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1819682_1 | ''The ads are like a Monty Python sketch,'' said Dev Ravindran, a software developer from Jersey City who created a blog to track and humorously critique the ads (lowermybillswatch.blogspot.com). ''Some of them are so out of the blue they make no sense.'' Roger Cadenhead, an author and blogger, resorted to tinkering with his computer to block all ads from the company. ''I was trying to read a news article and realized the dancing mortgage people were eliminating all rational thought from my brain,'' he said. There may be few online ads less aimed at a specific audience than the LowerMyBills dancers, who are equally likely to perform their fanciful boogie on a bulletin board for hockey enthusiasts as next to an article related to home finance or on a mortgage-related site. (They also appear on the Web site of The New York Times.) Matt R. Coffin, the co-founder and chief executive of LowerMyBills, said the company's ad campaign represented a return to traditional advertising principles rather than an embrace of the latest conventional wisdom. ''Building a brand is often about being different, and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to attract the attention of consumers interested in lowering their bills,'' he said. Mr. Coffin said that the company closely tracks the performance of its ads, removing the ones that do not attract clicks, and that the banners are highly effective at getting Internet users to fill out loan applications. ''If you keep seeing the same ads, that means they are working,'' he said. Internet companies like LowerMyBills are called lead generators because they take loan applications filled out by customers who click the ads and give them to actual lenders like Citibank, which pay them for the referrals. The company's success hinges on buying lots of low-cost ad space on Web sites and then persuading users to click. But on Web bulletin boards, the ads are drawing a lot of criticism. In one discussion of the company, a user calling herself Jane Dough wrote, ''Even if they had the best interest rate around, I would still find myself thinking, 'But aren't they the cheesy company with the stupid dancing people?' '' In another discussion last week on the site of the band the Beastie Boys, fans of the group pondered the prevalence of the ads and in particular the woman on the rooftop, who appears to have | Don't Like the Dancing Cowboys? Results Say You Do |
1854384_2 | it's a modest beginning.'' Though Wall Street has learned the consequences of paying too little attention to messages zipping through its corporate pipelines -- ask Merrill Lynch about Henry Blodget -- other ways of communicating have cropped up faster than regulators have been able to address them. What has emerged in the latest revision is a series of recommendations on how to monitor text-based communications from these firms. The overarching principle: if firms cannot supervise or review the messages, or if the sender cannot be identified, they should consider blocking them from the workplace. The goal was not to deprive bankers, traders and brokers of their BlackBerrys or market terminals, said Ben A. Indek, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and a committee member, but to offer companies guidance on how to monitor their use. While many firms have already addressed some of these concerns -- like blocking sites for personal e-mail messages -- Ms. Vogel said that many Wall Street executives felt that regulators needed to address the issue more broadly. In addition, the guidelines suggest that brokers should limit the use of their personal cellphones and that companies should not allow the use of instant messaging or pin messaging if they cannot monitor it properly. Among the discussions at the inaugural meeting was defining ''electronic communications.'' The task took three hours, Ms. Vogel said. One of the ground rules the committee worked under was that any proposals would emerge as principles rather than rules. The decision, members said, underscored concerns about cost, as smaller firms worried that they could not institute the types of systems used at larger companies. Instead, the proposal urges firms to consider what is appropriate for their size and business models. ''We didn't necessarily want mechanistic guidance, that you must look at X number of e-mails,'' Marc Menchel, executive vice president and general counsel at NASD, said. Another reason was a recognition that a list of guidelines could more easily accommodate the rapid evolution of technology. Rather than a list that prohibited means of communication, the guidelines lay the groundwork for a wider scope, not limiting regulators from addressing the BlackBerrys of tomorrow. Gaining consensus within the committee was challenging, especially on the inclusion of internal e-mail communications, an item flagged by NASD and the S.E.C. Several firms pointed out that certain kinds of messages, like those between bankers and analysts, are prohibited. | Wall Street to Get Guidelines on E-Mail |
1854387_3 | to spend on starting a business. American labor markets are flexible enough to create a large number of jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. Teenagers are more likely to acquire work experience, and they are more likely to earn a small amount of capital for financing a start-up enterprise. It is a common American dream to want to start one's own business, and this cultural influence spreads to the young. It sometimes replaces school and family as a driving force. Ben, in an e-mail message, cited the openness of American culture. ''If starting a business wasn't 'cool,' '' he wrote, ''I doubt very many teens would partake.'' In the relatively nonegalitarian United States, almost everyone likes a winner. Ben also cited outsourcing, in this case the ability to buy cheap programming from abroad, as helping business start-ups. The new ideas and business principles behind the Web have carved out the ideal territory for the young. A neophyte is more likely to see that music can come from computers rather than just from stores or radios, or that it is best to book a flight without using a travel agent. Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University, notes that many young people are blessed by an absence of preconceptions about Internet businesses. Years of experience are critical to refining and improving a long-familiar product, like bread. But completely new, outside-the-box ideas -- which typically come from the young -- are more important for founding Napster or YouTube. The Web also makes the human face of a business less important and allows the young to put forward their talents while disguising their inexperience. It is well known that American companies have been the most successful at turning information technology into productivity advantages. In part, this is because of American success in mobilizing young talent. In 2006, BusinessWeek ranked Ben as one of America's top young entrepreneurs, and he is only this fall enrolling at Claremont McKenna College. Whatever Ben does next, his story shows that economic advantages start early. On a national level, these successes are rooted in the commercial, competitive, philanthropic, nonegalitarian and open nature of American society. America's economic head start probably won't go away anytime soon. ECONOMIC SCENE Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book ''Discover Your Inner Economist.'' He can be reached at tcowen@gmu.edu. | The Loose Reins on U.S. Teenagers Can Produce Trouble or Entrepreneurs |
1852727_1 | marketplace, the companies have become aware of the significant changes in the availability and price of the best woods. In an unusual alliance, the four guitar makers have joined with Greenpeace in one of many efforts to bring attention to forest management and sustainability. Bob Taylor, president and co-founder of Taylor Guitars in El Cajon, Calif., says that he has observed one vital wood species after another become unavailable in the 35 years he has been in business. ''I used to buy Brazilian rosewood back in the 1970s at the lumber yard for $2 a square foot,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''Now it's impossible for us to make a guitar out of it and ship it outside the U.S. If we do get a little bit of it, it's extremely expensive. The cutting of it has all but halted.'' He added that ''Adirondack spruce is unavailable. Mahogany was so plentiful it was a commodity. Now only specialty cutters are getting it, and the prices have gone through the roof. All these things happened just in my lifetime.'' Greenpeace headed the Musicwood Coalition, as it is called, in January 2006, to promote better logging practices, particularly in the rain forest region in southeast Alaska. Because of its unique geography -- a thin strip of land in the Alaska panhandle with the ocean on one side, huge mountains on the other -- this temperate forest is considered one of the rarest on the planet. Its majestic trees -- Sitka spruce that are hundreds of years old -- have been clear cut by private timber companies, and Greenpeace has worked to encourage these landowners to try new approaches that would help preserve the ancient forests. Specifically, Greenpeace wants the private logging companies to apply for certification by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental organization that would require the adoption of different logging practices. Scott Paul, the forest campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, said that if the current practices continued, the last old-growth Sitka spruce trees would be gone in just six or seven years. ''This scared the hell out of them,'' Mr. Paul said of the guitar makers. For them, Sitka spruce is a precious commodity, a tonal wood used for the soundboards in acoustic guitars and pianos. To achieve the sound that guitarists cherish, the Sitka spruce, at least 250 years old, has long been a required material. Mr. Paul said that the amount | Saving Trees Is Music To Guitar Makers' Ears |
1852656_2 | cashier, Ms. Mahone said she exclaimed to the woman behind her, '''Girl, I'm having a moment here and she's got to hurry so I can get the hell out of here!'' ''I know what you're going through,'' the woman commiserated. Then, two women ahead of Ms. Mahone caught sight of her frantically fanning herself and laughed sympathetically. Afterward, she said, in the parking lot, the group debated synthetic hormone replacement therapy versus herbal remedies, and Ms. Mahone, the author of ''Whatever! A Baby Boomer's Journey into Middle Age,'' passed out her business card to the women who promised to buy her book. ''It opens up a whole dialogue,'' Ms. Mahone said. ''We're laughing and making women who feel less comfortable know that it's O.K. We've embraced it. It's our exclusive club.'' In New York last February, a similar impromptu bonding session occurred at the Park Avenue office of Dr. Alan Matarasso, a plastic surgeon. Four women in their late 40s to mid-50s, all strangers, sat wordlessly in the waiting room until one, Joanna Bonaro, 42, an actress, was called up to fill out paperwork. She began chatting with the office manager, Lisa Holderby, 46, who mentioned that she had recently had a hysterectomy, which can trigger menopause. Coincidentally, Ms. Bonaro had undergone one, too. Within minutes, the two other women chimed in. ''We started talking about hot flashes and having to carry around extra T-shirts because of the sweating,'' Ms. Holderby said. She remembered when these conversations were so unheard of that mothers were even mum about the subject with their daughters. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, some 21 million women are between the ages of 45 and 59, the span during which menopause usually starts and ends. They make up nearly 20 percent of all women in the United States and almost 7 percent of the total American population. It's hardly unusual, then, to overhear a middle-age woman grousing about a restaurant's lack of air-conditioning -- in the dead of winter. And given today's openness and even exhibitionism -- including tell-all memoirs, diaristic blogging and YouTube stardom -- a personal condition that is common and natural is no reason for discretion, many women say. Indeed, as far more private matters -- erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostates, sexually transmitted diseases -- are served up on sitcoms and in commercials, it hardly seems daring to air one's menopausal memory | Listen Up, Everybody: I'm in Menopause |
1854113_3 | in the 17th century, have featured Socrates as a character. But Target Margin's latest offering, he said, may well be the first one in which a young African-American woman plays the part. She is Stephanie Weeks, but during ''Dinner Party'' all the actors use their first names. So Stephanie, Han Nah and Steven replace Socrates, Agathon and Aristophanes. The setting is a contemporary loft, and the music comes from a D.J. offering Lauryn Hill, Gotan Project and Seu Jorge. And, significantly, women invade the formerly all-male precincts of ''The Symposium.'' Much of the conversation in ''The Symposium'' involved pederasty, but Mr. Herskovits's production instead features both homosexual and heterosexual relations between adults. The play's dramaturge, Kathleen Kennedy Tobin, defends this choice, arguing: ''The classical dynamic of man-youth love doesn't exist today. There's no equivalent in modern society for this accepted power-education-desire dynamic. You'd have to set it in ancient Greece, with a long program note.'' Mr. Herskovits said that he chose to ''sacrifice an allegiance to that bit of history in order to favor what I believe are the deep truths about love and human relationships.'' Neither Ms. Tobin nor Mr. Herskovits said they wanted to create a show requiring a philosophy degree to understand. Using contemporary settings and actors' own names was intended to make the proceedings clearer, Ms. Tobin said. She and Mr. Herskovits have walked the cast through the original Greek and several translations to help them create an improvised, idiomatic script. Mr. Herskovits said that ''the decision to improvise language is a choice in tension with the literary qualities of the speeches,'' but he felt that ''the idiomatic freedom and instantaneous texture of the performances make the game worth the candle.'' He described Plato's language as so much ''smoke.'' He encouraged the actors to clutch at ''the core of thought'' behind it, to ''scrape away all of the encrustation of scholarship and translation and expectation.'' The theme and tension in ''Dinner Party'' come from asking, what is love, and how does it differ from sexual desire? ''Plato really is interested in getting beyond human erotic relationships, but he always remembers that that's what's driving us all,'' Mr. Herskovits said. ''It isn't either-or. It's both. That's why it's a Target Margin show.'' ''Dinner Party'' and ''The Argument'' open tomorrow and run together through June 30 at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 255-5793, Ext. 11. | Socrates as a Woman, and Other Twists on the Ancients |
1855559_8 | Radiologists and other medical specialists have a different perspective on patients and their diseases. As one aphorism puts it: A physician sees a patient at the bedside and imagines the disease. A radiologist sees the disease on the film and imagines the patient. As X-ray technology improved, my father often replaced older machines with newer, larger and more powerful ones that produced better pictures. Ultimately he had to expand the office to the point where only a rock garden was left between the front of the house and the street. The equipment often broke down. When the X-ray repairmen came, he joined them in spreading across the floor the diagrams needed to trace the complex circuitry and pinpoint the problem. His acumen was so sharp that Harvey Picker, whose company made X-ray machines, came along. I did not inherit those interests. My father was curious about the causes of the medical problems he saw and sought ways to prevent them. He drew out epidemiologic information by talking with patients. For example, he asked victims of automobile accidents about the model and color of the cars involved. Because so many victims said the color was dark, he bought only light-colored cars (much easier to see at night) and advised others to do likewise. Other conversations and observations convinced him, long before the 1964 surgeon general's report, that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. No one in our household smoked, though relatives who did died from ailments related to smoking. My father was puzzled by why so many workers at the Fore River shipyard in Quincy developed mesotheliomas and other cancers. He tried to persuade the owners to find out why. Doctors later determined that many were from asbestos. Those anecdotes and studies kindled my interest in epidemiology. Dad and other radiologists would be irked when referring doctors failed to communicate the specific symptoms and physical findings that led them to order a patient's X-rays. Such details help radiologists know what to look for. The lack of precise information is still is a common problem between radiologists and referring doctors. And that is a symptom of a much larger problem: lapses in communication among medical professionals and the public. It was partly to remedy such lapses, and partly to inform the public about medicine and its advances, that I chose the specialty I have pursued for four decades: medical journalism. THE DOCTOR'S WORLD | Radiology Was Young, And So Was I |
1855622_3 | blue-headed parrot that watched us as it plucked nuts from an almond tree. The Canal Zone watershed, according to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, is a haven of biodiversity, its dense tropical forest a buffer against erosion and silt. Abundant wildlife is a fringe benefit. Ché nudged a bucket of minnows toward me. I shook my head. ''I'd rather fly fish,'' I said, enjoying the scenery as I strung up my 8-weight fly rod. Ché shrugged, and spit over the transom. Then he pulled an empty one-liter Pepsi bottle from the bilge. He had wound three yards of heavy monofilament hand line around it and tucked a rusted bait hook underneath. ''Feel free to fish, Ché,'' I said. Before I could finish the sentence, he was hauling in his first peacock bass, and grunting for effect. He motioned at the bait bucket again, eyeing my fly rod with suspicion. I refused, then tied on my fly -- a small green and yellow cork popper, and flipped it out. A bass rose and inhaled it with a splash. I pulled the line tight. My reel ran. Peacocks, nicknamed sergeants by Canal Zone troops for their stripes (sargentos in Spanish), are native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in Brazil, not Panama. They appeared in the canal around 1958, much to the delight of local fishermen. After a few belly-flop style jumps, we hauled the fish aboard and admired its bright colors, smeared like moist paint along its flanks: green, gold and black stripes and the trademark ''third eye'' on its tail. I asked my wife to take a picture. Despite our early success, we caught nothing more that morning. Recent heavy rains, Ché said, had turned the fish off. On the way back to the dock, we saw another enormous tanker ship, this one more impressive than the first. Multicolored cargo containers lined its deck like shoeboxes at a factory store. It was now or never. ''Stop, stop!'' I yelled in Spanish. Ché hit the kill switch on the motor, and the boat jolted and spun. I took my peacock bass from the cooler behind my seat, then vaulted to the bow, fish in hand. The freighter passed behind me down the main channel of the canal. ''O.K., now!'' I said. My wife snapped the photograph -- me, a peacock and the Panama Canal -- then we looked back at | For the Angler, a Flash of Color Among the Freighters |
1855518_3 | yet been determined, Mr. Tepper said. One option is to hold the land until the state can purchase it. The conservancy could also sell some of the property to a timber investment management organization that would oversee the sustainable harvest of the trees but keep out residential development. Eventually some parts of the property being sold -- which has been closed to the public since Ulysses S. Grant was president -- could be opened for limited public recreational use, though that has not yet been decided. For now, access is generally limited to scenic views along Blue Ridge Road and other thoroughfares that border Finch lands. In the recent past, some paper companies in New York have sold only the development rights to their Adirondack lands while retaining ownership. Adam Blumenthal, managing general partner of Blue Wolf Capital Management, one of the partners in the new holding company, said that selling the property outright was considered the better option because doing so brought an infusion of capital that ''provided a strong financial basis for the mill to go forward while also assuring fiber supply for the long term.'' John F. Sheehan, of the Adirondack Council, an environmental group, said the 161,000 acres -- which include what he called some of the wildest country in the Adirondack Park -- are ''crucial to the park's biological diversity and completeness in terms of ecological protection.'' He said that continuing timber operations that provide jobs and have been sustainably managed is considered compatible with the Adirondack Park's preservation goals. According to biological inventories prepared by the conservancy, the Finch property is home to 95 different animal species, including 37 that are considered rare in New York. The land also supports 91 species of birds. The Hudson River Gorge, which is sometimes called New York's Grand Canyon, flows through the property. With this acquisition, the Nature Conservancy has protected 556,572 acres in the Adirondacks since 1971. The group financed the $110 million Finch purchase with loans from the Open Space Conservancy, the land acquisition arm of the Open Space Institute. The John Hancock Life Insurance Company is continuing an existing mortgage. Mr. Tepper said the conservancy would undertake a major fund-raising project to cover the purchase price. And over the next year to 18 months, the conservancy will meet with community leaders, lease holders and the state to determine how best to manage the land. | Conservancy Buys Large Area of Adirondack Wilderness |
1855601_1 | Novomer has received money from the Department of Energy, New York State and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Coates imagines CO2 being diverted from factory emissions into an adjacent facility and turned into plastic. The search for biocomposite materials dates from 1913, when both a French and a British scientist filed for patents on soy-based plastic. ''There was intense competition between agricultural and petrochemical industries to win the market on polymers,'' said Bernard Tao, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue. Much of the early research on bioplastics was supported by Henry Ford, who believed strongly in the potential of the soybean. One famous 1941 photo shows Ford swinging an ax head into the rear of a car to demonstrate the strength of the soy-based biocomposite used to make the auto body. But soy quickly lost out to petrochemical plastics. ''In those days you had a lot more oil around, and you could dig it up all year round,'' Dr. Tao said. ''You didn't have to wait until the growing season.'' And there was another problem: permeability. The soy plastic was not waterproof. ''Petroleum is biologically and relatively chemically inert, '' explained Dr. Tao. ''Most living systems require water.'' Fossil fuels -- inexpensive, abundant and water resistant -- quickly dominated the plastics market. Now, agriculture-based plastics are back in the running, and with the type of catalysts developed by Dr. Coates and others, a whole new array of polymers has become commercially viable. Choosing carbon dioxide as a feedstock for a polymer was not an obvious choice. It was what Dr. Coates called ''a dead molecule.'' ''CO2 has almost no reactivity,'' he said, ''and that's why it's used in fire extinguishers.'' So what made him choose carbon dioxide? ''It's highly abundant and really cheap. We picked it for environmental and economic reasons, not for its reactivity.'' Mix carbon dioxide with an epoxide, he explained, ''and the two would just stare at each other for a hundred years.'' This despite the fact that epoxides are the base derivative for sticky epoxy resins and glues. The key is in finding the right catalyst to open a pathway for the carbon dioxide and the epoxide to bond. ''Catalysts are like a matchmaker who make a marriage and then can go off and make other marriages, Dr. Coates said. ''They accelerate a reaction without being consumed by that reaction.'' His catalyst -- | Sifting the Garbage for a Green Polymer |
1855613_0 | Regular aspirin use may significantly reduce the incidence of both cancer and heart disease, according to a large new study, but other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or Nsaids, have no effect. Researchers studied 22,507 postmenopausal women, following them for 10 years. All reported their aspirin and Nsaid use as part of a detailed physical and behavioral health questionnaire. None of the women had cancer or heart disease at the start of the study. After controlling for age, exercise, diet and other factors, those who used aspirin had a 16 percent reduced risk of getting cancer, and a 13 percent reduced risk of cancer death, compared with women who never used it. Aspirin use was also associated with a 25 percent reduced risk of dying from coronary artery disease and an 18 percent reduction in all-cause mortality compared with those who never took aspirin. But use of other Nsaids like ibuprofen (Advil and other brands) and naproxen (Aleve and others) had no effect, and there was no significantly reduced risk among aspirin users who were currently smoking. The study was published in the June issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The authors acknowledged that the study was not a randomized trial, that the questionnaire did not assess duration of aspirin use, and that the participants were all postmenopausal women, most of whom were white. ''It would be premature at this point to advise women to take aspirin,'' said Dr. Aditya Bardia, the lead author and a resident in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic. ''The study does produce provocative evidence that aspirin can reduce mortality, but for now it would be best that women talk to their health care provider about the risks and benefits of aspirin use.'' VITAL SIGNS | Aspirin Linked to Lower Risk Of Cancer and Heart Disease |
1854942_0 | A message to those who have applied for -- and are eagerly awaiting -- passports: relax. The Departments of State and Homeland Security announced on June 8 that through Sept. 30, United States citizens traveling to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda may enter and depart the United States by air as long as they have a government-issued photo identification and proof that they have applied for a passport. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which has required passports for all air travel outside of United States territories since Jan. 23, has created a record demand for passports, meaning longer processing and turnaround times. Details are at www.travel.state.gov. Want more ''Pirates of the Caribbean''? Hotels on Dominica, which provided some locations for the movies starring Johnny Depp (below), have created packages for pirate-crazy travelers. A seven-night experience offered by Calibishie Lodges (www.calibishie-lodges.com) includes visits to eight spots used in the movies; it is available for $599 a person, double occupancy, if reserved by June 30. A seven-day package offered by the Tamarind Tree Hotel and Restaurant (www.tamarindtreedominica.com) includes tours led by the driver for Gore Verbinski, the movie's director, starting at $1,615 a person, double, with all meals. Other pirate-themed packages are being offered by the Anchorage Hotel (www.anchoragehotel.dm), the Hummingbird Inn (www.find-us.net/hummingbird) -- ask at these two when you reserve -- and the Fort Young Hotel (www.fortyounghotel.com). American Airlines (www.aa.com) recently announced that all AAdvantage members must redeem or accrue miles at least once every 18 months to keep their accounts active. Starting Dec. 15, mileage accounts that have not changed in the previous year and a half will expire. HILARY HOWARD | COMINGS & GOINGS |
1855277_3 | Bill Cypher, 46, a plumber from Washingtonville, N.Y., submitted a pirate ship whose steering wheel is a brass faucet, for display behind velvet ropes at the Stamford mall. ''Most everything on that ship is from an electrical thing like a light fixture or a plumbing-related object,'' Mr. Cypher said. Steve Heller, 62, who made the rocket ship sculptures, had put in many years as an auto mechanic. But ever since a childhood visit to the Museum of Modern Art, where he saw a baboon head that Picasso had fashioned from two toy cars, he said, ''I knew I, too, could be an artist.'' He is used to the odd stares he gets from neighbors in Boiceville, N.Y., a tiny Ulster County town near Woodstock, when he drags home infected maple trees, so he can take advantage of the wild-looking streaks in the blond wood, or loads up on old barn siding. ''I save everything,'' he said. ''If I didn't make stuff out of it, it would have been in the crusher, or it would have ended up in a Toyota.'' Richard Benash, 53, a scrap yard dealer in Yonkers who does a lot of demolition work, completed three large sculptures for the show in less than four weeks. ''I just go,'' he said of the process. ''I lay the sheet of steel on my design table, and I just take a piece of chalk and draw my design, and then I cut it out.'' His work has a cartoonish feel to it -- in part, he said, to appeal to children. To make the whimsical lettering, he uses an air-pressured plasma cutter. One Benash on view is a funky taxi that has been parked on Summer Street, as if awaiting a fare. The wooden wheels came off a 1915 Buick, Mr. Benash said. The taxi is the only piece in the collection that viewers can experience from the inside. ''Wish I knew it was next to an automotive glass shop,'' he said of the taxi's placement. ''I would have put a broken window on it.'' He also contributed a loopy sign that says Main Street and sits, appropriately, on Main Street, just outside Stamford's old town hall. Mr. Benash, who taught leather crafts to fellow servicemen in the Army in the 1970s, began experimenting with metal after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Friends who had helped with the downtown rescue | Recycling With a Twist: When Trash Becomes Art |
1854987_1 | Pincus said. ''I pleaded with her to be transferred to Connecticut. There were two riders down, bleeding and unconscious. It was a real emergency.'' Another rider called the Bloomin' Metric emergency line, and the Norwalk police were alerted at 8:41 a.m., five minutes after Mrs. Pincus's 911 call. An ambulance was on the scene eight minutes later, and it arrived at Norwalk Hospital at 9:03 a.m., according to a hospital spokeswoman, Maura Romaine. Mrs. Pincus's friend, who asked that her name not be used, broke her skull, jaw and collarbone and required emergency brain surgery, according to the woman's sister. She returned to her home in Westchester last Tuesday. The other cyclist sustained scrapes in the fall, but was able to walk away. That episode, on May 20, exposed the intricacies and technological challenges facing the metropolitan region's enhanced 911 system as the authorities field calls from wireless phones whose signals do not follow state or county boundaries. It also pointed out flaws in Suffolk County's response to out-of-state 911 calls. While the Suffolk police routinely transfer calls from Nassau County back to the Nassau police, they had no protocol in place to transfer calls from Connecticut. Mrs. Pincus said she was so incensed by Suffolk's response that a few days after the incident, she sent letters to the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, and Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York. On June 4, the Suffolk authorities announced a new policy in which a cellphone call from Connecticut would be transferred to the Connecticut State Police, who would then find the proper department to handle the call. ''Now our officers will have those Connecticut numbers in front of them,'' said Lt. Mark Fisher, a Suffolk County Police Department spokesman. ''When it's life or death, we have to move as quickly as possible.'' The region's 911 systems have developed over the past decade to keep pace with the growth in wireless phone use and developments in phone technology. Wireless signals, which are radio waves, are picked up by one of the thousands of wireless antennas in the region, and Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have their own systems to handle emergency calls. While Connecticut and New Jersey have statewide systems, the one in New York is set up on a county-by-county basis. In Connecticut, for example, there are more than 1,500 cell towers | Cellphone Exposes Flaw in 911 System |
1855050_1 | Pincus said. ''I pleaded with her to be transferred to Connecticut. There were two riders down, bleeding and unconscious. It was a real emergency.'' Another rider called the Bloomin' Metric emergency line, and the Norwalk police were alerted at 8:41 a.m., five minutes after Mrs. Pincus's 911 call. An ambulance was on the scene eight minutes later, and it arrived at Norwalk Hospital at 9:03 a.m., according to a hospital spokeswoman, Maura Romaine. Mrs. Pincus's friend, who asked that her name not be used, broke her skull, jaw and collarbone and required emergency brain surgery, according to the woman's sister. She returned to her home in Westchester last Tuesday. The other cyclist sustained scrapes in the fall, but was able to walk away. That episode, on May 20, exposed the intricacies and technological challenges facing the metropolitan region's enhanced 911 system as the authorities field calls from wireless phones whose signals do not follow state or county boundaries. It also pointed out flaws in Suffolk County's response to out-of-state 911 calls. While the Suffolk police routinely transfer calls from Nassau County back to the Nassau police, they had no protocol in place to transfer calls from Connecticut. Mrs. Pincus said she was so incensed by Suffolk's response that a few days after the incident, she sent letters to the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, and Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York. On June 4, the Suffolk authorities announced a new policy in which a cellphone call from Connecticut would be transferred to the Connecticut State Police, who would then find the proper department to handle the call. ''Now our officers will have those Connecticut numbers in front of them,'' said Lt. Mark Fisher, a Suffolk County Police Department spokesman. ''When it's life or death, we have to move as quickly as possible.'' The region's 911 systems have developed over the past decade to keep pace with the growth in wireless phone use and developments in phone technology. Wireless signals, which are radio waves, are picked up by one of the thousands of wireless antennas in the region, and Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have their own systems to handle emergency calls. While Connecticut and New Jersey have statewide systems, the one in New York is set up on a county-by-county basis. In Connecticut, for example, there are more than 1,500 cell towers | Cellphone Exposes Flaw in 911 System |
1855062_1 | in spots, through forests and farms and little mill villages to the Delaware. It joined some grand company recently, though, when more than half its length was designated by the federal government as a ''wild and scenic river,'' the newest addition to a list of 165 rivers that includes the Yellowstone, the Snake and the Rio Grande. ''It's not working the way it's supposed to work now, and what we're doing is taking it back to where it was when the Native Americans lived here,'' said Bill Leavens, 61, who once farmed along the river and who is now president of the Musconetcong River Watershed Association, which is leading the effort to remove the dams. ''I'd like to see them all done in 10 years.'' The dams are mostly a century or more old, built at a time when the river was regarded as an electrical current to plug into: Trap some water and use it to power your mill. But the old gristmills and sawmills, like the one across from Mr. Cornell, are long defunct, and with the closing last year of the paper mill at Warren Glen, just one industry is left along the river, the graphite mill in Asbury. The dams, though, have remained, blocking fish from migrating upstream; trapping wide shallow pools of warm water without enough oxygen to sustain the trout that fishermen flock here for; and sometimes even collapsing and releasing flood waters, as several did after a big storm in 2000. ''That's when I got the letter from the state that said, 'Fix it or remove it,' '' said Mr. Cornell, who is 57, and who runs the Pump House with his wife, Eileen, and their four children. ''I didn't have the money to do either.'' He called the watershed association, looking for some help. A long, complex series of negotiations ensued, in which Mr. Cornell gave up the development rights to the acre of land he owns across the river from his restaurant, and $170,000 was raised from county, federal and private sources to remove the dam this summer. Once the equipment is in the river, the watershed association would like to keep it there long enough to take out another dam around a bend just upstream that's owned by Hackettstown. And then they'd like to head all the way downstream, to the first dam up from the Delaware, in the tiny | Putting the Wild Back Into the River |
1855042_1 | Pincus said. ''I pleaded with her to be transferred to Connecticut. There were two riders down, bleeding and unconscious. It was a real emergency.'' Another rider called the Bloomin' Metric emergency line, and the Norwalk police were alerted at 8:41 a.m., five minutes after Mrs. Pincus's 911 call. An ambulance was on the scene eight minutes later, and it arrived at Norwalk Hospital at 9:03 a.m., according to a hospital spokeswoman, Maura Romaine. Mrs. Pincus's friend, who asked that her name not be used, broke her skull, jaw and collarbone and required emergency brain surgery, according to the woman's sister. She returned to her home in Westchester last Tuesday. The other cyclist sustained scrapes in the fall, but was able to walk away. That episode, on May 20, exposed the intricacies and technological challenges facing the metropolitan region's enhanced 911 system as the authorities field calls from wireless phones whose signals do not follow state or county boundaries. It also pointed out flaws in Suffolk County's response to out-of-state 911 calls. While the Suffolk police routinely transfer calls from Nassau County back to the Nassau police, they had no protocol in place to transfer calls from Connecticut. Mrs. Pincus said she was so incensed by Suffolk's response that a few days after the incident, she sent letters to the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, and Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York. On June 4, the Suffolk authorities announced a new policy in which a cellphone call from Connecticut would be transferred to the Connecticut State Police, who would then find the proper department to handle the call. ''Now our officers will have those Connecticut numbers in front of them,'' said Lt. Mark Fisher, a Suffolk County Police Department spokesman. ''When it's life or death, we have to move as quickly as possible.'' The region's 911 systems have developed over the past decade to keep pace with the growth in wireless phone use and developments in phone technology. Wireless signals, which are radio waves, are picked up by one of the thousands of wireless antennas in the region, and Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have their own systems to handle emergency calls. While Connecticut and New Jersey have statewide systems, the one in New York is set up on a county-by-county basis. In Connecticut, for example, there are more than 1,500 cell towers | Cellphone Exposes Flaw in 911 System |
1854956_0 | The big openings of the international shows in Europe end this weekend, which means that in the United States all is still quiet on both the Eastern and Western museum fronts. But the middle of the country is delivering in three exhibitions that become more unusual as you move from South to North. THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM in Fort Worth is playing it relatively safe with ''The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, opening Sunday. What it lacks in daring it should make up for in important works by heavy hitters and, one assumes, interesting juxtapositions. The artists start with Picasso and Matisse and include Miró, Beckmann, Bacon and Dubuffet. Meanwhile, another city, another era. On Sunday the ST. LOUIS ART MUSEUM unveils ''Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style, 1800-1815,'' a show of 140 decorative objects that will examine the way Napoleon and his designers countered the frivolities of the last royal style (Rococo) with a Neo-Classical revival. Simplicity was increasingly augmented with emblems of authority borrowed from Greek, Rome and of course Egypt, where Napoleon had his first foretaste of Waterloo, in the military sense, but triumphed archeologically. The exhibition has been organized with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; many of its works have never been exhibited outside France. On Saturday THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART in Chicago will take a highly focused look at some of the contemporary art coming out of Mexico. ''Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City'' takes its title from ''social sculpture,'' Joseph Beuys's encapsulation of his ambition to work in three dimensions -- with objects, video, installation and performance -- in ways that transform society. For nearly 20 years the artists in and around Mexico City have followed his cue with unusual alacrity. Including 18 artists, a collective, an architect and way too few women, this show will take a look at the efforts of the newest recruits. | THE WEEK AHEAD: June 17 - 23; ART |
1854932_0 | MILAN doesn't cater to tourists. Its many pleasures are intended mainly for the Milanese, who are expert at making -- and spending -- money. This is the home, after all, of Armani and Prada. But step outside the central shopping district and you'll find a growing number of stores that showcase young fashion and furniture designers. There's also an exploding restaurant scene. Sri Lankan food may be as easy to find as anything cooked alla Milanese (battered and fried). In fact, the only meal that may elude you is ''The Last Supper.'' Friday 4 p.m. 1. Top Design Milan is all about design, and until July 1 the Palazzo Reale, a museum in the city's center (Piazza Duomo, 12; 39-02-875-672; www.comune.milano.it/palazzoreale), has a terrific exhibition of Italian furniture from 1900 to 2000. The show, ''Rooms With a View,'' offers an eye-catching primer on the sometimes surreal styles that have made Milan the global center of furniture design. If you aren't already a devotee of, say, Futurism or Memphis, you will be by the time you leave the building. Admission is 9 euros, or about $12.40 at $1.38 to the euro. 5:30 p.m. 2. James Bond Meets Armani Now that you know where Italian design has been, see where it's going, at the shops nearby along the Via Alessandro Manzoni. The brightest include Sawaya & Maroni (No. 11; 39-02-8639-5218; www.sawayamoroni.com) for furniture and lighting by Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who shuns right angles. Just a few blocks away is the Bulgari Hotel (Via Privata Fratelli Gabba, 7B; 39-02- 805-8051; www.bulgarihotels.com ), which, thanks to another star architect, Antonio Citterio, is the type of place where James Bond and Giorgio Armani might meet for a martini. (Call ahead to get past the front gate.) Share a caprese (mozzarella with tomatoes and basil, served with a delicious eggplant purée) for 15 euros. 8 p.m. 3. Tuscany in Milan Brera is one of the city's quaintest neighborhoods, and La Torre di Pisa (Italian for the Leaning Tower of Pisa) is one of Brera's quaintest restaurants, a Tuscan-style trattoria that's always packed (Via Fiori Chiari 21/5; 39-02-874-877). You can't go wrong with the wonderfully spicy spaghetti alla puttanesca (10 euros) and the Robespierre, a hot platter of sliced Fiorentina steak, potatoes and vegetables (52 euros for two). After dinner, stroll Brera's lovely streets, many of which are cobblestone and closed to traffic. 10 | Milan |
1855208_1 | Hostess decided to bring it back after banana-crème Twinkies flew off shelves in a limited-time offer. LOW ON SYRUP The News -- Maple syrup production dropped 13 percent this year to 1.26 million gallons. Behind the News -- Maine was down 25 percent; Vermont, producer of more than one-third of the nation's syrup, was off by 2 percent. Uncooperative weather hurt the sap flow, with New England too cold and other areas too warm. Making matters worse, the sap's sugar content, averaging about 2.5 percent, was lower than usual, requiring more sap to make a gallon of syrup -- about 45 gallons, on average, or 5 gallons more than usual. CEREAL CRACKDOWN The News -- The Kellogg Company said it would phase out advertisements to children under 12 unless its products meet specific nutritional criteria. Behind the News -- Fruit Loops, beware. The world's largest cereal maker said it would reformulate its foods to reduce calories, sugar, fat and sodium or stop marketing them to children by the end of 2008. About half of the products Kellogg markets to children worldwide exceed the standards. As a result of the new policy, two advocacy groups have agreed not to sue Kellogg over its advertising to children. SUGAR ANXIETY The News -- The consumption of foods that are low in sugar or sugar free is rising as more consumers worry about sugar levels, a market study found. Behind the News -- The study by the NPD Group, a market research firm, found that 44 percent of consumers are extremely or very concerned about sugar in their food, the highest level since 1994. Consumers are cutting back as a result. Twenty percent ate low-sugar, sugar-free or artificially sweetened food at least once in a two-week period last year, compared with 14 percent in 2001, according to the study. TOUGH TALK The News -- A panel of medical experts said children at risk of becoming obese should eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages from their diets. Behind the News -- The recommendation was one of many by an American Medical Association committee on childhood obesity. The panel defined children at risk as having a body-mass index equal or above the 85th percentile but below the 95th, at which a child is obese. Doctors were urged to be frank with patients. ''We need to describe this in medical terms, which is obesity,'' one panel member said. THE WEEK | Sweet Stuff | June 10-16 |
1855040_1 | Pincus said. ''I pleaded with her to be transferred to Connecticut. There were two riders down, bleeding and unconscious. It was a real emergency.'' Another rider called the Bloomin' Metric emergency line, and the Norwalk police were alerted at 8:41 a.m., five minutes after Mrs. Pincus's 911 call. An ambulance was on the scene eight minutes later, and it arrived at Norwalk Hospital at 9:03 a.m., according to a hospital spokeswoman, Maura Romaine. Mrs. Pincus's friend, who asked that her name not be used, broke her skull, jaw and collarbone and required emergency brain surgery, according to the woman's sister. She returned to her home in Westchester last Tuesday. The other cyclist sustained scrapes in the fall, but was able to walk away. That episode, on May 20, exposed the intricacies and technological challenges facing the metropolitan region's enhanced 911 system as the authorities field calls from wireless phones whose signals do not follow state or county boundaries. It also pointed out flaws in Suffolk County's response to out-of-state 911 calls. While the Suffolk police routinely transfer calls from Nassau County back to the Nassau police, they had no protocol in place to transfer calls from Connecticut. Mrs. Pincus said she was so incensed by Suffolk's response that a few days after the incident, she sent letters to the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, and Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York. On June 4, the Suffolk authorities announced a new policy in which a cellphone call from Connecticut would be transferred to the Connecticut State Police, who would then find the proper department to handle the call. ''Now our officers will have those Connecticut numbers in front of them,'' said Lt. Mark Fisher, a Suffolk County Police Department spokesman. ''When it's life or death, we have to move as quickly as possible.'' The region's 911 systems have developed over the past decade to keep pace with the growth in wireless phone use and developments in phone technology. Wireless signals, which are radio waves, are picked up by one of the thousands of wireless antennas in the region, and Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have their own systems to handle emergency calls. While Connecticut and New Jersey have statewide systems, the one in New York is set up on a county-by-county basis. In Connecticut, for example, there are more than 1,500 cell towers | Cellphone Exposes Flaw in 911 System |
1852063_3 | motto of all his swims has been ''Swim for peace, friendship and clean waters.'' He also dedicated his Amazon swim to preserving the rain forest. Also, according to one of his blogs, ''If I can swim that river, then the Palestinians and the Israelis can find a way to live together in peace,'' and ''the Chinese government can allow the sovereign of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, to return to his throne'' and ''the 8 most powerful and richest countries in the world can find a way to forgive the debts of the 15 poorest countries.'' And a bunch of other stuff too. ''For all these reasons,'' Strel's declaration says, ''I am going to swim that river.'' But here's another clue from his Web site: ''As a young boy, I was beaten a lot by my parents and schoolmasters. This no doubt contributed greatly to my ability to ignore pain and endure.'' Is there a psychiatrist on the river? (Actually, there was. Strel sat down for an hour of psychotherapy on some nights. Among the topics discussed were the hallucinations he experienced on a regular basis, causing him to babble to himself as he swam.) My personal opinion is that he does it because he can. Strel is a powerfully built man, 5-foot-9 and 253 pounds when he started his Amazon swim (217 when he finished). His chest is broad, his legs strong, his short graying hair combed neatly forward toward a nose that starts out thin and straight and then takes a dive toward the equator, the result of being broken three times (''The first time was fighting, then gymnastics, then fighting with policemen,'' he says). An all-around athlete, Strel was attracted early on to swimming and went professional in 1978. He doesn't like pools -- ''To swim 50 seconds for 100 meters, that's not me'' -- so he tried his hand at the World Cup open-water circuit, but those were ocean swims and he doesn't like salt, either. ''It destroy my mouth,'' he says. ''You can't drink, you can't eat. No wine. Beer, a little, maybe. Water. Soup, no.'' So he thought things over: ''In my head, What to do? I can swim more, longer.'' The solution was obvious: fresh water. ''In the lake, in the river, I can reach -- '' His son finishes his thought: '' -- what his power allows him to do.'' After a little | Swimming for Peace in the Middle East, for the Dalai Lama, for Clean Water, for the Rain Forest. We'll Drink to That. |
1851588_3 | motto of all his swims has been ''Swim for peace, friendship and clean waters.'' He also dedicated his Amazon swim to preserving the rain forest. Also, according to one of his blogs, ''If I can swim that river, then the Palestinians and the Israelis can find a way to live together in peace,'' and ''the Chinese government can allow the sovereign of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, to return to his throne'' and ''the 8 most powerful and richest countries in the world can find a way to forgive the debts of the 15 poorest countries.'' And a bunch of other stuff too. ''For all these reasons,'' Strel's declaration says, ''I am going to swim that river.'' But here's another clue from his Web site: ''As a young boy, I was beaten a lot by my parents and schoolmasters. This no doubt contributed greatly to my ability to ignore pain and endure.'' Is there a psychiatrist on the river? (Actually, there was. Strel sat down for an hour of psychotherapy on some nights. Among the topics discussed were the hallucinations he experienced on a regular basis, causing him to babble to himself as he swam.) My personal opinion is that he does it because he can. Strel is a powerfully built man, 5-foot-9 and 253 pounds when he started his Amazon swim (217 when he finished). His chest is broad, his legs strong, his short graying hair combed neatly forward toward a nose that starts out thin and straight and then takes a dive toward the equator, the result of being broken three times (''The first time was fighting, then gymnastics, then fighting with policemen,'' he says). An all-around athlete, Strel was attracted early on to swimming and went professional in 1978. He doesn't like pools -- ''To swim 50 seconds for 100 meters, that's not me'' -- so he tried his hand at the World Cup open-water circuit, but those were ocean swims and he doesn't like salt, either. ''It destroy my mouth,'' he says. ''You can't drink, you can't eat. No wine. Beer, a little, maybe. Water. Soup, no.'' So he thought things over: ''In my head, What to do? I can swim more, longer.'' The solution was obvious: fresh water. ''In the lake, in the river, I can reach -- '' His son finishes his thought: '' -- what his power allows him to do.'' After a little | SWIMMING FOR PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, FOR THE DALAI LAMA, FOR CLEAN WATER, FOR THE RAIN FOREST. WE'LL DRINK TO THAT. |
1851634_1 | you've just made tends to be felt rather than accurately remembered.'' Whitty's mission is to ''comprehend and then translate the otherworldly marvels under the surface into the alien world topside,'' and her subject is exploring the South Pacific's fertile atolls, going on ''the underwater equivalent of an African big-game safari.'' ''The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific'' does offer a handful of true-life big-game tales. There is mention of ''Bloop,'' the mysterious ''low glugging burp'' that can be heard over a span of 3,000 miles. Best guess: an elusive giant squid. And there's a loco French diver who might have become chum for a lone tiger shark with the girth of a rhino. But by and large, Whitty is loath to trade on Shark Week sensibilities. Her rapture is more subtle, grand, intelligent and cosmological; and her primary devotion is to the coral reefs. Among the natural world's most fertile masterpieces, they cover only one-tenth of 1 percent of the earth's surface but may harbor upward of nine million species. Whitty has a penchant for Eastern spiritual philosophy, and she uses it to draw the reader into a revelry with coral reefs and their riotous biodiversity. She slips into the waters, often practicing pranayama, the yogic breathing exercise, or reflecting on concepts like the Tibetan lhun drub (''spontaneous perfection''). She guides us through a symbiotic potpourri of critters and wonders: gender-bending eels and hermaphroditic corals; pink shrimp acting as community dental hygienists; bacteria that manufacture carbon dioxide on a huge scale; a sleeping pilot whale in mystical repose. Whitty's prose is supple and scientifically informed (a rare and graceful mix), and her intimacies with the ocean's curiosities captivate. The less charming and more sobering subjects -- say, the atrocities of cyanide fishing; or an island nation at 12 feet above sea level that is quite literally drowning in the juggernaut of global warming; or France's vast atmospheric nuclear testing in Polynesia (which caused birth defects in newborns and turned reefs into nuclear waste dumps) -- provide a visceral understanding of humanity's relationship with the oceanic world. ''The Fragile Edge'' is a quietly ambitious, if sometimes meandering, book. Are you up for tales of microscopic dinoflagellates? Interested in how the ancient Indian philosophy of Jainism may affect your interpretation of light playing off a lagoon? And don't be misled by the ''hot girl swimming with a dolphin'' | Water World |
1851633_1 | Virginia, then hung their terrible prize from a pole on the banks of the Hampton River. In its violence and drama, Blackbeard's death was emblematic of the so-called golden age of piracy -- actually a period of unrestrained murder, robbery and kidnapping on the high seas. Although his reign as one of England's most feared pirates was brief, the memory of his black, braided beard, flashing sword and wild eyes has lived on, coloring the modern image of pirates. Already commemorated in literature, movies and music, the pirates of the golden age and their predecessors, the privateers of the 17th century, are now the subject of three new books -- ''Empire of Blue Water,'' ''The Sack of Panamá'' and ''The Republic of Pirates'' -- each of which adds a new dimension to an era that was, in equal parts, thrilling and disturbing. The story of piracy began, of course, many centuries before Blackbeard, when desperate men first realized they could find easy prey on the open sea, far beyond the reach of any authority. For most of history, unarmed merchant and passenger ships were on their own. The technology of seafaring had grown sophisticated enough to allow pirates to roam freely, but was too primitive for others to stop them. As a result, pirates terrorized ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the Qing Dynasty, and they kidnapped whomever they chose, from Julius Caesar to St. Patrick to Cervantes. By the 17th century, pirates had become so dangerously effective that many were enlisted by governments to act as privateers, commissioned to attack the ships and colonies of rival nations. One of the most notable of these, Capt. Henry Morgan, a predecessor to Blackbeard, had an uncanny ability to sack Spanish outposts, generating deep-seated fear throughout the Americas. So fascinating and complex was Morgan that both ''Empire of Blue Water'' and ''The Sack of Panamá'' largely focus on his life as a privateer, which had its climax in the famous attack on Panama in 1671. As similar as the books are in subject matter, however, they differ significantly in approach. Stephen Talty, the author of ''Mulatto America,'' keeps ''Empire of Blue Water'' moving at a fast clip. Its characters leap to life in a swashbuckling adventure story one expects from a book about privateers. It's marred only by Talty's creation of a composite character. In an effort to ''profile a typical pirate/privateer,'' | Pirates of the Caribbean |
1851734_0 | BEFORE a 5-kilometer race here last weekend, a pair of 16-year-old identical twins limbered up among several hundred other runners, looking, at first glance, perfectly ordinary. They had slim builds, sinewy legs and lean faces. Their tank tops bore their race numbers: 46 for Alex Schneider, 47 for his brother Jamie. But closer up, one could see they were different from the runners around them. They did not speak, even when spoken to. They stared into the distance and were clingy with their parents, Alan and Robyn Schneider. Each twin wore a bracelet identifying him as having nonverbal autism and listing contact information. They pranced distractedly on the lawn like colts, impatient to run. But by the time the competitors left the starting line on South Oyster Bay Road, both boys stared intently ahead and moved quickly -- each with a running coach at his side -- toward the head of the pack. ''They can focus like a laser beam,'' Mr. Schneider said. ''They just get in a zone from the minute they wake up on a race day.'' That zone can distress the parents of autistic children. It can keep the children prisoners of their inner world and keep everyone else out. But if applied, it can become a tool, the way some of us use anger or charm or obsession to pursue our goals. The Schneiders were desperate for some activity for their boys to focus on -- one that would bring crucial interaction with nonautistic children and allow a physical outlet for their boundless energy. The boys would often run speedy circles in the gym of their school, the Genesis School in Plainview, founded in 1995 by a group of parents with autistic children. A school official mentioned the Rolling Thunder Special Needs Program, which helps physically and mentally challenged athletes on Long Island compete in mainstream races. In the regular weekend races and practices, the Schneiders found focus and interaction and energy release for Alex and Jamie. They also learned that the boys were gifted runners. Alex is beginning to challenge the best of his age group, finishing 25th out of 370 runners in February at the Snowflake four-miler in Long Beach and recently running a 10K race (6.2 miles) in 43 minutes. He beat 85 people last month to win a 5K (3.1 miles) in Great Neck. Officials at Great Neck South High School have | Silent Running |
1853689_0 | INCOME inequality is a hot topic in politics and economics. The rising economic tide is lifting a bunch of yachts, but leaving those in simple boats just bobbing along. Two professors -- Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley -- have found that the share of gross personal income of the top 1 percent of American earners rose to 17.4 percent in 2005 from 8.2 percent in 1980. Many economists, especially those who find themselves in the Bush administration, argue that the winner-take-all trend is fueled by other, unstoppable trends. After all, globalization, information technology and free trade place a premium on skills and education. ''The good news is that most of the inequality reflects an increase in returns to 'investing in skills' -- workers completing more school, getting more training and acquiring new capabilities,'' as Edward P. Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, put it last year. It takes an optimist to find good news in the fact that the top 1 percent have steadily increased their haul while the other 99 percent haven't; after all, many more than one in every 100 Americans are investing in skills and education. But the orthodoxy surrounding income inequality is being undermined by research that looks at institutional issues: changes in the way the corporate world measures the performance of workers, the decline of unions, and government wage and tax policy. In this view, skills, education and trade aren't the whole story. They're simply ''factors operating within a broader institutional story,'' as Frank Levy, the Rose professor of urban economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it. One big change in recent decades has been a rise in performance-based pay. Through the 1970s, thanks in part to unions that negotiated wages collectively, ''people with different abilities and capabilities were frequently paid the same amount for doing similar jobs,'' said W. Bentley MacLeod, an economics professor at Columbia. But as companies and compensation consultants began using information technology to determine more accurately the contributions of individual employees, employers began to discriminate among employees based on performance. In a working paper, Professor MacLeod, along with Thomas Lemieux of the University of British Columbia and Daniel Parent of McGill University, mined census data and found that the proportion of jobs with a performance-pay component rose to 40 percent in the 1990s | Income Inequality, Writ Larger |
1853691_0 | WITH the announcement of new appointments to New York's community boards this spring, membership on these volunteer committees is suddenly on people's minds. Yet, as is usually the case when community boards are discussed, the talk has missed the point, focusing on the wisdom of who has been asked to serve and who has been asked to give up a seat in favor of a new member. What we need is a broader discussion of the role of community boards. After a year and a half of concerted effort, Manhattan's 12 boards have both acquired a new professionalism and improved their ability to articulate the views of neighborhood constituents in debates over growth and development. Of the 600 volunteer members now serving on Manhattan's community boards, 224 are in their first two-year term. These new members have made the borough's community boards younger, more diverse and stronger. Breaking with past practice, each new member is now appointed after being screened by an independent panel of government and civic organizations. The old expectation of automatic reappointment has given way to a merit-based process. When the chairman of Community Board 4, which covers Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen and Clinton, identified a need for new members with expertise in health care and human services, the appointment process found a certified social worker and several other applicants with the desired background. At Community Board 1, the influx of families with young children into TriBeCa created a need to refocus the board on schools and recreational space. A teacher with years of experience in public school education now serves on the board, along with several parents of young children, including the president of the Downtown Little League. This new emphasis on the expertise of the borough's community boards is a good thing for New York. Community boards, though often overlooked, are uniquely suited to express neighborhood concerns and ambitions that may differ from the goals of large commercial and political institutions. Without their voice, we would be unlikely to achieve the balanced growth essential for preserving the values of this city. But community boards still face long odds in providing a counterweight to the billions of dollars of investment driving development here. To level the playing field between neighborhood residents and developers, and to help community boards raise their game, we need to focus on training. To that end, we are offering tutorials for new board | A Community of Experts |
1853543_0 | THEY have been around since the Ice Age and have been inhabited by some famous people, like Tom Thumb and President William Howard Taft. Legend has it that Captain Kidd may have buried pirate treasure on one of them, and in the early 1900s visitors flocked to resorts on their shores. Most recently, the archipelago islands off the shores of Branford known as the Thimble Islands have been the talk of the town because one woman has been buying them up. Christine Svenningsen, who lives in Westchester, owns more than a third of the two dozen inhabitable Thimbles -- the first time in recent memory that so many of the islands have been owned by one person. Her most recent purchase was this spring, when she bought East Crib Island for $3.15 million. In October, she purchased Belden Island for $2.7 million. In total, she has spent more than $30 million for nine islands, including the most expensive, Rogers Island and its Tudor-style mansion, for which she paid $22.3 million in 2003. Mrs. Svenningsen, the widow of John A. Svenningsen, a party-goods magnate from Westchester who died in 1997, declined to comment about the purchases, citing privacy concerns, according to her spokesman. Many residents and preservation officials say she lovingly restores the homes -- some of which date to the 1800s -- on the islands, paying careful attention to their historic integrity. Her signature is flagpoles spelling out her islands' names in color-coded flags. But ''creekers,'' as many shoreline residents in the Stony Creek section of Branford call themselves, say they wonder what she will do with her nine islands, whether she will rent, resell or keep them for family members. They say the buying has changed the culture of the islands -- many of which have remained in families for generations -- and driven up already skyrocketing real estate prices and taxes. Taxes for the Thimbles and waterfront homes rose sharply after townwide revaluations in 2002 -- the first reassessment in 12 years -- and in 2004. Mrs. Svenningsen is appealing the revaluations on up to five of her islands, said her lawyer, J. Michael Sulzbach. Cut in Two East, for example, was assessed at $324,000 in 2002 and taxes were $7,761 in 2003, when she bought it for $3.4 million. After the second revaluation, the island was assessed at $2.38 million and taxes rose to $51,982 in 2005. | She Bought Another Island. People Are Wondering. |
1855385_4 | should be seen, Mr. Rorty said, as having the ''same footing'' as literature or art, and he suggested that physics and ethics were just differing methods of ''trying to cope.'' The Caduveo might have agreed, as long as they were permitted to determine which methods of coping were used. But what place would such a society have in a Rortian democratic landscape? How would they be answered if their claims to divine right and arbitrary power came in direct conflict with the more embracing arbitrariness of Mr. Rorty's vision? In reasoning one's way into pragmatism, in minimizing the importance of natural constraints and in dismissing the notion of some larger truth, the tendency is to assume that as different as we all are, we are at least prepared to accommodate ourselves to one another. But this is not something the Caduveo would necessarily have gone along with. Mr. Rorty's outline of what he called ''the utopian possibilities of the future'' doesn't leave much room for the kind of threat the Caduveo might pose, let alone other threats, still active in the world. One tendency of pragmatism might be to so focus on the ways in which one's own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty recalled the events of 9/11: ''When I heard the news about the twin towers, my first thought was: 'Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire.' '' If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain amount of reluctance to comprehend forces lying beyond the boundaries of his familiar world, an inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one's skin or mental habits. But in this too the Caduveo example may be suggestive. As Mr. Lévi-Strauss points out, neighboring Brazilian tribes were as hierarchical as the Caduveo but lacked the tribe's sweeping ''fanaticism'' in rejecting the natural world. They reached differing forms of accommodation with their surroundings. The Caduveo, refusing even to procreate, didn't have a chance. They survive now as sedentary farmers. Such a fate of denatured inconsequence may eventually be shared by absolutist postmodernism. The Caduveo's ideas weren't useful, perhaps. Some weren't even true. Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday. CONNECTIONS | Postmodern Thoughts, Illuminated by the Practices of a Premodern Tribe |
1855411_1 | of view -- focusing on the actual work the clerks will perform, and setting aside the law firms' quest for prestige and bragging rights -- it is difficult to understand why firms fight for the right to shower 26-year-olds with cash. Clerkships tend to attract, and justices tend to hire, academic or intellectual types. Once in private practice, these lawyers typically gravitate toward more academic fields like appellate litigation (the former practice area of Chief Justice John Roberts). It's a field characterized by relatively low billable hours and profit margins compared to, say, time-intensive trials or high-margin merger-and-acquisition work. By virtue of their clerkship experience, clerks do have specific expertise in Supreme Court litigation. But practice before the court is, even for the most elite firms, a tiny field. Moreover, former clerks are ethically barred from practicing before the court for two years after their clerkships (by which time they may no longer be at the firm). Perhaps the best justification for eye-popping clerkship bonuses is that Supreme Court clerkships correlate strongly with legal genius; the clerk jobs are so coveted that those who get them must be the best legal minds. The problem with this ''screening function'' justification, however, is that the law-clerk hiring process isn't entirely merit-driven. The justices consider qualities other than legal acumen when picking clerks (as they are perfectly entitled to do). The former Chief Justice William Rehnquist favored applicants who played tennis. Hugo Black, who was from Alabama, had a soft spot for clerks from Southern law schools. And all the justices interview prospective clerks to assess personality fit -- which makes sense, since they will be working closely with their clerks for an entire year. For every Supreme Court clerk, there is another similarly gifted lawyer who could do law firm work just as well, but who narrowly missed out on a high court clerkship. Such ''near-misses'' are like generic drugs, or store-brand paper towels: they perform the same function, at a fraction of the cost. For every $250,000 Supreme Court clerkship bonus, a firm could pay five clerkship bonuses of $50,000 -- the going rate -- to former appeals court clerks who just missed out on clerking for the Supreme Court (disclosure: I'm one of those former appeals court clerks who didn't get a golden ticket). The bigger point is that even if the astronomical Supreme Court clerkship bonuses may be dubious | The Supreme Court's Bonus Babies |
1853982_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Listen Up, Everybody: I'm in Menopause'' (Thursday Styles, June 7): Congratulations for highlighting something many of us have now realized for several years. That menopause is not a taboo subject, and women have been expressing openly their thoughts, concerns, fears of certain treatments, and yes, jokes, for quite some time. But for many women the symptoms are not trivial and can be severely disruptive to their quality of life, and their ability to function well at home, at work and with people. While a humorous comment may deflect the moment, it is not possible to laugh off 10 or more disruptive flashes during the day or disturbing sleep at night. Unfortunately, menopause is so out in the open now that snake oil salesmen of all stripes have oozed out of the woodwork, and the best message to women today is: Realize that it is a normal transition event in life, and you don't need to suffer through this transition. Remember, buyer beware. Get good evidence-based factual advice and treatment from trustworthy sources, and avoid the unproven ''menopause cures'' sold through health stores and even some health providers. Wulf H. Utian, M.D. Mayfield Heights, Ohio June 7, 2007 The writer is executive director of the North American Menopause Society, a scientific not-for-profit organization. | Menopause, in the Open |
1854024_0 | To the Editor: Re ''The Disorder Is Sensory; the Diagnosis, Elusive'' (June 5): As a teacher I attended workshops on Sensory Integration Dysfunction, and while I was never convinced that it should be labeled a disability, studying the ''symptoms'' allowed me to understand those children better and to help parents see them not as problem children, but as kids whose skills were still maturing. Young children work hard to understand their environment, and the goal of education is to enable that process. Many teachers already know the value of occupational therapy as a tool to help children grow in skill and confidence. The more enlightened schools have therapists on staff or available for consultations. This issue belongs with the American Academy of Pediatrics, since sensory problems in a healthy child are more properly regarded as issues of growth and maturity. Liz Jones South Chatham, Mass. | Children and Their Senses |
1851203_3 | Odysseus'' would register as quirky-cool if moved to a different context (say, further downtown). Here they're merely among the stranger works. There is just one photographic work: Frances Myers's intermittently graphic and heavy-handed series of digital prints on canvas, taken from a video depicting a ''Dead Deer.'' Walking through this show, you may notice the breach between this vision of contemporary American art and others -- the Whitney Biennial is the oft-cited example -- but there is also a gap between participants and abstainers. Of the roughly 350 members of the academy, 194 took part this year. You sense that the annual show may not rank very high on the ''To Do'' lists of abstaining academicians like Elizabeth Murray, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Eric Fischl, Bill Jensen, Jasper Johns, Frank Gehry, Lee Bontecou or Chuck Close. (In the early years, if members failed to contribute work for two years, they were demoted to associate status.) The academy, with its school as well as its museum, in recent years has tried to reposition itself by mounting several shows to emphasize its relevance. ''Surrealism USA'' in 2005 used works from the collection to demonstrate American contributions to Surrealism. ''The Photorealist Project'' in 2004 looked back at a 1970s American movement that hasn't fared as well as others from that period, despite the obsession with the relationship between painting and photography. This year's ''High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975,'' organized by a guest curator, Katy Siegel, with the painter David Reed, offered a new look at a decade when painting flourished on the margins, in the shadow of new mediums like performance art and photography. Some of this spirit has made its way into the ''182nd Annual.'' Space constraints were the reason that in 2000 the work of academicians was separated from that of nonmembers. Mixing these groups once again would perhaps fill all the gaps -- of the last century and this one as well. ''182nd Annual: An Exhibition of Contemporary American Art'' continues through July 24 at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 369-4880. ART REVIEW Correction: June 30, 2007, Saturday An art review in Weekend on June 1 about ''182nd Annual: An Exhibition of Contemporary American Art,'' at the National Academy Museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, referred incompletely to a show at the museum earlier this year, | In the 21st Century, the Persistence of Tradition |
1852598_0 | China has reached a ''turning point'' in reversing its runaway pollution problems and expects to see reductions in air and water pollution in the coming months, according to Zhang Lijun, a top official with the State Environmental Protection Administration. Mr. Zhang, left, used a news conference to predict that emissions of sulfur dioxide in the air and levels of water pollution measured by a process known as chemical oxygen demand would fall this year. Cutting those areas of pollution are the main indicators in China's nationwide plan for a 10 percent reduction in pollution by 2010. Last year, China failed to meet its goal of two percent reductions in each category and instead registered small increases. But Mr. Zhang said improvements had become evident after government programs to install pollution technology on coal-fired power plants, as well as the installation of new wastewater treatment equipment. He acknowledged that other pollutants, including ammonia, continued to rise. And greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide are increasing rapidly. JIM YARDLEY | World Briefing | Asia: China: Optimism On Pollution |
1854604_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Listen Up, Everybody: I'm in Menopause'' (Thursday Styles, June 7): It's great to see women embracing menopause as a natural stage of life and a universal female experience. Most women don't have symptoms severe enough to need hormone therapy or other prescription medications; in fact, fewer than 1 in 5 women would be considered appropriate candidates. But it's important for all women to understand the range of options available for treating symptoms. Helpful approaches include lifestyle modifications (wearing layered clothing; avoiding caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and spicy foods; increasing soy in the diet; getting adequate physical activity), lowering thermostats, and paced respiration or other relaxation techniques. For women with hot flashes or night sweats severe enough to interrupt sleep and disrupt quality of life, prescription medications may be worth discussing with your doctor. Fortunately, we are now in a position to make more informed choices than the generations of women before us. JoAnn E. Manson, M.D. Shari S. Bassuk Boston, June 8, 2007 The writers are authors of a book about menopause. | Coping With Menopause |
1853789_5 | children with autism were tallied in other categories, though no data exist to tell us exactly which ones. Urban planners know that ''if you build a new road, people will drive on it.'' Likewise, in special education, if you create a new counting category, people will use it. At the same time, older counting categories may then be used less frequently as our ability to differentiate diagnoses improves. And true enough, our study found that the growth in children classified with autism was accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the number of special education students with other designations. This is an example of ''diagnostic substitution'' -- as information on new autism classifications has gradually spread, the label ''autistic'' has been used more commonly for children who previously would have been labeled something else. Our analyses demonstrated that from 1994 to 2003, in 44 of 50 states, the increase in autism was completely offset by a decrease in the prevalence of children considered ''cognitively disabled'' or ''learning disabled.'' What does this all mean? First, we should be wary of ''epidemic'' claims and percentage increases based on administrative data. Second, we should not be surprised if school counts of children with autism continue increasing as they play catch-up to the number who truly have autism. We want to be very clear: our results do not mean we have nothing to worry about. Scientific and clinical advances have improved our ability to identify autistic children and to differentiate their unique needs from those of children with other types of developmental disabilities. But schools and other social service systems are unable to keep pace with these changes or give the children the help they need. Research to discover what causes autism, including possible environmental triggers, must be a top priority. However, autism is not purely a medical puzzle -- as we invest in new ways of understanding autism, we have a corresponding responsibility to invest in the capacity of our schools, medical centers and social workers to provide up-to-date treatment for those with the condition and support services for their families. In the end, we should not have to deliver a verdict on whether there is an epidemic to fulfill these obligations. Op-Ed Contributors Paul T. Shattuck is an assistant professor at Washington University's School of Social Work. Maureen Durkin is an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and Public Health. | A Spectrum of Disputes |
1853762_0 | The eternal tension between Brazil's need for economic growth and the damage that can cause to the environment are nowhere more visible than here in this corner of the western Amazon region. More than one-quarter of this rugged frontier state, Rondônia, has been deforested, the highest rate in the Amazon. Over the years, ranchers, miners and loggers have routinely invaded nature reserves and Indian reservations. Now a proposal to build an $11 billion hydroelectric project here on a river that may have the world's most diverse fish stocks has set off a new controversy. How that dispute is resolved, advocates on both sides say, could determine nothing less than Brazil's vision of its future at a moment when it is simultaneously facing energy and environmental pressures and casting envious glances at faster-growing developing countries, like India and China. Unhappy with Brazil's anemic rate of growth, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made the economy the top priority of his second term, which began in January. Large public works projects, including the dams here on the Madeira River, are envisioned as one of the best ways to stimulate growth. ''Who dumped this catfish in my lap?'' was the president's irate complaint when he learned recently that the government's environmental agency had refused to license the dam projects, according to Brazilian news reports. But the proposal is far from dead, and continues to have Mr. da Silva's support. Additional environmental impact studies are under way, but the dispute now raging in Rondônia appears to have more to do with politics and economics than science and nature. ''My impression is that some environmental groups see the authorization of construction as opening the door to unrestricted entry to the Amazon,'' said Antônio Alves da Silva Marrocos, a leader of the Pro-Dam Committee, financed by business groups and the state government. ''But if they are able to block this,'' he added, ''then every other Amazon hydroelectric energy project is doomed as well.'' Many of the arguments for and against the two dams to be built, Jirau and Santo Antônio, reprise those from previous debates in Brazil and elsewhere. Proponents talk of the thousands of jobs to be created if the dams are built and predict power blackouts if they are not. Opponents warn of damage to the rain forest and say cheaper, more efficient alternatives are available. But the correlation of political forces is | Both Sides Say Dam Project Is Pivotal Issue for Brazil |
1853762_1 | complaint when he learned recently that the government's environmental agency had refused to license the dam projects, according to Brazilian news reports. But the proposal is far from dead, and continues to have Mr. da Silva's support. Additional environmental impact studies are under way, but the dispute now raging in Rondônia appears to have more to do with politics and economics than science and nature. ''My impression is that some environmental groups see the authorization of construction as opening the door to unrestricted entry to the Amazon,'' said Antônio Alves da Silva Marrocos, a leader of the Pro-Dam Committee, financed by business groups and the state government. ''But if they are able to block this,'' he added, ''then every other Amazon hydroelectric energy project is doomed as well.'' Many of the arguments for and against the two dams to be built, Jirau and Santo Antônio, reprise those from previous debates in Brazil and elsewhere. Proponents talk of the thousands of jobs to be created if the dams are built and predict power blackouts if they are not. Opponents warn of damage to the rain forest and say cheaper, more efficient alternatives are available. But the correlation of political forces is now much different than it had once been. Though Brazil's environmental movement had a big hand in founding the left-wing Workers' Party in 1980, it has steadily lost influence under Mr. da Silva, who took power in 2003. He has since courted the business establishment. As environmentalists see it, the dams, one of which is to be barely 20 miles from Brazil's border with Bolivia, will not only add to the strains on the Amazon, but also generate tensions within the country and between Brazil and its neighbors. ''Yes, we need electricity, but not in this form,'' said Artur de Souza Moret, director of the sustainable energy institute at the Federal University here. ''And there are still a lot of unanswered questions as to the impact that this project could bring.'' The energy generated by the dams is to be transported more than 1,000 miles south to Brazil's industrial heartland, with little or no immediate benefit for this state of 1.5 million people, whose own growing demand for energy is supposed to be met by a new gas pipeline to the north. ''The biggest problem is the studies showing that this project will bring 100,000 people to Rondônia, between workers | Both Sides Say Dam Project Is Pivotal Issue for Brazil |
1853774_3 | the Holy Family, in 1883 and only 15 percent of it was complete when he was killed in a streetcar accident in 1926. It was eventually decided that the master had left sufficient plans to compete the church. But in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, an anticlerical mob set fire to Gaudí's workshop, destroying blueprints and breaking hundreds of plaster models. Mr. Bonet's father helped salvage the models and became one of Gaudí's successors on the project. Work finally resumed in 1952, but financing depended largely on donations, and progress has often been slowed by a lack of money. Part of Gaudí's vision has been humbled by the spread of Barcelona itself. The site is flanked by two subway tunnels (which, being shallow, cause minimal distress, Mr. Bonet says) and plans for a grand esplanade leading to the church were foiled in the 1970s, when apartment houses rose opposite the main entrance. Hundreds of residents are also campaigning against the tunnel, saying that it will damage their homes. Academics from overseas have joined the protest. ''To consciously endanger a World Heritage site is an act of thoughtless vandalism,'' J. Mark Schuster, professor of urban cultural policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote to Mr. Bonet. World Heritage sites are cultural and national places designated by Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The government says the project could begin next spring, and despite the potential dangers, Mr. Bonet remains philosophical about La Sagrada Familia's future. ''Gaudí said that everything is providential,'' he said with a shrug. ''This is the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, and by expiatory we mean that everything is achieved through sacrifice and tribulation.'' As for the church's completion, the only thing Mr. Bonet is sure of is that he will not be around to see it. Computers have made the work much faster, and Mr. Bonet says technology is changing so rapidly that, for all he knows, helicopters rather than cranes will be used when it comes to building the central 550-foot cross. The financing has improved, and spending on the church currently runs about $1.35 million a month. ''What is the point in worrying about whether it will take another 20, 30 years to finish?'' he said as he crossed into the gloom of one of the tight, spiral staircases. ''Gaudí never saw it finished. Why should I?'' BARCELONA JOURNAL | Warning: Trains Coming. A Masterpiece Is at Risk. |
1853779_0 | Commencement is a time for idealism. But economic reality is lurking everywhere, and new college graduates are vulnerable to ambush. They have been told repeatedly that a college degree is an open sesame to the global economy. But that's not necessarily so, according to new research by two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Frank Levy and Peter Temin. It is true that people with college degrees make more money than people without degrees. The gap has narrowed somewhat in recent years, which is disturbing. But the earning power of college graduates still far outpaces that of less-educated workers. The bad news, though, is that a college degree does not ensure a bigger share of the economic pie for many graduates. In recent decades, Mr. Levy and Mr. Temin show, only college-educated women have seen their compensation grow in line with economywide gains in productivity. The earnings of male college graduates have failed to keep pace with productivity gains. Instead, an outsized share of productivity growth, which expands the nation's total income, is going to Americans at the top of the income scale. In 2005, the latest year with available data, the top 1 percent of Americans -- whose average annual income was $1.1 million -- took in 21.8 percent of the nation's income, their largest share since 1929. Administration officials, and other politicians and economists, often assert that income inequality reflects an education gap. But Mr. Levy and Mr. Temin show that in the case of men, the average bachelor's degree is not sufficient to catch the rising tide of the global economy. They argue that the real reason inequality is worsening is the lack of strong policies and institutions that broadly distribute economic gains. In the past, for example, a more progressive income tax and unions fostered equality. Affirmative action has also helped and probably accounts, in part, for the pay growth of college-educated women. But such institutions have been eroding and new ones have not yet emerged. At the same time, corporate norms that restrained excessive executive pay have also eroded, making the income gap even greater. Mr. Levy and Mr. Temin conclude that only a reorientation of government policy can restore general prosperity. That's a challenge to the nation's leaders and today's graduates. America needs them to build the new institutions for a global economy. | Economic Life After College |
1853828_0 | Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75. The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Mary Varney Rorty. Raised in a home where ''The Case for Leon Trotsky'' was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. ''At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice,'' he wrote in an autobiographical sketch. Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more than a decade, said, ''He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints'' and returned it ''to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.'' Mr. Rorty's enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher's primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing. To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. ''There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one's peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,'' Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, ''truth is not out there,'' separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings ''cope with the environment'' and ''enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.'' Mr. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine and others. Although he argued that ''no area of culture, and no period of history gets reality | Richard Rorty, Contemporary Philosopher, Dies at 75 |
1851504_4 | butter in retirement?'' He said he came to the conclusion that a strategy to reduce retirement expenses ''will be dwarfed by rapidly growing out-of-pocket medical expenses.'' He noted projections based on the Health and Retirement Study, a survey of 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 sponsored by the National Institute on Aging found that by 2019, nearly a tenth of elderly retirees would be devoting more than half of their total income to out-of-pocket health expenses. He said, ''These health care cost projections are perhaps the scariest beast under the bed.'' As Victor Fuchs, the professor emeritus of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, told me, money is most useful when you are old because it makes all the difference whether you wait for a bus in the rain to get to the doctor's appointment or you ride in a cab. ''Saving for retirement may ultimately be less about the golf condo at Hilton Head and more about being able to afford wheelchair lifts, private nurses and a high-quality nursing home,'' Professor Skinner said. His best advice for people in their 20s and 30s: maximize workplace matching contributions, seek automatic savings mechanisms like home mortgages and hope ''that their generation can still look forward to solvent Social Security and Medicare programs.'' Over the last two years I've been dispensing advice in this space about how to spend and save more wisely. This will be my last column for a spell as I am taking on editing duties that give me little time for reporting. But before I go, I want to remind the young graduates, their parents who scrimped and saved to get them there, and anyone else who stuck with me this far that are a few other rules of life worth considering. Among them are the following. Links are available at nytimes.com/business: Never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission. Buy used things, except maybe used tires. Get on the do-not-call list and other do-not-solicit lists so you can't be tempted. Watch infomercials for their entertainment value only. Know what your credit reports say, but don't pay for that knowledge: go to www.annualcreditreport.com to get them. Consolidate your cable, phone and Internet service to get the best deal. Resist the lunacy of buying premium products like $2,000-a-pound chocolates. Lose weight. Carrying extra pounds costs tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. | Dear Graduate, Please Keep The Change |
1851467_0 | To the Editor: Re ''How We're Animalistic -- in Good Ways and Bad,'' by Maureen Dowd (column, May 30), about conservatives who are obsessed with ancient Greece: War is an endlessly fascinating subject for those who want to theorize, speculate and analyze. It is quite a different thing for those -- usually poor young men -- who do the fighting and killing and dying. The abysmal folly of the American war in Iraq teaches many lessons, and one that should not be forgotten is that men without direct experience of war know nothing about it. This is as true for men like President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who hid from war, as it is for intellectuals who make a fetish of studying the military history of ancient Greece. David Hayden Wilton, Conn., May 30, 2007 | The Wordy Warriors |
1851406_2 | 2006.'' IS INEQUALITY GOOD? -- The growing income disparity among Americans can be viewed as a good thing, two professors at the University of Chicago argue in The American. Gary S. Becker, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1992, and Kevin M. Murphy write that the rising inequality has ''accompanied a rise in the payoff to education and other skills.'' In 1980, someone with a college degree earned 30 percent more than a high school graduate. Today, there is about a 70 percent difference, and ''the premium for having a graduate degree increased from roughly 50 percent in 1980 to well over 100 percent today,'' they write. ''The labor market is placing a greater emphasis on education, dispensing rapidly rising rewards to those who stay in school the longest.'' That isn't surprising, they say, given the increasing demand for educated and skilled workers. And the payoff for that increased demand is clear. ''Growth in the education level of the population has been a significant source of rising wages, productivity and living standards over the past century,'' they write, and should be viewed as a positive, even if it results in a growing gap between the rich and the poor. Writing like the economists that they are, the authors point out that higher rates of return on capital are a sign of greater productivity and ''that inference is fully applicable to human capital as well as to physical capital.'' They conclude: ''We believe that the rise in returns on investment in human capital is beneficial and desirable'' and they add, in a not-so-veiled message to politicians, ''policies designed to deal with inequality must take account of its cause.'' FINAL TAKE -- Summertime is coming, and for most of us the living won't be as easy as it could be. Money magazine notes that Americans average the fewest days off and leave the greatest percentage of their vacation time unused, compared with other nations. The average American gets 14 days of vacation but takes only 11. Germans use 25 of the 26 days they receive; the British use 21 of their 24 days off; and the French use all but 3 of their 36 days, the magazine writes, citing research done by Expedia.com. All this leads the magazine to conclude that America is ''land of the free, home of the Type A personality.'' PAUL B. BROWN WHAT'S OFFLINE | All Tapped Out, or Maybe Not |
1852261_7 | sensitivities, from smells and tastes (''Lettuce is so bad I almost throw up. Really throw up.'') to a feeling of being cramped or crowded, which kept him in perpetual motion. Spencer is still unusually sensitive, said his father, Roger Cambor, a psychiatrist, but added that after months of occupational therapy, ''there was a marked change; all of a sudden he could sit in a circle when asked, he settled down, his handwriting got much better.'' Other families have tales, too, of children who do much better in class when allowed to fidget, handle a small rubber toy, bounce in place, even sit against the wall on a blow-up cushion. As with any therapy, there are also parents who say they saw no change, that the therapy was a waste of money and time. Whether these diverse anecdotes fit together into a coherent picture of a stand-alone, treatable disorder is not yet clear, at least not to researchers, and many say there is good reason for caution. The current interest in sensory processing echoes the 1970s theory that learning problems were caused by impaired eye-tracking abilities, said Stephen P. Hinshaw, professor and chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of a cultural history of mental health stigma, ''Mark of Shame.'' ''Back then people tried all sorts of therapy to correct eye tracking, and it turned out to be mostly misguided,'' Dr. Hinshaw said. ''This idea that there are deep, underlying sensory problems, and if we treat those it will bubble up and the child's behavior will improve -- boy, that idea has a checkered history.'' ''It does make some intuitive sense, all right,'' Dr. Hinshaw added, ''but I keep looking and hoping that the evidence base for this will get better.'' Researchers have in fact laid down a fragile thread of evidence, publishing several small studies in just the past year of children identified with sensory processing problems and normal I.Q.'s -- that is, no developmental problems. In one study, Patricia Davies of Colorado State University led a research team that analyzed how children identified as having sensitivity to sounds responded to pairs of sharp clicks, heard through headphones. The team used EEG technology to measure brain waves, and found that these youngsters responded to the first click normally, showing the same pulse of brain activity as children without sensory problems. But this comparison group | The Disorder Is Sensory; the Diagnosis, Elusive |
1852398_0 | Rescue efforts continued in southwestern Yunnan Province as roughly 180,000 people were evacuated from their homes after a Sunday morning earthquake that registered a magnitude 6.4 killed at least three people and injured more than 300, according to state news media. More than 1,000 aftershocks have rattled the nerves of residents in the city of Pu'er, in a mountainous region of Yunnan. Roughly 2,000 soldiers and rescue workers are at the scene, and evacuees are living in tents or public buildings. JIM YARDLEY | World Briefing | Asia: China: 180,000 Displaced After Strong Quake |
1852264_2 | done on polar bears before,'' Ms. Gormezano said of the research on scat. Other methods for tracking shifts in populations involve chasing the bears in helicopters, sedating them with darts and tagging or collaring them. But such methods can pose risks or alter the bears' behavior, she said. Some Canadian national parks require a shift from darting. In contrast, bear scat, and also tufts of fur left in dens or sleeping spots, can be collected without affecting the bears. Tests of DNA in the feces can distinguish individual animals. So the dispersion of scat provides a map of a particular bear's wanderings. ''All the issues with global warming are going to affect southernmost populations, especially around southern Hudson Bay and western Hudson Bay, where they're already starting to see changes, reduced reproductive output, thinner subadults,'' Ms. Gormezano said. ''So this is a great opportunity to try out a new method.'' The Mianus gorge was chosen for a final spring tune-up for Quinoa because Ms. Gormezano has another research project under way there on a very different predator -- coyotes. In contrast to the polar bear, which is under study because some populations appear to be in retreat, coyotes have become a conservation concern because they have been expanding, growing physically and in pack size, in the deer-rich woods and lawns surrounding New York City. Quinoa is an equal-opportunity seeker of polar bear and coyote poop. With coyotes, it is particularly important that the dog not touch the scat, Ms. Gormezano said, given that their DNA is nearly identical. Those samples are placed in paper bags, allowing air to circulate and desiccate the material, with the location noted using a global positioning system device. Up north, she said, bear scat is handled differently. ''Each sample, regardless of how I initially store it, is subsampled and dried in a food dehydrator for a few hours at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then vacuum sealed in plastic,'' Ms. Gormezano said. ''Basically, I turn it into scat jerky. Getting rid of moisture is the key to preserving the DNA most effectively until it can be extracted.'' As she followed Quinoa in his sniff, sit, play and hunt routine through woods and fields, Ms. Gormezano reflected on the odd trajectory that brought her to this place. She grew up in Queens in New York City and studied classical percussion at Queens College. Then she started pursuing | SCIENTIST AT WORK -- Linda J. Gormezano; A Team of 2, Following the Scent of Polar Bears |
1852258_0 | Consuming high levels of vitamin D and calcium may offer some protection against the most aggressive kinds of breast cancer, a new study reports, but only in premenopausal women. Researchers studied 10,578 premenopausal and 20,909 postmenopausal women, using data gathered as part of a larger long-term study of women's health. All the participants had filled out extensive dietary questionnaires, and the researchers computed their intake of vitamin D and calcium. During an average 10 years of follow-up, 276 premenopausal and 743 postmenopausal women were found to have invasive breast cancer. The paper appeared May 28 in The Archives of Internal Medicine. The one-fifth of premenopausal women who consumed the highest levels of vitamin D and calcium -- more than 1,366 milligrams of calcium and 948 units of vitamin D daily -- had a one-third reduced risk of developing breast cancer compared with those who consumed the least, fewer than 617 grams of calcium and under 162 units of vitamin D. The association was particularly strong for the most malignant and aggressive kinds of tumors. ''This was only an observational study,'' said Jennifer Lin, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, ''so I would not recommend that women take more than the recommended amounts of calcium or vitamin D. I would suggest instead that women take at least the suggested values to keep up their overall health, and possibly to prevent breast cancer.'' One thousand milligrams of calcium and 200 to 600 units of vitamin D a day are considered adequate. VITAL SIGNS: NUTRITION | Vitamin D and Calcium Intake Found to Affect Breast Cancer |
1852413_0 | Officials with the Adirondack Council, an environmental group, are lobbying to reverse planned reductions in the federal budget that would severely limit or eliminate several acid rain monitoring programs. The proposed budget would cut $1 million, about 25 percent, from one program that measures atmospheric gases. Two other programs that sample lakes and streams in the Adirondacks and other areas of the Northeast on an annual combined budget of less than $1 million would also be eliminated. Acid rain remains a serious problem in many parts of the country, but nowhere has it been more damaging than in the Adirondacks, where vast forests have been decimated and more than 500 lakes and ponds have been left unable to support many species of native fish. ''Closing down, even for a few months, will wipe out 21 years of continuously collected scientific data,'' Brian L. Houseal, the council's executive director, said in a statement. ANTHONY DEPALMA | Metro Briefing | New York: Albany: Monitoring For Acid Rain |
1854769_3 | disappearance of much of the world's remaining tropical forests and the oxygen and animal habitat they provide. The indigenous people who make the world's forests their home are retreating in the face of agricultural expansion. Their interactions with loggers, miners and ranchers are destroying their cultures and bringing disease to their communities. By providing powerful incentives to leave the forests intact, carbon ranching can allow these people and their cultures to survive as well. Carbon ranching would also be a good way to bring the developing world into the effort to reduce emissions. A coalition of ''rainforest nations'' led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica has indicated it will participate in carbon ranching projects without demanding any increase in foreign aid. Corporate polluters also like carbon ranching because conserving rainforest is often cheaper than reducing their own emissions. Some, like Mitsubishi in Madagascar, are already doing it voluntarily because they want to be seen as supporting environmental efforts and anticipate that future legislation will let them get credit for it. Crucially, support from business guarantees that the idea will get a hearing in this polluter-friendly White House. Indeed, the Bush administration has already financed some relatively small tropical forest conservation projects -- most recently forgiving $24 million of Guatemala's debt in exchange for that country's putting the money toward conservation. So carbon ranching may provide a rare piece of common ground for the president and Congress. To be effective, however, any legislation must include certain safeguards. First, no polluter should be allowed a free pass on cleaning up its own industrial pollution just because it protects rainforest -- saving tropical forests should be part of the climate equation, not the whole equation. Second, if a company pays to protect a forest that for whatever reason ends up getting destroyed anyway -- as the politics or economics of the tropical country change -- both the company and the country should face strict financial penalties. That would provide a powerful incentive to make sure those forests stay protected. Time is short. The world's rainforests are shrinking. With global temperatures rising rapidly, it's essential that Congress and President Bush act quickly before the vast forests that cool the planet disappear forever. Op-Ed Contributors William Powers is the author, most recently, of ''Whispering in the Giant's Ear.'' Glenn Hurowitz is working on a book about the importance of courage in Democratic Party politics. | Home On the Rainforest |
1854781_0 | Buried in the final communiqué issued at the recent Group of 8 summit in Germany was an important and overdue pledge to help poorer nations reduce the global warming emissions caused by the slashing and burning of their tropical forests. One of the glaring weaknesses in the 1997 Kyoto Accord was its failure to address deforestation, which now amounts to an astonishing 50 million acres a year. Because it releases huge quantities of carbon stored in trees, deforestation contributes at least 20 percent of all carbon emissions, quite apart from the toll it takes on plant and animal life and biodiversity generally. That's more carbon dioxide than all of the world's cars and trucks produce. A collective effort to bring deforestation under control, and to plant new trees in areas already laid bare by the chain saw, could substantially reduce these emissions. It would also provide developing countries with outside revenue and draw them into the broader fight against climate change. The industrialized world now needs to follow up its pledge with hard cash. Several big environmental organizations -- including Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund -- have already embarked on privately funded efforts to protect forest land. But there is no substitute for collective government action, and on this score other rich nations are well ahead of the United States. Australia recently announced a commitment of $200 million to forest preservation efforts worldwide. The Europeans have agreed to put $150 million into a World Bank facility aimed at strengthening the ability of poorer countries to manage forests and prevent illegal logging. The governments that demonstrate management strengths are likely to attract foreign investors eager to satisfy their own obligations to reduce emissions by helping others do so. Regrettably, the United States seems headed in the opposite direction. President Bush's foreign aid budget proposes a one-third cut in funding for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. Comparable cuts are targeted for a program that helps Madagascar's struggling population protect its tropical forests. This is embarrassing, to say the least. As the world's richest nation -- and also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases -- the United States should be leading this parade, not bringing up the rear. Editorial | Slashing and Warming |
1854806_0 | Acknowledging that the nation remains too vulnerable to terrorist attack by small planes and recreational boats, the Department of Homeland Security is considering new requirements to allow authorities to identify operators and passengers in millions of these vehicles as they ply the coasts and skies. Department personnel have been touring the country meeting with trade groups and elected officials to gauge their reaction to the proposed changes, to be issued by the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard. ''What I'm trying to do is to kind of stick my toe in the water and see if I get bit by a piranha,'' the Coast Guard commandant, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, told a group of state legislators at a recent briefing. The Coast Guard proposals in particular are still in the conceptual stages but are already drawing protests from boat owners, who under one measure would be required to pass a proficiency test and to carry a form of government-issued identification. ''These are ill-conceived solutions that will inconvenience everyone and not result in a substantial increase in security,'' said Michael G. Sciulla, senior vice president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States, which is already organizing to fight the proposals. The threat posed by small planes and boats has been well documented. While the United States is spending billions of dollars to screen cargo containers carried by ships, as well as passengers and baggage on commercial planes, a small private jet could be used to fly a weapon, or a team of terrorists, into the country. The first set of new rules, to be announced by the end of this summer, will most likely be for small planes. Under those rules, boarding of small private planes would continue to be allowed without X-ray screening of passengers and baggage. But passengers on corporate and fractionally owned jets would for the first time be required to undergo terrorist-watch-list checks, particularly if they are flying into the United States from overseas. A similar mandate now generally applies only to small planes flying as a charter. Under another proposal, general aviation airports, which range from a grass runway in the middle of a field to sprawling complexes with air traffic rivaling that at some major city airports, would have to conduct security assessments, identifying vulnerabilities. In addition, planes parked at those airports might be required to have ignition or propeller locks. | U.S. Eyes Antiterror Rules For Small Jets and Boats |
1832602_2 | of the surveillance machines involved in both incidents, said in an e-mail message that the company had ''no independent information regarding the two specific cases,'' but that the article reinforced the scientific consensus ''that patients with medical implants like pacemakers and defibrillators should simply walk through electronic antitheft systems at a normal pace.'' The Food and Drug Administration advised the industry in 2000 to label surveillance devices with warnings not to linger near them or lean on them. ''That recommendation still holds true,'' said Mitchell Shein, a senior reviewer in the agency's device center. ''But if a person is exposed to an E.A.S., as long as they move through at a normal pace, the likelihood of a negative outcome is very limited.'' Another article in the same journal describes an experiment testing cellphones at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., over a four-month period in 2006. The researchers used various phones and wireless handheld devices in 75 patient rooms and the intensive care unit, where patients were nearby or connected to a total of 192 medical machines of 23 types. In 300 tests of ringing, making calls, talking on the phone and receiving data, there was not a single instance of interference with the medical apparatus. For many of the tests, the cellphones were working at lower received signal strengths -- that is, showing fewer bars on the screen -- which means they were operating at the highest power output levels. The authors conclude with a recommendation to relax existing cellphone rules. But Mr. Shein said changing hospital cellphone regulations on the basis of these findings might be premature. ''I think it's dangerous for someone to go around doing ad hoc testing and conclude that it's not going to be an issue for others,'' he said. ''There was no result, but there may have been if the circumstances had been slightly different.'' Dr. David L. Hayes, the senior author and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, disagreed. ''Cellphone technology is the same throughout the country,'' he said, ''and hospital equipment is similar. I don't think that testing in another part of the U.S. is going to have different results. ''I'm advocating based on this testing that we should change the rules,'' Dr. Hayes continued, ''and in fact many people ignore the rules anyway. In a way, the policy is already antiquated and violated de facto.'' | Data Show How Electronics Mix With Medical Devices |
1832714_2 | or nearly twice the level found in rice from California. The most likely reason for the difference, the researchers say, is that rice growers in South-Central states are increasingly using old cotton fields, where years of application of inorganic arsenic as a pesticide has contaminated the soils. Arsenic is a carcinogen and can cause skin, reproductive, developmental and other disorders. Given that most Americans do not eat large amounts of rice, the arsenic levels in the tested rice may not result in excessive exposure to arsenic. But the researchers note that some population subgroups -- among them Hispanics, Asian-Americans and people who suffer from celiac disease and must avoid wheat products -- eat much more rice on average. So for them, the researchers calculate, exposure may exceed the limits established for arsenic intake from water, the main source of the element for most Americans. Satellite Resuscitation It's a sad fact of orbital life, but all satellites eventually die, eventually running out of propellant or other consumables needed to keep them in orbit. But a satellite experiment launched last week called the Orbital Express has the potential to change that. The experiment, the work of NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will test the robotic repair and refueling of satellites in orbit. It consists of two satellites, one carrying extra propellant and batteries and equipped with a small robotic arm. The two spacecraft will practice autonomous rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and the servicing satellite will try to transfer propellant and batteries to the other. Rain Forests, It Seems, Need the Dry Season To the uninitiated, the Amazon rain forests are a vast ocean of trees that are unchanging throughout the year. Scientists know better. Like trees in more temperate regions, those in the tropics display what is called phenological behavior -- budding and other events that recur seasonally. ''We always find there seems to be some sort of seasonality'' in the rain forests, said Ranga B. Myneni, a professor in the department of geography and environment at Boston University, that corresponds to the rainy and dry (or rather, not so rainy) seasons. But the overall impact of this seasonal behavior has been largely unstudied. Now, Dr. Myneni and other researchers have discovered one effect: leaf area in the Amazon changes significantly between wet and dry seasons. The researchers used data from NASA's Terra satellite, which can measure reflected sunlight | OBSERVATORY |
1834145_0 | Exaggerated fears that illegal immigrants are fraudulently receiving Medicaid health benefits have led to a crackdown that is preventing tens of thousands of American citizens from obtaining legitimate coverage. Congress, whose mindless actions led to this travesty, needs to fix this injustice. The problem was triggered by last year's Deficit Reduction Act, which contained provisions requiring applicants for Medicaid, a health insurance program for the poor, to show proof of their citizenship and identity when they apply for, or seek to renew, coverage. That may not seem unreasonable since eligibility is generally limited to American citizens and certain qualified aliens. But previously most states had simply asked applicants to declare in writing -- under penalty of perjury -- that they were citizens or qualified immigrants. Now they must submit specified documents, such as birth certificates and passports, which many have difficulty tracking down or paying for. The Bush administration added to the difficulties by requiring people to submit original documents or copies certified by the issuing agency, not simply other copies they might have at hand. The more stringent documentation was the brainchild of two Republican congressmen from Georgia. Never mind that there was little evidence that illegal immigrants were defrauding the program. Now the fruits of that policy are becoming visible. As Robert Pear recently wrote in The Times, at least seven states have reported declines in Medicaid enrollments and traced them to the new requirements. It is hard to be sure how many illegal immigrants were screened out, but state officials think the number is small. Florida believes that nearly all of the people it has excluded for failure to produce documents are American citizens. The most appalling impact falls on infants born to illegal immigrants whose deliveries were paid for by Medicaid. They are American citizens under the 14th Amendment simply by virtue of being born here and used to be covered automatically for a year. Now they must wait until their skittish parents obtain a birth certificate before they can get vital infant care that should begin at birth. Congress needs to move quickly to fix this problem. At a minimum, every poor infant born here ought to be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. Congress also needs to simplify the Medicaid application process instead of making it more onerous. That would be fairer to qualified applicants and could help reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Editorial | The Medicaid Documentation Mess |
1834143_0 | EVERYBODY knows how to use a library. You look up the card catalogue in the computer, type in the subject, find the Dewey Decimal System number, walk to the shelf and get the book. It's different with an archive, where unpublished memorandums, reports, notes and letters are organized not by topic but by the agency that created them. You have to know which agency did the work you are interested in, and whether more than one was involved. The complexity of government means first-time archive users need help. Alone among the world's great archives, the National Archives of the United States has offered such assistance to visitors. At Britain's Public Record Office, for instance, a courteous official points to rows of volumes listing the contents of files for the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, Scotland Yard. After that, you're on your own. It is much the same at France's Archives Nationales and Germany's Bundesarchiv. Only at the big modern Archives II building in College Park, Md., will an archivist sit down and guide a user through the maze. But that precious advantage is being lost -- and it's all started to change in the last few months. More than a million cubic feet of documents, nearly enough to fill the Washington Monument, need to be organized, described and filed. This ''document surplus'' -- a term the archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, prefers to ''backlog'' -- was caused in part by the wait for a new archives building and by a new emphasis on electronic records. But mainly, with no increase in its budget in years, it comes down to a lack of money. As a result, the archives have hired less-experienced personnel to organize the records, often resulting in people having to hunt longer for what they need. And although 50 professionals have recently been moved to processing, that has left only 22 archivists to deal with the public -- and with records they do not know well. Moreover, instead of conferring at their desks, with reference books at hand, the archivists now answer the questions of walk-ins in a glass-enclosed room on the busy main research floor. Written requests for information should be answered in 10 working days, something the archives once did 95 percent of the time; this year it is 75 percent. In the military and civil branch the backlog of unanswered letters used to be | History Lessens |
1831219_1 | applications where performance, heat resistance and durability are more important. These applications typically require that biopolymers be reinforced with kenaf fiber (similar to jute) or other fillers. Products based on durable biopolymers have begun appearing in the marketplace. Japanese companies like NEC Corporation, Unitika and NTT DoCoMo are manufacturing cellphones with casings made from bioplastics. Toyota Motor Corporation uses bioplastic reinforced with kenaf for the rear package tray in its Lexus ES300 model. The largest commercial producer of bioplastic is NatureWorks, which is owned by the food-processing giant Cargill. The company's plant, in Blair, Neb., uses corn sugar to produce polylactide plastic packaging materials and its Ingeo-brand fibers. It churns out white pellets that other manufacturers use. The second largest biopolymer producer is Metabolix of Cambridge, Mass. It makes a different form of polymer for applications ranging from rigid molded items to flexible film for shopping or garbage bags. Metabolix claims that its plastics are biodegradable in such varied environments as backyard composting bins, wetlands and the ocean itself. (According to the Biodegradable Products Institute, bioplastics should decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a ''controlled composting environment'' -- a municipal facility, for instance -- in under 90 days.) ''A lot of bio-based products are tossed out like cigarette butts, and for various reasons never decompose,'' said James J. Barber, Metabolix's chief executive. ''I can't conceive of a system that's so perfect that none of this stuff will escape into nature. For the stuff that does escape, we're a backstop, ensuring that it won't last thousands of years.'' But representatives of the petrochemical industry point out that plastics made from fossil fuels can be biodegradable, too. And they note that most bio-based plastics, if tossed in a landfill rather than a municipal-scale composting facility, might as well be a tin can or a conventional plastic bottle. ''It's not just bio-based versus petroleum-based,'' said Judith Dunbar, director for environmental issues at the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council, which represents hundreds of plastics manufacturers. ''I believe conventional plastics would probably be better than renewables over a full life cycle.'' Even some scientists who are creating bioplastics caution against overstating their benefits. John Warner, director of the Center for Green Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said it was unlikely that bioplastics would offer advantages in every application. ''It's not about finding the magic material that'll replace all bad | The New Bioplastics, More Than Just Forks |
1832850_1 | Orthodox. The issue was one major block to a visit to Russia by John Paul II, a Pole who often expressed his desire to travel there. Despite invitations from Russian leaders, the Orthodox hierarchy has opposed any papal visit, and on Tuesday, an aide to Mr. Putin said he would not negotiate church issues. ''There are no middlemen in the dialogue between the churches,'' the aide, Sergei Prikhodko, told reporters in Moscow, according to Reuters. Mr. Putin met with John Paul twice, in 2000 and 2003. The document released Tuesday contained no surprises, repeating in a more comprehensive form positions that the church has long held and that Benedict frequently addresses. An apostolic exhortation is the second highest form of papal teaching after the encyclical. Still, the document's timing resonated in Europe, where an increasing number of countries permit forms of both euthanasia and same-sex marriage. Debate on these issues has been especially potent in Italy, where the Vatican remains influential even as church attendance drops. Over the last few weeks, Vatican leaders, including the pope himself, have spoken out against a law proposed by the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, which would expand rights to nonmarried couples, including same-sex couples. The proposal has been a major source of tension in Mr. Prodi's fragile coalition, as top church officials asserted that Catholic politicians were obligated to oppose it. The document suggested that the church would continue to speak out strongly on political issues it saw as fundamental, even at risk of accusations, as has been the case in Italy, that it is interfering in politics. Those issues, Benedict wrote, include ''respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built on marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one's children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.'' In the document, the pope also repeated that celibacy remained ''obligatory'' for priests. In the 2005 meeting, numerous bishops lamented the shortage of priests in many parts of the world, opening a rare public debate about possible limited changes, such as allowing married deacons to ascend to the priesthood. But Benedict ruled out any such changes. ''I reaffirm the beauty and importance of a priestly life lived in celibacy as a sign expressing total and exclusive devotion to Christ, to the Church and to the Kingdom of God,'' he wrote. | Pope Reaffirms View Opposing Gay Marriage And Abortion |
1832818_1 | Sun Pacific, a large grower, as he watched harvesters clip fruit at a huge planting near Bakersfield. Tom Mulholland, who grows 400 acres of mandarins southeast of Fresno, was even more dismissive of seeded varieties. ''Push 'em out, bye-bye,'' he said. ''That's where your low prices are going to be.'' As growers learned starting 70 years ago with seedless grapes and more than a decade ago with seedless watermelons, shoppers will pay for convenience. To feed the demand for fruit with less mess, farmers and scientists have been chasing new varieties and developing new technologies. But the process began long ago, when growers found natural mutations of citrus fruits with few or no seeds, like navel oranges and Persian limes, which they propagated by grafting. A few seedless mandarins have been around for more than a century, notably the early-season satsumas, but they were limited in season and not as addictively sweet and richly flavored as the best varieties, like clementines. Originally, clementines were seedy, and required pollination by bees to bear regular crops. In the 1960s California researchers discovered that by applying a spray at bloom, simulating the growth hormones naturally secreted by seeds, farmers could obtain good harvests of seedless clementines. Bees became undesirable. Spanish scientists improved this technique, and in the 1980s and 1990s seedless Spanish clementines conquered markets in Europe and the eastern United States. California growers saw this success, and in the late 1990s rushed to plant clementines, mostly in the San Joaquin Valley citrus belt, from south of Bakersfield to Fresno. They also placed big bets on a clementine-like variety of seedless mandarin, found in Morocco in the 1980s, with the ungainly name of W. Murcott Afourer. A hybrid of Florida's Honey Murcott tangerine, possibly with a clementine, it has thin, easily peeled skin, a deep orange color and very good flavor. Ripening after clementines, from late January to March, and producing abundantly without bees or hormones, it quickly became the hottest new citrus variety. A freeze in mid-January destroyed about half of the state's late-season mandarins, but as shipments soar in the next few years ''there's going to be a head-on clash'' with Spanish exporters, Mr. Rabe said. But clementine and W. Murcott trees dependably produce seedless fruit only when grown in isolated blocks. If they are not, the presence of bees becomes an issue. Most growers underestimated how much buffer zone they | Growers Yearn to Be Free Of Mandarin Seeds |
1836178_0 | Paul C. Lauterbur, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for developing magnetic resonance imaging into a way to look inside living organisms, died yesterday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 77. The cause was kidney disease, said the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had worked for 22 years. Magnetic resonance has revolutionized medicine, giving a clear look inside the vulnerable human body without cutting it open; it avoids not only unnecessary surgery but also the radiation of X-rays. Even the brain is now becoming an open book, as subsequent refinements have allowed researchers to identify which parts are active during different mental tasks. ''Paul's influence is felt around the world every day, every time an M.R.I. saves the life of a daughter or a son, a mother or a father,'' Richard Herman, the chancellor of the Urbana-Champaign campus said in a statement yesterday. The nuclei of most atoms act as tiny magnets that line up when placed in a magnetic field, and if the field is set at a specific strength, the atoms can absorb and emit radio waves. Physicists and chemists including Dr. Lauterbur used this technique, first known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or N.M.R., to study atoms and molecules. In early work, Dr. Lauterbur, working at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, and then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, did N.M.R. studies of carbon-13, which is slightly heavier than the usual carbon atom. The carbon-13 could act as a tag to allow chemists to track its movements as carbon-based molecules were transformed in chemical reactions. ''He was a real pioneer in the study of the nucleus of the carbon atom,'' said Charles P. Schlichter, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois. Dr. Lauterbur became interested in possible biological applications of nuclear magnetic resonance after reading a paper in 1971 by Raymond V. Damadian, who described how some cancerous tissues responded differently to the magnetic fields than normal tissue. Some scientists had already used the technique to measure blood flow and perform other properties of biological materials. Until then, most scientists placed the samples in a uniform magnetic field, and the radio signals emanated from the entire sample. Dr. Lauterbur realized that if a non-uniform magnetic field were used, then the radio signals would come from just one slice of the sample, allowing a two-dimensional image | Paul C. Lauterbur, 77, Dies; Won Nobel Prize for M.R.I. |
1831797_1 | to be on the team. And it also gave me the understanding that having another sister around makes a difference.'' In her clerical life, Ms. Cook, 50, has nurtured black female protégées at all three churches she has led in New York over the last quarter-century. The Rev. Henrietta Carter succeeded Ms. Cook in her first pulpit at the Mariner's Temple in the Financial District. The Rev. Karen Jones served as Ms. Cook's assistant pastor first at the Bronx Christian Fellowship in the Pelham Parkway section and currently at Believer's Christian Fellowship in Harlem. Both Ms. Carter and Ms. Jones, in turn, have cultivated younger black women as staff members and pastoral interns. This kind of informal web of connections matters enormously in African-American Christianity, because the overarching tradition across denominations, even those with a formal hierarchical structure, is of local control. ''Every pastor a bishop'' goes a venerable idiom, and one of the major uses of such autonomy is the grooming and selection of young ministers. From slavery through segregation, the ministry offered black men one of the precious few occupations that commanded respect even among whites. The male franchise on the pulpit also reflected the strain of social conservatism that has long infused black Christianity. The leading black ministers of postwar years, men like the Rev. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, counted literally dozens of men as their ''sons in the ministry.'' Tracing the lines of ministerial influence through the generations is, in black church circles, almost as holy an endeavor as reciting the Bible's genealogical begats. While African-American women have increasingly enrolled in seminaries and received degrees and ordinations in the last 30 years, they continue to lack the personal access that transforms education and credentials into a prominent pulpit. Nearly half of black seminary students are now women, yet they are far less likely than men to lead a congregation. The most authoritative study of the subject, conducted by Prof. Delores Carpenter of Howard University, looked at the outcomes of more than 800 black men and women who earned divinity degrees from 61 seminaries covering 18 denominations from 1972 through 1998. Half the men, but barely one-fifth of the women, went on to a position as senior pastor. Some of those women had to shift into a more theologically liberal denomination -- typically from Baptist to United Methodist or Presbyterian -- | Pastor Leaves Door Ajar For Other Black Women |
1836909_2 | of several scholars painted a more optimistic outlook -- and a less golden picture of Ellis Island's past. Dan Siciliano, who teaches corporate governance at Stanford Law School, cited recent research showing that the record immigration between 1990 and 2004 had helped to increase wages in the United States, contradicting older research that predicted the opposite would occur. He said that immigration-- including illegal immigration --increased the wages of the native-born by an average of 1.8 percent, and by as much as 3.4 percent among 9 out of 10 native-born workers with at least a high school education. Mr. Siciliano, a research fellow at the Immigration Policy Center, an organization affiliated with groups that support liberalized immigration, said the older studies failed to recognize that immigrants create jobs as well as fill them. With enough immigrant waiters to staff a restaurant for lunch as well as dinner, for example, he said, the owner will make more on his capital investment -- and perhaps open a second restaurant across town. ''There's a divide between what we say we want from immigration and what the economy is telling us we need,'' he said. Immigrants at all skill levels will be needed more than ever over the next 20 years, said Dowell Myers, a demographer from the University of Southern California, to offset the aging of the baby boom generation and the decline in the nation's birth rates. From the other side, Jack Martin, a director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said no study showed that the United States was harmed from 1914 to 1965, when immigration was reduced to a trickle. And he suggested tradeoffs might be necessary, noting that a new White House plan considers denying citizens the right to sponsor foreign brothers and sisters, in exchange for more employee visas. ''The country changes, and the needs of the country change,'' he said. Some things do not change, however, said Daniel J. Tichenor, who teaches history and political science at Rutgers University. ''Each wave of 'new' immigrants has been scored by critics as incapable of successfully joining our ranks, only later to distinguish themselves among our most loyal and accomplished citizens,'' he said. And American history has been marked by waves of xenophobia that ebbed as the new immigrants gained the power of the ballot box. He cited Benjamin Franklin's complaint that German immigrants in Pennsylvania had made his | Where Millions Entered U.S., a Debate on Letting in More |
1836856_5 | for the days when parents at class events didn't spend as much time tapping on their BlackBerrys as watching their children haltingly recite their poetry; when cellphones were not the background noise of daily life. But instead of bemoaning technology, it is time to make it a tool of good rather than evil. Often, small changes can be amazingly simple. For example, one woman took back some of her time, Dr. Hallowell said, by making a seemingly minor but crucial shift in her workplace: ''She put her computer behind her instead of in front of her, so she had to swivel around to use it. To use the computer -- to write, to do e-mail, go to Google, whatever -- she had to make a conscious decision to do so. This is huge.'' Other times it can take a little training. Answering and receiving e-mail messages can suck up enormous amounts of time during the workday, said Mike Song, a co-author of ''The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your E-Mail Before It Manages You'' (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007). Mr. Song, along with his co-authors, surveyed 8,000 employees working in major corporations over three years, and found that most say they spend about 40 percent of their workday on e-mail activity. ''E-mails put other people's priorities in your lives,'' he said. And although his emphasis is on work, to a lesser extent we all see it at home in the form of the friend who constantly sends out the group messages or passes on every joke. With a few relatively simple tactics, that time can be cut way back, said Mr. Song, who used to be a money manager and now is a founding partner of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, a firm that trains corporations on, yes, controlling e-mail. For example, 75 percent of those surveyed said their colleagues used the ''reply all'' function far too often. Yet only 15 percent said they felt that they themselves did so. So Mr. Song suggests largely eliminating the ''reply all'' and ''cc'' options. I particularly like some of the codes you can use to avoid having to reply, such as NRN, for no reply needed, and NTN, for no thanks needed. I never thought I would accuse people of being overly polite, but perhaps we can cut a wee bit back on the e-mails that say ''Thanks!'' The trouble with writing about busyness is that, | Too Busy to Notice You're Too Busy |
1836906_3 | say, that whether legal or not, many women will seek out underground clinics to keep their condition secret from their friends and families anyway. The bill, tentatively scheduled for a vote on April 19, is likely to pass the 66-member city Legislative Assembly with a solid majority, and the mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, has said he will sign it, the sponsors say. It would legalize abortion in the capital, which has eight million residents, and could make Mexico City a magnet for women seeking abortions across the country. The debate now roiling Mexico would have been nearly unthinkable a decade ago, proponents of the law say. The topic was so taboo that the church once excommunicated actresses and television producers for bringing it up in a soap opera. ''People are talking about abortion openly for the first time in Mexico,'' said Lilian Sepúlveda, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights who tracks the issue in Latin America. ''It is historic.'' Still, lawmakers in the Assembly are bracing for an ugly fight, and each side has held competing rallies. Several hundred people in favor of the law marched Thursday afternoon through the narrow streets of the historic downtown. The crowd was made up mostly of women, largely from women's rights groups and political parties that support legalizing abortion. Last Sunday, Cardinal Norberto Rivera was among the church leaders who joined a protest march down the boulevard to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite a ban on the clergy taking part in politics, the cardinal told the crowd of several thousand, ''We are united here so that they hear our voice, the voice of life.'' ''They say that it's a problem of a woman's rights over her body, but they ignore the right over their bodies that all the aborted girls and boys have,'' he said later in his homily. ''They deny them the fundamental right, which is the right to life.'' Víctor Hugo Círigo Vásquez, the majority leader of the Assembly, said many of the 34 legislators from his Party of the Democratic Revolution who support the measure had received threatening calls and messages on their cellphones, as well as nasty e-mail. They were told they would be excommunicated or go to hell if they approved the law. ''There is a media lynching campaign that has been orchestrated by clerical groups from the very, very far right,'' | Abortion Plan in Mexico City Shakes a Heavily Catholic Land |
1836870_2 | type of consultation, informal or otherwise, prior to making a conclusive determination that there would be no effect,'' she wrote. She sent the management plans back to the Agriculture Department, the parent agency of the Forest Service, to be redone, this time in consultation with the public and with the federal agencies that protect wildlife. Tim Preso, a lawyer who argued the case for the environmental group Earthjustice, said Friday, ''Basically, the importance of this decision is that the Bush administration had been trying to take all mandatory environmental protections out of forest planning process and this decision puts them back in.'' One of the crucial questions in the case was whether, simply by setting rules for its actions, a federal agency was triggering the same requirements for study and consultation that are usually set in motion by specific actions, like authorizing a timber harvest. The environmental groups bringing the lawsuit, including Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife, argued that these management rules should be seen as an action. Judge Hamilton agreed, saying that ''the trigger'' for the consultations that the Bush administration failed to make was not that the rule changes were ''likely to have adverse effects, but simply that the rule may affect listed species or critical habitat.'' Among the changes made in the 2005 regulations was the elimination of a requirement that forest managers ensure that no fish or wildlife species with habitat in their forest become threatened or endangered. Mark Rey, the under secretary of agriculture who oversees the Forest Service, said his agency was ''carefully reviewing the decision'' and had not decided whether to appeal. He said the findings in recent court rulings on forest plans in New Mexico and Alabama appeared to contradict Judge Hamilton's view. Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, a group based in Portland, Ore., that represents timber interests, said: ''The court order is requiring analysis when not a grain of sand or a single hair on a critter is being moved. And we are going to spend millions of dollars doing it.'' ''It's bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake,'' Mr. West said. Just one management plan has been completed under the new rules, the one for the twin Comanche and Cimarron National Grasslands in Colorado and Kansas. At least half a dozen others are well on their way to completion. Their status is questionable given Judge Hamilton's ruling. | Federal Judge Strikes Down Forest Management Rules |
1830116_3 | to become a global commodity, and for that to happen, Brazil can't be the only producer,'' said José Luiz Oliverio, vice president for operations at Dedini Industries, Brazil's leading manufacturer of equipment for sugar cane and ethanol mills. ''We've been growing and processing sugar for 500 years, and we are confident of our ability to maintain our leadership in this sector.'' American officials expressed a similar enthusiasm for making ethanol and ethanol-producing equipment on a huge scale. The biggest area of cooperation, they said, will be in helping countries identify and remove obstacles to building their own ethanol production capacity. Mindful of protests from domestic ethanol producers and from the powerful American farm lobby, administration officials are not expected to even hint at a reduction in American tariffs on foreign ethanol. Nor does the administration appear ready to offer money or loan guarantees for construction of ethanol plants in other countries. In a letter to President Bush on Thursday, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he failed to understand ''why the United States would consider spending U.S. taxpayer dollars to encourage new ethanol production in other countries.'' The proposed partnership, Mr. Grassley warned, could become a backdoor way for Brazil to escape the tariff on imported ethanol that currently insulates American producers. The United States imposes a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol, but Caribbean nations and countries in the Central American Free Trade Agreement are exempt from those duties if they make the ethanol from products grown in their own countries. Using Brazilian technology for refining sugar-cane-based ethanol, such countries could in time become exporters to the United States. In addition, Caribbean nations can export a limited amount of ethanol that comes indirectly from Brazil and other countries. Under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which has been in force for years, countries can take partly processed ethanol from a country like Brazil and carry out the last step in processing before shipping it to the United States. But the region is allowed to export that kind of ethanol only up to a limit of 7 percent of United States' ethanol consumption. Last year, the United States imported about 600 million gallons of ethanol, and about 200 million gallons came indirectly from Brazil through the Caribbean, according to Robert Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group that represents ethanol producers. The total imports of | U.S. and Brazil Seek to Promote Ethanol in West |
1831587_0 | The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited employees to an agreed-on agenda. Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia. The stipulations that the employees ''will not be speaking on or responding to'' questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are ''consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what's on the agenda,'' said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall. One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants. Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, parent of the wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hahn from talking about climate change ''over a beer'' but indicated that climate was ''not the subject of the agenda.'' The other employee, Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, was invited by the World Wildlife Fund to help advise villagers along the Siberian coast on avoiding encounters with the bears, said Margaret Williams, director of the Bering Sea program of the fund. With increasing frequency, polar bears are being found near the villages of the Chukchi in part because their migrations have shifted as warming trends alter the sea ice. In 2006, after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a marauding bear, the local groups reached out to Russian scientists and the World Wildlife Fund for help, Ms. Williams said. She asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to take along Mr. Perham to seacoast villages less than 250 miles from Alaska to offer his expertise. A memorandum on Feb. 26 said Mr. Perham ''understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to those issues.'' Mr. Hall, the director, said in an interview Thursday that ''these memoranda could have been better worded,'' but that requiring strict adherence to a set agenda had ''been a longstanding practice.'' Asked for the formal agenda of the Russia meetings, Ms. Williams | Protocol Is Cited in Limiting Scientists' Talks on Climate |
1831597_1 | commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, that the greatly enlarged American force remain until February 2008. But he added, ''If you're going to achieve the kinds of effects that we probably need, it would need to be sustained certainly for some time well beyond the summer.'' Military officials in Iraq have indicated that they would need a large American troop presence for at least a year and probably far longer to achieve lasting stability. For now, Congress seems persuaded to give General Petraeus's strategy a year to yield results, setting the summer of 2008 as a deadline for the return of all troops. General Petraeus's open-ended strategy appeared to be an effort to avoid a repeat of the pattern that has doomed past American efforts to halt the insurgency. In hot spots including Tal Afar and Diyala, United States soldiers have cracked down on insurgents and then reduced the American presence only to see insurgents retake old ground. In his first extended public comments since taking over one month ago, General Petraeus, 54, cited a handful of early favorable indicators since American and Iraqi forces began sweeping through militia- and insurgent-dominated neighborhoods and building new outposts as part of a Baghdad security plan widely seen as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war. ''While too early to discern significant trends, there have been a few encouraging signs,'' General Petraeus said. ''Sectarian killings, for example, have been lower in Baghdad over the past several weeks than in the previous month.'' He also said that fewer families were being forced out of homes by sectarian gangs and that troops had uncovered significant illegal stashes of bombs and weapons. But he emphasized that successes had come with devastating setbacks. ''Schools, health clinics and marketplaces have all been attacked,'' he said. ''Car bombs have targeted hundreds of innocent Iraqis,'' including worshipers in Habbaniya and college students in Baghdad. He also underscored how crucial it would be to prevent the insurgents and death squad members who are believed to have fled Baghdad from exporting violence to nearby areas -- like attacks in Hilla on Tuesday that killed more than 100 Shiite religious pilgrims -- and to block efforts by insurgents forced to abandon Baghdad from returning. ''Anyone who knows about securing Baghdad knows that you must also secure the Baghdad belts, in other words, the areas that surround Baghdad,'' he said. One | New U.S. Commander In Iraq Won't Rule Out Need for Added Troops |
1830276_0 | To the dismay of pundits and politicians alike, women in industrialized countries and elsewhere have been bearing fewer and fewer children. More than 90 states have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and the trend, which began in the early 1960s, is already leading to fewer workers, graying populations and dire predictions about vanishing peoples. While scholars blame several phenomena, including greater access to birth control, later marriage and a drop in what one researcher calls ''hopefulness about the future,'' many researchers agree that at least part of the problem is due to the particular burdens women face in the work force. If becoming a mother requires a woman to take a huge financial and professional hit, the thinking goes, she will be far less likely do it. Could it be, then, that easing a woman's ability to hold a job and raise children simultaneously will nudge her toward having a bigger family? At least 45 countries in Europe and Asia are betting on it, having instituted government programs to maintain or raise their fertility rates. Contrary to the rhetoric of many family-values champions, their example suggests that the promotion of larger families and the promotion of women's careers may go hand in hand. In the European Union, all countries require employers to grant parity in pay and benefits to part-time workers -- allowing women more flexibility in their work lives. In Scandinavia, extensive public child-care systems offer a slot to virtually every child under 5 whose parents work. Do such programs have an effect? Some experts have linked changes in Sweden's birthrate to paid-maternity-leave policies. And according to Ronald Rindfuss, a sociologist, Norwegian women who live in towns with more day-care slots available have more children and become mothers earlier. The timing of births is important, because lower fertility rates may owe something to the fact that many women inadvertently delay becoming pregnant until it's no longer biologically possible. (One survey showed that Western Europeans, on average, said they wanted two children, even though in reality the regional birthrate was only 1.4.) Accommodating working mothers isn't a new idea, of course. Sweden has offered paid maternity leave since before World War II. And there's also a long history of using public policy for natalist purposes -- some of it morally repugnant. Mussolini's government instituted a special tax on bachelors. In the 1980s, Singapore introduced | The Motherhood Experiment |
1830507_3 | than a few minutes a day, employees may need to reorganize their priorities. ''The secret is to do it sparingly,'' Ms. Kerr said. ''If you have to wonder whether you're writing too many personal e-mails on company time, you probably are.'' Whatever kind of e-mail you are writing at work, it is important to consider the content before you hit the send button. Obviously, pornography should be off limits. Employees should also avoid distasteful jokes and sentiments that could be construed as a form of harassment. Q. Can you be fired for what you write in personal e-mail? A. Yes. Because companies in most states offer employment at will, they can terminate employees at any time, and may do so if they decide that an employee has misused corporate e-mail. Soon, one exception to this rule may be messages about organizing labor unions. This winter, the National Labor Relations Board was hearing oral arguments on a new interpretation of the law that would prohibit employers from firing employees for using corporate e-mail to plan union meetings. A decision is expected soon. Q. Are there any ways to protect personal correspondence from an employer's eyes? A. Perhaps. E-mail systems like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail all operate through a standard Web browser, meaning that employees may be able to send and receive messages free of corporate watchdogs. Still, depending on the employer, use of even these sites might lead to trouble. Some companies monitor all outgoing Internet traffic for personal use, meaning that they can read messages from these sites as easily as they can read regular e-mail. Other companies restrict the Internet addresses to which employees have access through the company network, banning Web-based e-mail services completely. David Ries, a partner at the law firm Thorp Reed & Armstrong of Pittsburgh, said that with so many roadblocks, employees might be safest saving personal e-mail for personal time. ''The messenger doesn't matter; it's all about the message,'' he said. ''You have plenty of time to send personal e-mails when you get home.'' OFFICE SPACE: CAREER COUCH Correction: March 11, 2007, Sunday The Career Couch column last Sunday, about the risks of office e-mail messages, referred incorrectly to Jefferson Wells, a firm that employs Don Ulsch, a lawyer who said that all information on a company's work computers normally belongs to the company. It is a consulting firm, not a law firm. | The Risk Is All Yours In Office E-Mail |
1830351_0 | To the Editor: Regarding ''The Awakening of Hanoi'' (Feb. 18) by Jennifer Conlin: As a young, gung-ho United States Air Force officer during the Vietnam war, I bought hook, line and sinker the Domino theory, and all its associated doom and gloom. I expected Vietnam, and that part of the world, to be a wasteland for many years to come. I was pleasantly surprised to read in Ms. Conlin's article that Hanoi is now a vibrant, bustling metropolis, and full of ''art and the art of living.'' I am happy for the Vietnamese people and hope to see their transformed country with my own eyes. Major Dorian de Wind, retired Austin, Tex. | HANOI'S PROGRESS PRAISED |
1830628_0 | Three months after canceling a bear hunt, the State Department of Environmental Protection received $850,000 in Gov. Jon S. Corzine's proposed budget for researching and initiating nonlethal methods of controlling the black bear population. The methods include bear-proofing garbage bins, expanding public education programs and using rubber buckshot to scare black bears away from contact with humans, said John S. Watson, the deputy commissioner for natural resources. ''This will provide a baseline of data to see if nonlethal strategies are effective and will help us make a legitimate and logical scientific determination of whether this works or not,'' Mr. Watson said. There is no timeline for deciding whether future hunts are needed, he said. The state allowed its first bear hunt in more than 30 years in 2003, followed by a second hunt in 2005. Hunting-rights groups sued the state last fall after the environmental protection commissioner, Lisa P. Jackson, overruled the State Fish and Game Council, which recommended a 2006 hunt. In November, she said she was withdrawing approval for future hunts because there was insufficient money to put nonlethal control methods in place and analyze their effectiveness. The state estimates that it has 1,600 black bears. Last year it received 900 complaints about them. DAVID K. RANDALL THE WEEK | Budget Would Finance Study Of Bear Population Control |
1833486_3 | and ''spirituality'' are now terms so badly tarnished by association with pop psychology and comfort food for the soul that they do little to convey the body of thought that Professor Taylor has produced. It includes highly technical philosophical jousting about language and knowledge, as well as political theory, analyses of multiculturalism and, in ''Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity'' (1989), a large-scale account of how post-Reformation Europe reconfigured a new understanding of the self around calling and family, the ordinary life of productive activity and intimate relationship. Journalists, including this one, should be forgiven for not managing to encompass in brief articles such a range of work drawing as freely on history, sociology and anthropology as on philosophy. Even Professor Taylor's brief ''reflections'' on 12 of his major books passed out at the news conference did not do justice to the complexities and subtleties of his thinking. In addition, ''A Secular Age,'' Professor Taylor's weighty (in every sense) account of modern secularization will appear from the Harvard University Press only next fall. This book will be the third but central volume developed from the prestigious Gifford Lectures that he delivered in 1999 in Edinburgh. Some journalists, especially in Canada, have tagged Professor Taylor, who was born in Montreal, a ''bridge builder,'' the bilingual offspring of a French-Canadian mother and an Anglo-Canadian father. That fact -- ''It had a profound influence on me,'' he has said -- certainly explains his deep appreciation of cultural diversity and of finding ways to prevent conflicts of identity from exploding into violence. Intellectually, he has been a bridge builder in other ways, between academic disciplines, between his Roman Catholic faith and the values of the Enlightenment, between the universal claims that can be made about all humans and the recognition of profound changes that are owed to particular histories. It is not surprising that Professor Taylor was recently named co-chairman of a commission to examine accommodating cultural and religious differences in the public life of Quebec. And on Wednesday, he voiced alarm at ''creeping Islamophobia.'' His political engagements are nothing new, of course. In the 1960s, he ran four times for the Canadian Parliament, coming closest in 1965, when he was narrowly defeated by the future prime minister Pierre Trudeau. After one more effort, in 1968, Professor Taylor devoted himself to philosophy. Seldom have voters made such a valuable contribution | 'Spiritual Realities' in Service of Science and Vice Versa |
1833474_2 | plans. Speaking of the wisdom of crowds, Fidelity says that those Americans over age 25 who think they are saving enough save about 7.5 percent of their annual pay. Used Tires and Safety About 30 million used tires were sold in the United States last year, almost 10 percent of all replacement tires sold. Used tires are a money-saving choice for people who need to replace tires on a leased vehicle or on a car they are planning to sell soon. A new Goodyear Eagle RS-A that goes for about $100 at a Big O tire store sells for about $18 at BorderTire.com, a used-tire dealer. Jobbers collect used tires from tire stores and the auto departments of Wal-Mart or Sears after they are replaced with new tires. The used-tire companies can get about $1 each by scrapping them or up to $10 apiece selling them to tire dealers. The profit margins for used tires are far better than for new tires, which explains why almost every tire store sells them. Reputable dealers examine the tires and grade them. But the problem is that most consumers, unless they have a degree in polymer science, will not be able to see flaws in a tire. Some tires are detailed -- that is, meticulously cleaned -- and even painted so they look younger. Sean Kane, an auto safety consultant at Safety Research and Strategies (safetyresearch.net) in Rehoboth, Mass., said that although consumers look at the depth of tire tread, the real concern should be the age of the tire. He wrote in a recent issue of The Safety Record, his firm's newsletter, that ''tires age in a way that often cannot be detected visually.'' A tire that looks new can be deteriorating internally, he said, in the same way that an old rubber band in your desk drawer might gradually develop cracks. It all depends on how the tire has been driven -- underinflation ruins a tire -- or where it has been stored. Mr. Kane said that the scope of problem tires was unknown. But he said that he had found 108 incidents in which tires older than six years were involved in loss-of-control crashes. These incidents caused 85 deaths and 115 injuries. Slightly less than a third of the vehicles had tires that were bought used. State governments regulate how much tread must be left on a tire -- the | Some More Numbers to Juggle In Figuring Out Retirement |
1833519_2 | government agencies to send workers home early and led some highway agencies to warn motorists not to drive above 35 miles per hour. The National Weather Service said yesterday that the brunt of the storm would hit the region last night and that precipitation would end by this evening. By late last night, US Airways said it had scrapped 1,217 of its scheduled 3,700 flights, Delta Air Lines had canceled 600 of its 4,100 flights and Continental had canceled 175 of about 1,100 flights on its bigger jets. Jenny Dervin, a spokeswoman for JetBlue, said that, for this storm, the airline had canceled flights early. On Feb. 14, JetBlue was widely criticized as having waited too long to do so amid an ice storm, leaving passengers stranded on planes on the tarmac at Kennedy Airport. ''We contacted customers at home,'' she said. ''Today is how you do it.'' At Newark Airport, Karen Opdyke, 48, was trying to get to Miami for a cruise with her husband, three young children and mother after their 9 a.m. flight was canceled. ''We got on the plane, we got off the plane,'' she told The Associated Press. ''We got on the plane and off the plane.'' As she balanced a crying child next to a pile of luggage, Ms. Opdyke said that she could not book another flight and that JetBlue agents were unable to help her make a reservation on a different airline. ''There's nothing available all week,'' she said. At Philadelphia International Airport, 95 percent of flights were canceled after ice pellets forced several airlines to ground their planes, said Phyllis Van Istendal, a spokeswoman for the airport. Thousands of passengers were stranded at several Philadelphia terminals, and officials at the airport began distributing pillows and blankets to passengers who planned to spend the night. With all the hotels around the airport completely booked by yesterday afternoon, Ms. Van Istendal said she was expecting several hundred stranded passengers to camp out. There were also aggravations on the runways. Passengers on nine US Airways planes were trapped on board for as many as five hours after the planes failed to take off because of the weather and got stuck on the tarmac. Valerie Wunder, a US Airways spokeswoman, said the passengers had been trapped because of the severe congestion at the airport. ''We didn't have any place to put the airplanes,'' she said. | Delays and Dangers as Messy Storm Hits Region |
1833454_0 | Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China said Friday that his country is still trying to overcome major obstacles to its internal development and suggested that it will not seek to disrupt the world order dominated by the United States. In a nationally televised news conference wrapping up the National People's Congress, Mr. Wen deflected a series of questions about China's rising financial and military power and its fast-growing emissions of gases that contribute to climate change. He argued that China remains a developing country that must study the experiences of richer nations, and which will always act responsibly on the world stage. Chinese leaders have long followed a public relations strategy that emphasizes modesty and avoids intimations of political, economic or diplomatic ambition. But Mr. Wen's defensive tone was notable because China's trade surplus, foreign exchange reserves, military spending and pollution have all surged under his leadership in the past four years, raising concerns about the country's growing impact on the outside world. Mr. Wen stressed that his focus remained squarely on overcoming ''hidden crises'' that threatened to undermine China's economy, which he said remained ''unbalanced, uncoordinated, unstable and unsustainable,'' even as it grows rapidly. He said the country must also address the ''overconcentration of power'' that has fueled rampant corruption, while doing more to help the poor. ''The two great tasks are, first, develop the productive forces of society and, second, advance social justice and fairness,'' he said. ''The speed of the fleet is not determined by the fastest vessel, rather it is determined by the slowest one.'' Mr. Wen said that even as China explores new ways to invest more than $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves in overseas assets, Beijing still amounts to a small player in world financial markets and ''will not have any impact on U.S.-dollar-denominated assets'' globally. He also claimed that China's military spending, ''whether in absolute terms or in relative terms,'' amounts to less than that of many wealthy countries and some developing countries. China's official military budget for 2007 rose 18 percent to $45.3 billion, continuing a decade-long streak of double-digit increases. Even at that level, which the Pentagon maintains understates China's actual defense outlays by a factor of two or three, China's military budget in 2007 exceeds that of Japan and is fast approaching those of Britain and France, the largest military spenders after the United States. Asked to explain China's | Despite Buildup, China Insists Its Goals Are Domestic |
1835412_0 | THE millwrights who built and repaired the 19th-century windmills of eastern Long Island favored white oak for its hardness and durability, sometimes finding what they needed on Gardiners Island. Now the Town of Southampton has gone far afield for what it thinks is a better wood, a tropical rain forest hardwood called ipe (pronounced E-pay) so dense and durable it resists nails and withstands time and weather the way oak never could. A stack of ipe lumber imported from Suriname, a South American republic where some of the last intact rain forests are found, waits in a town warehouse for use in a $354,900 project to restore the wind shaft, sails and fantail of the Beebe windmill in Bridgehampton. The restoration will last much longer than if oak were used, but some environmentalists say it might come at a cost. The windmill, built in 1820 and owned by the town, was last restored in 1984. Winter storms in 2003 and 2004 sheared off the four paddle-like sails and left only the nub of the rotting wind shaft protruding from the windmill's revolving cap. Robert J. Hefner of Amagansett, a historical preservation consultant who drew up the current restoration plans, said ipe with flashing would mean work otherwise good for 20 to 25 years could last four times as long. ''You would be using four large white oaks versus one large ipe,'' he said. ''And knowing what we know, it would be irresponsible not to use it.'' But Tim Keating, the executive director of Rainforest Relief, a group in Brooklyn that tries to protect rain forests, said importing ipe was a misstep. He suggested that the town use black locust or recycled plastic for the project. ''Ipe may sound like a good idea because it lasts longer and cuts maintenance costs, but three or four generations from now people are going to be wondering, 'What were you thinking?' '' Mr. Keating said. ''We should not put cost saving above the destruction of the world.'' Mr. Hefner said black locust of the size needed -- 24 by 24 inches square and 20 feet long -- would be ''next to impossible'' to find. He said recycled plastic was not strong enough. Darron A. Collins, a managing director of the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group, said: ''You can harvest ipe well or not so well. The quality of the wood is just unbeatable, | Preservation and Ecology Clash in Windmill Repair |
1835702_1 | are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.'' The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. ''But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,'' said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once. Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images. The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time. In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted. ''We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,'' observed Mr. Marois, who said he turns off his cellphone when driving. The young, according to conventional wisdom, are the most adept multitaskers. Just look at teenagers and young workers in their 20s, e-mailing, instant messaging and listening to iPods at once. Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code. The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group | Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, And Don't Read This in Traffic |
1835702_4 | be bad at other companies, too.'' In the computer age, technology has been seen not only as a factor contributing to information overload but also as a tool for coping with it. Computers can help people juggle workloads, according a paper presented this month at a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers scrutinized the work at an unnamed executive recruiting firm, including projects and 125,000 e-mail messages. They also examined the firm revenues, people's compensation and the use of information technology by the recruiters. The recruiters who were the heaviest users of e-mail and the firm's specialized database were the most productive in completing projects. ''You can use the technology to supplement your brain and keep track of more things,'' said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper, along with Sinan Aral of the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University. But the paper also found that ''beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.'' For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each. The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year. That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks. Mr. Spira concedes that the $650 billion figure is a rough estimate -- an attempt to attach a number to a big problem. Work interruptions will never -- and should not -- be eliminated, he said, since they are often how work is done and ideas are shared. After all, one person's interruption is another's collaboration. The information age is really only a decade or two old in the sense of most people working and communicating on digital devices all day, Mr. Spira said. In the industrial era, it took roughly a century until Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 published his principles of ''scientific management'' for increasing worker | Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, And Don't Read This in Traffic |
1835417_0 | SOME of us played with toy cars as kids. Kevin Gershowitz helped shred real ones. After college, he and his twin brother, Elliot, began helping run Gershow Recycling, the family business started by their father, Sam Gershowitz, in 1964. It is now one of the largest recyclers in the country and the depository (but not the final resting place) of many of the cars that once clogged the arteries of Long Island's circulation. Anyone who has ever cursed all those cars in front of him on the road might relish standing here at the expansive Gershow yard and watching the two towering cranes pick up one car after another and feed them into a giant automobile shredder, like servants feeding grapes to Caesar. The shredder is the killing floor of the Gershow yard. It is the only such shredder on Long Island and it is a fearsome machine, powered by two 2,700-horsepower engines at a time. The 150-ton rotor wields 28 1,100-pound steel alloy hammers that slam the steel to pieces in seconds. Strong magnets help sift the scrap metal from unwanted foam, plastic and rubber, and a conveyor belt leads out a million meek little pieces of scrap metal to be shipped by rail to steel mills down South and eventually reused to make more cars. Kevin Gershowitz, the company's executive vice president, will not divulge how many cars are shredded here per year, but allows that it is in the hundreds of thousands. ''It's enough each year to fill the entire Long Island Expressway, bumper to bumper,'' he said. Asked if his cranes could start plucking straight from the expressway tomorrow morning, he laughed and said, ''We have to wait for people to get sick of their cars first.'' ''Most people don't know, or want to know, where their old car goes,'' he said. ''This is where it goes.'' Mr. Gershowitz, 39, stood in front of a mountain made of almost every conceivable type of household, commercial and municipal castoff: bathtubs, file cabinets, appliances, wheelbarrows, chain-link fences, street signs, radiators, bicycles, baby strollers and pots and pans. But most of the pile was junked cars. A maroon Jeep Wrangler tried to hide under a tangle of wire and cable, and a van emblazoned with ''Goshen Temple of Seventh-day Adventists'' seemed to seek sanctity squeezed between blue and red sedans. Mr. Gershowitz watched his giant, lucrative arcade game: cranes | Where Expressway-Clogging Cars Meet Their Fate |
1835610_0 | SENDING an e-mail message is one of the more spontaneous things you can do in modern life, but maybe spontaneous is not great. E-mail marketing experts have developed, if not a science, a highly articulated superstition about the best and the worst times for sending e-mail. Sundays are great for catching up on correspondence and getting a jump on the week ahead. But on Monday, many people arrive at work and clean their in-boxes in a burst of resolution, without reading half of the e-mail collected there. And don't ask your parents -- or anyone else -- for money late at night, any night. You're desperate, it's midnight, and you're ready to hit the Send button, as though it will blow up your debts, if not your pride. But spam ships between two and five a.m. And, as Jeanniey Mullen, executive director and senior partner for worldwide e-mail marketing with OgilvyOne Worldwide, explained, your plea pops up the next morning with company. Lots of it. Hit. Delete. WILLIAM L. HAMILTON IDEAS & TRENDS | Clicking Delete, Without Looking |
1835489_1 | conducting for the Office of Naval Research, which oversees science and technology programs for the Navy and the Marine Corps. The underwater vehicle is a drone that can patrol open waters or a confined space in a port or harbor in an effort to protect ships and docks. It can detect other vessels, oil slicks or chemical agents and send warnings to a central location via wireless and cellular signals. Since 1935, Stevens has been home to the Center for Maritime Systems, a laboratory for graduate students that has created and improved on nautical technologies like creating faster boats and developing sonar technology. The lab also worked on the Apollo space program, testing the capsules' ability to float in water after re-entry. The campus, on the banks of the Hudson with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, is an ideal spot to conduct nautical tests. The Office of Naval Research projects at Stevens are not classified, but Captain Barnes speaks with discretion about specific aspects of the antiterrorist technology he and his 10 students are working on. ''Basically, we're looking at several ways of neutralizing an underwater threat,'' he said. Another project involves testing ships so they can better withstand explosions and to lengthen the time it takes them to sink. The research inside the Davidson Laboratory, home to the maritime systems program at Stevens, is not all related to the military. The students are also working on projects for the America's Cup yacht race, paid for by grants and donations. But military research is important to the lab. Stevens has received $13 million in grants over the last three years from the Office of Naval Research. Each year the office spends $630 million on research programs at colleges and universities around the country, said Patricia L. Gruber, director of research at the agency. Projects include advanced water purifiers, mathematics data mining, and creating video games to help soldiers recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. ''They are really doing the necessary basic research that helps the Navy and Marine Corps continue to sustain their mission,'' Dr. Gruber said. ''These programs also help to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers that help us grow as a country.'' Captain Barnes, who joined Stevens in 2003, said that when he looks at the Hudson, especially in summer, and sees the container ships, sailboats, kayaks and cruise liners, he is a little frightened. | Drone From Stevens Lab Will Patrol in the Hudson |
1836076_0 | After years of hostility and recriminations, the leaders of Northern Ireland's dominant rival groups, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and the Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, held their first face-to-face talks on Monday and agreed to form a joint administration for the province on May 8. The deal came on the day Britain and Ireland had set as the deadline for restoring Northern Ireland's local government, more than four years after it was suspended in October 2002 in a dispute over espionage activities by the Irish Republican Army. ''The word historic has to be used,'' said Brian Feeney, a historian at St. Mary's University College in Belfast. ''It was the only way it was ever going to work. The two leaders of the two traditions had to do the deal.'' The province's leaders failed to meet the March 26 deadline set by Britain and Ireland to restore local government, but they were under pressure from a threat by London and Dublin to dissolve the suspended local assembly altogether if they did not reach agreement. The fact that the two men set a date themselves for restored self-rule and sat together in the same room persuaded Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, to accept the delay. ''We were not going to stand in the way of consensus,'' Mr. Blair's spokesman told reporters in London, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity. Mr. Blair depicted Monday's events as ''a very remarkable coming together of people who, for very obvious reasons, have been strongly opposed in the past.'' Though the two sides remain divided in their ultimate aims, the sight of the once sworn enemies sitting feet apart was all the more striking in contrast to the once familiar images of bloodshed that scarred Northern Ireland for decades. More than 3,500 people died in three decades of the latest round of sectarian strife known as the Troubles that ended with an I.R.A. cease-fire 10 years ago and the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998. If carried out, the agreement means that Britain will formally hand back responsibility for running many of Northern Ireland's internal affairs to an administration composed of Protestants and Roman Catholics, with Mr. Paisley, the leader of the biggest party in the province, as first minister and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, as his deputy. Other, smaller, parties will also have seats | ULSTER FACTIONS AGREE TO A PLAN FOR JOINT RULE |
1830900_3 | his first clinical clerkship, transfixed by the misery of a patient everyone else had labeled a miserable old crock years before. He tried to reassure the sick man, but the usual platitudes sounded hollow, and the man became only more agitated, almost incoherent, pain and fury all garbled together. Fortunately, at this juncture the demigod Heracles showed up to straighten everything out. The medical students breathed a sigh of relief and clapped heartily. These students and this patient will, of course, never meet; that would require a giant warp in the fabric of time and history. The sick man with the infected foot, Philoctetes, was marooned by his comrades on a deserted Greek island back in the mists of ancient myth. The rest of the crowd all headed off to sack Troy, but the kid, Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, was sent back to steal Philoctetes's magic bow and arrows (without which the Greeks could not prevail). The wily Odysseus was waiting on the beach for the kid to get the goods. It was all only a footnote to the bloody saga of the Trojan war. But to Dr. Lyuba Konopasek, a pediatrician who directs the medical school's first-year course in Medicine, Patients and Society, Sophocles's play, from the fifth century B.C., had so much to say to medical students and doctors that she invited Bryan Doerries, a classicist and director, to stage a reading for her course. After the actors finished, students and faculty members talked for a long time about how students often feel helpless in the hospital, torn between befriending patients with incurable illness and sticking to a professional script. Sophocles somehow got that tenuous position just right, just as he knew that sick people, isolated and transformed by chronic disease, dread being alone and forgotten more than they dread pain or even death. ''We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine,'' Mr. Doerries said. ''They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?'' Dr. Edith Langner, an internist, said, ''Philoctetes' horror was the horror of abandonment.'' And yet, she continued, as Sophocles accurately pointed out, it can take so little from doctors to turn that around: a daily visit, a few minutes of friendly conversation, or sometimes just a new young ear to hear the old story all over again. | The Difficult Patient, a Problem Old as History (or Older) |
1829777_0 | Deutsche Telekom AG said on Thursday it was seeking acquisitions to fuel growth as Europe's largest telecoms operator blamed fierce competition and staff costs for a 43 percent drop in annual net profit. Hoisting an effective "for sale" sign over non-core assets such as Internet companies in France, Spain and radio towers in Germany and the United States, the group's new chief executive vowed to cut costs and revive the flagship German company. "Our focus for growth will be abroad," said Rene Obermann, who faces analysts and investors later on Thursday for the first time as CEO since taking the helm in November. "We want to examine mobile phone acquisitions abroad." Deutsche Telekom has been tipped as a possible acquirer of a stake in Greek peer OTE, which owns growing eastern-European assets, and of France Telecom's (NYSE:FTE) Orange Netherlands unit. But Obermann declined to be drawn on details. Deutsche Telekom's shares, which have been on a downward trend since January, slid 2.5 percent, underperforming a flat, broader telecoms market. Despite shocking the market in late January with its second profit warning in six months, net profit of 3.17 billion euros ($4.2 billion) missed average analyst forecasts of 4.24 billion euros. Revenues came in at 61.3 billion euros, as expected. But the company also disappointed some investors by leaving its dividend unchanged at 0.72 euros per share. "There were some hopes for a positive surprise regarding the dividend, but they were not fulfilled," HVB analyst Thomas Friedrich said. Europe's largest phone operator by sales wants to save 2.0 billion euros this year and 4.2-4.7 billion euros by 2010 from 2005 levels. As part of the drive, Deutsche Telekom plans to move up to 50,000 employees into lower-paying subsidiaries. Thousands of staff have taken to the streets in protest. It also wants to beef up domestic customers, who have been leaving in droves for smaller, cheaper rivals, by more than 40 percent this year. Deutsche Telekom plans to follow some of its domestic peers and launch a no-frills brand in Germany, Europe's largest telecoms market, to claw back lower-spending customers. Obermann said the new brand should generate 1.0 billion euros by 2010. Some analysts warned that there was still no evidence that the fall in prices in the German market had slowed or that Deutsche Telekom's new management team could negotiate the prickly politics of trying to cut the company's swollen cost | Deutsche Telekom's Annual Net Drops 43 Percent |
1829660_5 | I also learned that while cellular companies install repeaters in corporate settings to improve service, they are not quite so sanguine about allowing individual consumers to install their own boosters. And while the two boosters I tested are approved by the Federal Communications Commission, whether consumers are free to use them wherever they please is a matter of considerable contention. While repeaters are not illegal to purchase or own, the fact that they operate in the frequencies licensed by the government to the carriers means that individual users are violating the terms of those licenses when they switch them on. According to a representative of Cingular, the company therefore believes that the Federal Communications Act prohibits the unauthorized use of repeaters by consumers. And wireless companies assert that the use of unauthorized repeaters can cause interference for other customers. Indeed, CTIA -- the Wireless Association, the trade group that represents carriers and manufacturers, asserts that repeaters have sometimes caused temporary service disruptions for adjacent customers. Christopher Guttman-McCabe, the CTIA's vice president for regulatory affairs, says the group believes that ''some discussion with the carrier'' must occur in advance to seek approval of a repeater's use. He warns that without such authorization, a repeater could even endanger lives by disrupting e911 location-based emergency services. But none of the carriers offer a standard approval process. There appear to be conflicting F.C.C. regulations as to whether cellular subscribers may use cell boosters. An F.C.C. spokeswoman said the agency was aware of the issue, but it has not issued an official interpretation of the regulations. John Davis, director of product management for Wi-Ex, conceded that oscillation -- a type of interference akin to feedback that can create noise on a carrier's network -- ''is a valid concern.'' But he says the zBoost will automatically shut down if it detects such interference. The makers of the Spotwave also say that their device reduces its power in such cases. Passive antennas, like the Freedom Antenna, present no such legal or interference concerns. And it is extremely unlikely that in my rural test location a properly installed, low-powered repeater could cause interference -- or be detected by the wireless carriers. Nevertheless, installing your own repeater is no panacea for poor cellular coverage. So like the adage that you need money to make money, it turns out that you also need a signal to improve a signal. Basics | Circuits; Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone |
1834260_1 | the 1960s the cigarette was a cultural icon of sophistication, glamour and sexual allure -- a highly prized commodity for one out of two Americans. Many advertising campaigns from the 1930s through the 1950s extolled the healthy virtues of cigarettes. Full-color magazine ads depicted kindly doctors clad in white coats proudly lighting up or puffing away, with slogans like ''More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.'' Early in the 20th century, opposition to cigarettes took a moral rather than a health-conscious tone, especially for women who wanted to smoke, although even then many doctors were concerned that smoking was a health risk. The 1930s were a period when many Americans began smoking and the most significant health effects had not yet developed. As a result, the scientific studies of the era often failed to find clear evidence of serious pathology and had the perverse effect of exonerating the cigarette. The years after World War II, however, were a time of major breakthroughs in epidemiological thought. In 1947, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill of the British Medical Research Council created a sophisticated statistical technique to document the association between rising rates of lung cancer and increasing numbers of smokers. The prominent surgeon Evarts A. Graham and a medical student, Ernst L. Wynder, published a landmark article in 1950 comparing the incidence of lung cancer in their nonsmoking and smoking patients at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. They concluded that ''cigarette smoking, over a long period, is at least one important factor in the striking increase in bronchogenic cancer.'' Predictably, the tobacco companies -- and their expert surrogates -- derided these and other studies as mere statistical arguments or anecdotes rather than definitions of causality. Dr. Brandt, who has exhaustively combed through the tobacco companies' internal memorandums and research documents, amply demonstrates that Big Tobacco understood many of the health risks of their products long before the 1964 surgeon general's report. He also describes the concerted disinformation campaigns these companies waged for more than half a century -- simultaneously obfuscating scientific evidence and spreading the belief that since everyone knew cigarettes were dangerous at some level, smoking was essentially an issue of personal choice and responsibility rather than a corporate one. In the 1980s, scientists established the revolutionary concept that nicotine is extremely addictive. The tobacco companies publicly rejected such claims, even as they took advantage of cigarettes' addictive potential | Tracing the Cigarette's Path From Sexy to Deadly |
1834277_2 | in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject. He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys -- among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality. Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates. Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males' hands. Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies. Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape. | Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior |
1833742_0 | THE developer Charles Wang has withdrawn an innovative proposal that would have brought housing, retail, hotel and office space to Plainview. One could have easily found a compromise that would have adjusted the density envisioned by the proposal, but protesters instead quashed it altogether. Sensing no leadership from John Venditto, Oyster Bay supervisor, Mr. Wang withdrew the application and will wind up submitting the ho-hum plan for houses and offices that zoning law will allow. In Great Neck, meanwhile, a developer wants to build luxury apartments, but seeks to set aside some 20 percent of the units for young firefighters who volunteer in the village fire department. If neighborhood criticism hobbles this effort, the developer will build what is allowed under the current zoning or sell his land to a church or synagogue. In Syosset, a 10-year dispute between a developer and civic association members is still in court because the Town of Oyster Bay refuses to approve a compromise version of a mall featuring Neiman Marcus. The proposed mall would be put on an industrial site, surrounded by two highway department depots, an animal shelter and the Long Island Expressway. The list of failed or pending development on Long Island goes on. The problem is that across the region, elected officials have willingly abdicated their zoning authority to civic groups that bitterly complain about property taxes while blocking proposals that would actually ease the burden borne by homeowners. Had these reactionary not-in-my-backyard forces been as dominant in the years just after World War II, most Long Islanders would still be living in cramped apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. Sadly, few municipal leaders today have the political will or the governmental vision to embrace a new generation of progressive development. The obvious solution would be to recast the Long Island Regional Planning Board, which has a minimal role, into an agency that has the authority to supersede zoning laws in local towns and the Island's two cities. Having produced three huge master planning reports in the last 30 years pertaining to Long Island's land use, the board understands, as few others do, the strategic role of ''smart growth'' in creating a vibrant, strong and attractive region. It would take a political earthquake in Albany to give the board such powers, but crushing property taxes, combined with a strong governor, could create the crucible for such change. What is | Zoning Out the Future |
1833756_0 | For much of the past century, the hills and valleys around Los Angeles have been a kind of developers' paradise, a patchwork of expansive ranches, many dating to the 1840s and 1850s, that supplied builders with a seemingly endless stock of raw acreage. As the region boomed, subdivisions and office parks spread steadily over these former ranch lands, until Los Angeles County encompassed not only Los Angeles but also nearly a hundred other smaller cities. How much bigger the area can get may be a matter of geography. West and south is the Pacific Ocean. East is desert. And the Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel Mountains bound the northeast. It may not be the case that the Southern California dream has run its course here. But the dream may be running out of room. About 60 miles north of the city, though, beyond the San Gabriels, you can still find some open space untouched by the backhoes of big developers. This is the future site of the city of Centennial, population about 70,000, just off Interstate 5, but today it is still fields of rolling grassland that cattle have grazed for more than 100 years. Seen from afar, the Centennial site looks like a swatch of green-and-gold fabric, rumpled here and there in small pleats and gathers, spread over an area six miles long and three miles deep. Behind it rise the Tehachapi Mountains, and if you look closely you can see a glint of silver running through the landscape: the water of the California Aqueduct flowing south. It's a landscape that's empty and attractive and remote -- but not a place, as one developer confided to me, that's so attractive or remote as to make it off limits to a builder. The 11,700 acres allocated for Centennial are part of Tejon Ranch, one of the last great California ranches. Comprising more than 270,000 acres, or 426 square miles, the ranch is roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island. It is so large that many things that need to get from Northern California to Southern California -- natural gas, drinking water, electricity, fiber-optic cables, the cars on I-5 -- pass through it. The ranch is home to about 14,000 head of cattle, and its agricultural fields yield almonds, pistachios and wine grapes. ''All these other huge properties from the 19th century have been broken up long ago,'' says Jan | Playing Sim City For Real |
1833959_3 | of strong economic fundamentals and transparent rules for investment by private industry. In many respects, Venezuela has strong fundamentals, with more than $30 billion in foreign currency reserves and large inflows of revenue from oil exports this year, which are expected to surpass $50 billion. But economists say confidence in the economy has started to erode since the government began to aggressively assert control over the activities of foreign companies in recent months. The de facto devaluation of the bolívar in street trading illustrates the growing concern. Economic historians here say the 12.5-cent coin was a descendant of a 2.5-cent coin introduced in the 1870s when the country's currency was called the venozolano. The denomination was changed to 12.5 cents when the bolívar, named in honor of the Caracas-born liberation hero Simón Bolívar, was introduced. ''At least they're not calling the new currency the venecuba,'' said Antonio Alessandrini, the owner of Globus, a Caracas company that deals in rare coins, a reference to Venezuela's alliance with Cuba. ''Maybe these changes will create an uptick in our business.'' Symbolism has long been a priority for Mr. Chávez, whose presidency began in 1999. For instance, after emerging victorious from a strike that had reduced Venezuela's oil exports in 2002 and 2003, he renamed the tankers that had dropped anchor to harden the strike. Gone were the names of Venezuelan beauty queens, replaced with names of Simón Bolívar's servant and his lover. Some historians see in Mr. Chávez's newest financial measures a parallel with changes made by Cuba when Che Guevara became president of the Cuban central bank after the overthrow of the strongman Fulgencio Batista. Cuba issued currency with new iconography, including a five-peso bill with the image of Antonio Maceo, an Afro-Cuban independence leader. Mr. Parra, of the central bank, said that iconic changes were in store for the bolívar fuerte. Officials at the central bank have defended the various monetary changes, including the reintroduction of the 12.5-cent coin, saying it would prevent consumers from having their purchases rounded up by merchants. ''Bringing memories of a past when the currency was strong may create the hope that the currency's strong again,'' said Fernando Coronil, an authority on Venezuelan history at the University of Michigan. ''But if this does not match the real strength of the economy, these measures could backfire.'' By focusing on financial symbolism, economists say, Mr. Chávez is avoiding | Venezuela to Give Currency New Name and Numbers |
1833316_0 | While enormous effort is focused on screening airline passengers for explosives or weapons before they can board a commercial flight, it remains shockingly easy for airport employees to sneak into secure areas and carry dangerous materials onto a plane without detection. That frightening truth was underscored by a flagrant breach of security at the Orlando Airport in Florida last week that was detected only because of an anonymous tip. The breach in this case was a small-bore smuggling operation. A customer service agent for Comair, a subsidiary of Delta, and another Comair employee used their work uniforms and identification badges to gain access to restricted areas, where they stored a duffle bag containing 13 handguns, an assault rifle and a stash of marijuana near the departure gates. One of the men later retrieved the bag and took it aboard a Delta flight to Puerto Rico as carry-on luggage. Based on the tip, authorities pulled one of the men off the plane before it took off and, disturbingly late, caught the other with the duffle bag in San Juan. It is small comfort that the Transportation Security Administration says that no passengers were put at risk because at least two federal marshals were on board. Had the smugglers been terrorists, they could presumably have fired their guns or brought down the plane with a powerful explosive. The vulnerability exposed by this incident is the lack of checkpoint screening for thousands of workers who have access to secure areas. The T.S.A. relies instead on background checks at the time of hiring, supplemented by random screening at many airports. In the wake of this latest embarrassment, the T.S.A. flooded five airports with a temporary surge of additional agents, hardly a solution. The Orlando airport, long confronted by smuggling, took a more sensible course by starting to screen all workers before they enter secure areas, thus joining Miami and Heathrow Airport in London. A sensible bill introduced by Representative Nita Lowey of New York and co-sponsored by Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, both Democrats, would create a pilot program at five airports to screen all workers with access to secure areas under the standards used for passengers. Airports typically object that such screening is cumbersome and costly. But it seems foolish to screen passengers and airline crews vigilantly and then ignore workers who could do just as much damage. Editorial | A Huge Hole in Airport Security |
1833372_3 | gains of corruption, arguing that it will protect only legal property. In the past, Chinese have bought and sold property freely, but doing so in a legal vacuum. Supporters say they hope the law strengthens the rights of property holders, especially middle-class homeowners. China's urban middle class has fueled a real estate boom, even though all land is owned by the state and purchasers trade only the right to use property on the land for up to 70 years. The disposition of property after that term expires is one of many unsettled issues. But proponents of the law tend to remain quiet on the broader complaint that China's pretense of socialism has become more and more hollow. Leftists do not seem likely to give up their offensive. They scored an important victory recently when online petitions and an intensive campaign in the state-run news media appear to have prompted a leading American private equity company, the Carlyle Group, to scale back its planned investment in one of China's largest construction machinery manufacturers, Xugong Group. The investment had become a test of China's willingness to sell majority stakes in core industrial companies to foreign investors. Amid this tussle, Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen appear to have sought a middle ground. In public statements, Mr. Hu has promoted a ''harmonious society'' that does a better job of distributing wealth equitably and alleviates some of the excesses of pollution and corruption that have accompanied rapid growth. Mr. Wen has focused mainly on lifting rural incomes and increasing social spending. Those approaches have addressed some concerns of people on the left. But in practice, the two leaders have also sought to keep faith with business leaders and the rising middle class. Under their leadership, state-run banks have sold shares to foreign investors and overhauled bank management systems with the help of foreign consultants. As well as approving the property law, the legislature revised a corporate tax, ending an advantage foreign investors enjoyed over local companies for more than two decades. Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu have so far steered relatively small amounts of government revenue into the country's rudimentary social welfare system. And they continue to invest heavily in infrastructure and industrial expansion, helping the economy expand even faster than in the 1990s. Those measures, along with the property law, suggest that they will not casually abandon the pro-growth policies that have made China | China Approves Property Law, Strengthening Its Middle Class |
1835098_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Stepping on the Dream'' (column, March 22): Bob Herbert highlights one dimension of a titanic problem on the horizon. The bow is, as he describes, the debt burden carried by increasing numbers of young college graduates. The stern, which is more likely to bring the ship down, is the looming default crisis that seems inevitable. Costs of education are rising at a far faster rate than the incomes earned by those who carry the debt. The whole system is predicated on future income streams that are drying up as fast as candor in Washington. I predict a financial collapse of unprecedented magnitude in the decades ahead. It will make the current mortgage lending debacle look trivial in comparison. Steven J. Nelson Head, Calhoun School New York, March 23, 2007 To the Editor: It is amazing, as Bob Herbert points out, that in a time when we've constructed a society that is critically dependent upon the pursuit of higher education by the widest possible range of citizens, we've managed to turn access to that education into just another debt-driven fixture of our consumerist culture. Given that a college education is important not only to the individual as a private person but also to the individual as citizen, one wonders why the pursuit of such higher learning is not seen as something of an obligation rather than one more trinket and one more hurdle in the ever-earlier-starting rat race. David Dumitru St. Louis, March 22, 2007 To the Editor: To be sure, the cost of a college education is escalating, but that ''sweet period'' of days gone by when recent college graduates could relax, travel or ''sample intriguing employment opportunities'' is largely a myth. Today's generation, used to instant gratification, may be ill equipped to face the sacrifices they must make to secure a college education. Designer clothes, expensive cars and travel will have to be put on hold for a while. And yes, the new graduate might just have to get used to the ''persistent anxiety'' and settle for a first job that pays the bills -- just as earlier generations had to do. Diane Marett Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y. March 22, 2007 To the Editor: My legal career transition is another example of how student debt steers lawyers away from public interest work. I worked as a public defender for the State of Florida right after law | Debt and the College Graduate |
1835104_2 | waters,'' the state TV quoted the official as saying, according to the Press Association, the British news agency. Even before this latest events, relations between Iran and the West were particularly fraught. Iran has refused to end its nuclear program -- which Western powers fear it could use to develop nuclear weapons -- and has been accused of helping to finance and equip Shiite militias in Iraq. The Britons were based on the frigate Cornwall, part of a multinational force that patrols in the northern Persian Gulf, just below the mouth of the disputed Shatt al Arab, a waterway between Iran and Iraq. Royal Navy Commodore Nick Lambert, commander of the naval force, told reporters that contact with the sailors was lost after they had searched the merchant boat, but that personnel in a helicopter overhead had seen the seizures. ''We know our helicopter reported that they saw the boats being moved up the Shatt al Arab waterway towards an Iranian base up there, and we know that there was no fighting, there was no engagement, no weapons or anything like that,'' Commodore Lambert said. ''It was entirely peaceful, and we've been assured from the scant communications that we've had from the Iranians at a tactical level that the 15 people are safely in their hands. ''Everything I've seen from the report of the situation suggested that they reacted in impeccable fashion, totally professional, entirely in line with the rules of engagement and the direction that I have given them.'' In an interview with the BBC, Commodore Lambert said that he hoped the episode was the result of a ''simple misunderstanding,'' and that he had no doubt that the British forces, on two rigid inflatable boats, were in Iraqi territorial waters. Ian Pannell, a BBC News correspondent on the Cornwall, reported that the confrontation took place just after the British sailors had boarded a dhow for inspection. ''While they were on board, a number of Iranian boats approached the waters in which they were operating -- the Royal Navy are insistent that they were operating in Iraqi waters and not Iranian waters -- and essentially captured the Royal Navy and Royal Marine personnel at gunpoint,'' Mr. Pannell said. A spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry said she could not confirm that the sailors and marines had been threatened with weapons, only that no shots had been fired. THE REACH OF WAR | Iranians, Alleging 'Aggression,' Seize 15 Britons on Naval Patrol in the Waters Off Iraq |
1836646_1 | a statue of Wynken, Blynken and Nod sits on the wide town green, across Main Street from the old stone Tioga County courthouse and the equally old brick jailhouse. Real estate prices are low compared with those in many other places in Pennsylvania. Grover and Debra Wolf, who own a tree-care business in Oley, Pa., near Reading, bought a three-bedroom, 100-year-old, wood-frame house near the center of Wellsboro last August for $173,500. The house was moved 50 to 100 feet about 15 years ago so that the lot could be subdivided, Mr. Wolf said. It was placed on a cement-block foundation and fitted with new plumbing and a modern kitchen. But the original oak woodwork remains. ''We bought all the charm -- with all new fixings,'' Mr. Wolf said. ''I didn't want to spend a lot of time when I came up here working on a house.'' While in Wellsboro, which they visit every two weeks, the Wolfs like to explore the town with their son, Tanner, 7, and venture to Pine Creek Gorge, which is about 10 miles west of town, not far off United States Route 6. ''For us, it was getting our child to an area that was safe,'' Ms. Wolf said, ''an area promoting small community.'' Pine Creek Gorge, formed by melting glaciers and dotted with trees that show off blazing colors in the fall, is itself a destination. A railroad bed along meandering Pine Creek was turned into a bicycle trail. The gorge, which cuts deep into the Appalachian Plateau, is also an ideal place to hike, fish, hunt and camp and to ride snowmobiles and horses. ''There are things to do, but they're quiet things to do,'' said Scott Wilcox, a Wellsboro native and agent for Century 21 Wilkinson-Dunn, which is on Main Street. The Scene Shops along Main Street have slowly changed hands in the past few years and have become tonier. On the south side of Main Street are the Fifth Season antiques store and Pine Creek Outfitters (which offers raft trips and canoe and bicycle rentals). A former five-and-dime is now the Blue Thistle Boutique, which sells women's clothing, and a popular Italian restaurant, the Timeless Destination. Just off Main Street is a bagel shop and an old-timey movie house, the Arcadia -- ''Tioga County's Finest Theatre,'' the marquee reads. Plans are under way to build a performing arts center not | HAVENS -- Wellsboro, Pa.; A Quaint Town With 'Quiet Things' to Do |
1831434_2 | statistical analysis of welfare recipients in Wisconsin -- the credit seldom influences hiring decisions of participating firms. Many companies wish to avoid preferential hiring, even though the policy is explicitly intended to give disadvantaged job seekers an advantage in the labor market. Is it a good idea to extend this program, even though it hasn't meaningfully improved the employment picture for disadvantaged workers? But suppose such a program had even a small effect. Would it undo the negative consequences of a minimum wage increase? The answer is no, for two reasons. First, data from Wisconsin show that fewer than 25 percent of workers claimed under the credit are earning the minimum wage. Second, large corporations are the most active participants in the program. In 1999, the average participating corporation received more than $100,000 in credits. The Senate bill, however, is supposed to support small businesses, which have never taken advantage of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit in large numbers, but are the most likely to suffer under the proposed minimum wage increase. There's a more direct path to improving incomes for the working poor. Instead of requiring employers to pay more, and then allowing them to apply for reimbursement through tax subsidies, why not skip the middleman and subsidize the worker directly? Such a program already exists. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a federal tax refund for workers, who qualify based on family income rather than individual income or wages. This means that an upper-class teenager working at McDonald's will not get a benefit, but someone trying to support a family will. Over the last 15 years, the credit's subsidy rates have increased and the definition of eligibility has broadened. These expansions have greatly improved labor force participation among single mothers. If we don't think that people with low incomes are getting what they need, let's not look to ineffective employer tax credits to try to create jobs. And let's not burden employers with the costs of a higher minimum wage, most of which won't even go to low-income families. If additional investments are to be effective -- and directed toward the intended recipients -- they should focus instead on making sure our Earned Income Tax Credit program provides an adequate income supplement for the working poor. Op-Ed Contributor Sarah Hamersma is an assistant professor of economics at the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. | The Bare Minimum |
1831400_0 | A conference that convened here this week to address the fate of an ecologically threatened Central Asian basin the size of California has ended in stalemate between Kazakhstan and China, the two countries most reliant on its waters. The heart of the basin is Lake Balkhash, the third-largest freshwater lake on earth, tucked in the southeastern corner of Kazakhstan. More than 20 percent of the country's population draws on the lake for its drinking water. Lumbering rivers flowing through neighboring Kyrgyzstan and China replenish the lake and adjacent wetlands. After decades of water diversion to nearby factories and farms, Lake Balkhash is threatened with ''the same fate as the notorious Aral Sea,'' according to conference documents. The Aral, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is widely considered one of the worst human-created ecological disasters in history. Rivers feeding the lake were diverted over decades for water-intensive cotton cultivation across Central Asia. That caused the sea to shrink drastically and eventually split into two anemic parts, devastating a once thriving fishing industry and causing deadly cancer clusters in nearby villages. Progress at this week's conference, convened to introduce an environmentally sound economic development plan, stalled when China spurned Kazakhstan's proposal to send China large stocks of free or heavily subsidized food for 10 years in exchange for a commitment from China to allow an unimpeded flow of river water into Lake Balkhash. ''The Chinese were cautious and wary, but they also were listening,'' said Anna Bramwell, chief of operations for the European Union's political office in Kazakhstan, who attended the meeting. As part of its ''Go West'' policy, China has offered incentives to people to move to its resource-rich Xinjiang territory, which includes part of the basin area. Chinese authorities have said the now sparsely populated region may eventually have as many as 40 million new inhabitants. On top of population pressures, the water system is fast draining into nearby rice and sugar farms that consume twice the water that European and American operations require, according to representatives of the European Commission. According to several participants in the conference, Kazakhstan's president, Nulsultan A Nazarbayev, strongly lobbied the other conference parties to urgently adopt preservation strategies. But Mr. Nazarbayev has angered environmentalists in the past by appearing to endorse the building of a nuclear power plant in the basin, which yields more than 30,000 tons of fish a year and contains vast amounts of | Kazakhstan and China Deadlock Over Depletion of a Major Lake |
1831352_3 | reforms, clearly gave the American public ownership of presidential papers, said the historian Robert Dallek, whose latest book, ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power,'' is being published next month. But Mr. Bush's executive order, he said, has had the effect of returning ownership to presidents and their heirs. Having written highly regarded histories of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, Mr. Dallek said ''my experience has been, particularly with this new book, that there is a very different story to be told than a president and his representatives would like you to hear when you get to get inside and read the records.'' He mined archives to put together his new book, which reveals that Henry A. Kissinger and Richard M. Nixon discussed early on the impossibility of winning the Vietnam War, as well as such unguarded moments as Mr. Kissinger referring to the South Vietnamese as ''little yellow friends.'' Presidents and the guardians of their legacies would prefer that such embarrassing details don't come out, Mr. Dallek said in a telephone interview. But archival evidence provides a ''much more candid, honest picture of what they were thinking and what they were saying and the acts of deception they practiced,'' he said. ''It is important for the country to hear and know.'' The release of presidential papers and telephone transcripts have often transformed the way the public and scholars think of presidents. The presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein used original staff notes of discussions to argue that Dwight D. Eisenhower, far from being ineffectual and uninvolved, was a remarkably engaged president who carefully orchestrated strategy during his two terms. Documents that gave a clearer view of the extent of Woodrow Wilson's and John F. Kennedy's debilitating illnesses -- diligently concealed during their terms and after their deaths -- have influenced the way people think about candidates' physical and mental health, as well as the transfer of power in case a president is severely impaired. Mr. Blanton said he believes the Bush White House is primarily concerned with reversing what it sees as an erosion of presidential power after Watergate. ''It has the added advantage of giving the incumbent a lot more control over history,'' he said. Whether he is right about the Bush administration's motives, though, is something no one will know until the president's own papers are released -- whenever that might be. | Historians Fight Bush On Access To Papers |
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