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1166386_0 | To the Editor: Re Bob Herbert's Jan. 3 column, ''When Treatment Is Denied'': While we condemn youth violence and fear for our children's safety in schools, we have neglected the mental health needs of children. Yes, mentally ill children are desperately in need of adequate treatment. However, as a clinical psychologist who works with children and families, for the Board of Education and in private practice, I can say that children's psychological needs are rarely disconnected from those of the adults they interact with. Children cannot be treated in isolation. To diminish the anguish that results from mental illness, financing for diagnosis and treatment of the mental health needs of both children and adults is vital. NOEMI BALINTH President, New York State Psychological Association Forest Hills, Queens, Jan. 4, 2000 | A Child's Mental Health |
1165330_1 | of cultural exchange that it has generated a whole new industry, namely Canada-Cuba Sports and Cultural Festivals, with offices in Toronto and Havana. This is not a sideline enterprise; it is based on Cuba alone. Canadians have an easier time of it here: officially friends, not enemies. Jonathan Watts, president of the company, reports that officials here are no harder to deal with than any others but that telephones and telecommunications are in bad shape. Canada-Cuba has responded by building its own private network of phones, faxes and e-mail, and hiring people here to run its office. Arts exchanges are only part of the business. The University of Colorado sends archaeologists; the University of Wisconsin, nurses and nursing know-how. Mr. Watts's worst Cuban-American experience was the recent visit of the Baltimore Orioles. ''They tried to politicize everything,'' he said. ''There was arguing whether Fidel Castro would get the proceeds of the gates at baseball games. The tickets were either free or cost 5 cents. This added up to about $50.'' One more way to describe Milwaukee in Havana is this: picture an American orchestra with Liszt and Strauss as its imports and set it against the much larger picture of musical Cuba as a whole. Anyone who has succumbed to ''The Buena Vista Social Club'' -- either the movie or the recording -- has to wonder whether we shouldn't be listening to the Cuban popular tradition rather than Bernsteinian syntheses of it in ''West Side Story.'' Maybe the classical European tradition arriving by way of North America is a marginal affectation. A more paranoid Cuban might find here the latest colonialist plot to impose the will of foreigners on local sensibilities. The divide between cultures is more vivid in Cuba, given its recent isolation and its ethnic core heavily based on the black slave population sent long ago to work the country's lucrative sugar cane. Europe came to this island, and the genetic memory of that coming survives. And, of course, any ''native'' music, with a little historical digging, can be shredded into many musics, all of them originally from somewhere else. But in the drums, bongos, claves and maracas that underlie the Cuban music that one hears performed in nearly every bar, restaurant and cafe, there is something distinctive. The distance to Spain and Britain seems far, and to Africa just a brief hop. WHOSE music is whose becomes | Colonialism's Latest Foothold in Cuba? |
1165605_0 | A computer failure caused by the arrival of the year 2000 cut communications with one of the nation's secret spy satellites for two to three hours on Friday night and continued to hobble its operations today, Pentagon officials said. A computer system at a ground station of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that runs the military's spy satellites, failed at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, or midnight Greenwich Mean Time, the standard to which many military systems are synchronized. The satellite continued to operate normally, but the disruption made it impossible to process the information it was transmitting back to earth, the officials said. No other satellites were affected. Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre said at the Pentagon today that officials had been able to rely on ''backup procedures'' to resume processing the satellite's feed within two to three hours, but they could do so at ''less than our full peacetime level of activity.'' ''It was only for a matter of a few hours when we were not able to process information,'' Dr. Hamre said. ''We are now. And we'll be back to normal operations very soon.'' Even so, he called the failure significant and said it was the most notable disruption attributed so far to the 2000 rollover, for which the Pentagon spent $3.6 billion to prepare. Despite fears of widespread problems, the nation's military reported only a few other minor disruptions as the new year arrived, including a power loss in the remote outpost of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Dr. Hamre and other officials would not say exactly where the computer problem occurred or disclose other details, such as what part of the globe was temporarily invisible to their eyes in space. Senior officials said that in an emergency they would be able to take surveillance photos by other means, such as U-2 spy planes. The National Reconnaissance Office, based in Chantilly, Va., operates about two dozen intelligence satellites, including five that take photographs or radar images, eight that intercept communications and eight that monitor ocean traffic, said John E. Pike, a military and intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. Although the Pentagon refused to identify the satellite, one military official indicated that it was one that took images. Mr. Pike said the information broadcast by the five photographic or radar satellites was processed at Fort | In One of Few Problems, Link to Spy Satellite Fails |
1166805_0 | Since 12 Victorian gentlemen gathered for its first meeting on April 6, 1858, in the New York home of Augustus B. Sage, the American Numismatic Society has grown into a research institution with one of the finest collections in the world, holding nearly a million Greek, Roman, Islamic, Asian and medieval coins. But in recent years, thanks in part to its low profile and, some say, its distant site in upper Manhattan, the society has largely been forgotten by the public. Now a plan to reduce the society's annual deficit of nearly $1 million by offering buyouts to its five curators while at the same time spending most of its endowment on a new home downtown has set off a rebellion by a group of devoted members. A special meeting of the society's 16-member board, which it calls the council, is to be held next Saturday to discuss the changes. The protesters plan to appeal to the society's leaders to freeze the buyouts for a year and to reconsider its decision to spend $16 million to move the society downtown from the neo-Classical villa at 155th Street and Broadway that has been its home for 93 years. ''This is unique as a cultural institution,'' said James H. Schwartz, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, who is leading the revolt. He accused the council of acting without properly consulting the society's 2,000 members and said its actions threatened the organization's strongest asset: its international reputation for scholarship. Ute Wartenberg, the society's executive director, says that she is simply following through on the council's directive to cut the annual deficit by $400,000. In addition to offering to buy out the curators, the senior staff took a 7.5 percent salary cut, six guards and maintenance workers were laid off on Dec. 31, and the society is now closed to the public on weekends. ''It's not that we want to get rid of the curators,'' said Ms. Wartenberg, who has a doctorate in papyrology and is an expert on ancient Greek coins. ''We are trying to cut the deficit to half a million dollars and hope that the move downtown will allow us to raise money and build the organization back up.'' The problems facing the Numismatic Society are similar to those that confront many museums as government support has waned in recent years and the | Coin Society's Plans Upset Some Members |
1166853_1 | form of anthropocentricity that clashes with the town's animal-loving ethos. ''We respect the mayor's decision, but we do not agree with it,'' said the Rev. Vincenzo Fortunato, the spokesman for the Franciscan order of Assisi. ''We believe there are alternatives that respect animals and the environment.'' But like most custodians of churches and historic buildings in Italy, the Franciscan friars have put up thin wiring that emits an electrical impulse that repels birds along parts of their restored basilica to protect the 13th-century building from pigeon excrement. Local environmentalists are even more upset. ''St. Francis called everyone brother and sister, even animals,'' said Silvia Rapicetta, a director of the Assisi Natural Council, an environmental and animal rights association. ''This order doesn't take into consideration the whole problem, it just gives out prohibitions.'' But even animal rights groups concede that there is no easy solution to limiting the country's rapidly multiplying urban pigeon population. Reducing the amount of food available and limiting nesting sites is a partial solution. Marco Dinetti, a national coordinator of the Italian League for the Protection of Birds, said that in addition, introducing natural predators like the falcon or the tawny owl to cities would be ''ecologically sound and not cruel.'' He warned: ''You have to do food reduction ethically. You cannot just take away food overnight and stop people from feeding the pigeons.'' But Venice, a city where there are almost twice as many pigeons as people, and where signs ordering tourists not to feed pigeons are cheerfully ignored, has taken a harsher route. There, since the end of 1998, about 20,000 pigeons have been captured and gassed. ''If we could find a falcon that could eat 50,000 pigeons, everyone would applaud, but it doesn't exist,'' said Mario Scattolin, director of Venice's Environmental Office. ''Nature is what it is, not what Walt Disney shows us.'' Giorgio Bartolini, the mayor of Assisi, said he would not dream of introducing extermination measures to his town and merely wanted to reduce the pigeon population by cutting back feedings and closing up windows and holes in abandoned buildings where pigeons congregate. ''Assisi cannot serve as a welcome center for pigeons,'' Mr. Bartolini warned. ''I am not saying that we have an epidemic on hand, but their growth rate is alarming, and they damage buildings and pose a health risk to people.'' Experts disagree on the degree of risk, but pigeons | Assisi Journal; When in Assisi, Don't Feed Saint's Flock |
1172438_1 | this. It was a stealth deal. When I saw the contract in September 1998, I thought that the compensation the district would receive was too low and that any kind of conflict resolution was solely in Sprint's hands. I felt it was foreclosing possibilities for the district.'' His co-plaintiff, Dr. Leslie Plachta, a doctor, said: ''Legally, you cannot have a purely for-profit entity on school grounds. This is a purely business venture. And no one took the health risks seriously.'' He said he believed the potential health risks of the radiation emissions from the towers could lead to increased instances of cancer. Chris Heath, president of the Ossining Board of Education, would not comment on the suit, but said: ''It's an agreement with a private company, but it's not commercial. The tower is on top of the high school, and Sprint is not pushing its products in the schools. We're leasing space, not touting a product.'' While some residents are opposed to having a cell phone tower at the high school because of what they contend are potential health risks or discomfort with a commercial presence on school district property, others maintain that they feel frustration with the school board. ''I'm always willing to trust the school board,'' said Dennis Kirby, a member of a group called Safe Ossining Schools. But he said he was now questioning the school board's decision making in this matter. According to the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, municipalities cannot ban cellular antennas and are restricted in their ability to limit their appearance or placement. Earlier this month, 300 residents here attended a meeting organized by Safe Ossining Schools to hear about the potential health risks of cellular phone antennas while members of the Ossining school board met with Sprint representatives to discuss alternative locations. Organizers of Safe Ossining Schools said that more than 600 residents have signed a petition opposing the tower on the high school. Although Sprint is willing to consider alternative sites, the company says it is resolute about enforcing its contract with the school district. ''We do consider the contract to be valid,'' said Larry McDonnell, a spokesman for Sprint PCS, a national cellular telephone network with headquarters in Kansas City, Mo. ''We negotiated in good faith, and assuming there are no other alternatives, we are committed to putting it on the high school. We really do have a responsibility to | Suit Filed Over Plan For School Antenna |
1172721_0 | Delegates from more than 130 nations today adopted the first global treaty regulating trade in genetically modified products, setting up an international framework for the increasingly heated and divisive debate about foods made with biotechnology. The biosafety treaty, forged after a week of intense negotiations that often pitted the United States against almost everyone else, allows countries to bar imports of genetically altered seeds, microbes, animals and crops that they deem a threat to their environment. But virtually all of the proposed provisions that Washington had feared would cripple world food trade and endanger billions of dollars a year in farm exports were watered down or eliminated. This led some European delegates and environmentalists to complain that the accord had been unduly weakened. Whether the treaty heightens consumer concern or helps ease it, the debate surrounding genetically altered food is sure to continue. European consumers, in particular, are wary of risks to human health and the environment and have become increasingly militant in their rejection of food that contains genetically modified grains or soybeans. About half the soybeans and one-third of the corn grown in the United States last year contained foreign genes making the crops resistant to herbicides or insects, and European resistance has cost American farmers millions of dollars in lost exports. Some of the European intensity in the debate stems from recent food scares unrelated to genetic engineering, like mad cow disease in Britain and dioxin-tainted chickens in Belgium, where there was also a vast recall by Coca-Cola after the parents of four ill teenagers laid the blame on the soft drink. Some also has arisen from European dislike of what is often called American culinary imperialism and meant as a criticism of of vast food companies like the McDonald's fast-food chain, which has seen protests and vandalism at some of its European locations over the use of hormone-treated beef. Concern about genetically altered food has also risen in the United States, where companies that develop genetically modified crops, like Monsanto, have found themselves increasing on the defensive. The Food and Drug Administration held public hearings on the such food recently and some members of Congress are calling for food with genetically modified ingredients to be so labeled. Despite the continuing controversy, when the biosafety protocol was finally approved at around 5 a.m., weary delegates from all sides stood up and applauded and hailed it as a | 130 NATIONS AGREE ON SAFETY RULES FOR BIOTECH FOOD |
1172678_1 | marked the bishop's retirement last week by gleefully announcing ''good riddance.'' Calling his tenure ''a sad example of misguided potential,'' he complained that the bishop had spent more time on book tours and public speaking than ministering to the desperately poor residents of New Jersey's largest city. As the spiritual leader of 40,000 congregants in 130 churches, Bishop Spong has made headlines as a vocal champion of gay rights, a supporter of assisted suicide and a theologian who has questioned the most fundamental tenets of Christian theology. In speaking engagements around the world, in appearances on ''Oprah'' and ''Larry King Live,'' and in the 18 books he has written, Bishop Spong has doubted the resurrection of Jesus, called Saint Paul ''a self-loathing and repressed gay male'' and suggested that the Virgin Mary was no virgin but a ''sexually violated teenage girl.'' He has attacked the Roman Catholic position on birth control as ''an act of immorality'' and the Vatican's treatment of women as ''so insulting, so retrograde,'' that women should abandon the church ''for their own humanity.'' While his successor, the Rev. John P. Croneberger, 60, is considered just as liberal on issues such as the ordination of gay priests, he has said he planned to have a much lower profile. ''I think the clergy of the diocese are looking for a pastor, are looking for a shepherd who will be present, who will be available,'' he has said. ''I will be less of a national and international figure.'' The Episcopal Church, which has produced more United States presidents, including George Bush, than any other denomination, would hardly be recognizable to another of its members, George Washington, if he were alive today. The church now allows the ordination of women, its clergy members are racially diverse and no one takes notice anymore when openly gay priests are ordained. ''I lost count at the number of gay priests'' in my diocese, said Bishop Spong, who found himself at the center of a national storm in 1989 when he ordained Robert Williams, who was living with another man. Bishop Spong turned Mr. Williams's ordination in Hoboken into a public event, even sending invitations to every Episcopal bishop in the country. The church's House of Bishops later voted to censure him, but Bishop Spong had the last word that day and chastised the body's 160 members after the vote. A dozen bishops who | Boat-Rocking Bishop Sits Down at Last |
1172339_0 | Frequent-Traveler Miles Q. Is there a Web site that calculates one's frequent flier miles on various airlines, or at least gives a formula for doing so? -- Joan Gross, New York, N.Y. A. Among the companies that provide the service you're looking for are MaxMiles and Biztravel.com. Each can be reached directly at its own home page -- www.maxmiles .com or biztravel.com -- or through links on other sites. You will very likely find MaxMiles the more convenient of the two since it tracks miles and expiration dates, if any, for 32 programs regardless of where you booked your flight, hotel stay or car rental. In addition, mileage reports are available on designated Web sites and by e-mail as well. Biztravel.com, which is a travel agency, tracks miles for six frequent-traveler programs -- British Airways Executive Club, Northwest WorldPerks, TWA Aviators, Midwest Express, Starwood Preferred Guest and Hilton HHonors. Beyond that, Biztravel.com compiles information only for travel it has arranged on any of 40-plus frequent-traveler programs. A log of accumulated miles is free on its Web site and affiliated sites, but there are no e-mail mileage reports. How much subscribers pay for information compiled by MaxMiles varies. It depends on which of many sites they signed up with. But cost does not necessarily reflect how much information is provided. For example, by logging on to a personalized www.excite.com home page, a subscriber can get mileage totals for each program free. For a more complete report -- showing individual transactions, expiration dates, mileage and special deals -- there is a charge: $2.95 a month or $29.95 a year. Under this arrangement, subscribers get reports on the Web and by e-mail. If one joins through www.expedia .com, the first year is free. After that, it's $9.99 a year, which provides a full statement online and e-mailed reports. But if three tickets are bought within a year of enrollment, the charge is waived. If you are an American Express cardholder, access to the information gathered by MaxMiles is free as are the mileage reports found at www.rewardsmanager.com or www .americanexpress.com. The best deal of all is offered by www.skymalltravel.com: Complete reports both by e-mail and on the Web free, period. Airport to Lake Como Q. Does Malpensa Airport outside Milan offer transportation to Lake Como, where visitors can board boats and hydrofoils to Bellagio and other places? Traveling south from Milan and then | Q and A |
1172631_0 | To the Editor: People with all sorts of disabilities -- physical and emotional, as well as developmental -- are living longer. Also, significant advances in neonatal medicine have enabled the survival of extremely-low-birth-weight infants who would previously have died at birth or soon thereafter. These children generally have profound physical and developmental disabilities requiring enormous expenditures throughout their lives. Planning for the financial future of any child with disabilities should begin as soon as a diagnosis is confirmed and a prognosis provided. An expert advisory team created early in the child's life can adjust long-term plans as tax laws, government responsibility for care, medical practices and investment choices change. FERN R. POTVIN Oradell, N.J., Jan. 11 The writer is vice president for medical education at Exceptional Parent magazine, for parents and others caring for children with disabilities. . | Help for the Aging Disabled |
1172304_3 | and Australian whaling histories with that of the Yankees. Led by Nantucket Quakers, New Englanders dominated the industry from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries, and their story has generally been told by Americans without reference to competitors. Yet whaling was central to Australia's founding, too, and might have remained big business there but for the nemesis of British tariff policy. As the story of the rise and decline of an industry, the book has a natural plot. It encompasses business innovation, international diplomacy and company histories of successful whaling families like Nantucket's Rotches and London's Enderbys. Much of the interest, however, is in the shorter essays that follow each chapter (Mawer calls them tailpieces). In one we find the psychopath Samuel Comstock and the horrendous mutiny he led on the Globe in 1824. The best, called ''Lay On, Cut In, Try Out, Stow Down: Or, From Blubber to Oil,'' provides logbook entries of an afternoon's chase in 1844, with glosses by the author translating what he calls whalemen's ''patois.'' It's a marvelous bit of drama, lilting toward its denouement like a bravura one-act play. Inspired passages like this live up to Mawer's stated desire ''to evoke the past as much as to explain it.'' So do 15 sidebars, each dedicated to a special topic. There are recipes for treats like pan-fried sperm whale brains, tips on scrimshaw and a captain's surly departure speech. Salting his text with quotations from legendary whalemen, Mawer steeps readers in whaling lore. But ''Ahab's Trade'' is essentially old wine in a new bottle. Other than a brief preface and epilogue situating the whalemen's adventures in light of contemporary attitudes, it seems quaintly old-fashioned. It is not just that these stories are well known, and almost all from published sources. For all his admiration of the exotic, Mawer is not an ethnographer who explains his subjects. And for all his admiration of the past, he takes interpretive shortcuts that few historians would countenance. For instance, after explaining that the 1840's were the industry's best years, he writes of the 1850's: ''Engrossing the world had been exciting; business as usual was not. It was not that the public was necessarily bored with its former darling, but it had other things on its mind: things like North versus South, and Out West. Besides, the whaling struggle was over and the Yankees had won.'' This passage | Catch Willy |
1172462_0 | THERE can be repercussions when another dog or puppy enters an existing dog's household. How best to deal with them? Coexistence is complex. Appropriately timed eye contact, and words spoken and mutually recognized can bridge the gap of understanding, but mystery overlays each relationship between the person and a pet. A large part of the interspecies attraction is the discussions that cannot be shared and actions that cannot be dissected. The decision to add a second pet invites the study of animal behavior. Two or more dogs under the same roof will interact in an unusual way. Undemocratically, dogs relate in a group in terms of hierarchy, where all members are ranked. The prospect of adding another dog to a household is exciting, and the assumption is often that the resident dog will share the same enthusiasm. But this often is not the case. A new dog or puppy signifies a shift in the hierarchy, divided attention and confrontation over coveted objects and sacred sleeping quarters. Human understanding of canine behavior and predictions about conflicts will affect the developing relationship. To shower a new puppy with affection, toys and play time is understandable, although not sensible. This can lead to deeply harbored resentment. You may have anthropomorphized your first dog's behavior, but the truth is, a dog can never be human. To avoid tensions, grant all special privileges to the resident dog, including first feeding and the right to a treat, petting and praise. Greet the dog first and foremost and always defer petting to the older dog, and respect toy or bone takeovers and boundary scuffles. Though a dog's growl may sound vicious, it is rarely so. A dog's growl says, ''That is enough'' or ''Give me space.'' Disciplining the older dog would make matters far worse as it would communicate disrespect for its authority. You can help, however, by remaining calm and separating the puppy in a crate or gated area when the older dog's patience is thin. In addition, time should be spent alone with each animal. Initially, your dog's established walks and playtime should continue one on one. The puppy can be cuddled when the older dog is preoccupied or attended to elsewhere. Bringing a mature dog into a household will cause friction. Although it might work out and will grant a solitary dog companionship, there are no guarantees. Well-thought-out selection, proper handling and respect for | Dealing With the Additional Dog |
1172162_1 | Kanther, searching for documents linked to the scandal. Victor Homola GERMANY: DAMAGES DENIED -- Munich's High Regional Court rejected an appeal for $7.21 million in damages, plus interest, made by relatives of 11 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian guerrillas at the 1972 Olympics in Munich . The decision upheld a lower court ruling in 1995 that the statute of limitations in the case had expired. (Reuters) BRITAIN: SWORD ATTACK -- A man wielding a samurai sword wounded a senior parliamentarian from the Liberal Democratic Party, Nigel Jones, and killed an aide at the lawmaker's office in Cheltenham, west of London, the police said. They said they did not know the motive for the attack, which occurred as Mr. Jones met constituents in a crowded office. The slain aide was not identified. The attacker was arrested. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS MEXICO: POLICE STOP TRAFFIC -- One thousand Mexico City riot policemen, angry about delays in payment of bonuses for working overtime during the year-end holidays, blocked major roadways in four city boroughs, stalling tens of thousands of motorists. Municipal authorities blamed the delays on a computer glitch. Sam Dillon ASIA AFGHANISTAN: AID MAY END -- United Nations experts say they may end a livestock and crop-development program because they are running out of money. The program, which costs $10 million a year and is dependent on government contributions, is considered important in helping to reduce food shortages and in introducing lucrative animal stocks and cash crops to farmers, many of whom grow opium poppies for their only source of income. Barbara Crossette CHINA: CRACKDOWN ON PIRACY -- China executed 13 people for hijacking a Hong Kong cargo ship in 1998, clubbing 23 seamen to death and throwing their bodies overboard, the official Xinhua news agency said. The agency called it China's biggest piracy case in 50 years. In the month before their executions, two of the pirates, Ma Aijun, left, and Yang Jingtao, appeared in court to appeal their convictions. (Reuters) CHINA: WARNING TO TAIWAN -- China's deputy prime minister, Qian Qichen, warned that any attempt by Taiwan to set up an independent state would lead to war. The warning comes ahead of Taiwan's presidential elections on March 18, in which a pro-independence candidate, Chen Shui-bian, is considered one of the front-runners. (Agence France-Presse) PAKISTAN: ANOTHER TRIAL DELAY -- The trial of ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif hit another snag when a | World Briefing |
1172198_1 | get it.'' Given how decentralized and varied Buddhist groups are in the United States, comprising different traditions and ethnic groups, it is not easy to know how many practitioners there are. Professor Seager said research suggested that two million was a safe estimate, with immigrants outnumbering converts 3 to 1. (If that is the case, then there are nearly as many Buddhists in this country as there are Episcopalians.) But if immigrants are the majority, the popular literature on Buddhism is written by converts. ''If you go out and say, 'I want to learn something about Buddhism in America,' you will find hundreds and hundreds of books by Euro-Americans,'' Professor Seager said. ''You have to work very, very hard getting beyond that.'' Still, the best-known exponent of Buddhism for many Americans is a frequent visitor to the United States: the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. With his outspoken emphasis on peace, the Dalai Lama has, in effect, ''done so much good public relations for Buddhism,'' Professor Seager said. ''All of my undergraduates have heard of the Dalai Lama.'' Reviving a Dialogue The past year proved an important one for Christian churches reaching major ecumenical agreements. In August, for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to enter into full communion with the Episcopal Church, a pact less than a merger, but one that would allow the churches to share clergy and collaborate on social service projects. This week came the news -- notable, but less momentous -- that the Orthodox churches in the United States were reviving a long-suspended ecumenical dialogue with Episcopalians. The two groups have an old friendship, dating to the days when some Orthodox immigrants from Eastern Europe worshiped in Episcopal parishes before they established their own churches. But discussions about common ground collapsed in 1991 when Archbishop Iakovos, then leader of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, suspended the dialogue, citing differences over ordaining women as priests (something the Episcopalians do and the Orthodox do not) and ordaining noncelibate gays (which some Episcopal bishops do, while the Orthodox oppose it). In resuming the dialogue, both sides are expected to focus on other issues. The Rev. Robert G. Stephanopoulos, dean of the Greek archdiocese's Holy Trinity Cathedral in New York, said talk would center on ''reviewing a lot of the issues we have dealt with in the past, building on consensus and avoiding those issues | Religion Journal; Buddhism Nears Mainstream in U.S., Author Says |
1172214_0 | Christie's, the worldwide auction house, said yesterday that it had given federal investigators information about ''possible conduct'' at the firm that was relevant to an antitrust investigation in the art world. In exchange for its cooperation, the company was ''conditionally accepted'' into a Department of Justice amnesty program, according to a statement by the company's general counsel, Jo Backer Laird. She said the conduct had taken place before new ownership took over a year and a half ago. The United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York shook up Manhattan's rarefied art world three years ago by subpoenaing truckloads of documents from Christie's; its archrival, Sotheby's; and more than a dozen more of the city's most prominent dealers. Among numerous practices said to be under investigation was possible collusion by Christie's and Sotheby's in setting sellers' commissions, fees that sellers paid to the auction houses. Ms. Laird refused to describe the nature of the information presented to the investigators or the specifics of what its involvement in an amnesty program would entail. A call to the United States attorney's office was not returned. Law enforcement officials said that subjects of civil prosecution can be treated more leniently if they volunteer information about wrongdoing. The statement came a month after Christopher M. Davidge, Christie's chief executive for six years, abruptly resigned. Christie's was bought in 1998 by Francois Pinault, the French investor who owns Au Printemps, France's largest department store, and Chateau Latour wines. Until March 1995, the two dominant houses charged flat commissions of 10 percent on sales. Then Christie's announced a change, to take effect that September, that replaced the flat commission with a sliding scale ranging from 2 percent to 10 percent, depending on the size of the sale. Shortly after the Christie's announcement, Sotheby's followed suit. Any collusion in setting the commissions would constitute an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Penalties for violations can include substantial fines and imprisonment of up to three years. If the companies had fixed their rates, they would have prevented sellers from trying to negotiate with the two houses for better fees. While neither Sotheby's nor Christie's would discuss the investigation, people familiar with the investigation said that employees, ranging from secretaries to top executives, have been subpoenaed to testify. Galleries, as well as the auction houses, are said to have spent tens of thousands | Christie's Says It Is Cooperating With Antitrust Inquiry in Art World |
1172193_3 | on arms. The Ulster Unionists are in no mood to be conciliatory after the British Government announced last week that it planned to reconstitute the Northern Ireland police force and retire its name, Royal Ulster Constabulary, which is cherished by Protestants. ''Unionists have been stretched to and beyond limit after limit after limit,'' Sir Reg Empey, a senior party official noted for his moderate views, said today. ''Our patience is completely exhausted in this matter.'' In the continual seesawing of power and favor in the politics of Northern Ireland, it is the unionists who are now perceived as having made significant concessions without corresponding responses from the republicans. Since Mr. Trimble's bold gamble in November, unionist frustrations have been given a more sympathetic hearing in places like Dublin, Washington, London and Belfast where their resistance in the past was more often characterized as obdurate nay-saying. Mr. Trimble has scheduled a vote of his party in Belfast on Feb. 12, but the British government is likely to suspend the home-rule government before then rather than see him put his leadership at obvious risk. Mr. Trimble has been a calming and progressive force in the unionist camp, keeping his party engaged in the crisis-ridden peace settlement process in the face of strong opposition from associates who are against the accord and covet his leadership position. Mr. Mandelson said he would base his own actions on Monday's report. ''If it reveals that decommissioning is still on track, I will be guided by that,'' he said. ''If we are going backwards in the process, I will draw the obvious conclusion.'' Mr. Mandelson has said he will suspend the assembly if the terms of the review of the peace accord conducted last fall by George J. Mitchell, the former United States senator, are not being met. The unionists believe that the Mitchell terms call for a start to disarmament by now, and Mr. Mallon said today that he agreed. Republicans assert that the only deadline for disarming is the May 2000 date in the original peace settlement, and they argue that the I.R.A.'s cease-fire, now in its third year, is proof that the clandestine organization is committed to peace. Mr. Adams made his remarks on Thursday night at the opening of a new party branch in Newry on the Irish border. He said it was ''a fundamental mistake in strategy to try and force decommissioning,'' | STANDOFF ON ARMS POSES NEW THREAT TO ULSTER ACCORD |
1170541_1 | vignettes of biography, explaining difficult concepts with well-chosen metaphors. When seen in this perspective, present-day confusion seems almost normal. Humankind has always been asking the same questions, and struggling to find answers in much the same old ways. People in primitive societies are just as capable of reasoning as people in advanced societies, and sophisticated people are often prepared to trust in irrational approaches. According to Fernndez-Armesto, people throughout history have sought to get at the truth in one or more of four basic ways. The first is through feeling. Truth is a tangible entity. The third-century B.C. Chinese sage Chuang Tzu stated, ''The universe is one.'' Others described the universe as a unity of opposites. To the fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the cosmos is a tension like that of the bow or the lyre. The notion of chaos comes along only later, together with uncomfortable concepts like infinity. Then there is authoritarianism, ''the truth you are told.'' Divinities can tell us what is wanted, if only we can discover how to hear them. The ancient Greeks believed that Apollo would speak through the mouth of an old peasant woman in a room filled with the smoke of bay leaves; traditionalist Azande in the Nilotic Sudan depend on the response of poisoned chickens. People consult sacred books, or watch for apparitions. Others look inside themselves, for truths that were imprinted in their minds before they were born or buried in their subconscious minds. Reasoning is the third way Fernndez-Armesto cites. Since knowledge attained by divination or introspection is subject to misinterpretation, eventually people return to the use of reason, which helped thinkers like Chuang Tzu and Heraclitus describe the universe. Logical analysis was used in China and Egypt long before it was discovered in Greece and in India. If the Greeks are mistakenly credited with the invention of rational thinking, it is because of the effective ways they wrote about it. Plato illustrated his dialogues with memorable myths and brilliant metaphors. Truth, as he saw it, could be discovered only by abstract reasoning, without reliance on sense perception or observation of outside phenomena. Rather, he sought to excavate it from the recesses of the mind. The word for truth in Greek, aletheia, means ''what is not forgotten.'' Plato's pupil Aristotle developed the techniques of logical analysis that still enable us to get at the knowledge hidden within us. He | Believe It or Not |
1171109_4 | that genetically modified plants, animals or micro-organisms could displace or endanger native crops or microbes. But, much to the dismay of the biotech industry and Washington, the talks have moved well beyond species preservation. The heart of the proposed Biosafety Protocol -- and the biggest sticking point in the negotiations -- is a requirement that exporters of ''living modified organisms'' notify the importing nation in advance, giving that nation a chance to reject the shipment. Washington contends that such a requirement is appropriate for bioengineered seeds, bacteria or animals that are released into the environment, but not for commodities like wheat and corn that are eaten or processed, since they are not released into the environment. Since genetically modified and unmodified grains are now often intermixed in shipments, such a requirement would cost billions of dollars, requiring crops to be tracked from the field to the docks, it says. But Europe and the developing countries say that concerns about high costs are exaggerated and that agricultural commodities should be included because they contain seeds that can be planted or can escape into the environment. Another sticking point is that Washington, worried that the biosafety rules will be a pretense for trade barriers, wants to make sure that the treaty does not take precedence over World Trade Organization rules. But the developing countries and Europe say Washington's proposed wording would subordinate the Biosafety Protocol to the World Trade Organization, which they do not want. What is at stake in this argument is that under World Trade Organization rules, a nation must base a decision to bar imports of a product on scientific evidence. But Europe and the developing countries want the biosafety treaty to allow such decisions to be made on the basis of reasonable concerns, even in the absence of hard evidence. Some compromises have been put forward, but all sides agree that they have not gone far enough to bridge the gaps. Washington has offered to disseminate information on the Internet as soon as genetically modified crops are approved by federal regulators, giving other countries time to decide whether they will allow imports. American and European officials do agree that the treaty should not cover the labeling on store shelves of biotech foods. That is a matter for domestic legislation, they say. What is at issue in Montreal is the labeling on shipments of genetically modified crops and seeds. | Talks on Biotech Food Today in Montreal Will See U.S. Isolated |
1171124_1 | that will essentially drag the system out of the 19th century directly into the 21st. Like electronic fare collection installed over the last six years, new tracking technology -- similar to that used by air traffic controllers -- will take the New York subway to a level that its smaller cousins in Washington, London, San Francisco and Montreal have been at for decades. Then over the next 20 to 25 years, at a cost that will likely reach into the billions, officials say, a system now in use only in Paris will be installed, in which trains will be dispatched, tracked, driven and stopped almost completely by computer. ''This is something that has been talked about here for at least 20 years,'' said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, adding that it was one of several major modernization projects postponed by the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970's. ''Now we are finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,'' he said. The new tracking system, to be installed first on all numbered lines, except the No. 7, and on the shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square, is being designed by Union Switch and Signal of Pittsburgh, the same company that built many of the lighted maps and bulky switching boards still in use in the 60 subway control rooms, known as towers. The new system will rely on tiny transponders, placed at close intervals inside the tunnels, that will send signals to passing trains and receive signals identifying the trains, in return. That information, which will be conveyed on fiber-optic cables already strung through the tunnels, can then be used to record the train's speed and its exact location, second by second. Compared with the patched-together system now in use, the innovations seem almost like science fiction. Last Wednesday afternoon, for example, in the cramped control tower that sits almost in the path of the No. 6 train inside Grand Central, Mr. Greenblatt and six subway controllers were keeping track of trains the old-fashioned way. At a gray metal desk with a fluorescent lamp and a small American flag hanging overhead, Ometa Byrd was staring intently at a typed-out train schedule, known as a gap sheet, that informed her when Lexington Avenue 4, 5 and 6 trains were supposed to pull into and leave Grand Central. For most of her career, | Subways Trade No. 2 Pencils For 21st-Century Technology |
1168831_10 | is, How do you make the world see? How do you establish a brand new international human right? The mental disabilities group is working on two fronts. First, it is trying to carve out a body of international law. Ultimately this would involve a United Nations treaty guaranteeing the rights and protections of the mentally disabled, similar to the 1987 convention against torture or the conventions in the 1980's on the rights of women and children. That, however, is not likely to happen soon. Nations are wary of creating new rights, especially ones that cost money. As anyone who has walked New York City's streets knows, not even rich Western nations can be proud of their care of the mentally ill. And so, in much the way that an activist American lawyer tries to squeeze a civil rights or labor precedent from the Supreme Court, Mental Disability Rights is trying to squeeze human rights precedents from existing international law. For this they have relied on a mix of U.N. resolutions, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. That treaty provides in Article 7 that ''no one shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.'' When Rosenthal sees naked, shivering women at Hidalgo, he writes in his report that it is a violation of Article 7 of I.C.C.P.R: ''cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.'' And when Dr. Juan deDios Uribe at the Hidalgo hospital tells him that 80 percent of patients could live in the community if the government financed group homes, Rosenthal writes that this is a violation of the 1991 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 119, Principles for Protection of People with Mental Illness: ''Every person with mental illness shall have the right to live and work, as far as possible, in the community.'' There is good reason for grounding the work in international law. ''We are sending a message,'' says Rosenthal, ''that this is not about comparing Mexico to Western standards: this is about the violation of universal law.'' Unfortunately, a million violations mean nothing without world opinion on your side, and that is the second, more important -- and far more difficult -- change that must take place to establish a new human right. ''Basically,'' says Rosenthal, ''you have to shame the world.'' That is when it helps to have a national activist like Virginia Gonzalez and an international one like Rosenthal, who feed | The Global Willowbrook |
1169095_0 | WHEN Jeffrey K. Harris was head of the National Reconnaissance Office in the mid-1990's, his agency's satellites routinely peered down on the world's hot spots from outer space and photographed them for federal intelligence agencies. It was all supersecret and all dedicated to national security. Now Mr. Harris has a new job and a new agenda. As president of Space Imaging Inc., a private company in Thornton, Colo., he wants to get rich by selling photographs taken by his company's satellite camera -- the first in the world to rival military reconnaissance in accuracy and sharpness. The spy-satellite business, for decades a secretive monopoly of advanced nations, is trying to go commercial. But the photographs pose questions of practicality, security and privacy: In theory, nosy neighbors can now peer over tall fences. Space Imaging's satellite, launched in September, is the first of a dozen or so commercial surveillance craft expected to be sent into orbit in the next decade, a wave begun by the Clinton administration's green light in 1994. The new field of close-up space photography is seen as a boon for mining companies, mapmakers, geologists, city planners, ecologists, farmers, hydrologists, road makers, journalists, land managers, disaster-relief officials and others seeking to monitor the planet's changing face. The global market in such imagery is expected to reach as high as $5 billion by 2004. Space Imaging's photos have already laid bare the devastation of last November's earthquake in Turkey, showing demolished warehouses and shattered residences. The pictures have also revealed the grim aftermath of Venezuela's recent floods and mudslides, as well as smoke curling over the Chechen city of Grozny, which was under Russian attack. From an orbit 400 miles up, the camera can see objects as small as three feet wide. The photos aren't cheap. A minimum order for a North American scene is $1,000, and a foreign image is $2,000. But the company, via its Web site, www.spaceimage.com, also sells $10 snapshots of world landmarks, including the Taj Mahal, Vatican City, Big Ben, the Forbidden City in Beijing and Central Park in New York. Albert D. Wheelon, a former Central Intelligence Agency official who helped shape the nation's early spy-satellite program, said world governments and their militaries would probably be the top customers for years to come. Civilian inroads, he added, ''will take a long time, like computers did.'' In fact, Space Imaging's main customer now is | Ideas & Trends; We're Ready for Our Close-Ups Now |
1169146_1 | and testing, would have to be taken into account. He said that for this reason, France was proposing that the companies and countries involved in both buying and selling drugs get together to discuss how to avoid more confrontations over intellectual property rights. He said in an interview Thursday that given the huge numbers of AIDS cases in the developing world, treatment should not be forgotten in the rush to support prevention efforts -- many of them more educational than medical -- and the development of an AIDS vaccine. The 21 countries with the world's highest H.I.V. infection rates are all in Africa, and these nations are also among the world's poorest. Vice President Al Gore, speaking at the same council session on Monday, also raised the question of how to make medicines more readily available, an issue President Clinton had addressed at the contentious World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in December. ''We are also committed to helping poor countries gain access to affordable medicines, including those for H.I.V./AIDS,'' Mr. Gore told the Security Council. ''Last month, the president announced a new approach to ensure that we take public health crises into account when applying U.S. trade policy. We will cooperate with our trading partners to assure that U.S. trade policies do not hinder the efforts to respond to health crises.'' Mr. Gore said the United States would add $150 million to next year's budget for fighting AIDS. A third of that amount would go to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, which sponsors medical research and works on the distribution of drugs to the third world. In total, the Clinton administration is seeking to make $325 million available for the American contribution to the worldwide campaign against AIDS. Mr. Gore learned last year how complicated efforts to aid poorer nations can be when negotiations with pharmaceutical companies are involved. He drew protesters to his campaign rallies after he presented the position of American drug companies in talks with South Africa. The talks concerned a 1997 South African law that allowed imports of cheaper, but unlicensed, copies of American drugs for AIDS and opened the way for South African manufacturers to produce generic versions of their own. Forty pharmaceutical companies responded by first lobbying the South Africans and then filing a lawsuit. The suit was suspended in September when South Africa said that the law would be re-examined. | France Presses the U.N. to Help Poor Nations Get AIDS Drugs |
1168822_0 | THE minimum amount airlines must pay passengers whose luggage is irretrievably lost on a domestic flight will rise this week to $2,500 from its longtime level of $1,250. The Department of Transportation will review the new minimum in July every other year and raise the level in increments of $100 if the rate of inflation requires it. This modification of a lower limit in effect since 1984 was a long process that began in 1993 with a Ralph Nader group petition asking for a rise to $1,850. Things moved glacially until June of last year, when the Air Transport Association, an industry group that embraces the major United States scheduled airlines, petitioned the Department of Transportation to double the amount. A rising tide of consumer complaints, coupled with stirrings in Congress, provided a context. But the airlines could have increased the payment level independently and, in fact, American Airlines, Midwest Express and Delta had already gone to $2,500. American changed Dec. 15 while it was awaiting the federal announcement; Delta acted on Jan. 5. All airlines publicized pledges to consumers at the end of last year as a response to steps in Congress. What Is Not Covered The change in reimbursement, which goes into effect Tuesday, one month after the rule was published in the Federal Register, does not affect the compensation for luggage lost on an international flight, which remains at about $9 a pound. In addition, airlines are not responsible for carry-on luggage left behind; the harvest of unidentified eyeglasses, Grisham novels and gloves is reported to be huge. If, on the other hand, travelers are told they may not carry something on, and it is taken for checking, it is then covered. The precise amount of checked luggage lost by airlines is unknown. The Department of Transportation collects major United States airlines' figures on complaints of ''mishandled'' luggage -- lost, damaged, delayed or pilfered. The numbers are pretty big. For 1998, it listed 2.49 million complaints for 10 major airlines, with United Airlines leading at 596,000 complaints. The year's total for the major airlines worked out to 5.16 complaints for each 1,000 passengers; United's rate was the highest at 7.79. But these are only complaints -- bags that failed to get to the carousel on time or were lost, stolen, broken or ripped. Most missing bags catch up with their owners in three days or vice versa, | More Money For Lost Bags |
1168890_1 | remain must be out by Feb. 7, a condition imposed by Spinnaker, which is buying the building from Maritime Square Inc. for $3.3 million as part of the city's Reed Putnam urban renewal project. As part of that project, a six-level parking garage with up to 830 spaces will be built on the Maritime Aquarium parking lot across the street from the aquarium and the Lock Building. The artists said they were frustrated because when they moved into the building years ago, it was falling apart. Artists were able to rent the space cheaply, and over the years they created studios and space for exhibits and galleries. At its peak, about 50 artists were in the building. ''What makes this such a tragedy is that they're using the plan we came up with, but forcing the artists who lived and worked here to leave, and the city is opting for a Disneyland type of atmosphere instead of real arts and culture,'' said Bill Kraus, executive director of the Historic Lock Building Association. ''At least we proved it was easier and just as economically feasible to preserve an historic building than tear it down, and the city and developer found out we were right.'' That won't keep artists like Dennis Bradbury in their studios. Ms. Bradbury, a photographer who has lived and worked in a 1,000-square-foot studio in the building for seven years, will be one of the last to leave early next month. ''What I'm going to miss most is the camaraderie, the inspiration we all gave to each other,'' said Ms. Bradbury, who is moving to another South Norwalk location. ''We fought hard to save the building and we can derive satisfaction that we changed a lot of minds about that.'' Enzo and Germano Russo, twin brothers who came to this country three decades ago after graduating from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Florence, Italy, said it would be like leaving a family. ''It is like leaving our family in Italy all over again, this is the best place we have ever had,'' said Germano Russo, who compares the four-block South Norwalk area to the famous ''SoHo'' section of Manhattan where the brothers also once lived and worked. ''This is like SoHo all over again. The artists come in and help save a dying area, and then are forced to leave when the revitalization makes | Artists Must Leave a Building They Saved |
1169157_1 | Mamiraua Sustainable Development Reserve in northwestern Brazil, part of a triptych of reserves that make up the largest block of protected rain forest on earth, bigger than the entire nation of Costa Rica. According to my friend Marcio Ayres, who studies primates in Mamiraua for the Wildlife Conservation Society, during the annual wet season, the Amazon rises some 30 to 40 feet, eventually covering most of the lakes and the surrounding forest for several months. Recently, the reserve began playing host to tourists in a floating lodge house along one of the coves that meander off the main-stem Amazon. Most of the visitors come to watch Mamiraua's array of birds, uakari monkeys, or pink river dolphins that forage among flooded kapok trees and strangler figs. But it's hard to ignore the staggering fish life that boils beneath Mamiraua's surface. Over 300 species are found here, from the spectacular peacock bass (called tucunarce locally) to tambaqui, a delicious, slab-sided fish with massive jaws designed to crush the fruits and seeds which it feeds on exclusively. I persuaded von Muhlen, a student of endangered river turtles at a nearby research station, to spend a couple of hours paddling me around. As far as anyone knew, this particular body of water had never been fished with a rod and reel before. After another half-hour of fruitless casting with my popper, I switched to a large, in-line spinner that would have been perfect for northern pike fishing some 4,000 miles due north. Apparently, this geographic hurdle was not a problem, as something walloped the spinner halfway through the first cast. The fish bore for the bottom, and I tried to picture what bizarre, unimaginable species I was about to set eyes on for the first time. A tiger-striped rayado catfish? An electric eel? Instead, it was an oscar, which I used to keep in a fish tank back home. I had forgotten that so many tropical fish found in pet stores have their roots in the Amazon. I felt a little sheepish unhooking it, as if I was torturing someone's pet. I then released it, my first ''wild'' oscar, and watched it dart away. A few casts later, something clearly bigger grabbed the lure and immediately tore line from my spinning reel with relative ease. The line suddenly rose, and a fish that at first looked like a slender, brown tarpon flew from the | Casting, Catching, Eating In the Heat |
1166180_1 | a retired government official than a shaman. ''But these days, there are no more dongba, and the rituals aren't carried out anymore.'' He said he began studying the writing and scriptures at age 12, in 1935, and after years of apprenticeship to an older dongba became, in the usual pattern, a part-time shaman while he farmed by day. He led ceremonies in his village right up to 1949, when the victorious Communists started to suppress what were seen as superstitious rites. Today, the Chinese government officially supports minority cultures as long as they do not challenge the state, and Yunnan Province, where Lijiang is located, trumpets the rich Naxi heritage in tourism brochures. If any minority culture were in a position to thrive here, it would seem to be that of the Naxi. Their mountain valley, guarded by a snow-capped sacred peak, is often likened to the mythical Shangri-La, while Lijiang, with its preserved old quarter, gurgling canals and elderly Naxi women in traditional blue dress, has become a major tourist stop. Naxi guides tell Chinese and foreign tour groups about the pictographs and the dongba, and a few ritual dances have even been revived for viewing. But as Mr. He lamented -- along with He Jigui, 76, his fellow dongba in the research center -- no one genuinely practices the rituals anymore, and only a handful of elderly men can properly interpret the written scriptures that describe ceremonial chants and tell the elaborate Naxi story of human origins. (The two men, like many Naxi, share the surname of He but are unrelated.) ''Lijiang and dongba culture are very much in vogue; a lot of tourists are coming, and that's mostly a good thing,'' said Zhao Shihong, 45, the director of the government-sponsored Dongba Culture Research Institute in Lijiang, where the two old men live and work. ''But there's a risk that commerce and tourism will turn the dongba culture into just a performance, or a bit of packaging,'' said Mr. Zhao, who is a Naxi. ''While there's a lot of interest in the external aspects of Naxi and dongba culture, the internal aspects may be lost.'' Mr. Zhao has directed an exhaustive cultural salvage operation that began in 1981, with 10 surviving dongba aiding in translations. Now, with all but 3 of those 10 dead -- and 1 of those 3 over age 90 and returned to his home | Lijiang Journal; A Dying Culture, as Seen Through Aging Eyes |
1166243_0 | EUROPE IRELAND: KILLER'S RETURN BLOCKED -- The High Court temporarily blocked the extradition to Northern Ireland of a former Irish Republican Army man facing a life sentence for killing a British officer in Belfast in 1980. Angelo Fusco, 43, was arrested by the Irish police and was being driven to the border when the court intervened. Mr. Fusco, who served 10 years in Irish prisons for a 1981 escape from a Belfast prison, had been at large since Ireland's Supreme Court ruled two years ago that he could be sent to Ulster. Warren Hoge (NYT) BRITAIN: JEWS CONDEMN DEPORTATION -- Jewish groups condemned the government's decision to deport, rather than arrest, an 86-year-old man accused of being a senior commander in a Latvian secret police unit that may have been responsible for more than 30,000 murders in World War II. Home Secretary Jack Straw said there was not enough evidence to arrest the man, Konrad Kalejs. But Rabbi Jonathan Romain, a spokesman for the Reform Synagogues of Britain, said that prosecuting him would show the world that ''people have to face the consequences of their actions.'' Sarah Lyall (NYT) FRANCE: TOLL ON TREES -- French officials say it will take up to two centuries to restore France's forests, devastated by freak Christmas weekend storms that killed 87 people. The National Forestry Office said gales blowing up to 125 miles per hour uprooted or broke in half 270 million trees of all kinds, from century-old oaks to young pines, beeches and maples. Suzanne Daley (NYT) VATICAN: CHINESE CHURCH ASSAILED -- The Vatican expressed surprise and disappointment after China's state-backed church, the Patriotic Catholic Association, said it would ordain three new bishops tomorrow, the same day Pope John Paul II is scheduled to ordain nine bishops from Poland, Italy, the United States, Hungary, Angola, India and Romania. The Chinese church does not recognize the Pope's authority. Elisabetta Povoledo (NYT) THE AMERICAS COLOMBIA: PEASANTS INVADE RED CROSS -- Nearly 100 displaced peasants protesting the lack of government help in providing housing, health care and education invaded the Bogota headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and held more than 30 employees for several hours before releasing most of them. A few aid officials remained to conduct negotiations. As a result, the group suspended operations in Colombia, which include supplying aid to civilians driven from their homes by the conflict among left-wing | WORLD BRIEFING |
1166121_3 | as a source of personal fulfillment rather than just something they must do. It might sound a little corny, but, he said, studying the works of the ancient Greek philosophers inspired employees at Ohio Casualty to think in new ways about fulfilling their lives in ways that would also have the practical effect of revivifying the company. ''Lauren had taken over a company that had long been run in the old authoritarian, command-and-control style,'' Dr. Morris said. ''He was trying hard to make a transition to a team-oriented, empowered organization. But people had old habits of mind and just weren't getting it yet. It was in that context that I first consulted Aristotle's 'Politics' and latched on to his view of a city as, ideally, 'a partnership for living well.' If this could be the ideal essence of a city, then why not of a company?'' With Dr. Morris as facilitator, the group discussed and defined different types of leaders, from Machiavelli's prince to more benign role models. They also talked about the nature of change and how to prepare for it. ''You don't get through change without a change in leadership,'' he said. They explored the seven universal conditions for success -- conception, confidence, concentration, consistency, commitment, character and capacity to enjoy -- that he says he culled from the teachings of Aristotle and Plato. And they talked about implementing them in the work environment. Once the decision was taken to stay independent, the next question was: How? Ohio Casualty realized it had to grow to stay competitive, and last December, it acquired the Great American Insurance Company, a unit of the American Financial Group in Cincinnati, increasing its size by about a third. The merger of two companies can be stressful for employees, who worry about how their careers will be affected and who have to adjust to new co-workers, and here, Mr. Patch said, the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Indians and Chinese, too, came in handy. ''No philosopher wrote about mergers and acquisitions per se, but many talked about adapting to change,'' Mr. Patch said. ''If you were a Stoic, they counseled you on looking at a problem without emotion. When you deal with people it can be so difficult, they attach all kinds of emotion and distort perceptions. Tom's teaching prepared people for the types of anxieties they would deal with in any kind of | If Plato Ran His In-Law's Insurance Company... |
1203831_2 | recognition systems. In addition to Messagepoint, companies like General Magic, Onebox.com, Ptek Systems and Webley Systems offer unified messaging, and each has its own take on the service. Some let users dial a local number to retrieve messages, while some offer the option, for an additional fee, of a toll-free number. Some services, like Onebox.com, are free; Onebox. com plans to make money by licensing its technology to telephone companies and cellular carriers. Others, like the Portico service from General Magic, cost $9.95 per month or more and offer news and stock quotations over the phone in addition to message services. Once unified messaging services catch on, free services may become hard to find. For example, Telebot.com, a free service of Portelco, based in Hayward, Calif., recently closed. Nader Rahimizad, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said Telebot.com would reopen soon as a service designed for cellular carriers. All the services let users listen over the phone to their e-mail; the text is ''spoken'' by text-to-speech software. If a user wants to reply to an e-mail note, that person can dictate a response; the service will send an e-mail reply that contains an audio file attachment with the dictated message. Anyone who gets one of these replies can listen to the message by double-clicking on the attachment. Since most PC's today come with the Windows Media Player, which handles WAV files, recipients do not need any additional software to play the messages. Message services let people like Mr. Damico roam without a laptop computer and still remain connected to the office. ''I was traveling once and there was a decision that had to be made on whether we could meet a certain quote for a very large piece of business,'' Mr. Damico said. ''The client e-mailed me. I was able to get his message and listen to it, which I wouldn't have until later that night. I was able to work out a deal with him, and I never saw the e-mail.'' Some services, like Webley from Webley Systems, Orchestrate from Ptek and Portico, have a ''find me, follow me'' feature that bounces an incoming call from one of the user's phone numbers to the next until the user is located. Even if the user is found in this way, the user can still choose to screen the calls and send to voice mail. If a user listens to | For the Busy, All Messages in One Basket |
1203946_0 | After more than two years of study, the federal government gave its approval yesterday for the construction of Hudson River Park, clearing what is probably the last major hurdle in the plan to create a ribbon of parkland along five miles of the Manhattan riverfront from Battery Park City to West 59th Street. The approval from the United States Army Corps of Engineers allows for construction to begin in the river itself, repairing the Civil War-era seawall and the 13 huge rotting piers that are the centerpiece of the plan. ''The West Side of Manhattan, along with the rest of the city, has been looking forward to this park for a very long time,'' said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who joined Gov. George E. Pataki at a news conference in Manhattan yesterday to announce that foundation work on the pilings in the river would begin as soon as possible. ''The park will ensure that the Hudson River is part of our everyday lives,'' Governor Pataki said, ''not just as that waterway we see from the car.'' Last September, the mayor and the governor opened the first phase of the park, running about 1,000 feet between West Houston and Bank Streets. When it is completed, scheduled for 2005, the park will have a continuous riverfront esplanade with lawns and flowers, bicycle and running trails and playgrounds. For supporters of the park, the last two years have been particularly suspenseful. The approval of the federal government was not a foregone conclusion, and the fate of the plan has been fiercely debated for the last 15 years. ''We're New York City, and we have the crummiest waterfronts in the United States,'' said Albert K. Butzel, chairman of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 community and environmental organizations that support the project. ''It's time to have a waterfront that celebrates the city, instead of the derelict waterfronts we have now.'' But in the months to come, there will almost certainly be more legal challenges. Several national and local environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth and the Clean Air Campaign, have long opposed the Hudson River Park and are threatening to sue. The park's opponents say that the many varieties of fish that migrate along that part of the Hudson, including striped bass and sturgeon, could be seriously harmed by construction work in the river. They say that a federal environmental | HUDSON RIVER PARK ON RESTORED PIERS APPROVED BY U.S. |
1203922_0 | Vice President Al Gore called today for legislation that would require health insurance companies to provide children with mental health benefits comparable to coverage for physical ailments. Appearing alongside his wife, Tipper, before a group of mental health professionals and advocates in suburban Washington, Mr. Gore pledged to make mental health care a priority in his administration. He described his proposal for children as a first step toward eliminating disparities in coverage for adults. ''People still have insurance plans that actively discriminate against mental health,'' Mr. Gore said. ''They still don't recognize it as a treatable illness, just like diabetes or high blood pressure or heart disease.'' The proposal was part of a package of mental health programs, some of them not new, that the vice president outlined today. Those measures included training teachers and police officers to identify mental illness, expanding community mental health services and creating a $3,000 tax credit for families to pay for long-term care, including in mental institutions. Achieving parity in insurance benefits for mental and physical illnesses is a leading legislative goal of mental health advocates, who contend inadequate insurance coverage has discouraged many sick people from seeking treatment. Under a 1996 law, group health plans are forbidden to set annual or lifetime dollar limits on mental health care that are lower than the limits for general medical and surgical services. But a Congressional report released two weeks ago found that thousands of companies were violating the law. Some companies have skirted the 1996 law's requirements by replacing dollar limits on mental health care with numerical limits on outpatient visits, treatment sessions or days in the hospital. Legislation with bipartisan support in Congress would attempt to close such loopholes by prohibiting insurers from setting limits on the number of outpatient visits or days in the hospital for treatment of mental disorders that are more stringent than those for the treatment of physical illnesses. In an interview today, Mr. Gore suggested that he would support a version of that legislation, but focused only on children. ''We want to close any loopholes that allow insurers to shirk their obligations under the law,'' he said, without offering specifics. Mr. Gore's Republican presidential opponent, Gov. George W. Bush, signed legislation in Texas in 1997 requiring health insurers to provide coverage for mental disorders comparable to that for physical diseases. But Dan Bartlett, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, said | Gore Calls for Better Benefits For Children With Mental Ills |
1203847_7 | the volume of bits that are sent and received or on a subscription basis for a fixed monthly fee. The pricing models are still being decided. ''The shift from circuit to packet systems is far more significant to consumers than was the shift from analog to digital,'' said Bjorn Norhammar, manager of market development for 3G communicators at Ericsson. This transition to packet-based services is expected to begin later this year in Europe, through a technology called General Packet Radio System. Based on 2G networks, G.P.R.S. is often called ''two and a half G,'' signaling its status as a step between 2G and true 3G networks. Although it is technically feasible that G.P.R.S. systems will have a connection speed of up to 170 kilobits (thousands of bits) per second, Nokia says the first packet-radio systems will have a maximum rate of 26 or 39 kbps. Still, that is faster than 2G phones, which are generally 9.6 kbps. A variant of the packet-based system called Cellular Digital Packet Data, or C.D.P.D., is being introduced in the United States by AT&T Wireless Services, under the Digital Pocket Net brand name. Users of the Pocket Net service have free, unlimited access to about 40 Web sites for tasks like finding directions, shopping for books and CD's, trading stocks, making flight reservations and checking news headlines. But the Pocket Net system has a speed limit of about 19 kbps and is seen as a transition step toward G.P.R.S., now primarily limited to phones based on European and Asian standards. One of the more intriguing features of 3G communicators will be locality, that is, the ability of the network to ''know'' where the user is whenever the phone is on. Location-based services are being developed here, for example, to notify a subscriber to an online dating service whenever another subscriber who matches a certain profile is nearby. Or a subscriber could sign up for a service that would let shops or restaurants beam the digital equivalent of discount coupons to the mobile device whenever the 3G customer is in the area. In another example, a 3G device installed in a car would allowthe police to track it down if the car was stolen. Obviously, many privacy issues remain to be resolved. Although 3G communicators are still years away, researchers here are hard at work on 4G, which promises data rates of 100 megabits per second | Heading North to the Wireless Future |
1208899_3 | accusing him of destroying their political partnership by pressing his strong social conservative positions. A21 NEW YORK/REGION B1-11 Thousands Attend Mass Consecrating Archbishop Edward M. Egan was installed as archbishop of New York during a televised Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral that was attended by 4,000, including an array of prominent political and government figures. A1 City to Sue Pistol Makers Mayor Giuliani said New York would sue handgun manufacturers, seeking tens of millions of dollars in compensation for injuries and other damage caused by illegal gun use. B3 Times to Build New Home The New York Times is expected to sign an agreement with the city and state this week to build a 40-story headquarters on Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets. B3 Hearing on 1975 Killing A judge in Connecticut will hold a hearing today on whether Michael Skakel, 39, charged with murdering 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich 25 years ago, should be tried as a juvenile or an adult. B5 SCIENCE TIMES F1-12 'Natural' Does Not Mean Safe Many women bypass hormone replacement therapy for ''natural'' alternatives containing plant estrogens. Experts worry that some are being overzealous or taking unsafe doses, especially women with estrogen-dependent breast cancer. F7 Health & Fitness F7 FASHION B12 A Jacqueline Kennedy Show The Metropolitan Museum of Art said the White House fashions of Jacqueline Kennedy would replace the canceled Coco Chanel retrospective as the Met's grand annual exhibition to benefit its Costume Institute. And it will be in April, not December. B12 ARTS E1-10 'Macbeth' Closing Early The Broadway production of ''Macbeth,'' starring Kelsey Grammer, will close on Sunday, after only 13 regular performances and five weeks earlier than planned. The production has gotten poor reviews. E1 BUSINESS DAY C1-26 Seagram-Vivendi Deal Seagram will announce its acquisition for $34 billion in stock by Vivendi, the French water utility transforming itself into a telecommunications and entertainment giant. A1 Complaints of Bias at Nextel More than 300 current and former employees of the wireless carrier intend to file complaints of racial and sexual bias, lawyers said. C1 Pursuit of Saatchi & Saatchi Publicis was said to be planning to buy Saatchi & Saatchi, the British advertising agency, for at least $1.5 billion in stock. C1 Nuclear Fuel Company Troubles The board of United States Enrichment, the uranium-enrichment company created by the Clinton administration in 1998, meets tomorrow to discuss closing one of | NEWS SUMMARY |
1208884_1 | brought by inmates in an Indiana prison who opposed the state's effort to invoke the law, the federal appeals court in Chicago declared the automatic-stay provision unconstitutional. A legislative determination that a specific court order had to be set aside violated the separation of powers, it said. In overturning that ruling, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion rejected the court's characterization of what the provision accomplished. The automatic stay did not interfere with a court's final judgment, Justice O'Connor said, because an ongoing injunction ''remains subject to alteration due to changes in the underlying law.'' The new standards in the prison act were such a change, Justice O'Connor said, requiring an order governing prison conditions to be ''narrowly drawn,'' to go ''no further than necessary,'' and to be ''the least intrusive means necessary'' to correct the violation. Congress specified that the law should apply retroactively to make any ongoing prison injunction subject to ''immediate termination'' if it cannot meet those standards. The case, Miller v. French, No. 99-224, put the administration in an uncomfortable position. Although President Clinton had signed the law, administration lawyers could not avoid the fact that it raised troubling constitutional questions. In defending the stay provision before the Supreme Court, the administration proposed a new reading of the provision. The automatic stay was not quite what it appeared to be, the Solicitor General's office argued; it did not strip federal judges of their traditional authority to maintain the status quo in pending litigation. Judges themselves could grant a stay of the stay, the government said, and avoid the separation of powers problem. While the State of Indiana, which also appealed the ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was nominally on the administration's side, the two briefs diverged dramatically. The state, asking the court to uphold the law as written, said the administration's interpretation flew in the face of Congress's intent to make the stay automatic. In her majority opinion today, Justice O'Connor agreed with the state and rejected the administration's view. ''Any attempt to enjoin the stay is irreconcilable with the plain language of the statute,'' she said. Seven of the nine justices agreed with the statutory interpretation. In addition to the five in the majority -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas, along with Justice O'Connor -- Justices David H. | Congress's Challenge to Judges Is Upheld |
1208812_0 | When women reach menopause, many struggle with the decision of whether to take hormone replacement therapy. It often comes down to weighing the compelling benefits against the disturbing drawbacks. The benefits are relief of symptoms like hot flashes and insomnia as well as a lowered risk of osteoporosis and of high cholesterol. (Until recently, many doctors believed that hormone replacement therapy also reduces risk of heart disease, but that finding has now been questioned.) The drawbacks, most notably, are an increased risk of blood clots and breast cancer. A growing number of postmenopausal women, however, are trying to sidestep the decision altogether by choosing a third route. They have turned to ''natural'' alternatives to hormone replacement, including foods and herbal supplements containing plant estrogens, phytoestrogens, which have estrogen-like effects when taken by humans. They are also using creams made with the hormone progesterone, and cocktails made up of vitamins, minerals and herbs. At low doses, most experts say, most of these natural remedies are probably safe. But they worry that some women are being overzealous in their self-treatment and taking supplements in unsafe doses. The greatest concern is for women with estrogen-dependent breast cancer. They are advised not to take hormone replacement because the estrogen in it may feed breast cancers, but some are taking large doses of these phytoestrogens that may be just as harmful. ''What worries me is how women are not willing to go on hormone replacement therapy, but willing to go on a supplemental medicine, without any information but hearsay that it's safe,'' said Dr. William Helferich, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois. Indeed, sales of supplements for menopause have risen greatly in recent years. In 1999, sales of soy isoflavones, the phytoestrogen in soy, rose to $21 million in supermarkets and drug stores, more than triple 1998 sales. Sales for all in-one menopausal formulas were $36.20 million last year, an increase of 197 percent, according to Spins and ACNielsen, market research firms. Sales of other popular herbs used to treat symptoms of menopause, like black cohosh, flaxseed, red clover, dong quai and wild yam, are also on the rise. Eating soy and their isoflavones are the most popular natural way to increase estrogen. Soy has estrogenic properties, and like hormone replacement, appears to lower cholesterol and reduce bone loss in postmenopausal women, though studies have not shown that it reduces hot | Natural Remedies for Menopause Gain Popularity |
1208150_3 | practice of philosophy. For many, such an enterprise was doomed from the start. After all, the rigor of post-structuralist thought had never been clearly established. Even if that were not in doubt, ANY would have been a quixotic undertaking, at least in the eyes of those who consider architecture an art. Art and philosophy are counter-propositions. They are different modes of apprehension. To say that art embodies ideas is not to suggest that artists should illustrate them. Detractors found it easy to dismiss ANY on other grounds as well: the conference represented architecture's succumbing to intellectual fashion. Its participants were using philosophy as a marketing tool. Its exclusivity was just a high-brow version of architecture's accelerating withdrawal from the public realm. It was too obedient to Peter Eisenman, Ms. Davidson's husband, an architect who has long relied on philosophy to give his architecture an aura of prestige. One must, I think, acknowledge the partial truth of these objections to get at what was valuable about ANY. It created at least a few shreds of solidarity among architects who would otherwise remain spinning in their separate spheres. It helped to retrieve architecture from the historical trash can to which the post-modern movement had gleefully consigned it. It exposed architects to potentially useful tools of cultural analysis. It helped to sustain the belief that, even in a relativistic universe, it is still possible to discriminate. For me, ANY was an incentive to carry on with a mid-life course in the history of ideas. Starting out in the mid-1980's with the standard post-structuralist reading list (Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan), I found my way to more sympathetic writers (Benjamin, Barthes, Rorty, Jameson, Murdoch, Bloom), and these led me back, in turn, to Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato and other contributors to the Western canon. As a result, I grew more confident in the value of criticism, more convinced that the difference between informed and uninformed opinion is a distinction worth pressing. Unfashionable concepts like morality became more accessible, provided I had the wit to construct plausible contexts for them. No one needed ANY to read philosophy, of course. But Ms. Davidson provided the incentive of immediacy. If architects today are philosophically up on their toes, that is partly because of the paces she put them through. Since I'm not a post-structuralist, I have no trouble ''privileging'' one point of view -- mine -- above | An Idea of Architecture; an Architecture of Ideas |
1208380_1 | from an exclusive reliance on the mail to quicker communication mediums -- their performance before the switch was credited to the second group, their performance after the switch to the first. Such services make particularly good illustrations. Consider BI Research, edited by Tom Bishop, who inaugurated a telephone hotline at the beginning of 1996 and more recently began communicating with subscribers via e-mail. I calculate that for the 12 years through 1995, during which Mr. Bishop relied solely on regular mail, his advice produced a 14.2 percent annualized return -- half a percentage point behind the Wilshire 5000. For the four-plus years since then, his advice has produced a 15.2 percent annualized return, 7.1 points behind the Wilshire. So while BI Research has had a slightly greater return after shifting to quick access, relative to the broad market, its performance has been much worse. Why doesn't a newsletter's ability to communicate quickly with subscribers improve performance? My guess is that the advisers' ability to make virtually instantaneous modifications to their model portfolios can tempt them into self-destructive actions. An example of such behavior would be selling winning securities too soon. All investors, of course, are vulnerable to this tendency, known among behavioral researchers as the disposition effect. But being able to communicate instantly with subscribers is likely to heighten the temptation, which can have especially damaging results in a bull market. I suspect that an intraday price spike is more likely to prompt a sale of a solid, long-term holding if an adviser relies on the Web to reach clients. On the flip side, Web-based letters may also be likely to exit the market too soon. Researchers have found that advisers tend to become more risk-averse as their perspective becomes shorter-term -- a tendency called ''myopic risk aversion'' by Richard Thaler, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and Shlomo Benartzi, an accounting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. An example of the effect: Investors who are restricted from changing the asset allocation in their retirement plans more than a few times a year tend to be more heavily invested in equities than those who can alter it daily. Myopic risk aversion probably helped those advisers who used quick communication during the spring correction in stocks. But because the market should outperform other asset classes over time, the tendency should eventually cause their returns to be | The Tortoises and the Hares, in a Dead Heat |
1208404_0 | The question was whether the last of the trio of London's riverside millennium projects could have an unembarrassing inauguration, and the answer, for all to see, was blowing in the wind. A new foot bridge, the sleek creation of the noted British architect Norman Foster, opened to the public and closed a day later after it began to sway violently in the Thames breezes, sending pedestrians lurching about. Engineers will spend the rest of the summer reinforcing the span. The London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, also had a calamitous start after rising from barges in the river to full height and barely clearing the water before collapsing. The $1.2 billion Millennium Dome at Greenwich had its disastrous debut on New Year's Eve, when thousands of guests were held in line for hours before being admitted. Among them were the editors of almost all the national newspapers, which have been getting their revenge ever since, gleefully highlighting the shortfall in projected visitor numbers and the widespread public disappointment with the display. WARREN HOGE | June 11-17; Troubled Bridge, Troubled Waters |
1208551_0 | A front-page article on June 4 about the quandary faced by American companies over genetically altered food included an industry analyst's imprecise reference to an ingredient in Heinz ketchup. A company spokesman said the product contained genetically modified corn syrup, not genetically modified tomatoes. | Corrections |
1208394_1 | not merely defensible in court. A key issue, of course, is: Who will do the monitoring? And that is where things get sticky. Two approaches are possible. Monitoring could become a full-time job for a person or department, or could be made a sidelight among other responsibilities. Each presents problems. When policing co-workers is someone's main job, human nature creates a real danger. The designated monitor will have every incentive to find problems to justify his or her job, said N. Ben Fairweather, a research fellow at the Center for Computing and Social Responsibility in Leicester, England. Once the egregious offenders are weeded out, an effective monitoring program can easily devolve into a wild, self-perpetuating array of witch hunts and speed traps -- an ethically unjustifiable state of affairs, however one may feel about monitoring in the abstract. More often, monitoring is assigned to people or departments that mainly do something else. Typically, the job goes to information-technology people, for no better reason than that they are usually the only ones who have the necessary access to hardware and software and know how it all works, on the snoop's side as well as the user's. But think again of human nature. Making snooping a sideline is likely to lead to wild inconsistency, occasional incompetence or outright capriciousness in the way monitoring is applied and policies are enforced. I don't meant to suggest that technical people are reckless or capricious. Only a fool would make such an observation and expect his office Internet connection to ever work smoothly again. It's just that the do-it-in-your-spare-time approach is doomed from the outset. People will naturally devote most of their time and attention to their principal responsibilities -- the ones that figure in whether they get promotions and raises -- and turn to monitoring only when they have the time and inclination. Inevitably, that means inconsistent enforcement, which can be worse than none at all. ''Generally, in all areas of corporate management, the idea of having a policy is a good one, but it's not enough,'' said Jeffrey D. Neuburger, a lawyer specializing in technology-related issues at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner, a Manhattan firm. ''If you don't enforce it, you're almost better off not having a policy, because you get charged with this standard that you're telling the world that you're going to live under.'' Mr. Neuberger's point is one both of | As Office Snooping Grows, Who Watches the Watchers? |
1207440_1 | ''We're adding a ton of features and still trying to keep the interface as simple as possible, which is a huge challenge,'' said Jim Foley, a technical specialist at Visteon -- now the Ford Motor Company's automotive parts unit in Dearborn, Mich., but soon to become an independent company. Mr. Foley said Visteon tested its dashboard audio interfaces by putting test subjects in arcade-style driving seats and watching how long it took them to do things like insert CD's and press preset buttons. The explosion of functions on today's car radios has led to a certain nostalgia among drivers for the plain old knob that adjusted the volume or tuned in a station. ''Knobs were easier to use when you're driving,'' said Marie O'Neill, of Upper Arlington, Ohio, who buys a new car about every four years and frequently drives long distances. ''Now I have an arrow button, which I frequently have to push and push without getting anything.'' Tom Magliozzi, co-host of ''Car Talk,'' a program on National Public Radio, said: ''The trend I see is that the more expensive the car, the more complicated the car radio is. They're doing it because if you're paying $75,000, they think you must want something fancy. You don't want a plain old radio.'' Mr. Magliozzi said he thought that the touch-screen menus found on the radios in some expensive vehicles could be dangerous. ''Even if you figure out how to use one,'' he said, ''you still have to go through this business with the touch-screen menus to get to the radio. How are you going to use a touch screen when you're driving a car? They think you're sitting at your desk.'' Just as they do with computer software and home entertainment systems, many people take the time to learn only what they need to on their car radios and leave the more sophisticated functions alone. ''There's a button on my radio called Phone,'' said Earl Hefley, a musician in Oklahoma City, ''and I think it's some kind of mute switch for when you're on a cell phone, but I don't know. I'm convinced that the secret to it all is to read the book.'' And he would read the owner's manual, Mr. Hefley said, if it wasn't so long. Mark Erdman, manager of Radios, Knobs, Speakers and Things, a car audio store in Pontiac, Mich., said that when his employees | For Car Radio, a Midlife Crisis |
1210732_0 | The Irish Republican Army announced today that two international envoys had inspected a number of its secret arms dumps, a significant step in advancing the Northern Ireland peace settlement. The envoys, Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, and Cyril Ramaphosa, the former secretary general of the African National Congress, confirmed the news in visits to Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland. Mr. Blair welcomed the announcement. He emphasized that the arms inspections were a valuable ''confidence building measure'' but did not satisfy the longer range goal of complete disarmament. ''It is not decommissioning itself,'' he said. ''It is a step on the way.'' The inspections fulfilled a promise made by the I.R.A. in May in response to demands that it move toward dismantling its arsenal in exchange for Britain's restoring the authority of the new Catholic-Protestant power-sharing Northern Ireland government. It had been suspended in February over earlier I.R.A. inaction on arms. The two envoys, who had been appointed as weapons monitors, reported that they had seen ''a substantial amount of military material.'' They said they had satisfied themselves that it was ''safely and adequately stored'' and had made sure that ''the weapons and explosives cannot be used without our detection.'' They said they intended to visit the stockpiles regularly to ensure that the weapons ''have remained secure'' and noted that the I.R.A. had met all their requests. ''The process that led to the first inspection visit and the way in which it was carried out makes us believe that this is a genuine effort by the I.R.A. to advance the peace process,'' they said. The I.R.A. also confirmed today that it had ended its four-month boycott of the international disarmament commission led by a Canadian, Gen. John de Chastelain, and was cooperating with the panel again. The commission is charged with determining whether the disarmament envisioned in the agreement is satisfactorily carried out and is the body to which Mr. Ramaphosa and Mr. Ahtisaari will report their findings. It is formally independent of the British and Irish governments, which sponsored the talks that led to the April 1998 peace accord. The I.R.A. is thought to have an arsenal of automatic rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers and ammunition stashed in remote underground spots in woods and fields across Ireland and in border areas of Northern Ireland. It was not known whether the | Envoys Visit I.R.A. Arms Caches, Advancing Ulster Peace |
1210743_1 | Microsoft was a client. ''I'll have to check that,'' he said. ''I can't confirm we've worked for Microsoft or any other client that hasn't been publicly identified, but I'll look into it.'' Mr. Lenzner would not comment on reports that his company had been investigating trade organizations and research groups sympathetic to Microsoft. And he would not say whether his firm had taken or paid for trash as part of such an investigation. Microsoft said its involvement with Mr. Lenzner's company began in March, when a Microsoft law firm, Preston Gates & Ellis, retained the company's Los Angeles office to help hunt down pirates and counterfeiters. The firm was hired to order software and computers and check to see if the software was legitimate, as well as search public records for evidence of dummy companies that the counterfeiters frequently hide behind. When they found illegal activities, they were to notify the authorities. This month, however, the Lenzner firm and Microsoft were linked in an altogether different connection. On June 1 and June 6, a woman identifying herself as Blanca Lopez offered to pay a cleaning crew to hand over trash from the office of the Association for Competitive Technology, a pro-Microsoft trade group in Washington, according to documents from the company that manages the association's office space. The incident was first reported by Wired.com and The Wall Street Journal. The documents said the woman had gained entry to the building using keys from another tenant. The tenant, Upstream Technologies, appears to be a dummy corporation that rented the office only last month. And the person named on a credit application for the property, Robert Walters, has been identified in the past as an agent for the Lenzner firm. A receptionist at the Lenzner firm's Washington office told a caller today, ''Mr. Walters is not employed here but I can get a message to him.'' Phone calls to Mr. Walters over the weekend and today were not returned. The Lenzner firm has been known to pay for or take trash on occasion, according to a person intimately familiar with its methods. He said the firm had used the tactic in ''four or five'' of the 8,000 or so cases it has investigated. He also said the firm had a policy of taking trash only if a lawyer had reviewed the tactic and deemed it legal and if the client who retained | Double Duty for a Microsoft Investigator |
1210727_1 | declared, ''It is an essential feature of the universe.'' In 1969, Dr. Whitrow was invited to serve as the first president of the newly founded International Society for the Study of Time, which tries to provide a framework for interdisciplinary discussions of the subject. The founder of that group, J. T. Fraser, said Dr. Whitrow had ''demonstrated that, even in our epoch of immense amounts of interesting but fragmented scientific understanding and humanistic insights, it is possible to filter all major ideas about time through the mind of a single person -- and produce an elegant and brilliantly clear survey.'' Gerald James Whitrow was born in Dorset. When he was 4, the family moved to London. Though they were poor, he won a series of scholarships, including one to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he won highest honors in mathematics. At 24 he was named a lecturer in mathematics, a feat so prodigious that it prompted an article in The Daily Mirror. His doctoral thesis at Christ Church concerned kinematic relativity, a subject created by his adviser, E. A. Milne, and derived from Einstein. It uses the discipline of cosmology to deal with the motions of objects. From that work he moved on to studying the philosophy and mathematics of time and motion. The first of his 10 books was ''The Structure of the Universe'' in 1949, and the last was ''Time in History'' in 1988. Some of his musings could be simultaneously provocative and playful. In ''The Nature of Time,'' he noted that the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece believed that the planets periodically return to the same relative positions they occupied at the beginning of time. ''The stars again move in their orbits, each performing its revolution in the former period, without variation.'' he wrote. ''Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again, with the same friends and fellow citizens. They will go through the same experiences and the same activities. Every city and village and field will be restored, just as it was. ''And this restoration of the universe takes place not only once, but over and over again -- indeed, until all eternity without end.'' During World War II he worked for the Ministry of Supply, researching ballistics. His apartment in Cambridge was bombed and his landlady was killed. In timely fashion, he was away when the attack happened. In 1945 he was appointed | Gerald J. Whitrow, 87, Author Of Philosophic Tomes on Time |
1210726_1 | project pitted James D. Wolfensohn, the politically savvy president of the bank, against the Clinton administration, which recently reappointed him to his post while declaring its opposition to the China project. Mr. Wolfensohn suspended part of the project last year and referred the case to the internal ''inspection panel,'' after the United States, Germany and a few other nations had contended that the entire program had been mishandled within the bank. The bank had planned to release the results of its harshly worded report last week, but decided against that at the last moment. A copy of the 160-page document was provided today to The New York Times by sources hostile to the project. The report refers repeatedly to ''confusion'' within the bank staff, which seemed unable to agree on what standards to use in judging the project's effects. The report also describes a ''disturbingly wide range of divergent and, often, opposing views'' on how the bank should interpret its policies on environmental and social issues. The study suggested, without quite saying, that the bank had bent its rules to accommodate China's leaders, who wanted to borrow millions of dollars interest-free for the project under a program for underdeveloped nations. The project was approved last year just days before China's eligibility for the loans permanently expired because of its rapid growth. This is not the first time that the bank has been accused of ignoring its rules to bend to the wishes of a major customer. Another internal report, more than a year ago, found that the bank had overlooked the corruption of President Suharto's regime in Indonesia, another major client. The most critical element of the new report was its finding that the bank had never seriously considered alternative locations for the farmers, sites that would not raise the sensitive questions of whether the bank was helping China dilute the concentration of Tibetans in the region. The report prompted a sharp response from Mr. Wolfensohn in a private letter to board members. He argued that the guidelines for assessing projects like this one were not hard and fast. The inspection panel, he wrote, is trying to ''push the bank in the direction of a literal and mechanistic interpretation of its rules.'' Although administration officials view the report as vindicating their views, bank officials said the heavy-handed criticism sounded similar to complaints by charity and activist groups. ''The panel is | World Bank Criticizes Itself Over Chinese Project Near Tibet |
1205157_0 | To the Editor: Your June 3 news article reporting that Cuban officials are receptive to negotiating settlements regarding claims about foreigners' seized assets is another indication that this is an opportune time to negotiate ending the United States embargo of Cuba. In Cuba, religious groups are highly active, professionals are linked with colleagues throughout the world through the Internet, small private businesses are increasing, foreign investors are making profits, dollars are legal tender, farmers sell a proportion of their production in the open market, and Canadian and European tourists are enjoying the resorts. The Congressional bill to end the food and medicine embargo should be speedily enacted and other issues negotiated so as to end the embargo. These actions will aid the changes already under way in Cuba and facilitate an orderly and just transformation of Cuban-American relations. LOUIS KRIESBERG Syracuse, June 4, 2000 | End the Cuba Embargo |
1205180_1 | or not junk e-mail can be considered forgery. ''There is no way this is second-degree forgery,'' said Mark D. Rasch, vice president for cyberlaw at the Global Integrity Corporation, a computer security consulting firm in Reston, Va., and the former head of the United States Justice Department's computer crime unit. ''Frankly, if this is forgery then everybody who uses an anonymous e-mail address is committing a felony,'' Mr. Rasch said. ''When you take traditional legal concepts and apply them to the Internet, it is not a good fit. The laws were not written to deal with this conduct. If you want to make it a crime, then write a statute. It is not the responsibility of the prosecutor to do that. It is the responsibility of the legislature to create a law after much public debate.'' Junk e-mail can be an expensive problem for businesses, particularly Internet service providers, who say that seven percent of their customers change providers annually in order to get a new spam-free e-mail address, according to Sunil Paul, the chairman of Brightmail, a San Francisco company that makes anti-spam software. In this case, Edward L. Greenberg, president of Market Vision Studios in Irvington, said his business lost $18,000 in three days in September 1998 when his computer system was filled with junk e-mail that was then relayed to tens of thousands of other computers with his company's name attached to it. ''I called AOL and they wouldn't talk to me because they thought we were sending the e-mail,'' Mr. Greenberg said. ''Then I called the police, and to my surprise, they knew what we were talking about. Two days later, the district attorney was involved and I.B.M. was involved and a whole investigation was under way.'' So far 11 states have passed laws against spamming, Mr. Paul said, but the laws are not much of a deterrent because the e-mailers can easily move to another state or country. The payoff can be big. ''The key to spamming is that it costs just about nothing to do,'' Mr. Paul said. ''For less than $1,000 you can buy the software that puts false headers on a document, buy e-mail lists and send out a million e-mails. Then they sit back and get paid per click.'' Mrs. Pirro said that Mr. Garon, who was running his business from his home computer, had $1 million in offshore bank accounts. | Man Charged With Forgery in E-Mail Scheme |
1205254_0 | To the Editor: The article ''Grizzly Bears Poised to Make a Comeback'' (May 30) mentions that relatively few bear attacks occur, considering the number of bears in North America. But when these animals do launch unprovoked attacks upon humans, the results can be horrendous. I happen to be a bear hunter. I hunt black bear with the kind of guns used by Lewis and Clark. It can be a frightening sport. While I agree that we must find room for America's native wildlife, we must also understand that those who will be forced to live with this reintroduced wildlife have serious, valid safety concerns. Grizzly bears are very dangerous animals, especially when they have lost their fear of humans due to a lack of hunting pressure. DR. CARL SEMENCIC West Hempstead, N.Y. | Dangers of Grizzlies |
1211524_8 | completed in 1990. The ship surely seemed authentic enough, though, as I stepped aboard in a downpour, seeking shelter under the canvas-covered main hatch and enviously eyeing the crew in waterproof orange and yellow foul-weather gear. In 1813 a crew of 155 manned the ship, about 100 of them on the guns. Today it sails with 16 professionals, including the master, Capt. Walter Rybka, plus 24 volunteers who sign on for at least three weeks at a time. Visitors are encouraged to pitch in on the two watches, port and starboard, and even, with proper safety harnesses, high up on the sails. Life Below Decks ''Give them tasks, belt them up if they want to play,'' Captain Rybka told the crew. But he cautioned, ''Do not belt up someone who doesn't want to go.'' Among the special guests on board was Cmdr. William F. Foster Jr. of the Constitution, the granddaddy of tall ships. Known as ''Old Ironsides,'' it was commissioned in 1797 as one of the nation's first six warships and is now restored and permanently berthed as a museum in Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Perhaps the biggest revelation for a nonseaman was how much brawn and know-how a tall ship requires to remain, well, shipshape. There are sails to loose and set, halyards to haul away on and make fast, line to coil, yards to brace up and brace in, watches to stand and the tiller to steer. Below deck, where the clearance is too low to stand upright, hot meals are cooked on a wood stove; the crew is unceremoniously bunked in hammocks hanging like clusters of cocooned caterpillars, and even the heads require manual pumping. That's all authentic, too (except that there are no more floggings and no grog issue). ''They always kept them busy so they wouldn't discover those sailorly vices,'' said John Beebe-Center, the sun-bronzed Chief Mate, who learned sailing while growing up in Salem, Mass. If the spaghetti tangle of rigging seemed impossibly intricate, it was perhaps only the 19th-century equivalent of today's computer innards: to the people whose business it was to sail the ship, it all made perfect sense. So, too, the laboriously loaded and fired guns, which Captain Rybka and his crew demonstrated to thunderous effect. In the sudden silence after the concussive blast, somewhere on deck a cell phone trilled. Clearly, we were back in the 21st century. | A Salute to the Fourth; Down to the Sea Again, in Ships Tall and Fleet |
1205614_2 | with wearable phones will continue to go up. In London, ''you can walk around the city and see people using them everywhere,'' said Jim Moore, a consultant for McKinsey & Company who recently lived in Europe and who would not even think about using a handheld cell phone. Mr. Moore adopted a headset to avoid the ache of holding up the phone. Others, interviewed on the streets of Manhattan, said they had heard that holding cell phones to the head causes brain tumors (So far, the Food and Drug Administration has said that such risks cannot be confirmed nor ruled out.) And most simply liked being able to use both hands while chatting. ''It's just so convenient,'' said Wilson Ortega, who wore a headset as he stood in line at a midtown Starbucks last week. When a cell phone rang inside the pocket of his baggy jeans, he took a peek at the phone, slid it back into his pocket and said a soft hello into a microphone hanging by his face. How the new technology will fit into the current cell phone confusion is not clear. People already complain about the rude intrusions of ringing cell phones in movie theaters and the annoyance of hearing one side of someone's extended phone conversation while on the bus. And that is when they can at least see the phone. Social scientists say much of the consternation is caused by the blurring of the lines between public and private spaces -- lines that will become even fuzzier as phones are not only taken everywhere, but are also worn everywhere, for easy access at any time. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association says that more than 92 million people now have mobile phone service in the United States. ''The idea of work and home is already largely gone,'' said Philip E. Agre, a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. The same principle, Dr. Agre said in an interview via his cell phone (though not a wearable one), can be extended to spaces like cars and sidewalks. As he stood in a Los Angeles taco bar, he managed to order a burrito and talk on the phone at the same time. Feeling self-conscious about those blurring lines, people using cell phones are trying to find ways to achieve privacy in public, often while still holding conversations a decibel above | No, I'm Not Talking to You |
1205628_0 | Mars spacecraft have gotten a lot of bad press in the last year or so, but the Mars Global Surveyor has been a good Boy Scout since it was launched in 1996 (and like a good Boy Scout, it even helped in the search for one of the spacecraft that was lost). Part of Global Surveyor's job is to obtain images of the Martian surface using a special camera operated by Malin Space Science Systems under contract to NASA. A gallery of images -- more than 27,000 of them -- is available at the contractor's site, www.msss.com/moc The images include high-resolution shots of specific surface elements, regional views of larger-scale features and wide-angle strips covering thousands of miles that show weather patterns. The high-resolution images tend to be the most interesting, and potentially the most useful to Internet millionaires planning their next real estate purchase -- a ranchette, perhaps, in the foothills of Olympus Mons. HENRY FOUNTAIN Browser A selection of events and sites on the Web. Events TODAY, 2 p.m. quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/sse/index.html Today is National Oceans Day: visit the Ancapa Islands in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary with NASA Oceanography and the Sustainable Seas Expeditions. TODAY, 8 p.m. comedycentral.com/festivals Webcast with editors and writers from The Onion, a humor magazine, at the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York. TUESDAY, 9 p.m. www.investorama.com Chat with Joe Hurley, the author of ''The Best Way to Save for College.'' Sites www.antiquetools.com The Museum of Woodworking Tools, with links and a shop. helping.apa.org/dotcomsense Advice on evaluating online advice, from the American Psychological Association. www.selu.com/bio/PrimateGallery A gathering of primates, including the black-and-white ruffled lemur, the yellow baboon and the Bolivian squirrel monkey, among others. www.coopandpapa.com An unabashed valentine to Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway, friends for 20 years, with lists of books and films and a collection of links. NEWS WATCH | A Gallery of Glimpses Of the Martian Surface |
1205669_1 | provide better juice for the armed forces and make more efficient use of Florida's orange crop. The work was done at a laboratory provided by the United States Department of Agriculture in Lakeland, Fla., and began in 1942. The concentration process, which involves heating the juice so that the water evaporates, was already well known. But the three invented the process in which the flavor of orange juice could be retained by adding a bit of fresh juice to the concentrate and then freezing it. Called the cutback process, it led to the expansion of the Florida citrus economy as well as surrounding industries for transporting and warehousing the juice. The cutback process also created a more nutritious product by restoring some of the Vitamin C that was lost in heating. Cedric Donald Atkins was born on Sept. 7, 1913, in Winter Haven. He was the only child of James H. Atkins, a railroad telegraph operator, and his wife, Christina, an elementary-school teacher. The Atkinses had inherited a couple of hundred acres of land in 1887, and they planted orange groves, from which they earned a second income, according to Mr. Atkins's son, Robert. C. D. Atkins attended the University of Florida for three years, planning to be a doctor. But when his parents ran out of money, he transferred to Florida Southern College near his parents' home in Lakeland, where he could help finance his tuition by teaching chemistry, biology and physics at the college. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1937. After college, he taught high school and coached football in the Florida towns of Plant City, Fort Meade and Winter Haven. In 1942, he became a research scientist with the federal Department of Agriculture. Mr. Atkins had seven patents in all, including one for a sports drink containing orange juice, a pulp-free syrup for carbonated beverages and a process for extracting the aroma from fresh juice, then adding it to concentrate, which enhances its flavor. The process for frozen orange juice was patented in 1946 under an agreement in which the patent belonged to the federal government. ''He never mentioned regretting it,'' Mr. Atkins's son said. ''He always had enough money to be comfortable.'' Mr. Atkins is survived by his wife, the former Martha Kathryn Marsh; a daughter, Barbara Atkins Smith, and his son, Robert, both of Winter Haven; nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. | C. D. Atkins, 86, Inventor of Orange Juice Process |
1205671_0 | Suddenly, droves of women on this city's crowded subways are gazing intently into tiny cell phone screens, checking their messages and then laboriously tapping out replies. Just as abruptly, office workers are fumbling with the tiny gadgets to confirm their evening plans the moment they step out of company headquarters, their faces glued to the monitors almost as if they were navigational aids. Even giggly teenage couples meeting in cafes often seem to reserve their dreamiest gazes not for their dates, but for the e-mail messages constantly popping up on the flip-top phones by which many measure their popularity nowadays. As if all at once, e-mail has arrived in Japan. If any further proof were needed, the official statistics are in: 10 million e-mail-capable telephones are now in use throughout the country. Japan had been one of the slowest developed countries to take to e-mail, thanks in part to the paucity of home computers. But by next year, according to some industry estimates, Internet usage in Japan will be the highest in the world, largely as a result of the explosive spread of cellular phones. Given the frenzied way that correspondence by cellular phone is taking the country by storm, it is only natural to wonder what in the world people are saying to each other with such urgency? Try, ''What are you eating for lunch?'' or ''Where are you now?'' said 16-year-old Satoko Ishihara, reading two of the latest messages from her little phone as she took a break from her part-time job. Then, after typing in the message ''I drank too much last night,'' came this flash, ''My friend just got her hair dyed red, but doesn't like it, so she's decided to cut it off.'' On the evidence, the strained eyes and linguistic gymnastics required to enter substantial amounts of text into this country's ultra-compact phones are sacrifices made for little more than the smallest of small talk. But people are chattering in stupendous, fortune-generating volumes nonetheless, and pulling it off, characteristically for the Japanese, in highly innovative ways all the while. With the cellular phone, the Japanese have married the ever-faster world of the Internet with the seemingly ever-smaller world of Japanese gadgetry, and the repercussions for life here, for the Japanese language and for the future of technology are still being tallied. It has long been noted here that space is the biggest handicap to | Tokyo Journal; In E-Mail Wrinkle, Cell Phones Are Chatterboxes |
1205751_0 | The long-running effort to bring the French abortion pill to women in this country has encountered yet another obstacle: a suggestion by the Food and Drug Administration that it may place tight restrictions on how the drug, RU-486, is distributed and who can prescribe it. Typically, once a drug is approved, any doctor can prescribe it for any purpose. But people familiar with negotiations between the F.D.A. and the sponsor of RU-486, which is also known as mifepristone, say the agency is considering taking several unusual steps, including restricting prescribing privileges to doctors who perform surgical abortions. That would effectively eliminate what advocates of abortion rights see as mifepristone's main advantage, moving the procedure out of potentially high-profile clinics and into the private offices of gynecologists, family practitioners and other doctors. ''It kills the drug if it can't be used by primary care providers,'' said Dr. Eric Schaff, a professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester who has run clinical trials of RU-486. ''The whole idea of mifepristone was to increase access.'' Indeed, that is mifepristone's potential. A study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 1 in 3 gynecologists who do not perform abortions would prescribe mifepristone if it was approved by the F.D.A. But the study also found that doctors would have second thoughts if they were required to undergo training to use the drug, another condition the F.D.A. is considering. Officials of the food and drug agency refused to comment on the negotiations, as did the Population Council, a nonprofit research group that holds the rights to market mifepristone in the United States. Heather O'Neill, a spokeswoman for the Danco Group, the investors who have licensed those rights and are arranging for the drug to be manufactured and distributed in this country, said, ''The agency's initial approach is more restrictive than we had envisioned for a drug that has been used safely by so many women.'' But Ms. O'Neill would not elaborate, beyond saying, ''We are in the very early stages of a delicate negotiation process with the F.D.A.'' Studies show that when taken with misoprostol, an already approved medication, mifepristone causes abortion -- in essence, a miscarriage -- in more than 95 percent of women who are no more than 49 days pregnant. After years of controversy, the F.D.A. announced in 1996 that mifepristone was safe and effective for use in this | F.D.A. Adds Hurdles in Approval of Abortion Pill |
1205656_0 | The New York Stock Exchange is discussing the creation of a single global equity market with a half-dozen other major exchanges from Tokyo to Toronto. The proposed round-the-clock global market would electronically connect the trading systems of the individual markets, the Big Board said in a statement yesterday. Though the details of how the new market would work have not been decided, it has the potential to provide investors worldwide with one-stop access to exchanges that list companies with a total market capitalization of $20 trillion -- 60 percent of the total value of stock markets worldwide. About half of that valuation is on the New York exchange. In addition to the Tokyo and Toronto exchanges, the potential partners mentioned in the release yesterday are exchanges in Hong Kong, Brazil, Australia and Mexico plus Euronext, the combination of the Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels markets. But the announcement appears to leave the Big Board still trailing the Nasdaq stock market, its fierce competitor, in the race to set up a true worldwide equity market. The winner will have a giant advantage in listing new companies, offering them the chance to reach investors worldwide through a single market and to gain access to the deepest possible pool of capital. The National Association of Securities Dealers, the parent of Nasdaq, has already announced joint ventures to build markets bearing the Nasdaq name in Japan and Europe. Nasdaq Japan will begin trading later this month in a handful of stocks and expects to grow by a dozen stocks or more each month, a Nasdaq official said. With that, the Nasdaq will leap forward in its plans to offer a single, worldwide exchange. In contrast, the Big Board announcement yesterday amounts to little more than an agreement to discuss ways that the different national exchanges might link up. The Big Board appeared to rule out a merger of the exchanges in its announcement, which explained the idea of a global equity market, or GEM. ''Investors will be able to access GEM through their domestic stock exchanges, which will keep the exchanges' brand and individual standing while creating a single global pool of liquidity,'' it said. Because Big Board officials confirmed over the last several months that they had been in discussions with several of the exchanges mentioned in the announcement yesterday, the timing of the announcement puzzled some competitors. ''It's talk at this point,'' said | Big Board in Talks on Global Equity Links |
1205651_0 | To the Editor: ''All College Graduates, Please Apply'' (news article, June 4) describes the wonderful opportunities available to today's graduates as they enter the information technology work force. What's missing is that the efforts to draw students, particularly those of diverse backgrounds, to this growing field must begin even earlier. The National Academy Foundation's Academy of Information Technology is challenging information technology and other industries to develop a long-range and systemic solution. We're also working to educate young people about career possibilities and help them build skills while they're still in high school. The technology work-force gap will only widen if we do nothing to increase the long-term pipeline of potential employees. GREGG B. BETHEIL New York, June 5, 2000 The writer is national director, Academy of Information Technology, National Academy Foundation. | Jobs in Technology |
1205740_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Modified Foods Put Companies in a Quandary'' (front page, June 4): As a biologist, I see the vast potential of biotechnology to make better food, medicine and even natural resources, but as a consumer, I subscribe to the credo of informed choice. With respect to genetically modified foods, that means the consumer should be able to get information about what products do and do not contain genetically modified foods and have a choice between the two. Many food companies have, from the early days of this debate, opposed and lobbied against the labeling of genetically modified components in the list of ingredients on processed foods. If biotechnology products are so safe, why can't the consumer know when a particular food product contains modified ingredients? DANIEL EMERLING El Cerrito, Calif., June 4, 2000 | Tell the Truth About Altered Food |
1205633_4 | black bears. Uncompromised. At full attention. Lifted up. Nearer to the eternal spirit. Brother of Thoreau. Or maybe just a middle-aged guy and his version of a boy's treehouse. Because I couldn't afford help and my wife wanted nothing to do with the tower, I was going to be one guy alone with lots of lumber and concrete to haul into the woods, which as yet had no road, not even a path. And after I chose my site and assembled my materials, I would have to raise it all alone, and by hand. As for electricity, a line through the sweet woods from the main road? Never. And no gasoline machinery, either. No generators, no backhoes, no cranes, I pledged. Bad enough that I drove that smoking Oldsmobile. Someday it, too, would go. Then I would rediscover my feet by hiking up and down this magnificent hill. Like Yeats -- and like Thoreau, in building his Walden Pond cabin -- I saved by shopping for leftovers. Early in March, while bicycling the dead streets of the town on Long Island where I live, I came across a Dumpster with sections of a sliding glass door sticking out. Thermal-pane doors are heavy, but since they often refuse to slide, they are common in Dumpsters. And they are terrific fixed windows, if you can haul the panels to your car and to the site without developing a hernia. Sedgwick had granted me the freedom to erect whatever I liked. Now, I had only to seek permission from the wind. If I had been thinking clearly, my model would have been the Eiffel Tower, that 984-foot marvel of wind resistance. The Leaning Tower of Pisa provided lessons as well. When I was a Sunday school child, I was taught that you should begin your life on a firm foundation: on rock, not sand. Only later did I hear about the citizens of Pisa, and how a lousy foundation beneath their 180-foot tower made them rich, if not saintly. My foundation of choice was concrete posts, a terrific foundation for the amateur builder. All that is required is a strong back or a sturdy wheelbarrow, a shovel and buckets. The builder will also need eight-inch-diameter cardboard forms, premixed concrete, reinforcing bars and J-bolts. But the soil, unbuilt upon since perhaps forever, was not interested in my tower vision. When I started to dig, | A Tower Rises Above Trouble |
1205741_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Modified Foods Put Companies in a Quandary'' (front page, June 4): The majority of American consumers support foods improved through biotechnology. An International Food Information Council survey conducted May 5-9 shows that 54 percent of consumers are somewhat more likely to buy foods enhanced to ''taste better or fresher,'' and 69 percent would be more likely ''to buy a variety of produce, like tomatoes or potatoes, if it had been modified to be protected from insect damage and required fewer pesticide applications.'' Fifty-nine percent believe that biotechnology will provide benefits for themselves or their family within the next five years. One example is a recently developed tomato with three times the amount of lycopene and beta carotene as a conventional tomato, which can benefit chronic conditions like coronary heart disease. L. VAL GIDDINGS V.P. for Food and Agriculture Biotechnology Industry Organization Washington, June 5, 2000 | Tell the Truth About Altered Food; Better and Fresher |
1204213_2 | of education to the next varies by gender, by race and by income. For instance, fully 60 percent of black 3-year-olds and 81 percent of black 4-year-olds attend preschool, compared with only 47 percent and 70 percent of their peers among whites, and 26 percent and 64 percent of peers among Hispanics. Women, who a few years ago became a majority of the college population, are entering higher education at even faster rates. The report says high school girls are more likely than boys to say they will definitely get a bachelor's degree, and women increased to 57 percent of the college population in 1998. After the issuance of ''A Nation at Risk,'' the 1983 federal report that described the nation's schools as woefully substandard, a panel charged with proposing means for improvement recommended that all students be required to take more, and more rigorous, course work. The new numbers suggest that schools have largely followed that advice. The average number of courses taken in high school had increased to 25 by 1998, from 22 in 1982. The number of students taking the highest-level math courses increased to 27 percent from 11 percent in that period, and the number taking both chemistry and physics jumped to 19 percent from 7 percent. ''States are requiring more courses, and moving away from anything-goes, shopping-mall high school that was in vogue 30 years ago,'' said Christopher Cross, president of the Council for Basic Education, which assists states in setting up academic standards. The report says students from families that are poor or not well educated increase their odds of finishing college by taking rigorous high school courses -- so much so that they are then just as likely as their better-off peers to graduate. ''For low-income students in particular,'' said Deputy Secretary Holleman, ''taking the right courses is critical not only to their decision to go to college, but to their success once they attend.'' And in fact students as a whole are achieving at higher levels. According to the report, the number of 17-year-olds who showed advanced mathematical proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test increased to 60 percent in 1996 from 49 percent in 1982. But officials pointed out that American students still did not take courses as rigorous as their peers in many other industrialized countries. According to the report, 39 percent of mathematics courses in Japan and | Report Gives U.S. Education 'A' for Effort |
1209591_1 | official of the Humane Society of the United States denounced the resumption of the hunt. ''We don't want a hunt period,'' said Barbara Dyer, the program coordinator for the society's mid-Atlantic regional office. ''We don't want one black bear killed.'' Patrick Carr, senior wildlife biologist with the state's division of fish and wildlife, called the scaled-down hunt a ''very conservative'' measure that was designed to protect the state's black bear population. New Jersey banned bear hunting in 1970, when its bear population had become all but extinct. Once protected, the few remaining native bears, and some from the Catskills in New York and the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania, started the species' recovery in the wooded hillsides of Sussex County, at the state's northwestern tip. Now the population is robust. State wildlife officials estimate that New Jersey has about 1,000 black bears in the countryside east of Interstate 287 and north of Interstate 78. And increasingly, the officials say, the bears are getting into all sorts of trouble with residents. In the last five years, wildlife control officials say they have received steadily increasing complaints about bears getting into houses, poking around backyard decks, disrupting barbecues, rummaging around campsites and picnic areas, killing goats and sheep, attacking dogs, and getting into garbage cans and beehives. John W. Bradway, chairman of the fish and game council, has said that the primary reason for the hunt is public safety. Although no black bear attacks or injuries have been reported, Mr. Bradway said recently that people living in bear country were worried that children would be attacked. Until mid-June, Governor Whitman had said little publicly about the proposed hunt. But in a letter to Mr. Bradway on June 14, she said she and state environmental officials had received hundreds of anti-hunt letters since March. And she noted that scores of opponents turned out at a council hearing on the hunt on June 6. In response to the outcry, she asked the council to approve the killing of 175 bears this year, half the number the council had proposed. In her letter, Governor Whitman said the bears posed ''very real public safety issues.'' But she also asked the council for a deeper study of nonlethal means of reducing the population. The plan enacted tonight recommended that the Division of Fish and Wildlife analyze ways to reduce the bear population through various methods of birth control. | New Jersey Orders Hunt to Reduce Number of Black Bears |
1211092_0 | Q. I have impaired vision and find that the white background and black type used in Microsoft Word documents is hard on my eyes. Is there any way to change the background color of the documents for easier reading? A. Yes, there is a setting within Microsoft Word that will let you create and use documents that have a dark blue background with white text on the screen. You may find that combination easier to read, and your files will still print normally. To change the setting in Microsoft Word 97 and 2000 for Windows, open the Word document you want to view, go to Tools in the menu bar and select Options. A box with several tabs will pop up on the screen. Click on the General tab and then check the box for ''Blue background, white text.'' Click on O.K. If you are a Macintosh and Word 98 user, go to the Tools menu in the Mac's menu bar and select Preferences from the list. That will call up the tabbed Preferences box. Click on the General tab, check the ''Blue background, white text'' box and click on O.K. Windows and Macintosh systems have a number of features to help users with impaired vision and other disabilities use the computer more easily. In Windows 98, for example, if you go to the Start menu, then to Settings and to Control Panel, then double-click on Accessibility Options, you can change your screen to a high-contrast, white-on-black display with extra-large fonts and icons. Within Accessibility Options, you can also assign mouse functions to the keyboard and create keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. You may also want to use the Windows 98 Accessibility Wizard to set up your system for better ease of use. To find the Accessibility Wizard, go to the Start menu, then to Programs. Find Accessories on the list and then go to Accessibility, where you should find the Accessibility Wizard. (If you do not find it on the list, it may not have been installed on your computer and you will have to install it from your Windows 98 CD-ROM.) Microsoft has a detailed section about Accessibility on its Web site at www.microsoft.com/enable. The page is full of links to documentation on customizing Windows to suit your needs, as well as guides for special hardware and software products. You can also sign up for a newsletter on | Computers Can Be Set To Handle Special Needs |
1211104_1 | one day help process auditory and visual information for robots as well as the output of bionic implants to help the blind see and the deaf hear. Retinal chips may someday be used as pre-processors that feed into such circuits, just as cochlear implants may one day be linked to these circuits to aid hearing. The circuits, which draw little power, may also be useful in the future world of ubiquitous computing, when chips in things like mailboxes and toasters will have to interact with people in a way that uses battery power efficiently. The new circuit is unusual in that both analog and digital features coexist simultaneously in it. ''Our specific advance is a hybrid analog-digital circuit,'' explained Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper. ''Other people have built hardware models of neural networks. What's new is the particular way we've used feedback to compute in a hybrid fashion, neither purely analog or digital, but an intimate mixture of both.'' That design adaptation is significant because the kind of signaling the brain uses is thought to be very different from that used in digital computers. ''Philosophers and psychologists have long noted that human perception has both analog and digital characteristics,'' said Dr. Sebastian Seung, a professor at M.I.T. and a co-author of the research report. While a nerve cell can trigger a nerve cell downstream to turn on or off, a digital kind of information transfer, analog interactions among nerve cells involve graded effects. ''One neuron can make another active or inactive,'' Dr. Seung said, ''but the intensity of the activity varies in a continuous way.'' Perception must make sharp, digital, yes-no distinctions like, Is that a dog or a cat? But it also has to make graded, analog distinctions, like identifying various shades of gray. ''We show that these operations are not mutually exclusive, but can coexist,'' Dr. Seung said, ''suggesting that the brain's microcircuitry may be ideally matched to the dual nature of perception.'' The work on the circuit was accompanied by the development of a mathematical theory describing how analog amplification and digital selection can coexist in the same silicon circuit. The theory and the circuit were developed over many years by Drs. Sarpeshkar, Seung and Richard H. R. Hahnloser; from 1996 to 1999, they collaborated at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., but | An Electronic Circuit That Draws Its Inspiration From Life |
1211108_2 | Web access, compared with 78 percent of those with incomes over $75,000, despite the drop in the price of a PC or an Internet connection. And although the Web is worldwide in name, it remains mostly an American phenomenon. The United States has more Web users than the next 15 countries combined, Mr. McFarland said. But only three of the next six biggest Web-using nations -- Canada, Britain and Australia -- have predominantly English-speaking populations. People are also spending more time staring at monitors. Nielsen/NetRatings measurements show that adult men, for example, increased their monthly viewing by two hours over last year, spending 10 hours and 44 minutes using the Web on average last month. In what appears to be a carry-over from the divide between the sexes over the use of television remote control, men also view more pages than women when online. Nielsen/NetRatings indicates that men look at, on average, nearly 74 pages an hour, compared with 71 for women. A more dramatic difference can be found hidden on the favorites or bookmark lists of men and women. Mr. McFarland said that when Media Metrix took a peek it found that the average man had 60 Web pages bookmarked, and the typical woman had 16. ''Men are more fickle,'' he said. Mr. Weiner added: ''What was Jerry Seinfeld's greatest line? Men aren't interested in what's on. They're interested in what else is on.'' Two of the biggest items on the Web in the last year were downloadable music -- legal or otherwise -- and shopping. Napster, the Web-based music file searching and sharing service that has become the bane of recording industry, was so small in April 1999 that it did not meet Media Metrix's minimum measurement threshold of 200,000 unique visitors. In April of this year, however, 1.79 million different people visited the site, the company said. Mr. McFarland said the past year also brought growth to Web-based radio, but primitive efforts at television have not been particularly successful. In shopping, the Boston Consulting Group estimates that North American online consumer purchases -- including the buying of other people's cast-offs through auction services like eBay -- will total $61 billion by the end of 2000. If so, that will be 85 percent more than the group measured during 1999. Online shopping, like the Web itself, is becoming increasingly mainstream, said James Vogtle, e-commerce research director at the | Studies Reveal a Rush of Older Women to the Web |
1211108_4 | billion by the end of 2000. If so, that will be 85 percent more than the group measured during 1999. Online shopping, like the Web itself, is becoming increasingly mainstream, said James Vogtle, e-commerce research director at the Boston Consulting Group, with a steady stream of major retailers like Kmart's Bluelight.com increasing their presence on the Web. One of the few areas to show a decline was the amount of time people spend online at work. In April, according to Media Metrix, Web users with access only at work spent an average of 10 hours and 19 minutes, 10 minutes less than the year before. Mr. Weiner said the estrangement between the Web and the office has been caused by employers blocking employees' access to streaming audio and video. EBay and other online auctions, which were once popular work-time Web destinations, are also being cut off. In addition, some companies track sites viewed by employees on the job and the time they spent using them. Office e-mail use, which is excluded from Web-viewing counts, continued to increase. One major attraction of the office PC is the high-speed connection. Despite all the advertising and media attention given to cable modems and digital subscriber lines, high-speed consumer services were used by only 8.8 percent of American home users last month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. About 55 percent of Web users relied on dial-up 56K modems. For most Americans, Mr. Weiner said, high speed is either too expensive or too fraught with technical difficulties to be attractive. The next big thing on the Web may have little to do with the medium directly. Mr. McFarland said that a major news event (bigger even than a Victoria's Secret fashion show) could erase any doubts about the Web's legitimacy. Perhaps that will happen this year with the presidential campaigns and the Summer Olympics occurring at a time of widespread Internet use. If large numbers of people use the Web to follow those or other major news events, it will confirm, Mr. McFarland said, ''that the Internet is becoming more of a part of the fabric of peoples' lives.'' Until then, the record for generating the most Web traffic will still be held by the release of the report to Congress by Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel. By one count, 20 million Americans had read parts of the report online within 48 hours of its release. | Studies Reveal a Rush of Older Women to the Web |
1206313_3 | we heard after his trip to the hospital, but for the rest of the summer, he didn't come back to the stockroom. What's the point of this story? Well, do you know anyone who was injured by a personal digital assistant? The comparison may seem silly, but I'm convinced that in our primitive consciousness, the part of the brain that regulates sex and shopping, the difference between the sort of technology that can mangle your hands and the sort you hold in your hand is highly significant. You look at a technological object and it speaks to you. It says, ''Hands off, buddy!'' Or it says, ''Touch me, hold me, push my buttons. . . . '' (You can finish the sentence with the endearment of your choice.) Most of us give in. But once we buy that perfect little P.D.A., or phone, or combination Global Positioning System/digital camera/blood-pressure monitor, we find there's some sleight of hand going on. The gadgets invariably feel great. They look right. Holding them in our hands produces the pleasant belief that we control them. But we don't. They control us. And instead of helping us organize our weeks or keep track of our children or resolve family confusion, they are ruining our lives, undermining civilized behavior, destroying the fine dining experience. The little machines threaten to devour every minute of time we have. They keep coming out in newer versions, with more features we don't need. And being able to identify this pattern is by no means enough to protect one from falling into it. I'm now onto my second Palm, though I didn't need the first one, and I wanted to trade my cell phone in as soon as I got it. Phone envy. Everyone else's was so much smaller. This situation isn't permanent, which is both good and bad news. The Goldilocks moment is fleeting: as chips and intelligent machines get even smaller, they will get to a scale where they become alien again. Perhaps cell phones will be implanted into our skulls with teeny, tiny drills. Medical nanomachines may course through our bloodstreams. Stuff so small we won't be able to think about it will be everywhere, doing who knows what. Wired magazine, which is to the new economy what Playboy was to the sexual revolution, recently ran a major essay detailing the dangers of self-reproducing nanomachines and genetic modifications. Technology, | The Way We Live Now: 6-11-00; The Size Of Things To Come |
1206417_4 | Of the 195 students who received a master's degree, 5 were minorities. Mr. Burke and other education officials said that minority college students, who might think about going into teaching, are sometimes drawn to corporations, which can offer a lot more money. ''An IBM or a Microsoft may knock at the door of a college student who's strong in math or science and say, 'We know you can start in teaching at $33,000 and have your summer off, but if you come with us, we'll start you at $55,000, you'll get four weeks off, and you'll be in six figures in four years.' I hear that's happening,'' said Tom Murphy, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. Rodney A. Lane, dean of the School of Education at Southern Connecticut State, said there is a deeper problem. ''A lot have gone through urban school systems, so they have in their mind what their schools were like, where a whole lot of people didn't want to come,'' Dr. Lane said. ''We've got to overcome a cultural and socioeconomic gap that is large and growing.'' Maria Lyons, who until recently was the school personnel director for Bridgeport, said that the stronger economy, combined with a greater willingness of employers to hire people without regard to gender or race, means less women and minorities are going into teaching. ''When I was in school, women had certain roles,'' said Ms. Lyons, who is Puerto Rican. ''You went into nursing, secretarial work or teaching. But now there's so many more options for young people and other careers that pay more than teaching.'' Also hurting poorer school districts like Bridgeport sometimes is that they can't pay as well as some of the better-off communities. Bridgeport's starting teacher salary for someone with a bachelor's degree is $32,500, below nearby communities like Fairfield, or Norwalk, which pay $34,000 to start. ''We have lost some people to other towns like Norwalk,'' said Marilyn Ondrasik, director of the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, which has worked on a teacher recruitment advisory committee in Bridgeport. The percentage of minority teachers in Bridgeport, whose student population is 88 percent black, Latino and Asian, has actually dropped a bit from the early 1990's, from 26 percent to 25 percent. Laura Williams, a teacher who is Puerto Rican, said she jumped from Bridgeport to Fairfield for better pay and benefits. Although she wouldn't say how | White Faces at the Blackboard |
1206633_2 | families claim have shamed them, so-called ''honor'' crimes that have drawn attention to countries like Jordan and Pakistan. United Nations officials and women's rights campaigners say that this is the first time an international document has specified these activities as crimes. Although the final agreement of the conference does not have the force of law, it can be used by women as a statement of international norms when trying to change the laws of nations. The meeting's final declaration also demanded more attention to the H.I.V.-AIDS epidemic, which in the five years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing has begun to victimize many more women, especially in Africa. There, women's organizations say, the sexual rights of women are a matter of life and death, when traditions within extended families or clans may force girls and women into sexual arrangements they cannot avoid with men whom they may know to be infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. As is almost inevitably the case when sensitive social issues are exposed to international debate, battle lines were drawn between conservative countries, largely Islamic or Roman Catholic, and more secular nations, though there was no fixed geographical pattern. Poland and Nicaragua, for example, have often been reticent on certain women's rights, while Europe and Latin America in general take a much more liberal stand, even on contraception and abortion. Among Islamic nations, delegates said, Algeria, Iran, Libya, Pakistan and Sudan were most reluctant to advance women's rights. The opposition lobby got strong support from the Vatican, which attends such conferences based on its territorial possessions in Rome. Among the organizations that expressed disappointment yesterday were the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, and the Women's Environment and Development Organization in New York. They issued a statement regretting the failure to agree to a stronger document. Anna Diamantopoulou, a Greek politician who is now the European Union's commissioner for employment and social affairs, was not concerned that the conference did not push too hard on the limits of what the majority of national governments or societies could accept. She warned of the danger of provoking a backlash against women's groups in many countries if they returned with a declaration that could be interpreted as a call to upset the social order. ''When they go home, they want to be waving the document, not apologizing for it,'' she said. | Rights Gains Are Preserved At U.N. Forum On Women |
1206307_3 | preventive health measures -- smoking cessation or weight-loss programs, for example. ''Somebody who's 25 and thinks: Hey, what's the problem? I'm paying for my own mammogram, sets into motion a whole chain of things,'' says Dennis Fryback, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Wisconsin. ''There will be additional tests, biopsies. Insurance pays for those, which raises everybody else's premium. And we always get many more false positives than true ones.'' There are screenings, of course, whose preventive health benefits are known and proven -- TB tests, mammograms for women over 50, pap smears. But there are others -- mammograms for men -- that are dubious because while they could benefit somebody (a few men do get breast cancer) they would do so only at tremendous cost in both dollars and anxiety to a large population of extremely unlikely victims. And there are still others -- full-body CAT scans, large-scale testing for prostate cancer -- that are dubious because what they turn up may be a very slow-growing tumor or an ''indolent'' disease that would never have caused a problem if the patient hadn't known about it. Only now that he does know, he may have unnecessary surgery (which carries its own risks). Or he may move through life burdened by the sense that he is a future patient, an illness waiting to happen. The truth is, it is not always easy to put such portentous knowledge to rational use. Consider this cautionary tale. Some years ago, Sweden established an experimental program in which about 200,000 newborns were screened for a recessive genetic condition that would predispose them to emphysema as adults. Since exposure to cigarette smoke, dusty environments and the like would increase the chances of contracting the disease, doctors anticipated that families whose children had this genetic predisposition could change their lifestyles accordingly. Instead, the whole program had to be canceled because families experienced such high levels of emotional disturbance. Parents reported that they couldn't help thinking of their affected children as ''different''; many of them said that their anxiety about the disease lying in wait led them to smoke more, not less. In the end, maybe there is such a thing as too much information -- a diagnostic dystopia in which an anxious few of us are privileged to know too much about what we are made of, and too little about what it means. | Tech 2010: #21 No Surprises; The Bathroom Where You Can Give Yourself a Daily Brain Scan |
1206278_3 | unrepentant decadence. In what can only be described as a radical step backward, Nestle suggests forgoing, say, the evil-tasting power bars (the doyenne of nutraceutical food), which are often loaded with sugar and calories along with vitamins, in favor of a really tasty plain old candy bar with a vitamin pill on the side. Despite her personal logic, she believes the day is coming when virtually every food on the market will be fortified. ''This food is very expensive,'' she says. ''Which is the point.'' Meanwhile, scientists are off in the lab trying to do the world a good turn with a banana. At the Boyce Thompson Institute, Charles J. Arntzen and Hugh Mason are developing plants that contain vaccines. The point is to someday eliminate the need for refrigeration so that these drugs can be easily and safely distributed to third-world countries. Some of the vaccines currently being worked into bananas include those for hepatitis B, Norwalk virus and enterotoxic E. coli. But don't expect to be slicing such a banana on your Special K Plus any time soon. In fact, don't expect to be able to buy one at all. In the same way you wouldn't hand out bottles of vaccine and tell people to help themselves, you can't send a bunch of bananas containing vaccines into a country and just tell people to eat up. Joyce Frank, the director of licensing and development at the Boyce Thompson Institute, explains that when the product is ready, it will be distributed through clinics, not sold in supermarkets. ''There won't ever be a time when people will be growing their own bananas with vaccines in them.'' Other scientists at the institute are doing research on food projects as well, including Patricia Conklin, who is working to develop plants with higher amounts of vitamin C and folic acid, which is especially important for prenatal health. In the future, the spinach that was always good for you will be great for you. Meanwhile, back at the grocery store, expect the future to look like a can of Ultra Slim-Fast -- food that is low in fat and calories, packed full of vitamins and minerals and not exactly food at all. While you're drinking that frothy whip that reminds you of a milkshake the same way a light bulb reminds you of summer, remember the Ben & Jerry's you may have left behind. | Tech 2010: #30 Healthy Living; The French Fry That Will Save Your Life |
1206287_7 | was little variation in the lines on the oscilloscope that displays Johnny's brain waves. But as his concentration intensified, spikes appeared, indicating frequency, and grew higher, indicating amplitude. Moore whistled when she saw the height of the waves. ''He can get those things off the screen when he gets going,'' she said then. The cursor moved diagonally at first, but Johnny soon righted it. When it cleanly touched a square, the note played through the computer speaker. The notes were clear, if a little out of tune (Moore recorded them from a 100-year-old family piano), and after a few minutes, Johnny could slide slowly but cleanly up the scales and down through the octaves. As Johnny tired and began to wince, Moore decided to cut the session short. She smoothed his blond hair back and asked him to rate his pain on a scale from 1 to 10. He didn't blink until she reached 10. ''He's the toughest guy I have ever known,'' she says. Since human brain waves were first recorded in 1929, scientists and sci-fi writers have been fascinated by the prospect of the mind controlling external objects without the intermediation of the body. (Writers like William Gibson, for instance, created heroes who were ''jacked in,'' able to send and receive digital signals by wiring their own brains directly to hard drives.) But it wasn't until the dawn of the personal computer in the 1970's and advances in the 1990's that brain-to-computer interfaces became plausible. Kennedy groans at some of the more speculative applications of brain-to-computer interfaces. ''I can operate a computer fine with my hands,'' he says. The objectives of his implant program are both more modest and far more profound. The first, proved at least possible by Johnny, is to establish new lines of communication with locked-in patients. The second is to help patients like Johnny (who is typing now thanks to a cataract operation) regain some control over their immediate environment -- to do things like switch their lights on and off, control the temperature in their room, even turn on a baseball game on their own. Ultimately, the doctors hope their research will allow locked-in patients to connect not just with computers but also with their own bodies again. Some patients in other research projects have had limited success controlling paralyzed limbs through the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) readings. A second set of electrodes, | Tech 2010: #07 Brainpower - Making Contact; The Mind That Moves Objects |
1206299_0 | IT was a simple matter of buying gas, but one, like so many things, that was not so simple in Cuba. Three of us had just piled out of a gray Peugeot 306, a cramped little model best driven with the choke full out and the pedal flat down, that we had rented about 50 miles back in Havana. Though he was standing in front of a tiny island of working pumps, the gas station attendant, shyly and as tactfully as he could, was trying to tell us that we should, well, sort of just pull behind the bushes across the road, where the gasoline could be siphoned into the car. The station could not sell us gas, he said, because it was not allowed to take dollars, which could be used only at places designated by the state. So pull across the road we did, and entered Cuba's thriving black-market economy. There, an eager youth took in a mouthful of gas from a plastic hose to get the siphoning started while another balanced a faded red jerrycan on his shoulder. It was a transaction (costing about $20) exceptional enough to draw a small crowd. Among them, a golden-haired green-eyed young mother named Paula, who quickly offered her address and, only half in jest it seemed, the baby suckling at her breast. This was the Cuba we had come to find, one a bit off the beaten path. The best way to experience this Cuba, we had figured, was to drive around. Our destination was admittedly vague and our system -- let's just see what turns up -- about as reliable as a bad three-card monty player's. What turned up during our visit in January was a rural landscape unexpectedly varied and beautiful and, more often than not, people and travelers tossed about on a topsy-turvy economy whose absurdities -- sometimes navigated, often simply endured -- could only be explained by four decades of embargo and mismanagement. Our chosen route eventually took us west of Havana, through the province of Pinar del Rio, along a coast road that offered up more pothole than pavement but led to some of the country's most fertile sugar cane and tobacco lands. Along the way, the vagaries of what one young Cuban described, rather nervously, as ''tourist apartheid'' were at least as stunning and abundant as the towering royal palms. The term is meant | In Cuba, 2 Worlds Bridged by a Dollar Sign |
1206603_2 | average of $10 an acre. Just two months ago, for example, Conservation International established a trust fund to underwrite a project announced last year to help Suriname, a small South American country, manage four million acres of untouched tropical forests that Asian timber interests had tried to buy. The total one-time cost was $16 million to $18 million, or little more than $4 an acre. Because of its proximity, biological resources and the inattentiveness of many of its governments, South America has commanded more attention than other continents. In addition to vigorous efforts by nearly every American conservation group to stop the burning of the Amazon rain forest, the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International have both recently acquired large tracts of land in Brazil's Pantanal, a huge wetland south of the Amazon that straddles the border of Paraguay. But other, less visible conservation efforts are taking place farther afield. The World Wildlife Federation, which has been in the overseas conservation business longer than any other American organization, is nearing agreement with the Sakha republic in Siberia to place 170 million acres of Siberian forest under protection, with the government of Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas to protect nearly 6,000 square miles, and with various central African countries to establish protected wildlife ''corridors.'' Conservation International has recently begun talks with the Cambodian government to set aside a large forested area that was once the stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. As these examples suggest, there are other conservation strategies besides the outright purchase of land. In Bolivia, for example, the Nature Conservancy is training people to manage the Mercado National Park. In the same country, Conservation International bought the development rights to 100,000 acres of land next to Madidi National Park, and then gave the land to the government. The fact that private groups like these are doing so much simply highlights the fact that the American government could do more. One of the few tangible achievements of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was to strengthen the nascent Global Environment Facility, a multilateral body that has helped underwrite some of these private efforts to help poor countries hang on to their natural assets. In 1998, the United States Congress pledged to give this group $430 million over four years. It is already $200 million in arrears, a rather shameful record given the commitment of private groups with fewer resources. | Conservation, Far From Home |
1207672_5 | the site of a cattle market connected to the Bull's Head Tavern, the neo-classical Bowery Theater was built in the 1820's. Then the largest theater in the country, it was the first in New York to be gaslit. Its 1826 opening production was ''The Road to Ruin,'' which many later said was prescient of its future, for the theater burned down six times and was rebuilt five times. The final fire was in 1929, and by then it had been renamed the Thalia, showcasing Yiddish, German, Italian, and Chinese theater. Now in its place are Chinese restaurants. In the mid-1800's, the city's theatrical life centered on the Bowery. The first stage version of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' opened at the National Theater, No. 104, in 1852, between Hester and Grand Streets, although serious theater gave way to melodrama, vaudeville, circus acts, minstrel and variety shows. Theatrics reigned inside and outside the theaters: the Bowery was an ongoing carnival. Crowded with trolleys and pedestrians, pushcarts, organ grinders and chestnut sellers, the street was lively late into the night, illuminated by streetlights and, after 1878, with the lights of the elevated train. A working-class haven, the street was lined with pawnshops, pool halls, used book stores barber schools, tattoo parlors and black-eye fixers, hotels of all kinds and missions to save residents from its vices. A German section, Kleindeutschland, served the large immigrant population in its beer gardens and theaters. Beggars worked the street, and a couple of blind men were known to regain their sight nightly after some whisky. Much has been written about the Bowery boys -- or b'hoys, in their dialect -- picturesque 19th-century characters who walked with a swagger, dressed colorfully and welcomed a good fight. I wonder about the women of the Bowery. A 1904 play, ''Strenuous Mame: The Bowery Girl: A Vaudeville Cocktail,'' is about a tough-talking, gum-chewing aspiring actress whose speech is as colorful as a Bowery b'hoy's. No doubt she would have gotten the hook, which presumably first came into use at Miner's Bowery Theater, No. 167, on its ''Amateur Nights'' in the 1880's. Today on the Bowery the tallest building -- other than the 1970's Confucius Plaza in Chatham Square -- is the 10-story Salvation Army Chinatown Corps, No. 225, near Rivington Street; most are three or four stories. Three buildings have landmark status. At No. 18, around 1789, the merchant Edward Mooney built | Oh, It's Not What It Used to Be |
1209747_2 | cannot do business with private citizens. They can do business only with Fidel Castro. It is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ workers. That means that foreign investors cannot hire or pay workers directly. They must go to the Cuban government employment agency, which picks the workers. The investors then pay Castro in hard currency for the workers, and Castro pays the workers in worthless pesos. Here is a real-life example: Sherritt International of Canada, the largest foreign investor in Cuba, operates a nickel mine in Moa Bay (a mine, incidentally, which Cuba stole from an American company). Roughly 1,500 Cubans work there as virtual slave laborers. Sherritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 a year for each of these Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers about $18 a month in pesos, then pockets the difference. The net result is a subsidy of nearly $15 million in hard currency each year that Castro then uses to pay for the security apparatus that keeps the Cubans enslaved. Those who advocate lifting the embargo speak in broad terms about using investment to promote democracy in Cuba. But I challenge them to explain exactly how, under this system, investment can do anything to help the Cuban people. The anti-embargo crowd should drop its rhetoric about promoting democracy and be honest: the one reason for their push to lift sanctions on Cuba is to pander to well-intentioned American farmers, who have been misled by the agribusiness giants into believing that going into business with a bankrupt Communist island is a solution to the farm crisis in America. Whoever has convinced farmers that their salvation lies in trade with Cuba has sold them a bill of goods. Cuba is desperately poor, barely able to feed its own people, much less save the American farmer. Castro wants the American embargo lifted because he is desperate for hard currency. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Moscow's subsidies ended, Castro turned to European and Canadian investors to keep his Communist system afloat. Now he wants American investors to do the same. We must not allow that to happen. Unfortunately, some in Washington are all too willing to give Castro what he wants. At the least they should stop pretending that they are doing this to promote Cuban democracy and American values. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. | On Trade, Cuba Is Not China |
1205008_2 | American minorities, the effects of AIDS, tobacco-related cancers, heart disease and violence as factors in reducing a healthy life expectancy in the United States. At the Population Reference Bureau, a private demographic research organization in Washington, Carl Haub, who compiles annual statistics on world population, said the American ranking is not particularly surprising. ''We have a 25 percent minority population that has lower life expectancies,'' he said, adding that even by traditional measures of mortality, the United States does not rank among the nations with the highest levels of longevity. ''If you look at the U.S. by ethnic group, you see a somewhat different result. African-Americans in the U.S. have a much lower life expectancy, particularly males.'' Using traditional methods, the United States had a life expectancy of 76.7 years in 1998, Mr. Haub said, with men at 73.9 years and women at 79.4. The World Health Organization table of healthy life expectancy lowers the level to 70 years for Americans overall, with 67.5 years for men and 72.6 years for women. Nicholas Eberstadt, who follows demographic surveys at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said there has been a trend, beginning in Europe, to add new dimensions to the study of longevity. ''There has been an enormous amount of work done on healthy life expectancy,'' he said. ''Some of these efforts have been inventive, but none have been particularly compelling.'' Mr. Eberstadt said that a number of surveys have factored in perceptions about health and well-being among populations, which can vary dramatically from one country or region to another despite the statistical similarities. The World Health Organization survey does not deal with perceptions, but does include projections based on what is known about major health factors like heart disease or lung cancer related to smoking. In Japan, for example, the new survey says that lung cancer rates for men ''are expected to jump in coming years as the long-term effects of the post-World War II smoking popularity begin to hit.'' China, the world's most populous nation, with one-fifth of the world's people, was found to have a healthy life expectancy of 62.3, well ahead of the second-largest country, India, at 53.2. The Chinese figure is considered particularly impressive, given the country's income level, W.H.O. says. China outranks not only India in a healthier life but also Russia and many nations in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. | Americans Enjoy 70 Healthy Years, Behind Europe, U.N. Says |
1205006_1 | of real estate agents visited their senators and representatives to argue that without the Coble bill, their multiple listing services were in danger of being pirated. Tennessee's senators, Bill Frist and Fred Thompson, both Republicans, were so besieged that they had to reserve a committee hearing room so they would have space for all the agents from their state. On the other side, lobbyists for Bloomberg L. P., the financial information service, have been telling lawmakers that if the Coble bill becomes law, the stock exchanges could make it impossible for the company to publish complex calculations about stock prices and trends. ''The bill would mean they would have absolute ownership right over something as basic as stock quotes,'' said Kevin Sheekey, a Bloomberg spokesman. Michael R. Bloomberg, the company's founder, is Northeastern vice chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and largely because of his influence, the chamber has thrown its considerable lobbying weight into the fray. ''Factual data is the nuts and bolts of the information age,'' said Rick Lane, the chamber's chief lobbyist on technology issues. ''If you try to control its use, you're going to stifle commerce.'' Both sides may be exaggerating. But the question of database piracy is one instance in which technology has developed so rapidly that it has outstripped the laws governing commercial relationships. Before there was an Internet, the issue was pretty well settled by copyright law. Creative works could be copyrighted; facts could not. If a database was nothing but a collection of raw facts -- say, a list of countries in Europe -- then it was public property. But if the compilation involved selection and coordination -- for instance, European countries ranked in order of their wine production -- then it could be copyrighted, and no one could use the list without permission. The courts have ruled, for example, that the telephone white pages cannot be copyrighted because the only arrangement involved is alphabetical. But the Yellow Pages are protected because someone had to select the various categories. Today, the sheer volume of information on the Internet, the ease with which it can be retrieved and the size of the potential profits have blurred the line between what is acceptable and what is not. For example, is the five-digit coding system for medical services and procedures developed by the American Medical Association more like the white pages or the | Database Legislation Spurs Fierce Lobbying |
1205059_3 | the $1.6 million needed to add to the $5 million federal grant that would pay for homes in the Lost Valley section. A bill that would create a $50 million fund to help communities meet their part of the requirement is being considered by the state Legislature. (AP) TRENTON: BEAR CAPTURED -- A 200-pound black bear was captured in Trenton early Saturday, about the same time as three bear sightings were reported in nearby Ewing. A man walking his dog in Trenton's West Ward about 1:30 a.m. saw the bear and called the police, who chased it for two hours before it climbed a tree. State wildlife officials eventually shot the bear with a tranquilizer gun, roped it and lowered it to the ground. It was taken into Warren County, where it was released on state property. Bears have been popping up around New Jersey in increasing numbers. In April, three were struck by cars in northern New Jersey in one day, and in May a bear bit a camper's sleeping bag at the Allamuchy Reservation. (AP) CALENDAR Tomorrow PRIMARY ELECTIONS -- A number of statewide votes in New Jersey from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., including Democratic and Republican primaries for the United States Senate. BEAR HUNT HEARING -- A public hearing at 6 p.m. by the New Jersey Fish and Game Council on its proposal to allow bear hunting this fall for the first time in 30 years. Location: National Guard Armory, Lawrenceville. Information: Department of Environmental Protection press office, (609) 292-3225. TOBACCO ADVERTISEMENTS -- A public hearing at 7 p.m. in Hempstead, Nassau County, on a proposal to ban tobacco advertisements from areas that children frequent. The law, which is scheduled to be voted on at the hearing, would prohibit the advertising of tobacco within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, licensed day care center or park. Location: Hempstead Town Hall, 1 Washington Street. Information: (516) 489-5000. LONG ISLAND SOUND -- A public hearing at 7:30 p.m. on a plan to create a Long Island Sound reserve in Connecticut, to preserve waterfront and underwater lands and increase public access. Location: Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk. CHILD SUPPORT -- Suffolk County Legislature's public hearing at 2:30 p.m. on a bill allowing police to place immobilizing devices on the wheels of vehicles owned by divorced parents who are behind on child support payments. Location: Riverhead County Center. Information: (631) 853-4088. | Metro Briefing |
1204960_14 | friends from Cuba. The men drive delivery trucks. The women, like his wife, work as medical or dental assistants. The men plop themselves on the couch and watch soccer on television. The women cluster around the kitchen table, talking about the pill. They are all in their late 20's, all still childless, focused on the English classes or professional courses that will advance their careers. The pill is pharmaceutical insurance for their dreams: eventually having children, owning businesses, buying suburban homes. It is all planned. With some pride, Mr. Valdes shows recent pictures of his house in Cuba. When he comes to one of his father with his new wife, his mother recoils at the sight of her ex-husband with his arm around a black woman. Mr. Valdes concentrates on the coconut trees he planted in the backyard years ago. ''Look how tall they are,'' he says, as if surprised that his house, his father, his trees have gone on without him. The talk drifts back to Cuba, as it so often does in Miami. Like much of Miami's Cuban community, Mr. Valdes is quite conservative politically. A favorite topic is how much he says he has learned about the Cuban government since arriving here -- the political prisoners, the human-rights abuses. He listens to Miami's Cuban exile radio every day, particularly enjoying a program in which the host regularly reads the names of the men and women who have died in prison or were killed trying to overthrow the Castro government. Like most Cubans in Miami -- but unlike Mr. Ruiz and most Americans -- he believes that Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor, should stay in this country rather than return to Cuba with his father. Ninety miles and four and a half years later, Mr. Valdes has ended up back in Cuba -- albeit a new and improved Cuba. ''The only thing I miss from Cuba is being able to see the ocean from my windows,'' he says. ''Everything else I need and want is right here. This is exactly the country that I always imagined.'' Confined in a Comfort Zone ''Que bola, acere?'' (''What's up, brother?'') Joel Ruiz asks a friend who has stopped to share neighborhood gossip. It is noon on a Tuesday, Mr. Ruiz's only day off. The friend leans in the window of Mr. Ruiz's 1989 Buick, and they talk about a shootout | Best of Friends, Worlds Apart |
1205368_6 | current tires are suitable. Continental insists the prices it received for its tires in the Ford auction were no lower than previous transactions, but Ford disagrees, saying it obtained cheaper prices. Some rival tire makers have gone farther than Continental in objecting to using auctions for tires at all, contending that carefully crafted brand images will be eroded if they are traded like commodities. They also question whether tires are commodities at all. ''Tires are a very highly engineered product but they are the Rodney Dangerfields of the vehicle,'' complained Robert J. McNally, the vice president for process improvement and information technology at Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. Mr. Kessel acknowledged that Continental's tires could be auctioned in the short term, but insisted that the rest of the company's products did not lend themselves to auctions and that even tires would someday be too complicated to be included. For now, he said, ''tires are more into the direction of a commodity business that might be suitable for reverse auctions -- brakes, brake systems and chassis systems will most likely not go through these reverse auctions.'' CURRENTLY, cars' brake, traction control and electronic stability systems rely on accelerometers and other sensors of the vehicle's movement, along with sensors linked to the vehicle's steel wheels. Sensors do not monitor tires, which would give a more accurate measurement of whether they are maintaining traction on the road. But Continental has developed a generation of tires that will address this problem and start appearing on vehicles in two years. The tires will have magnetic stripes baked into the tread; new magnetic sensors in the brake system will monitor these magnetic stripes, engaging the brakes when needed. Since these tires will work only with Continental's brake systems, manufacturers will have to buy tires with the brake systems. Continental engineers say they can make the tires and magnetic sensors better and much cheaper than the current sensors, and predict that the new tires will become ubiquitous in a few years. Because the magnetic tires will become a big part of one of an automobile's most complicated systems, automakers will be forced to engage in extensive negotiations to buy them, said William Kozyra, the president of Continental's North American brake and chassis operations. ''So, when it comes to tire auctions on the Internet,'' Mr. Kozyra said, ''I don't envision that's something that can be done long term.'' BUSINESS TO BUSINESS | Exchange This: Making Sure a Tire Is More Than a Tire |
1205497_0 | Some speakers hailed New Jersey's black bears as majestic symbols of the state's diminishing wilderness and appealed for their preservation. Others denounced them as risks to children and called for their elimination. Some called them timid, harmless and quick to flee. But others said they were becoming more and more ominous and threatening. Opinions ran the gamut tonight as about 450 people, many heavily opinionated, turned out for a public hearing on the New Jersey Fish and Game Council's plan to allow bear hunting in the state for the first time in 30 years. Once nearly extinct, New Jersey's black bear population is flourishing and is estimated at 1,000. The council has proposed killing 350 of them this year, and up to 320 more by 2003. It is to make its final decision on June 22. The plan was hailed tonight by representatives of sportsmen's clubs and hunters' groups, and condemned by environmentalists and animal rights activists. A social worker from Flemington, Gloria Zola-Mulloy, said hunting posed a greater public risk than the bears and sent children the message that violence was a viable solution. ''Problems should be solved through knowledge, science and education,'' she said. Another foe of the proposed hunt, Jack DeTalvo, the superintendent of schools in Middletown and a member of the National Rifle Association, said he saw no need for a hunting season and urged the council to allow hunting only by people who need to protect themselves or their property. ''I don't think anyone's tripping over bears yet,'' he said. But Dennis Ohab, a turkey hunter from Jefferson Township, disagreed. ''It's hand-to-hand combat up there,'' he said of his hometown, recalling that a bear followed him home from a recent hunt. ''I was screaming and hollering and the bear kept coming. Sooner or later our children will get killed.'' The measure has become the most controversial proposed change to state hunting regulations in years. Twenty-two animal rights groups have formed an antihunt coalition and staged rallies. Coalition leaders contend that the Fish and Game Council has overestimated the bear population and has proposed the hunt to reverse declining sales of hunting licenses. They favor sterilization of female bears and programs to teach people ways to coexist with bears, which by nature are shy and solitary. Council officials counter that sterilization would be too limited and costly for a bear population that is expanding from traditional | Proposed Hunt Brings Out Bear's Fans and Critics |
1205393_1 | 30. ''It's nice to know that the incredible amount of work that has gone into this has finally borne fruit. I feel really lucky.'' Luck is only part of it. Larger forces are at work to pry open the door to the ivory tower, the teaching profession's nirvana. Where else can you aspire to earn $100,000 a year playing the wise elder to eager students for a few hours a week, get extended summer and winter vacations and sabbaticals, read and write about your favorite topics and lock in a juicy TIAA-CREF pension to boot? Indeed, the lure of academia is so strong that the supply of would-be professors has outstripped demand for their talents for most of the last quarter-century. Stories have abounded of Ph.D.'s with gold-plated resumes who got rejection after rejection at even the more obscure schools. But now, the dynamics of the market have suddenly changed, and college teaching is emerging as a hot career in a hot job market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of college and university professors will surge 23 percent, to 1,060,000, in 2008 from 865,000 in 1998. That compares with projected growth of 14 percent in the overall American labor force in the same 10 years. And the job prospects are improving not only in traditionally high-demand fields like business, computer science and engineering but also in such disciplines as English literature and the social sciences, which have been the hardest to crack because opportunities for employment outside academia are so slim. For example, the American Historical Association reports that job openings for historians have jumped 23 percent in the last two years, while the Modern Language Association of America says listings for English language and literature positions have soared an even more impressive 29 percent in the same period. ''It does appear the academic market has turned around,'' said Ronald Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell. ''My experience in talking to people nationwide is that there is a much hotter market for students in the social sciences.'' In fact, one of his labor economics students already has a job at a major research university even though he is six months from finishing his dissertation, Dr. Ehrenberg said. Several factors are driving demand for more professors. Enrollments are rising as the children of baby boomers reach college age and | Higher Degrees Of Occupation |
1205392_3 | for employers by the things that matter to you -- signing bonus, car allowance, stock options, on-site massages, flexible schedules and more.'' One afternoon a few weeks ago I did just that. I logged on as the me I was my senior year, a confused Ivy League political science major who thought she might want to go to law school but figured journalism might be fun, too. Under ''fields of interest'' I entered advertising, publishing, consulting and the Internet. That last one didn't exist when I graduated, but if it had I don't imagine I could have resisted that which lures this whole generation. Then I scrolled through Mr. Gitlin's ingredients for a balanced life. I clicked ''yes'' to all the insurance benefits, to the stock-option plan, to paid personal days, paid sick days, paid vacation days, paid holidays. I clicked 'not essential'' to the commuting allowance and auto allowance because my 22-year-old self expected to live in the middle of a city. My only ''no'' was to paternity leave, for obvious biological reasons. I said I needed a flexible schedule and a smoke-free environment, but I could live without a casual dress code and the right to bring my (nonexistent) dog. On-site food facilities were on my list of requirements and, as a result, so was an on-site gym. Wanting to appear reasonable, I said that an on-site hairdresser, dry cleaner, car wash and massage therapist were ''nonessential.'' I was, I admit, sorely tempted to check ''yes'' to the massage. After agreeing to move anywhere in the country, I hit the send button. A list of more than a dozen companies appeared, and most were technology-related. Not one had all the features I had checked, but a few had most. Would I have been happy with a life spent writing banner ads for Internet sites? Perhaps. Would all this advance warning really have prepared my 22-year-old self for the cataclysmic changes brought to that life by adding children? Probably not. No class nor Web site can prepare you for that. But I would have been well served to have paid some attention. The biggest change since I was ''their age'' is not that they have all the answers, but that they know enough to ask the questions. LIFE'S WORK This column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives appears every other week. Lisa Belkin's e-mail address is Belkin@nytimes.com. | It's a Whole New Lexicon |
1205435_0 | Britain's royal family has fallen to feuding over a subject on which one would expect them to be solidly united: genetics. Prince Charles, the country's most famous organic farmer, has found his passionately stated views against growing genetically modified crops suddenly under assault from his sister, Princess Anne, and his father, Prince Philip. ''It is a huge oversimplification to say all farming ought to be organic'' or there should be no genetically modified foods, Princess Anne said in an interview published on Monday in a magazine called The Grocer. ''Man has been tinkering with food production and plant development for such a long time,'' she said, ''that it's a bit cheeky to suddenly get nervous about it when, fundamentally, you are doing much the same thing.'' Prince Philip told an audience at Windsor Castle on Monday night, ''People are worried about genetically modified organisms getting into the environment, but what people forget is that the introduction of exotic species -- like, for instance, the introduction of the gray squirrel into this country -- is going to do or has done far more damage than a genetically modified piece of potato.'' Prince Philip did not choose his vegetable lightly. It was a study conducted on genetically altered potatoes by a scientist in Scotland in August 1998 that set off what has by now become a voluble and forceful movement by protesters against planting what they call ''Frankenstein food'' in Britain. When the work of the scientist, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, was dismissed as ''garbage'' by the government's chief scientist, Sir Robert May, Prince Charles rushed to his defense. The heir to the throne permits only organic farming on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, and he regularly speaks out on the perils of genetic engineering. He used a nationally broadcast BBC lecture last month to raise the moral stakes in the debate, casting the argument as one of science acting in opposition to religion and saying that experimentation was taking man into realms that belong to ''God and God alone.'' ''We need to rediscover a reverence for the natural world, irrespective of its usefulness to ourselves,'' he said. ''If literally nothing is held sacred anymore, what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some 'great laboratory of life' with potentially disastrous long-term consequences.'' Playing on a cultural distrust of science and on fears lingering from the epidemic of mad cow | Britain's Green Prince and His Family Differ on Altered Crops |
1205371_2 | not be a dream deferred. Currently, the fastest-growing group of job hunters are those with less technical acumen, who are now posting their resumes in far greater number. Their influence is starting to broaden the sorts of career-management tools available online, like salary surveys and certification tests, which still cater to the Net's early adopters, technology professionals. ''It can be tricky finding a site that has a lot of positions for the noncomputer geeks,'' said Christine Tetrault, the human resources director for a software company in Virginia, who found her job at Careerpathcom. The site is built on newspaper classified advertisements and is owned by eight newspaper companies, including The New York Times Company. ''It was easy and quick and I saved a fortune in stationery and stamps,'' she said in an e-mail message. ''I also liked the ease involved in setting search parameters and checking out what comes up instead of getting all cramped and grimy leaning over the classifieds.'' Nagib Tharani, 25, a Canadian electrical engineer, is still stunned at the speed at which Hotjobs transformed his life when he graduated from college a year ago. ''I applied to four or five companies on March 4th, got calls on the 8th, flew for an interview on the 16th and was hired the 25th,'' he said, referring to the job he took with a branch of Ericsson Inc., the Swedish wireless company, in Santa Barbara, Calif. The sites earn their meal tickets from employers, who pay for a range of services, and advertising sponsors. Job lists come from corporate offices, media buyers and temporary agencies like Manpower and Kelly Services. (An exception is Hotjobs, which refuses to list recruitment-agency openings.) The sites allow managers and commission-based recruiters to tally how often their listings are searched. Some include matchmaking software that pairs resumes with appropriate job descriptions. Most charge employers for access to peruse a site's database of resumes. Top executives, still mostly loyal to headhunters to fill high-level slots, often use job sites to monitor their in-house recruiters. For some employers, the Web sites' resume databases are all they need to fill job openings. That is the approach of Julian H. Fisher, the president of Paperpath Inc., a small software publisher in Chestnut Hill, Mass. ''I've changed tactics completely,'' he said, expressing dissatisfaction with recruiters who expected 33 percent commissions and brought him ill-suited prospects. ''They didn't get the | Change Jobs Like Clothes? Click Here |
1207319_1 | the landless such as Mr. Ribeiro de Souza have been killed in Brazil in the last 10 years. Only a handful of the murderers have been tried, virtually all of them low-level hired triggermen. The conviction and sentencing of the powerful Mr. Amorim is one of several recent setbacks for Brazil's ranchers, whose drive for land is furthering the destruction of the Amazon and condemning peasants to lives of destitution. Brazil has one of the world's most unequal patterns of land distribution. One percent of landowners own half the agricultural land -- much of it idle, bought for speculation. Brazilian law allows land to be expropriated if it does not fulfill its ''social function.'' Tens of thousands of peasants have won title after occupying idle land, but millions remain landless, and their leaders run huge risks. Other victims are rubber tappers who live in the forests claimed and burned by ranchers and farmers. The ranchers have great political power in rural Brazil and in Congress. They have little to fear from the justice system or the police, who have themselves massacred the landless. In 1996, 19 peasants were killed and dozens injured when they clashed with military police in Para State. Last year three police commanders were acquitted of the massacre after a trial marred by evidence-tampering and accusations of jury bribery. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso criticized the verdict. His government supports some land reform, but the ranchers' lobby has been able to block progress. After the landless movement occupied government ministries recently, Mr. Cardoso cracked down, establishing a federal police unit to deal with the movement and making it harder for those who occupy land to win title to it. But Brazil's state and federal authorities also feel pressure from sectors of the Catholic Church, environmentalists and the growing movement of the landless, who can mobilize a network of supporters abroad. On controversial issues, these voices can be persuasive. Para has now ordered a new trial for the police accused of the 1996 massacre. Ranchers had sought a change in forestry laws that could have allowed a 25 percent increase in the clearing of Amazon forests. Last month in Congress, the legislation was unexpectedly defeated. Mr. Amorim's sentence is perhaps the most significant victory in the courts. The challenge for Brazil, however, is to do justice and make fair land decisions even in the cases that never make headlines. | Brazil's Rural Violence |
1207205_1 | ourselves that we really don't know what's going on. If I've found something and say, ''Hey, I know what's happening here,'' I've probably missed other stuff. It's a weird job where you have to do these sorts of things, continually say to yourself, ''I don't have the whole story; I need to learn more.'' Usually, the stuff we find has been put in in a hurry. People will put something in in a way that lets them get in and out quickly. That means that we tend to find things above dropped ceilings, stuck under desks and hidden behind books. Not long ago, our company, which is part of Future Focus Inc., did the home of a communications company president who had three cordless phones. All were defective, easy to intercept. We put him in the truck, which we call the sweep mobile, and drove half a mile away. His mansion was on a hill, so the conversations we picked up for him were being broadcast farther than average. He was pretty shocked. Our advice to him and other people with cordless phones is to smash them with a hammer unless they are a particular type that uses red spectrum modulation. That technology is very good in preventing people from listening to you. One case involved a whistle-blower in a government organization who said people were monitoring her conversations at home. Her co-workers had found out how to use her home answering machine to listen into the room. About 50 percent of home answering machines you buy in the store can do that. I explain to people that we cost as much as plumbers do. There are always low bidders, but they may be criminals who want access to bosses' offices so they can plant something. Or maybe they're just wannabe spy-fighters who spent $500 for equipment when you really need to be bringing in something like $100,000 worth. What I enjoy most about the job is the thrill of the hunt. The most satisfying one we did was a woman who called up and said, ''I think I'm going crazy.'' We typically don't work for people who are crazy. Our work would not change their lives, and unless our report can change someone's life, we feel we are stealing their money. But we found a number of listening devices in her home. She really did feel better. MY JOB | On the Anti-Snoop Patrol |
1210515_0 | Baseball may still have a place in America's heart, but the game is engraved on Cuba's soul. Or so you are told in tonight's earnest PBS documentary ''Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball and the United States.'' As Cuba was trying to free itself from Spanish rule in the second half of the 19th century, ''baseball seemed to represent American values,'' the narrator says. It was modern and democratic compared with Spain's national pastime, bullfighting, which was ''ceremonial and brutal.'' You may never have thought much about the differences between baseball and bullfighting. And you won't ponder them too long tonight, as a succession of facts and observations are popped at you like balls off a fungo bat. The film bounces back and forth among impressions of today's ballplayers in Cuba; glimpses of the two games last year between a Cuban team and the Baltimore Orioles; snatches of history, represented by grainy newsreels and vintage baseball cards; and talking heads, often talking in Spanish (with English subtitles). These include several Cubans who defected for freedom, which cannot be measured, and for major league salaries, which can be. Much of this is interesting. You'll learn, for instance, that while Fidel Castro was a pitcher, the oft-repeated claim that he was a major league prospect is apocryphal. And you'll learn that when Mr. Castro led a successful revolution in 1959, a minor league team called the Havana Sugar Kings was slated for elevation to the majors, which would have made it the first such team outside the United States. (When Mr. Castro banned professional sports, the Sugar Kings moved to Jersey City.) The film, written by Aaron Woolf and Christopher White and directed by Mr. Woolf, notes that Cubans have played professional baseball in the United States since the 1870's. And it bows briefly in the direction of one of the highest-profile Cubans among current major leaguers, Orlando Hernandez, El Duque, who escaped his homeland to pitch for, of all teams, the Yankees. Wearing its heart on its sleeve like a team insignia, the film finds nobility in the hardscrabble life of today's Cubans. ''To me the greatest baseball experience in the world is going to Cuba,'' says the American baseball historian Peter Bjarkman, ''because you can go to a place where the grass is greener. You can go to a place where players play for the love of the game.'' But there is | It's About Love of the Game (Not Salaries in the Majors) |
1209112_1 | indication of just how sensitive the issue of policy toward Cuba remains. Supporters of a commission said American policy toward Cuba was outdated. ''Castro is in no position to export revolution, none whatsoever,'' said Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, alluding to the country's financial crisis. ''According to the Pentagon, Castro represents no real threat to national security. So times have changed. ''We have in place a policy that has not worked in 40 years. It was a different world in the 1960's.'' But the measure's opponents argued that nothing has changed, so Cuba should not be rewarded by a commission likely to recommend ending the embargo. ''This is the same regime that sent its troops to Africa to further the cause of Communism,'' said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, who said he supported lifting sanctions against the Communist government of Vietnam but only after it carried out new policies. ''It's the same regime that continues to repress and oppress its people.'' The question of whether the United States should alter its policy toward Cuba, specifically on trade, took on new life this year, when a powerful coalition that included agribusiness giants increased pressure on lawmakers from farming states to open new markets. Human rights and major business groups have also lobbied extensively on this issue. Two Senate and House delegations sympathetic to weakening or lifting sanctions recently visited Cuba to see conditions there. House Republican leaders continue to grapple over how to proceed on a measure, which some of them oppose, that would permit the export of food and medicine to Cuba under certain restrictions. The measure, sponsored by Representative George Nethercutt, a Washington Republican, has delayed consideration of the huge farm spending bill. A similar provision has passed the Senate. While opponents of the bill, including Cuban-American lawmakers, say they will fight to block it, there have been recent signs of compromise. The House Republican whip, Tom DeLay of Texas, who has been a staunch supporter of the embargo, is now trying to broker an agreement between anti-embargo House members and Florida lawmakers who oppose sales to Cuba, his spokesman said today. The spokesman, Jonathan Baron, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that while Mr. DeLay ''remains opposed to easing sanctions on rogue states, including Cuba, whenever there are disagreements in the Republican conference, the leadership works to resolve them.'' Last weekend, the Cuban American | Senate Kills Plan for Panel To Review Cuban Embargo |
1209164_0 | In an area often regarded as the cradle of the digital revolution, Gov. George W. Bush warned today that American schoolchildren were not being adequately prepared for the demands of jobs in high technology, and he proposed spending an additional $2.3 billion over five years in federal funds to improve math and science education in public schools. ''I know we can do better,'' Mr. Bush told educators at De Anza College here in the heart of the Silicon Valley. The Texas governor frequently cited tests of children in 21 countries, including the United States, as yardsticks of just how much room for improvement there was. ''This is America,'' Mr. Bush said. ''There's no reason for us to be next to last in math. There's no reason for us to be last in physics. We're the greatest country in the world. We ought to be first.'' Beyond those exhortations to greatness, however, Mr. Bush talked little about the proposals he was making, which were spelled out instead in documents distributed by his aides. These plans were the latest in a series of education initiatives that Mr. Bush has made over the last three months, and they reflected his focus on education as an issue with which he can appeal to moderate voters. Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, called for the federal government to spend an additional $1 billion over five years on the establishment of a Math and Science Partnership Fund to encourage universities and colleges to interact with public schools in ways that enhanced math and science instruction for children in kindergarten through the 12th grade. Mr. Bush proposed an additional $1 billion over five years to increase the value of the federal Pell grants that are given to low-income students to defray the cost of college education. Under the governor's plan, young people who have taken college-level math or science courses in high school can qualify for a grant that would be worth an additional $1,000. The average Pell grant, Mr. Bush's aides said, is worth about $3,000. Finally, Mr. Bush called for an additional $345 million over five years to encourage college graduates who majored in science or math to spend at least five years teaching in public schools in needy areas. Under current federal programs, graduates who do this can have $5,000 of their student loans forgiven or paid by the federal government. Mr. Bush | Bush Proposes $2.3 Billion for Math and Science Teaching |
1209051_1 | chains are also making a point of stocking organic ingredients, but not with quite the same fervor. A number of factors account for the differences between the two countries. The simple answer is a series of food scares there that have made consumers uneasy. ''We have lived in a culture of food scares,'' said Alan Wilson, an agronomist and organic food consultant for Waitrose, citing organophosphates in carrots, salmonella in eggs and B.S.E. in cattle. The latter refers to mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which destroys the brain. For several years, the British government insisted that it could not be passed from cattle to humans. Then, in 1997, the government acknowledged that B.S.E. could be transmitted. The admission was followed by the appearance of genetically modified foods, and for Britons that apparently was the last straw. Mr. Wilson said the furor last year over genetically modified foods occurred because ''it threatened to take away choice from British consumers.'' He continued: ''Any science that comes to market has to benefit consumers, and the presentation of G.M. foods here was very, very poor. So G.M. was just another gift to the organic movement,'' helping to speed up its popularity. As in the United States, organic means free of genetically modified ingredients. Despite food scares in the United States -- salmonella in chickens and eggs, listeria in ready-to-eat meats and E. coli O157:H7 in a number of products -- Americans appear to trust government food safety agencies more than the British do. Craig Sams, an American who is founder and president of Whole Earth Foods in England and lives there but travels often to the United States, said there were three fundamental differences between attitudes here and there: regulations, the press and the English connectedness to the countryside. He could have added vegetarianism. For generations, meatless diets have had a much higher profile in England than in this country, where few even knew what vegetarians were until the 1960's. The United States has no national organic standards, Mr. Sams said, which ''undermines the market and deters big companies from going in.'' When the European Union's organic regulations went into effect in 1993, it improved credibility, he said, ''because everyone knew what organic meant.'' In England, the press has been very supportive of organics, Mr. Sams said. Food writers there are continually exposed to information from the Soil Association, which is a | Mainstream Organics: Britain Stocks Up |
1209134_2 | as many students as possible into regular classrooms -- a process known as mainstreaming -- has long been Board of Education policy, but the new plan would speed movement in that direction. The plan is the board's latest response to pressure from the federal government, which has long criticized New York City for placing too many students -- especially black and Hispanic boys -- in special education classrooms. Roughly one in eight of the school system's 1.1 million students are currently classified as disabled. Of those, more than half spend most or all of their time in specially designated classrooms, while the remainder are pulled out of regular classrooms for part of the day for special instruction tailored to their disability. The board currently spends $2 billion of its $12 billion annual budget on special education. Ms. Goldstein said yesterday that spending on special education would probably increase under the plan, although she did not have an estimate. The costs would be higher in part because the school system would need more special education teachers, many of whom would be ''team teaching'' with regular teachers in regular classrooms. Board officials hope that the plan will improve the academic performance of disabled students, most of whom lag far behind their peers. The board is under pressure to improve the performance of disabled students, because new statewide graduation standards require that all students, including those in special education, pass the rigorous Regents exams. Mr. Leahy and several other advocates said yesterday that while mainstreaming was an admirable goal for many disabled children, they were worried that schools would feel pressure to keep some children in regular classrooms who would be much better off in special education classes. ''If the goal is to put as many kids as possible into mainstream classes, I don't think the system is prepared to handle that,'' Mr. Leahy said. ''Teachers will have to really want to reach out to these children and go the extra mile with them. But you can't force every teacher in the system to go the extra mile.'' Leaders of the union representing New York City teachers also expressed concerns about the plan yesterday. Carmen Alvarez, a vice president of the United Federation of Teachers, questioned whether the board would give teachers the resources necessary to accommodate so many disabled students in regular classrooms. She also questioned how teachers would deal with students | School Board Approval Expected for Plan to Put Disabled Students in Regular Classes |
1207009_0 | To the Editor: You report that President Clinton told the graduating seniors at Carleton College that their degrees would be ''a better investment than anything Wall Street could offer'' (news article, June 11). ''Over the course of a career,'' you quote the president as saying, ''a person with a bachelor's degree will earn, on average, $600,000 more than a person who has a high school diploma.'' The average college graduate will also pay taxes on that $600,000 that far exceed the cost of education at a decent college. Wouldn't it therefore also be a good investment for the government to provide free college education for any qualified student who would otherwise be unable to attend? C. LEON HARRIS Plattsburgh, N.Y., June 11, 2000 | Making College Free |
1206984_1 | planet, said that Dr. Gilbert was the first to explain correctly why a compass always points north and the first to propose that the earth itself was a giant magnet. ''He also introduced experimental observations into science in a systematic way,'' Dr. Stern said. While the ancient Greeks and others conducted experiments, he said, Dr. Gilbert was the first person to methodically tie these observations to theories he proposed and to detail the experiments so that others could reproduce them. Because of his interest in why some objects attract others, Dr. Gilbert conducted pioneering experiments with static electricity, then called the amber effect because rubbing a dry cloth on pieces of amber causes them to attract feathers and other light objects. He found that the attractions of magnetism and static electricity were not related, but in his book he classified numerous substances that were, or were not, drawn toward amber, the Greek word for which is ''elektron.'' Dr. Gilbert called the attracted materials ''electricks'' and what drew them the ''electrick force.'' In doing so, experts say, he created the vocabulary now used to describe electricity, including terms like electron. As part of the commemoration of ''De Magnete,'' the American Geophysical Union held a seminar at its spring meeting in Washington early this month on the impact of the work on the study of magnetism. The scientific group also published a new ''book review'' of the work in its journal Eos, in which Stuart Malin and David Barraclough, members of the British Geological Survey, noted that the book pre-dated many better-known volumes remembered for ushering in the renaissance of science. ''De Magnete'' outlined a method and philosophy of experimental science that preceded by 20 years Sir Francis Bacon's now famous call for a deductive system of empirical research and observation to uncover the secrets of nature, the authors said. At a time when it was considered heresy to conduct experiments that might conflict with church teachings, or to present ideas that conflicted with past philosophy, they said, Dr. Gilbert's book stood alone. ''Recall that it was not until 1687 that Newton's 'Principia' was published,'' Dr. Malin said. And Dr. Barraclough pointed out, ''De Magnete'' also predates Kepler's ''Astronomia Nova'' (1609), in which he enunciated the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, and Galileo's ''Sidereus Nuncius'' (1610), in which the earliest telescopic observations of astronomical objects were reported. Dr. | Celebrating the Book That Ushered In the Age of Science |
1208663_0 | America Online said yesterday that it would take steps to fix flaws in its network that allowed hackers to get access to personal information about some members last week. Richard D'Amato, a spokesman for America Online, said the company did not yet have a specific number of how many member accounts were affected and what damage was done, but added that the company believes the number was about 200. The service has about 23 million subscribers. The issue came to light late last week when Observers.net, a Web site critical of AOL, said hackers had found an elaborate way to gain access to the system used by America Online's customer service representatives. Depending on their job function, those representatives can see members' names, addresses and other information, like the last time they logged on. A smaller number of representatives has access to the users full credit card numbers. Mr. D'Amato said the company did not believe that any credit card numbers were obtained in the incident last week. The breach involved sending an electronic mail message -- with an attached program file -- to a customer service representative or other America Online employee who has access to customer information. E-mail attachments were used in the recent worldwide outbreak of the ''I Love You'' bug and are potentially very destructive because if the recipient opens an attached program, the bug can allow access to the user's entire system. In this case, Mr. D'Amato said, the virus did two things. First it identified an AOL employee's password and sent it back to the e-mail's sender. And second, it created an electronic link between the AOL internal network and the hacker. Using what amounted to a covert relay station, the hacker could use the password to look up information about users. Mr. D'Amato declined to say what steps America Online was taking to prevent the abuse. But he did confirm the report on Observers.net that one measure would require AOL employees to log on using a small electronic device that displays a numeric code that changes every minute. Mr. D'Amato said that unlike other incidents in which hackers broke into the computer systems of companies, the damage done would be moderate because the hacker would have to type in each user's name separately to obtain the personal information. ''It's not like they can download a file with 10,000 users' credit card numbers,'' he | After Attack by Hackers, AOL Tightens Data Access |
1204490_23 | fetched the Rube Goldberg device from the basement. While setting up the apparatus, they talked about the research they were conducting for their Intel projects. Rube would not have approved. Through an uncle who is an orthopedic surgeon, Daniel had found a position working in a lab at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, testing the effect of naturally occurring estrogens (known as phyto-estrogens) on bone-forming cells known as osteoblasts; this has suddenly become a hot avenue of research lately because of concerns about hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women. Etan, meanwhile, was working with psychiatric researchers at Columbia University who were investigating the biology of several drugs that seemed to mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia. ''Ready?'' Etan said, with a sly self-aware smile, after they had set up the device. ''Ready to be amazed?'' It doesn't translate readily into words but involved a golf ball rolling down a tube that hit a lever (which caused cereal to fall into a bowl) and then knocked another ball, which caused a container of milk to tip over, slowly filling the cereal bowl until the weight completed a circuit underneath the bowl that turned on a motor, which removed a nail from the lower end of the tubing, allowing the golf ball to descend and then plop into a little basket and activate a pulley, which lifted it, as the rules required, exactly 30 centimeters above the surface, returning the ball to its starting height. It was a little hard to reconcile the geeky exuberance of their creation with the heavy exertion usually required to maintain teenage indifference, and I was curious if Daniel and Etan felt the same defensiveness that characterized the students in the picture from my yearbook. ''We're friends with people on the lacrosse team that we hang out with,'' Daniel explained. ''We hang out with a lot of kids who are, quote, popular, although they do make fun of us all the time and call us nerds. But,'' he added with a triumphant smile, ''we have better grades than they do.'' Perhaps the shrewdest observation came from Lauren Mikulski. ''I think a lot of people perceive that the Intel students are supersmart and dorks,'' she admitted. ''But there is so much cultural diversity at Midwood, I guess, that you don't see it as much.'' Brilliance, in other words, is just another form of diversity at a school with an | The Smart Set |
1204784_1 | been told that men were much more likely to open the 'I Love You' worm than women,'' said George Cybenko, a computer scientist at Dartmouth University and a founder of the Institute of Security Technology Studies. Indeed, the ''I Love You'' message was so simple and beguiling that in some cases it hoodwinked even the most sophisticated computer programmers. Steven Capps, a senior Microsoft software designer, padded downstairs at 5 a.m. on the morning of the ''I Love You'' infection, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at his computer to read his e-mail. It happened to be his birthday, so as he scanned his mailbox he thought he saw a love note from his wife. After opening the program Mr. Capps quickly realized his error and managed to delete the bug before it spread widely. ''What I remember thinking was, ''How did Marie manage to sneak downstairs late at night to send me a birthday note?'' he said sheepishly. Mr. Capps was not alone. Hewlett-Packard & Company acknowledged last week that its computers suffered more than 700,000 infections from the ''I Love You'' worm -- more than 500,000 in the United States. The total damage -- primarily time spent restoring files and cleaning out clogged e-mail systems -- may reach $950 million, according to ICSA.net, a computer security company that tracks the cost of computer infections. Two weeks ago, the far more lethal ''NewLove'' bug began infecting the address books of users of the popular Microsoft Outlook e-mail program, sending itself to every person on the list. But instead of delivering the endearingly named document LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.VBS, NewLove cloaked itself by snatching a recent document name from its victim's hard disk and using that name in the subject line of all subsequent messages sent from the address list, destroying data on the hard drives of affected computers. Last week, the ''Resume'' bug urged e-mail recipients to look at a job seeker's fabulous curriculum vitae, helpfully included as an attachment -- which, of course served as an electronic Trojan Horse. Despite their cleverness, however, both ''NewLove'' and ''Resume'' were stopped in their tracks. ''If 'NewLove' had come before 'I Love You' it would have spread more slowly but we would have had a bigger disaster,'' said Peter Tippett, chief technology officer of ICSA. Mr. Tippett, who was trained as an epidemiologist before starting an antivirus software company in the | Ideas & Trends; Even a Worm Needs Love |
1204776_0 | New York City residents have long hoped to reclaim their Hudson River shoreline south of 59th Street by restoring rotting piers and replacing the parking lots and other bleak spaces that now exist with an inviting mix of walkways, playing fields and modest commercial development. The last major obstacle to that dream has now been removed. On Thursday, the United States Army Corps of Engineers gave final approval for work to begin. The focus now shifts from the approval process, which has had supporters of the park in a state of high anxiety for two years, to the Hudson River Park Trust, which is in charge of the project and has no further reason for delay. There is $100 million in state and city money in the bank. Architectural plans should be completed in short order and contracts put out for bid, with actual construction to commence as soon as possible. The plan envisions a five-mile-long waterfront esplanade, from Battery Park City north to 59th Street, with bicycle and running paths and a narrow buffer of lawn and open space between the West Side Highway and the river. The park's main attraction, however, will be 13 huge piers, now falling apart, that will be rebuilt for recreational purposes and for a limited number of small-scale commercial enterprises like restaurants. In September 1988, the State Legislature approved a bill authorizing the park. But the project could not proceed without corps approval. Opponents, worried about development and the impact on the river's striped bass, urged the corps to undertake a full environmental impact statement, a process that could have delayed the project for two more years. The corps chose not to do so for several reasons. First, New York State had already done a massive impact statement. The corps also decided that the park would have ''no significant impact'' on the marine environment and that a full-scale federal assessment was therefore not required under the National Environmental Policy Act. This page has long argued that environmental impact statements are an essential tool for protecting the nation's natural resources. But in this case such an assessment would have been largely redundant. Moreover, environmental law requires a full-scale federal assessment only when preliminary investigation suggests that a project might have ''significant impact.'' The corps was right to conclude that this project would not. All the reconstruction work will be done within the ''footprint'' of | The Hudson River Park, on Track |
1204770_5 | those of the Republican right. In early 1998, or around the time the Republicans took their impeachment case against President Clinton to the Senate, the Democrats gave way. The previous fall a congressional commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, a former defense secretary, had concluded that ''rogue states'' could acquire ballistic missile technologies, and North Korea had test-fired a long-range missile out over the Pacific. In January the Clinton administration pledged funding for the deployment of a national missile defense system to cope with this threat. In March the Senate, with administration support, overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for a deployment. At the time White House officials commented that the administration's support for the bill would help to defuse a potent political issue for the Republicans in the campaign of 2000. Last fall, Mr. Clinton announced he would make a final deployment decision this summer -- in the very midst of the presidential campaign. This determination clearly had little to do with technology, for the schedule did not permit time for adequate testing -- and since then one of the two tests has failed. Rather, it had to do with the fear that the Republicans would call Democrats weak on defense. In their unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Russians to agree to the deployment, administration officials assured them that they could defeat the system if they kept 1,000 or more strategic nuclear weapons on full alert. This was hardly a bargain for either country, given the decay of the Russian early-warning system and the increasing real threat of an accidental launch. In the midst of these technological and diplomatic embarrassments for the administration, Governor Bush revived the political issue by calling for the entire Reagan program: Star Wars, radical nuclear-arms reductions, the de-alerting of nuclear forces and the sharing of antimissile technology with our allies and possibly the Russians as well. The proposal is, of course, self-contradictory; it is also wildly implausible in that the Pentagon is no more likely to agree to give away advanced American technology than it ever was, and no country except the United States can afford an open-ended missile defense program. But then, the majority of Americans did not notice any of these problems when Reagan made the proposal 15 years ago. Frances Fitzgerald is the author of most recently, ''Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.'' | The Poseurs of Missile Defense |
1204828_0 | The 1.2 million college graduates in the nation's class of 2000 are entering an unusually strong job market that is a result of a flourishing economy and, especially, the boom in high technology. From Northeastern University in Boston to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, from the University of Michigan to the University of Texas, colleges, universities and professional schools are reporting a record number of recruiters competing to hire students in a time of low unemployment. Engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities in the East have been flown to Silicon Valley and Seattle for audiences with billionaire executives, while investment banks have flown Stanford University students to New York for high-priced dinners accompanied by job offers. Some of the graduates have landed jobs paying more than $60,000 a year. With unemployment near its lowest level in three decades, despite the increase in unemployment announced on Friday, salaries overall for this year's graduating class are up 6 percent over last year's, job placement experts say. ''It's gangbusters,'' said Carol S. Lyons, dean of the department of career services at Northeastern University. ''There are even more jobs now than last year. Obviously the hot market is high-tech, but if you're any kind of a business major, you're in fine shape. And even if you're a liberal arts major there are plenty of opportunities.'' But those in computer sciences are doing best of all. Many technology companies are offering signing bonuses of $5,000, with stock options often added on top. One graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., has taken an $82,000-a-year job in Silicon Valley. This year's computer science graduates have landed jobs averaging $48,500, while graduates in accounting average $37,200 and liberal arts graduates, $29,100, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which represents employers and college job placement officers. Emily Lowe, a senior at Stanford University who majored in product design engineering with a minor in computer science, said she will earn about $60,000 next year with a software company in San Diego, and that is before the $5,000 signing bonus and stock options. ''I had five job offers, including one from a company in Arizona that agreed to fly me to San Diego every weekend to visit my fiance,'' she said. But some university officials see troubles behind this bright picture. A smaller percentage of students from this | All College Graduates, Please Apply |
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