn has been found in taco shells, setting off recalls and causing millions of dollars in losses for farmers, grain elevators, flour mills and food companies. So Aventis CropScience, the developer of StarLink, is seeking temporary approval so the food industry can avoid further recalls and will not have to test its corn so extensively for the presence of StarLink. The advisory panel, which conducted a 12-hour public hearing last week, was not asked to make a recommendation, only to answer scientific questions. It concluded that there are many uncertainties -- about whether the protein is an allergen, about the level of exposure to an allergen needed to cause a reaction, and about the amount of the protein actually in foods made from corn. Those uncertainties, as well as the panel's judgment of the medium likelihood that the protein, known as Cry9C, is a potential allergen, could make it more difficult for the E.P.A. to satisfy the necessary standard for approval, which is that there be ''reasonable certainty of no harm.'' At the least, the 28-page report could delay any approval because it calls for more studies, which the E.P.A. said yesterday that it was undertaking. In particular the report said the government should test the blood of 7 to 14 of the people who complained of allergic reactions from products containing StarLink to see if they are in fact allergic to it. Still, people on both sides of the debate claimed victory. The panel ''has clearly agreed that there is a low risk to public health,'' Gene Grabowski, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which represents food companies, said in a statement. But Richard Caplan, environmental | Federal Panel Is Wary On Gene-Altered Corn |
1258415_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-12 Israelis and Palestinians Weigh Clinton Peace Plan The Clinton administration expects to receive answers to its Middle East peace proposals that will be qualified but positive enough for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, to go to Washington for talks. The proposals, which Mr. Clinton laid out to negotiators last weekend, call for wrenching concessions by both sides. A3 Corruption Charges in Thailand The government anticorruption agency ruled that Thaksin Shinawatra, the leading candidate for prime minister, had engaged in financial wrongdoing that could disqualify him from holding office. Mr. Shinawatra said he would appeal the ruling to the Constitutional Court, a process that is likely to last past Election Day, Jan. 6. A5 Bias Attack in Germany Officials said rightist youths shouting anti-immigrant insults stabbed a man of ''Asian appearance'' in Guben, a town on the Polish border that was the scene of the killing of a 28-year-old Algerian man last year by a xenophobic mob. The police detained three men aged 16 to 19 in yesterday's attack. The victim, a 20-year-old man, was hospitalized in serious but stable condition. A12 Testing Soldiers for Radiation European NATO allies began checking whether their soldiers had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from depleted uranium ammunition used by American warplanes in Kosovo last year. Spain said initial findings were negative. (AP) Rebels May Get a Second Zone The Colombian government said it was pursuing a plan to establish a second demilitarized enclave for leftist rebels. President Andres Pastrana and other officials met with community leaders in two areas north of Bogota to address concerns about creating such a zone. A7 Arrests in Deadly China Fire The police made an undisclosed number of arrests following a Christmas Day fire in Luoyang that killed 309 people, mostly revelers in a disco, New China News Agency reported. The cause of the fire is under investigation. Residents said emergency exits in the building had been blocked by boxes of merchandise. A3 World Briefing A10 DINING F1-12 SCIENCE/HEALTH Galapagos Protest Fishermen, unwilling to accept limits on their catch, are openly and violently defying Ecuadorean government efforts to preserve a delicate and threatened ecosystem near the Galapagos Islands. The fishermen are protesting a 1998 law that established a marine reserve, prohibiting all but local residents from fishing in the protected area. A1 NATIONAL A14-17 Administration Drops Prescription-Import Plan The | NEWS SUMMARY |
1258415_1 | soldiers had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from depleted uranium ammunition used by American warplanes in Kosovo last year. Spain said initial findings were negative. (AP) Rebels May Get a Second Zone The Colombian government said it was pursuing a plan to establish a second demilitarized enclave for leftist rebels. President Andres Pastrana and other officials met with community leaders in two areas north of Bogota to address concerns about creating such a zone. A7 Arrests in Deadly China Fire The police made an undisclosed number of arrests following a Christmas Day fire in Luoyang that killed 309 people, mostly revelers in a disco, New China News Agency reported. The cause of the fire is under investigation. Residents said emergency exits in the building had been blocked by boxes of merchandise. A3 World Briefing A10 DINING F1-12 SCIENCE/HEALTH Galapagos Protest Fishermen, unwilling to accept limits on their catch, are openly and violently defying Ecuadorean government efforts to preserve a delicate and threatened ecosystem near the Galapagos Islands. The fishermen are protesting a 1998 law that established a marine reserve, prohibiting all but local residents from fishing in the protected area. A1 NATIONAL A14-17 Administration Drops Prescription-Import Plan The Clinton administration killed a program created by Congress to allow imports of low-cost prescription drugs. Donna E. Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, said the program would not be safe and would not save money for consumers, findings that barred the plan from going forward under terms of the legislation that created it. Although George W. Bush said at the Oct. 17 presidential debate that the program ''makes sense,'' his advisers said yesterday that he would consider other ways to moderate spending on prescription drugs, which has grown rapidly in recent years. A1 U.S. Head Count Due The Census Bureau will publish the official population count tomorrow, including the state-by-state totals required under the Constitution to determine how many seats each state is allocated in the House. New York is among several states expected to lose Congressional seats, while California is among several hoping to gain at least one. A1 Legislation to Protect Sharks President Clinton signed a measure banning the practice of removing the fin from live sharks at sea and dumping the fish back into the water to die. The legislation, which covers all waters of the United States, provides for international negotiations to prohibit the | NEWS SUMMARY |
1255384_0 | Firestone and Ford Motor have made considerable progress in their investigations into the tire-related crashes that have killed more than 100 Americans, mostly in Ford Explorers, but they remained divided on some basic issues as they presented their results to regulators this week, people close to the inquiries said. Ford's newest finding is that a Firestone factory in Decatur, Ill., followed procedures different from those at other factories in handling rubber and other incoming materials, and these procedures may have allowed the quality of the materials to degrade, a person involved in the inquiry said. The steel-belted radial tires made in Decatur have had a much higher failure rate than tires of the same brands made elsewhere, according to Firestone and Ford. Sanjay Govindjee, an engineering professor and tire expert at the University of California at Berkeley retained by Firestone to conduct a separate review, said that preliminary results from tests conducted for him by Firestone provided little evidence for a possible problem cited in a Firestone preliminary report five weeks ago. During normal driving, the motion of the Explorer does not appear to put unusual stress on its tires that would cause them to fall apart faster than usual, he said in a telephone interview. The Explorer does have an uneven weight distribution that puts an extra load on the left rear tire, Mr. Govindjee said. A disproportionately large share of the fatal crashes have involved failures of the left rear tire. But the extent of the extra load appears to vary considerably with the location of the people and luggage in the vehicle, Mr. Govindjee said, adding that he had not determined whether the extra load was a factor in the tire failures. The current Explorer has the gas tank and the four-wheel-drive system on the left side of the vehicle; Ford has moved the gas tank to the right side for next year's model, improving the vehicle's balance. The two companies have made further progress in isolating two other problems identified in Firestone's preliminary report, people close to the companies' investigations said. These problems are a tendency for cracks to develop in the rubber between the layers of the tread and problems in the design of the rubber wedges that fill the space between the edges of the steel belts. But Firestone and Ford are still at odds over the appropriate scope of the investigation, people close | Firestone and Ford Make Progress on Tire Inquiries |
1255480_0 | The Transportation Department announced new rules yesterday to protect the rights of 8.5 million workers who undergo drug testing that the government makes mandatory as a safety measure. But critics, while welcoming the changes, said they did not go far enough. The new rules were made public on the same day that the Department of Health and Human Services disclosed new evidence of testing laboratories' shortcomings that can mistakenly brand innocent workers drug abusers, ending their careers. The most significant of the rules involve so-called validity testing, a relatively new procedure to determine whether a urine specimen is legitimate. Under current rules, transportation workers whose specimens are found to be invalid are assumed to be cheaters. Many are fired without any opportunity for an appeal. The new rules extend to validity testing two safeguards that already protect a worker who actually tests positive for any of five illegal drugs: cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, marijuana and PCP. A medical review officer, hired by the employer, will have the right to cancel the result of a validity test upon finding a sound medical reason for a specimen's testing illegitimate. And workers will have the right to demand that a second sample of their specimen be tested at a laboratory different from the first. The drug testing of millions of transportation workers -- largely bus and truck drivers, airline flight crews and mechanics, and a variety of railroad workers -- is required by the government in the name of public safety. But serious questions about validity testing, which is now optional, at the employer's discretion, were raised in September after Delta Air Lines agreed to reinstate four flight attendants and a pilot whom it fired last year for failing validity tests. Delta had maintained that the tests were accurate, and the four flight attendants, though insisting that they had not tampered with their specimens, had been unable to challenge the airline's decision. But after the pilot appealed the Federal Aviation Administration's revocation of his license, it was discovered that the laboratory that had performed the tests had not followed government testing standards and, in a subsequent cover-up of that failure, had falsified evidence. The Health and Human Services Department, which supervises the validity testing laboratories, subsequently inspected all 66 of them to see if they were meeting the standards. The agency said yesterday that as a result of its review, it would instruct laboratories | Workers Get Greater Drug Test Protection |
1255405_0 | President Vladimir Putin is in Cuba this week, on a visit rich in symbolism. But Mr. Putin, the first Russian leader to visit Havana since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, brings a substantive agenda as well. He seeks to repair political and economic ties that have frayed in recent years. The days are past when Moscow's relations with Havana threatened American security. But Mr. Putin should not provoke Washington by expanding Russian arms sales to Cuba or helping Havana complete an unfinished civilian nuclear reactor. After the demise of the Soviet Union, Moscow cut off its $2 billion annual subsidy, plunging Cuba into economic crisis. European and other Western companies stepped in with investments and trade, shouldering Russian businesses aside. Annual trade between Moscow and Havana has plummeted from $3.6 billion in 1991 to less than $1 billion today. How far Mr. Putin plans to go in rebuilding the relationship is unclear. He will surely promote new Russian investment, particularly in developing Cuba's rich nickel deposits, and will try to work out terms for repayment of some of the estimated $20 billion that Havana owes Moscow. But his ambitions may go beyond the purely commercial. There has been discussion of new Russian weapons sales to Cuba's military and of help in completing the unfinished power reactor, near Cienfuegos. Washington fears that once this reactor is completed, its fuel could be secretly diverted to nuclear weapons production. It is also concerned about safety risks to Florida. This trip is part of Mr. Putin's effort to raise Russia's diplomatic profile after its erosion during the final years of Boris Yeltsin's rule. He has tried to strike a balance between challenging American policies on problems like Iran and Iraq and cooperating with Washington on other issues, like arms control and Mideast peace. Yesterday Mr. Putin made the right decision in granting amnesty to Edmond Pope, the American businessman convicted of espionage last week. Mr. Pope suffers from bone cancer and his release is a welcome humanitarian and diplomatic gesture. But Moscow was wrong in pressing Spain earlier this week to arrest Vladimir Gusinsky for extradition to Russia on fraud charges. Mr. Gusinsky's television stations and print outlets have been critical of the Putin government, and his prosecution appears politically motivated. | A Russian Return to Havana |
1255381_2 | ''from the new boss, we expect little.'' Mr. Castro, seated next to Mr. Putin at a news conference, challenged Washington's ''preoccupation'' with increasing its military spending after the cold war and criticized Mr. Bush's support for erecting an antimissile shield over the United States. In the Palace of the Revolution, the two leaders signed minor accords to cooperate in medical research, reopen a $50 million line of credit for Cuba and lay the groundwork for future trade, but they have yet to announce agreement on how Cuba might repay its estimated $20 billion in debts accumulated over three decades during which Moscow subsidized Cuban agriculture, industry and a significant military buildup. Mr. Putin pointed out that even though the Russian and Cuban economies have contracted by a third or more in the past decade, the two countries still carry on nearly $1 billion in trade a year, mostly in barter by which Cuba receives Russian oil and sends much of its annual sugar output to Russia. ''This level of trade is not bad,'' Mr. Putin said. ''But there are still some problems that have accumulated in the last 10 years, and they demand especially close attention. The Soviet Union has invested a lot in Cuba's economy. This is worth billions of dollars, and we have to understand what to do about this.'' Russian officials traveling with Mr. Putin said Moscow is most concerned that if it does not re-establish strong trade ties with Cuba, Europe, Canada and eventually the United States will move in and capitalize on abandoned Soviet-era investments and equipment, which still form much of the island's industrial base. These officials said Moscow had presented to Mr. Castro several proposals for swapping Cuba's debt for Russian stakes in potentially profitable Cuban enterprises in oil refining, nickel production and other sectors. But Cuban officials are looking for debt forgiveness as part of the bargain, pressing Cuba's standing grievance that aid was withdrawn by Moscow so abruptly that Cuba's economy suffered billions of dollars in damage and has yet to recover. Mr. Castro indicated that Cuba, as a charter member of the World Trade Organization, which Russia would like to enter, has leverage that might be of use to Moscow, but he has yet to publicly specify his price. Mr. Putin also brought along his defense minister, Marshal Igor D. Sergeyev, for discussions that appeared to be related to the | Putin Feels Whiff of Soviet Era in Cuba |
1182106_3 | ''It's not a defense of the United States,'' she said, eyes flashing. ''It's a conspiracy to allow them to milk the government. They are creating for themselves a job for life.'' According to court records, Dr. Schwartz was hired as a senior engineer by TRW on Sept. 5, 1995, joining the company's space group in Redondo Beach, Calif. TRW was allied with Rockwell (later bought by Boeing amid defense consolidations) in a competition to build a ''kill vehicle,'' which would zoom into space atop rockets and smash enemy warheads to pieces. The work for which Dr. Schwartz was hired, enabling the kill vehicle to spot enemy targets, represented the soul of the machine. ''She is almost uniquely qualified to strengthen the interplay'' among TRW specialists pursuing image analysis and object recognition, her boss wrote personnel officials after she was hired. Among her jobs was to help assess a kill-vehicle program called the Kalman Feature Extractor. From incoming sensor data, the extractor was to find critical characteristics of scanned objects, teasing out familiar ''signatures'' that could separate decoys from warheads. TRW executives believed the extractor offered a competitive edge over the rival industrial team (then Hughes, later bought by Raytheon), and they told the government it was a potential breakthrough. Familiar with the extractor from previous research, including that for her patents of 1983 and 1989, Dr. Schwartz proceeded to test it against nearly 200 types of enemy decoys and warheads in computer simulations, using secret intelligence data. ''The moment I analyzed the signatures,'' she said in an interview, ''I saw there was a problem.'' Most of the time, she said, the kill vehicle's extractor program failed to distinguish between warheads and decoys because their identifying signatures differed wildly depending on variables like spin, attitude, temperature, wobble, deployment angle and time of day and year. ''For every RV there was a decoy'' that produced an identical signature, Dr. Schwartz said, referring to a warhead as a reentry vehicle, or RV. The variations she used in the tests, she added, were not arbitrary but spelled out in the Pentagon's antimissile bible, the 1993 ''Technical Requirements Document.'' The results were roughly the same, Dr. Schwartz said, with the math tool failing about 90 percent of the time, when she tested TRW's less sophisticated method for separating wheat from chaff, known as the baseline algorithm. In interviews and court documents, Dr. Schwartz said she | Missile Contractor Doctored Tests, Ex-Employee Charges |
1181965_2 | event that created the tektites would have caused wide burning and destruction of forests, exposing cobble outcroppings. The early humans then eventually came to make use of the available stone. Advancing Fish Surveys In order to manage and conserve the world's fish stocks, it helps to know where they are and in what numbers. One way of doing that is by using sonar equipment operated from research ships. The devices send acoustic pulses straight down into the water, and the intensity of the returning echo is used to calculate the abundance of fish. A great idea, save one thing: it has been thought that the noise of a moving ship would scare away schools of fish, skewing the results. It's a marine version of the uncertainty principle: trying to take a measurement affects the measurement. New research, however, has shown that fish surveyors have little to worry about. In a brief report in the journal Nature, scientists in Scotland describe how they used an extremely quiet robot submersible to conduct sonar surveys of schools of herring in the North Sea. The results were not appreciably different from surveys taken a short time later from a much noisier boat. The researchers say their work also demonstrates that submersibles are robust enough for extensive surveying on their own. The craft offer an advantage over surface vessels because they can dive down to take acoustic measurements near the particular species that is targeted. This might help, for instance, in taking accurate surveys of bottom fish. Recovered Moons From the galactic Lost and Found Department comes this bit of good news: astronomers have relocated two tiny moons of Uranus after 14 years. The moons, Cordelia and Ophelia, were discovered in 1986 by the Voyager spacecraft. The moons orbit just inside and outside the planet's main ring, so they are believed to be shepherd moons, meaning their gravitational influence keeps the ring intact. Recently, a University of Arizona researcher, poring over Hubble Space Telescope images taken in 1997, found Ophelia. He then contacted astronomers at Wellesley and Cornell, who have studied the edges of the ring for signs of gravitational disturbances such as would be caused by the moons. Ophelia, it turned out, was right where it should be if it was acting as a shepherd. His East Coast colleagues then told the Arizona astronomer where Cordelia should be, and sure enough, he found it. | OBSERVATORY |
1186643_0 | On The Emotions By Richard Wollheim. 269 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $25. Modern philosophy has been much concerned with what we know and little with what we feel (though Descartes, whose theory of knowledge got things started in the 17th century, also wrote a book about what he called ''the passions of the soul''). Recently philosophers have become more interested in the emotions, perhaps in response both to the growing place of psychoanalysis and other psychologies in popular and academic culture and to the (not unrelated) general conviction that knowledge does not represent the product of pure rationality it was once taken to be. But the linguistic and logical conceptions popular among English-speaking philosophers since World War II may not be well suited to the analysis of emotion. At any rate, this is the opinion of Richard Wollheim, whose new book, based on lectures given at Yale University in 1991, insists on the ''psychological reality'' of emotion, as both product and shaper of individual lived experience. The classical simplicity of his title, ''On the Emotions,'' suggests an imagined place alongside the writings of much earlier thinkers. His view of the mind also suggests the past. Unfashionably like Descartes, Wollheim contrasts ''internal'' psychological phenomena with ''external'' events in the physical world, which includes a person's body. Like Plato, who pictured the human soul as divided into spirit, reason and appetite, Wollheim employs a tripartite organization contrasting emotions with beliefs, which provide us with an understanding of the world, and desires, which motivate us to act in it; emotions give us ''an orientation, or an attitude to the world.'' Like Freud, he seems to believe that all a theorist needs to penetrate to the truth of mental life is an incisive mind, an imaginative grasp of human experience and a knowledge of great works of literature. In Wollheim's account, emotions arise as attitudes, positive or negative, to whatever we experience as having satisfied or frustrated a desire. Though this is not an original idea, Wollheim devotes great ingenuity and learning to developing his version of it, in a complex argument that twists and turns, investigating questions nested within questions. He is at pains to stress, notably, that while emotions are dispositions -- character traits, one might say -- they are not sources of a person's actions. Instead, they are the ground on which desires, which he takes to be the | You've Got an Attitude |
1186722_0 | DESIGN has abandoned Socrates for Nietzsche. This is the take-away idea at the first edition of the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. No more pure geometric shapes. No more strict correspondences between form and function. No more efforts to refine materials and production methods to their pure Platonic essence. Instead, we behold room after room of dancing stars. Fluid shapes. Appetizing colors. Laughter in the dark. Flesh. Organized by the curatorial team of Donald Albrecht, Ellen Lupton and Steven Skov Holt, this is the first of a series of surveys to be conducted every three years by the Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian Institution's New York venue for the study and exhibition of design. The inaugural version, subtitled ''Design Culture Now,'' presents projects conceived or completed since 1997 by 83 architects, designers and firms. In addition to the customary design fields -- appliances, graphics, furniture and assorted accessories -- the show includes fashion, architecture, interiors, landscapes, film, video, computer animation and sets for movies and theater. The projects are not organized by discipline but presented in a sequence of eight themes: Physical, Minimal, Reclaimed, Branded and Fluid, to name a few. Fluid sums up the whole show. The themes flow and swirl into and around each other like dancers in a Dionysian revel. The operating logic here is intuitive rather than analytic, and it reflects the state of design as well as the sensibility of the field's leading figures. Even without including the work of European designers, this show makes design look like the most fertile artistic field in the world today. The fluidity invites viewers to give the show some shape. Here's my contour. Design's movement in a Nietzschean direction has been evident for more than 30 years. From Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus to the Good Design shows in the 1950's at the Museum of Modern Art, designers had aimed to distill the ethos of industrial civilization into practical tools for everyday life. In the 1960's, designers like Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, Gaetano Pesce and James Wines opposed the rationalist mentality of modern design. Their work dealt with emotional content: subliminal impulses, cultural memories, subconscious images. More recently, Philippe Starck has injected Surrealism into the mainstream. Until recently, the irrational impulse has been identified with a small constellation of designers. What the Cooper-Hewitt show reveals is the extent to which Dionysus now rules over mainstream design. No | The Dionysian Drama of Today's Design |
1186672_8 | the bowels of a volcano. Geryon himself, who also happens to be red, is pulled straight from one of Carson's own translations of the Greek poet Stesichorus, who, she writes with her usual flair, ''came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.'' The poem fleshes out what is known about Geryon (one of the fragments included in the book is titled ''Total Things Known About Geryon'') and then places his story in an aggressively modern context. It's the tale of how a young boy, who -- in addition to being red and having wings -- is gay, grows up and is ravaged by love and, later, by unrequited love. Despite his ancient origins, Geryon, like any teenager and much to his mother's chagrin, wears a ripped T-shirt that says ''God Loves Lola'' on it. Carson fuses him to his classical roots by entangling him in a doomed love affair with Herakles, but even this is described in distinctly contemporary terms. As the two sit in Herakles's car talking about sex, she writes: ''Something black and heavy dropped/between them like a smell of velvet./Herakles switched on the ignition and they jumped forward onto the back of the night.'' It's Mount Olympus meets lovers' lane. ''Red'' brought Carson enormous critical attention, though she doesn't quite understand why. ''It was surprising, because I thought it was obscure. But that crossover thing seems to interest people, having the ancient material be contiguous with modern detail. But that's just my normal texture of mind.'' According to Emmet Robbins, a classicist at the University of Toronto who has known her for 25 years: ''She brings the ancient Greeks alive, and makes them speak in the 20th century without betraying what's been bequeathed to us from antiquity. I can't think of anyone else who does it in the same way.'' Carson is at it again in ''Men in the Off Hours,'' her sixth book. One of its most fascinating and difficult sections is a series called ''TV Men,'' in which she sets up what amounts to head-on collisions between various historical and mythical figures -- Antonin Artaud, Lazarus and Sappho, among others -- and what she sees as the debilitating world of television. (These poems begin with the epigraph: ''TV makes things disappear. Oddly the word comes from Latin videre, 'to see.' '') In ''TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2),'' we | Things Fall Together |
1186796_1 | ''But it's not too early for homeowners to start their mosquito prevention efforts.'' Pest control authorities say that the best way to reduce the number of mosquitoes around a home is to remove any standing water. Dr. Michael Potter, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said that the kind of mosquito identified by health officials as the carrier of the West Nile virus -- Culex pipiens, the common household mosquito -- typically lays its eggs on the surface of standing water. ''Homeowners often don't realize that there are a whole bunch of places where water might be accumulating,'' Dr. Potter said, adding that while it is unlikely that there are any mosquitoes flying around right now, it is only a matter of a short time before egg-bearing females take flight. ''As soon as the conditions are right they'll start laying eggs,'' Dr. Potter said. ''And any eggs they lay will hatch in a matter of days.'' Among the likely -- or perhaps unlikely -- places that eggs will be laid, Dr. Potter said, are in buckets, birdbaths, pool covers, discarded tin cans, old tires, cisterns, recycling bins, inverted trash-can tops and saucers for flowerpots; in water that has collected on top of pool covers and tarpaulins and even in small pockets on children's toys. And one of the most common breeding areas, he said, is a leaf-clogged rain gutter. ''Mosquitoes develop rapidly,'' Dr. Potter said, and they can go from tiny water-bound wrigglers to flying, biting adults in as little as one week. ''That means that a single neglected roof gutter can produce hundreds of new mosquitoes each day,'' he added. But what can homeowners do if they have an ornamental pond or a swampy area that is impossible to drain? ''One thing to consider might be to stock the pond with mosquito fish,'' Dr. Potter said, referring to what are called predacious minnows, about an inch to an inch and a half long, that dine quite happily on mosquito larvae. Another alternative, he said, is to treat the pond or swampy area with a ''biorational'' insecticide that will kill mosquito larvae while leaving pets, plants and people unharmed. Products that will accomplish this, he said, include Bactimos, Vectobac and Altosid, all of which can be purchased from the Clarke Mosquito Control Products in Roselle, Ill., (800) 323-5727; and Mosquito Dunks, manufactured by March Biological Control | Keeping Mosquitoes At Bay |
1186958_2 | their electronic correspondence is private. (It may also highlight the misconception that historians no longer have paper trails to follow.) It was Lt. Col. Oliver North who proved that e-mail, so apparently ephemeral, is harder to expunge than paper documents comfortingly run through a shredder. In the 1980's, Mr. North thought he had deleted electronic messages regarding his assistance in providing arms to Nicaraguan rebels, but it turned out he had neglected to take care of the back-up copies. Ever since, a wave of court cases based on e-mail has mounted. In the Microsoft trial, the credibility of company's chairman, Bill Gates, was undermined when he flatly denied in his deposition what he had previously written in electronic exchanges. In the wake of the Microsoft trial, many companies issued strict policies governing employees' use of e-mail. Yet people continue to send such messages that they would never commit to a written document -- and save them. ''What the Microsoft case showed is that people need to think about e-mail as a form of writing, as opposed to a telephone call or a face-to-face conversation,'' said Henry H. Perritt Jr., dean of the Chicago Kent College of Law. So why don't they? One reason may be the seductive quality of computer communication, which encourages the belief that words are disappearing into the ether. ''In a public situation you are clearly aware of people listening,'' said Sara Kiesler, a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. ''But on a computer you have to monitor yourself.'' Aware of the apparently intractable human tendency to blab electronically, several companies are proposing to fight technology with technology. Sendmail, whose software handles most of the world's electronic mail traffic, is working with others on a standard that would enable senders to control whether their e-mail can be forwarded by the recipient. Another company, appropriately named Disappearing Inc., is developing an encryption system that would enable senders to set a date when their such mail would no longer be readable. But there is concern that such features could also dampen enthusiasm for a medium whose speed and simplicity has made it a hugely popular form of communication. ''A hard problem is how to do this in a way that doesn't take away from the trillion messages that are being sent each day,'' said Greg Olson, president of Sendmail. ''This is a very delicate evolution.'' THE NATION | E-Mail Is Treacherous. So Why Do We Keep Trusting It? |
1186718_1 | that caused her severe pain, Ms. Manheim was Mr. Foreman's leading stage interpreter, and scattered through the loft are cardboard and balsa-wood valentines he has made for her, one a train with the words ''Richard Loves Kate'' on it and the figure of Mr. Foreman leaning out the window. But dominating the space and lining every wall are Mr. Foreman's 10,000 books. He is widely read in European intellectual history: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan. And, of course, Nietzsche. But ''it was the image of Nietzsche holding his head and having an idea, as an icon of a hermitlike intellectual, that dominated me as much as his specific ideas,'' Mr. Foreman said. ''Bad Boy Nietzsche!'' is in many ways typical Foreman: ropes strung across the stage, optometrists' letters, a clear plexiglass wall separating the audience from the performers. The actors wear headsets with microphones and funny hats. But this is the first time that Mr. Foreman has based a play on a historical figure. Nietzsche, born in 1844 in Rocken, near Leipzig, is widely regarded as one of the foremost influences on contemporary philosophy, and as a precursor of existentialism and post-structuralism. In ''The Birth of Tragedy,'' published in 1872, he questioned the foundations of Western rationalism as exemplified by Socrates and the plays of Euripides, espousing a new kind of morality, one based on the mastery of the passions, not their extirpation through religion. IN his best-known work, ''Thus Spake Zarathustra,'' published in 1883-85, Nietzsche wrote of the death of God and the will to power, and developed his notion of the Superman, a figure who celebrates life on earth, rather than as it is sanctified in the hereafter. For the young Nietzsche, his friend Richard Wagner was the perfect exemplar of passion and will combined in the artist, the authentic heir to the Greek tragedians. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner over the composer's anti-Semitism, his manipulativeness and the cult he had inspired at Bayreuth. Grand as Nietzsche's ideas were, the philosopher led a lonely life. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when his son was 4, and Nietzsche's childhood was dominated by women. He was said to have contracted syphilis in a brothel as a student, and suffered from migraines and stomach pains. His one great love was the writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome, but their relationship was chaste, and she did not return his affection. She | Who Is That Man Posing As Richard Foreman? |
1187045_1 | the tolling of a bell 53 times in honor of each of the captives held on the Amistad. A ceremonial chain was cut, a bottle of water broken across the bow and six white doves released. Then, with the push of a button, automated winches lowered the lift-dock holding the Amistad into the water. As it reached a depth of 10 feet, the wooden ship, flying the American flag but still without masts or sails, floated free, and the crowd erupted in loud cheers and applause. The HMS Rose, a tall ship anchored nearby, fired its cannons. There was no such ceremony when the original Amistad entered Connecticut waters 161 years ago, carrying a cargo of slaves who had been kidnapped in Africa and sold at auction in Havana. Seized by a Navy brig off Long Island, the Amistad was towed to shore in New London, Conn. The slaves, in a mutiny, had killed the ship's captain and chef but failed in an effort to return to their homeland in what is now Sierra Leone in West Africa. After 63 days at sea, they were charged with murder and jailed in New Haven, where they waited for American courts to consider their fate. President Martin Van Buren hoped to extradite the prisoners to Cuba, where they would have been enslaved once again. But abolitionists took up the Africans' cause and organized a defense that eventually led to John Quincy Adams, the former president, arguing their case before the United States Supreme Court. In March 1841, three years after the ship's capture, the court ruled that the Africans had been kidnapped illegally and ordered them freed. The 35 survivors eventually returned to their homeland, their saga fixed in American history. The idea of recreating the Amistad grew out of a parade of tall ships in New York Harbor to celebrate the American bicentennial in 1976. The parade included a ship that had been temporarily renamed Amistad, which caught the attention of Warren Q. Marr II, then editor of Crisis, a journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His interest led to the creation of Amistad America, a nonprofit educational foundation formed in 1996 to recreate the Amistad. The project also got a huge lift in publicity and interest from the 1997 Steven Spielberg movie ''Amistad.'' Construction of the $3.1 million replica, paid for by corporate sponsors and | In a Replica of a Famed Slave Ship, Lessons From the Past |
1186876_0 | College seniors dusted the sand off their resumes earlier this month in Panama City, Fla., and headed to the Spring Break Career Expo 2000. For a short time, fun in the sun took a back seat to the real world of wages and work. Recruiters from 50 companies offered annual salaries of $30,000 to $65,000 for high-technology positions. Sixty-six percent of seniors surveyed at the job fair by Herbert H. Rozoff Public Relations of Northbrook, Ill., said they did not anticipate staying with their first employer for more than two years. That was quite a change from last year, when 54 percent said that they expected to remain at their first jobs for 5 to 10 years. ''With today's tight labor market, students know they are in demand,'' said John A. Challenger, the chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm in Chicago. JULIE DUNN PERSONAL BUSINESS: DIARY | Where the Jobs Are |
1186818_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER' JOURNAL | |
1187046_0 | Unable to find enough workers in the booming economy, American corporations are trying to expand the labor pool. Until recently, employers had met their labor needs by hiring people who were already employed or at least wanted to work. But as this pool shrinks, they are increasingly recruiting from among the 36 million working-age people in the United States who had not sought a job, or even thought about taking one. Conrad Bell is one of these new workers. Mr. Bell, a college junior, did not need a job. Living at home, he had enough pocket money, and the first payments on his school loans were still in the future. But when a notice went up on a campus bulletin board that H & R Block was hiring students skilled in computers to trouble-shoot problems called in from Block offices around the country, Mr. Bell applied and got one of the jobs. ''Most of my friends now work,'' he explained. The company has gone out of its way to accommodate the 23-year-old student, juggling schedules so that he can carry four courses at the DeVry Institute of Technology and still work 25 hours a week. Between semesters, he worked on Tuesdays, then switched to Mondays to attend Tuesday classes. Nearly 200 other students hired for the tax season get similar flexible treatment at Block's new technical center here. In addition to students like Mr. Bell, companies are stepping up recruiting of the urban poor, retirees, homemakers, men and women mustering out of military service, the handicapped, women coming off welfare and illegal immigrants not already counted in the labor force. People with jobs are being recruited to moonlight in second jobs, and part-timers are adding hours more easily than in the past. To get workers, some companies even relocate to pockets of relatively high unemployment. The recruiting poster and the promise of flexible hours were what landed Mr. Bell despite his mother's resistance. ''She does not want me to work while I'm in school,'' he said. Aside from flexible hours, companies are offering subsidized transportation, child care, store discounts, free meals, family outings, tuition subsidies, and, in one case here, an $80,000 softball field -- everything, but significantly higher pay. ''We really are in uncharted territory,'' said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University. ''The last time we had such tight labor markets, in the 1960's, the baby boomers | Companies Try Dipping Deeper Into Labor Pool |
1186833_5 | Mark Burris, a research associate at the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Mr. Burris and an associate set out to determine what data was available, and issued a report last spring saying that cell phone use had ''an adverse effect'' on driving performance, though so far that has been difficult to quantify because states do not keep such records. Nonetheless, the reports they studied indicated that the chances of getting into accidents while operating a cell phone ranged from 34 percent to 300 percent. And the most thorough study and the one most frequently quoted appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. It said drivers using cell phones were four times more likely to be involved in an accident than those who were not. In preparing the report that appeared in the journal, two researchers at the University of Toronto studied 699 drivers with cell phones who were involved in accidents and used detailed billing records to examine their cell phone calls on the day of the collision and in the previous week. They found that it was the talking itself -- not the use of the phone -- that broke the driver's concentration. As a result, and challenging a commonly held view, they said that hands-free cell phones were no safer than those requiring use of the driver's hand. James E. Katz, a professor of communication at the School of Communication Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University who has done surveys on driver attitudes and cell phones, said talking on a phone while driving was more distracting than talking to someone in your car. ''A person in a car is interacting with you, not just in words but by watching you,'' Professor Katz said. ''If they see you're distracted, they ease off, and if they see a big semi lumbering toward you, they quit talking. When you're talking on a cell phone, they can't see the situation you're in, so they don't moderate their conversation.'' Yet the 1998 study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said using a cell phone while driving was just one of many distractions that increased the risk of a crash. The study went on to say that the development of new forms of wireless technology like on-board navigation systems and portable fax machines would only increase potential hazards. Moreover, the report | Talking and Driving: Growing Road Menace? |
1186948_0 | To the Editor: In ''Natural Born Killers'' (column, March 22), Paul Krugman overlooks two important points when offering genetically modified foods as an ''escape'' from poverty and starvation in developing countries. First, the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has demonstrated conclusively that famine does not result from underproduction of food, but rather from distribution problems. Second, the multinational companies developing these genetically modified crops have patented the crops, which drives up seed prices. Genetically modified food does not offer a solution to poverty. DIAHANNA LYNCH Oakland, Calif., March 22, 2000 | Alleviating Famine |
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