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1052355_1 | navigator who discovered the island in 1506 and named it after himself, did not stop there. While Tristan does have a library, a weekly dance, a pub, a cafe, a cricket field and a golf course that shares space with grazing cows, it can still get a little lonely on this very far-flung patch of the British Empire. ''The Internet and, more specifically, the E-mail facility it provides, have been a tremendous boost for Tristan,'' Brian Baldwin, the island's administrator, wrote last month by E-mail from his office. ''It was introduced in January this year. To date there is only one terminal on the Island, although all islanders have access to it should they want to send a message to friend or family. Prior to E-mail the only written communication the Islanders had with the outside world was 'snail mail' by ship. A letter to reply would take around six months.'' There is a link through Cape Town Radio to international satellite telephone service for the Government and the crayfish factory, and a public satellite telephone is being installed. But fax use is limited to official and emergency communications, and the fax link is not always reliable, Mr. Baldwin said. The Internet, by contrast, has not only speeded up public and private communication but has saved a good deal of money. Still, the cost of communicating remains high. The Inmarsat satellite link costs $5 or more a minute. ''Thus we cannot 'surf the Net' to any great extent,'' Mr. Baldwin wrote. ''However, we have been able to make use of it to access information, in particular current news events. (We download extracts from the British newspapers and display these for the island's 300 inhabitants to read.'') You can't do a lot of chatting yet, but you can read plenty about Tristan da Cunha on the site Mr. Baldwin has put together, www.st-helena-org. ndirect.co.uk/tristaninfo.htm. After sporadic settlement by sealers and whalers -- one of them, an American from Salem, Mass., briefly declared himself emperor of the island -- the British garrisoned Tristan in 1816 to prevent the French from using it as a base to rescue a more formidable emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been exiled to the almost-as-remote St. Helena the year before. The garrison was soon withdrawn, but a few people were permitted to stay. In the 1820's, five bachelors on the island persuaded a naval captain to drop | Far Becomes Much Nearer As Web Touches an Island |
1057995_1 | injuries or exposure before anyone finds them. In a federally sponsored experiment, Mr. Buffum's car was one of about 600 equipped with a cellular phone and a receiver for the global positioning system. Such receivers are now common in car navigation systems. The phone and the G.P.S. receiver -- which fixes its location to within a few yards by receiving signals from a network of satellites -- along with three crash sensors, had been wired together by Calspan Operations, a transportation technology company based in Buffalo. The system was set up to dial 911 in case of an accident; thus the dispatcher knew where the car was and at what angle it had come to rest. The dispatcher sent emergency vehicles, knowing from the conversation with Mr. Buffum that there was only one victim and that he was not severely hurt; in other circumstances, the dispatcher might have sent out several ambulances. Mr. Buffum, of South Wales, N.Y., who works in a machine shop at a plant that makes aerospace parts, was impressed. He sent Calspan a letter thanking the company and apologizing ''for any swear words'' that the cell phone might have captured. Government officials are impressed, too. ''It shows what intelligent transportation systems can do for you,'' said Mortimer Downey, the Deputy Secretary of Transportation. But it is too early to say what final form such systems might take, he said. Mr. Buffum would have survived without the Automated Collision Notification system, but others could have been saved by it, experts say. ''How many times have you read about somebody who went off the road, and hopefully two days later they wake up?'' Mr. Downey asked, adding that if they did not wake up, they might not be found. Patrick M. Gallivan, the Erie County Sheriff, described the system as being ''like Dick Tracy with the telephone on his wrist.'' He said that almost every winter, someone skidded off a road and disappeared into a snowbank or down a hill and died before the car was discovered. And often if someone with a cell phone discovers an accident on a rural road, the person calls for help from the scene, but does not know precisely where the scene is. ''It's just a matter of time,'' he said, before equipment like the kind that helped Mr. Buffum is standard on new cars. The experiment is operated by the National | AUTOS ON FRIDAY/Safety; In a Test, the Crashed Car Calls 911 |
1058095_3 | her doctor about her breast-cancer risk and the use of tamoxifen. Ms. Carver gave these examples of how the risk-assessment system works: *A 45-year-old woman, had her first menstrual period at the age of 12 and her first child at 38. Her mother died of breast cancer, and her sister is being treated for the disease. The woman has a risk score of 2.4 and should therefore consider taking the drug. *A 40-year-old white woman, had her first menstrual period at the age of 12 and has not had any children. Her mother and sister have had breast cancer, and a breast biopsy found that the woman had abnormal noncancerous cells. The woman has a risk score of 5.9 and should therefore discuss the possibility of taking tamoxifen with her doctor. *A 35-year-old black woman, was 15 when she had her first menstrual period and was 20 when she had her first child. No close relatives have had breast cancer. She herself has had two breast biopsies that found abnormal noncancerous cells. Her score is 1.1, so she is not a candidate to use the drug. Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director of the National Women's Health Network, a women's health advocacy group, said healthy women should be cautious about using the drug approved today. ''This is a premature approval,'' she asserted. ''There's no way to know yet whether tamoxifen can truly prevent breast cancer or merely delay it.'' In addition, Ms. Pearson said she worried that heavy advertising could lead to overuse of the drug. Women, she said, may underestimate the danger of ''serious, even fatal, complications.'' Scientists do not know exactly how tamoxifen works, but they have a theory of one possible mechanism. Estrogen, a hormone, is believed to stimulate the growth of cancer cells, and tamoxifen is believed to block the action of natural estrogens in breast tissue, thus inhibiting the growth of breast-cancer cells. Federal officials and Zeneca executives sounded a similar note in describing the significance of today's decision. Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said, ''Today's action provides an important new option for some women at heightened risk of breast cancer,'' the second leading cause of cancer death among American women. Robert C. Black, the president of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, said: ''For the millions of women who are at high risk of developing breast cancer, there is now something they can do | Preventive Use of Tamoxifen Is Allowed |
1058079_1 | that much more research is needed to learn whether cell creation can be put to work. But, he said, ''the new research should prove interesting.'' The new growth was discovered in the hippocampus, a center of learning and memory in the brain. Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York, called the discovery an ''exciting development -- the isolation of a specific part of the human brain where you actually caught a glimpse of new cells being produced.'' Dr. McEwen and Dr. Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University published findings last March on the discovery of neurogenisis, as brain cell growth is called, in adult marmoset monkeys. Dr. Gage and others had previously recorded it in rodents. The new study was done in brain tissue taken in autopsies on five cancer patients at Sahlgrenska Hospital. In a range between about three weeks and two years before their deaths, the patients -- ages 55 to 70, in both early and advanced stages of the disease -- were given injections of bromodeoxyuridine, a chemical marker, or tracer, to help determine later what was happening in the hippocampus. This chemical-tracing technique is now often used in cancer patients to determine whether malignant tumors are proliferating, which prompted the Gage team to use it to search for healthy cell production. After the patients died, the researchers used advanced imaging techniques to find the markers, and confirmed that undeveloped primitive cells had in fact divided and continued to divide, and produced new mature neurons as well. They also found indications that this process continues until death. It is not clear whether these primitive progenitor cells are actually stem cells, which have a powerful capacity in the formative stages of brain development for generating neurons that have a wide variety of functions, or whether their capacity is more limited. Dr. William Greenough, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, called the Gage team's work ''incredibly clever.'' ''It provided science its first real retroactive look at a live human brain in the process of creating new cells,'' he said. ''And because of the presence of the bromodioxyuridine markers in the DNA, the conclusions are absolutely credible.'' Dr. McEwen, like Dr. Gage, pointed out that future projects will have to determine the precise functions of these new mature brain cells. In general, neurons play a wide range of roles in directing the operations | ADULT BRAIN CELLS SAID TO REPRODUCE |
1053093_3 | the chaotic heap of junk I had expected, this breaker's yard was a scene of ordered chaos -- 15 acres of engines, doors, seats, transmissions and electrical parts, all labeled and arranged on indoor and outdoor racks. Grease-stained men (this seems to be the last men-only job on the planet) were rushing around with hammers, huge wrenches and power saws, tearing cars into their component fragments. ''Do you have any wheels?'' I asked a passing wrecker. He pointed his crowbar at a 10-foot-high rack of wheels that stretched into the distance. They were all sizes and (due to the effects of impact) several different shapes. I pawed helplessly through the racks for a while, until somebody sent me to the office. I hesitated to drag someone out of his comfortable office to search through all these filthy wheels. But lo and behold, the whole operation was computerized, with radio links between the office and the greasy agents out there in the field. My wheel was located in about five seconds and delivered two minutes later, at about a 10th of the price the dealership had wanted to charge. I was impressed. This was not at all the junkyard I had imagined. (Actually, the operators don't like the term ''junk,'' and I can see why. ''Salvage'' is the preferred term.) These guys are recyclers on a heroic scale, and I think we can learn something from their efforts. We already recycle paper, cans and plastic, and old jokes. Hollywood recycles the same aging actors and ancient plots over and over again. Furniture and domestic stuff is endlessly recycled through garage sales. And I had this revelation that recycling will be the salvation of the human race in the next century. Nothing will be wasted. We'll learn how to recycle our houses, body parts, clothes, domestic pets and marriages. We may even achieve a steady state, where nothing new need be manufactured at all, and the malls will become giant salvage yards. If my Honda had been provided with the correct spare wheel, I might never have achieved this profound and satisfying insight into the meaning of life and the ecology of the future. The Zen masters of Tokyo may have their economic troubles right now, but they still have their own subtle ways of teaching us a lesson. OUT OF ORDER The author is an essayist and commentator on public radio. | Wrecked Cars and an Epiphany |
1053344_1 | through each machine was rising sharply as airlines gained experience. Mr. Flynn and airline representatives said that part of the problem was that the computerized system for choosing which passengers' bags get scanned was still developing, and would not be fully implemented until the end of the year. ''We haven't ironed out all the kinks in the process,'' said Susan Rork, managing director of security at the Air Transport Association, the trade group of the major airlines. The computerized system singles out individuals about whom there is too little information to conclude that they are not a threat, officials say. It also draws a sample from the group judged not to be a threat, to increase the chance that a terrorist would be caught, and to make the system fairer, Mr. Flynn said. One problem, he said, is that if the system were changed to require that a larger number of passengers have their bags scrutinized, then at peak periods people would be delayed so long they would miss their flights. ''If you get people fuming at a line, that's not good either,'' Mr. Flynn said. That, he said, would probably discourage machine operators from doing their jobs right. And delays, he said, would damage public acceptance of security measures. In written comments responding to the report, the F.A.A. said that the agency would ''pursue a more coherent strategy with air carriers to ramp-up to a higher level of use.'' However, the agency said, it would be ''many years'' before technology allowed screening of all bags. Auditors also said that the machines in use could handle only about half as many bags as they did in lab tests, partly because they sound false alarms far more when in use at airports. Each false alarm requires time to resolve. (All alarms so far have been false, officials said, because no bombs have been detected.) The machines' higher false alarm rate is ''probably a reason why they don't use it as often as they should,'' Mr. Weintrob said. Fifty-nine of the machines have been installed so far; plans are to have 74 in place by the end of the year, he said. Officials of airports where the machines are installed declined to comment and asked not to be identified. Under F.A.A. rules, airport operators are responsible for various aspects of security, but not for screening bags. That responsibility falls to the airlines. | Costly Machines to Check Airline Bags Mostly Idle, Report Says |
1052972_1 | 1930's, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it fostered a blinkered isolationism that allowed Germany and Japan to fan the flames of world war. The United States next nurtured a muscle-flexing, policemanlike mentality that led to repeated showdowns with nations of differing political ideologies, mainly the Soviet Union and China. This bullying zeal for democracy, he demonstrates, led to the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War on the specious premise that if one small country fell to Communism, many others would quickly follow. Jingoistic Americanism, Evans suggests, lay behind both the successes and the mistakes of several modern Presidents. In the Kennedy-Johnson era, it contributed to the Vietnam fiasco and the arms race, but it also brought significant movement toward full democratic rights for women and ethnic minorities. With Richard M. Nixon, it fed into a blind belief that the President, as the world's most powerful person, was somehow above the law. But it led as well to Nixon's democratic gestures toward our enemies, gestures which with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan paved the way for detente and the collapse of Soviet-bloc Communism. By summarizing a vast reach of history, Evans gives us a bird's-eye view of 20th-century people and events, leading us to ask constantly ''What if?'' What if the United States had become active in the League of Nations in 1920? Would it have then overcome its insular nationalism, which was partly responsible for World War II? And couldn't the war have been averted if Roosevelt had risen above his caution and got tough with Germany early on? What if J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had pursued the Mafia with the zeal that he hunted alleged Communists? Would not the power of the mob have been greatly curtailed? What would have been the outcome had Khrushchev not pulled his missiles out of Cuba when confronted by Kennedy? World War III? Besides raising such questions, Evans puts to rest several myths. He shows that the stock market crash of 1929 was not the main trigger of the Great Depression, which resulted largely from other factors, including income disparity and the weak structure of banks. He argues convincingly that Japan would have surrendered without America's dropping the bomb. Evans is adept at dispelling fabricated stories about plots and conspiracies. He dismantles the popular theory that Pearl Harbor was part of a secret plan by Roosevelt | The March of Time |
1053106_0 | AN unusual little rotini-shaped snack food with a definite crunch has recently joined the potato chip on supermarket shelves in New England and Westchester County. They are Pastos, baked pasta snacks, and they are actually pasta. ''Its best feature is its crunchy taste,'' said Ronald Anderson, chairman and founder of R & J Pasta Snacks, with corporate offices here. Barbara Longchamp, senior vice president of marketing and one of five members of the entrepreneurial team, said, ''And unlike other snack products with a high 'cracker factor,' they do not stick to the teeth.'' For munchers and those who look for healthful qualities in snacks, Pastos come in five flavors: the basil and garlic taste of pesto, the creamy Parmesan flavor of fettuccine Alfredo, a mixture of Romano cheese, tomato and onion, the combination of tomato, basil, oregano and parsley and the plain flavor of butter and pasta. Mr. Anderson said customers in demonstrations overwhelmingly liked Pastos. ''Our in-house research showed us an 87 percent positive response,'' he said. The product is manufactured at Keystone Foods in Easton, Pa., and distributed in Westchester by Fairchester Sales in White Plains. The snack food went on store shelves in Westchester in July. Mr. Anderson took his idea for a ready-to-eat pasta snack, which took three years to develop, from food laboratories in the Agriculture Department of the University of Nebraska, where he found experts in wheat technology, to taste-testing 40 flavors a day with Ms. Longchamp in distributors' conference rooms. ''I would dawdle around in my kitchen, aided by my wife, JoAnn, who is a food technologist, trying to develop recipe formulations by experimenting with the capacity of certain wheats to expand,'' Mr. Anderson said. ''Parts of our recipe need to expand in the processing of the product. I was also testing for the mouth feel of the product. Was it too hard, too soft? Was it digestible?'' Mr. Anderson and his team, he said, are determined to make Pastos pasta snacks the No. 1 snack food in the United States. As the co-owner, president and chief executive officer of DeBoles Nutritional Foods, the maker of DeBoles dry package pasta, Mr. Anderson sold his interest to his partner in 1995. Before that he was senior vice president of the retail coffee division of Chock Full o'Nuts. He has also held executive marketing and sales positions with multinational conglomerates and large domestic operations like | Company Introduces Snack Made of Pasta |
1057883_0 | To the Editor: As a new member of Estrolist, I was throughly disheartened by the one-sided view of the network as ''raunchy and sex-obsessed'' (''Women Want It All, and It's All on Line,'' Oct. 22). Estronet provides intellectual conversation on almost every topic, from Afghanistan to problems in universities. JAMILLE JACKSON Atlanta, Oct. 22, 1998 | Women on the Web |
1057873_0 | PCS cellular telephone transmissions would be much clearer if not for one thing: the cellular telephone user's cranium. A Silicon Valley company, Range Star International, contends that the signals coming from PCS phones -- the latest generation of digital wireless phones -- radiate through 360 degrees, which means that a good portion of them run directly into, and are absorbed by, the user's head. To find a way around the pesky cranial protrusion, Range Star is selling an antenna that the company says will redirect the cellular signal. ''What our antenna does is redirects signals away from the head and makes it more of an effective signal,'' said Alan Brune, the company's director of marketing. The small black device, which costs $29.95, clips onto the existing PCS antenna and turns it into a high-performance antenna, Range Star said. The company contends that the antenna can increase the phone's range, improve the effective battery life by limiting time lost for dropped calls and reduce by ''50 percent or more the signal loss to the head.'' NEWS WATCH | PCS Antenna Can Avoid Thick Skulls |
1057881_0 | To the Editor: In (''Women Want It All, and It's All on Line,'' Oct. 22), Circuits missed the boat in describing the network that I helped found, Estronet (www.estronet.com). I was part of a group that founded the on-line magazine Maxi (www.maximag.com) -- the original and first member of Estronet -- to provide content that's relevant to women like ourselves, those ages 18 to 35, who can't find what they're looking for in traditional women's glossy magazines. We cover a wide range of topics, including feminism, the media, work, friends, motherhood, our bodies, and yes, sex. We started Estronet to use the Internet as a tool to build community. I've reached my goal with Maxi if I can inspire and empower one girl or one woman to think differently about how she's perceived in the world, to think critically about the media and advertising, and to get news that pertains to women. ROSEMARY PEPPER San Francisco, Oct. 24, 1998 | Women on the Web |
1057835_2 | lobbying group in Washington.'' No church has ever lost its tax-exempt status for distributing coalition voter guides. The coalition itself, however, has been sued by the Federal Election Commission. The lawsuit contends that in previous elections the coalition coordinated the use of its voter guides, telephone banks and mass mailings to promote Republican candidates, including former President George Bush, Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Oliver L. North in 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for a United States Senate seat in Virginia. The suit, filed in 1996 and still pending, contends that even if the voter guides do not explicitly favor one candidate, they still violate the law if they are part of a coordinated effort to mobilize specific voters in a contested district. Sensing that the lawsuit has made the Christian Coalition vulnerable to accusations of partisanship, two advocacy groups opposed to the coalition have recently sent ''Dear Pastor'' letters to tens of thousands of ministers across the country, warning them away from the coalition's voter guides. The Interfaith Alliance, a network of Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy, most of whom are liberal but some moderate and conservative, has sent 20,000 letters to fellow clergy members in 25 states, accusing the Christian Coalition of ''seeking to transform houses of worship into precinct halls for espousing partisan politics.'' At the same time, Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has written letters to 80,000 pastors alerting them to a memorandum written by two Washington tax lawyers warning churches against distributing slanted voters' guides. The tax lawyers point to several aspects of the Christian Coalition's guides that potentially violate Federal Election Commission regulations: They list the candidates' stands on only a few, select issues of concern to coalition members (in contrast to the extensive guides issued by the League of Women Voters, for example); they distort the candidates' voting records, saying, for example, that the Democrat supports ''special rights for homosexuals,'' and they distribute most of the guides the Sunday before the election, giving candidates no time to respond to inaccuracies. ''We have never seen a guide in all of these years that is slanted in such a way as to suggest you vote for a Democrat,'' Mr. Lynn said in an interview. ''They are blatantly partisan appendages of Republican campaign material.'' The Christian Coalition has responded by directing its | Church Debate Over Voter Guides |
1057856_1 | round of television advertisements shown, the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., senior minister of Riverside Church, wants voters to turn to prayer -- and to keep at it all night. ''The nation is facing a serious spiritual crisis of hopelessness, insecurity, a retreat from moral and political responsibility, so we are inviting it to pre-election prayer vigils,'' Dr. Forbes said at a news conference yesterday in the towering nave of his church on Riverside Drive. Organizers said they hoped the idea would be taken up around the country. At Riverside Church, the dusk-to-daylight gathering will include worship services, musical performances, a candlelight march to Grant's Tomb and screenings of documentaries. ''Then, the first act of the new day will be to go to the polls to vote and agree to come back to help transport others to vote,'' Dr. Forbes said. He was flanked at the news conference by 17 other members of the clergy from Christian, Muslim and Buddhist houses of worship along with umbrella organizations like the National Council of Churches of Christ and the Interfaith Alliance Foundation. Efforts are also being made to involve Jewish and Roman Catholic clergy members, but none were there yesterday. Bishop Paul Moore Jr., retired Episcopal Bishop of New York City, said: ''Our system of democracy depends on voting, as we face a world crisis, poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor and wars springing up everywhere. We need strong people of integrity and leadership.'' But what would the clergy members counsel people who, under the barrage of reports about moral failings and financial impropriety, feel there are no worthy candidates for their votes? ''The act of voting itself is moral, even if the candidates don't measure up to the ideals,'' Dr. Forbes said. And, the clerics were asked, what would the prayers ask for? ''For guidance for the path beyond the recent political warfare of the major parties,'' Dr. Forbes said, ''for renewal of leadership, and for us as citizens to be rededicated to civility, moral courage, compassion and tolerance.'' Shaykh Abd'Allah Latif Ali, general secretary of the Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York, held up copies of the United States Constitution, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the Koran. All promote the responsibility to civic duty, he said. And, he added, ''Remember, the Muslims believe that prayer is better than sleep.'' THE 1998 CAMPAIGN: THE CLERGY | Prayer Vigil Set for Eve Of Election |
1057750_0 | SUGAR UP 2.8 PERCENT. Prices rose as concern ebbed that Brazilian growers would flood the market. The March contract rose 0.21 cent, to 7.76 cents a pound. | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES |
1053687_1 | One popular hypothesis was that the variation results when predators focus on hunting down the most common type until it becomes rare and then switch to hunt whatever has become the common type in its place. By doing so, they would prevent any one color type from being hunted into oblivion. But the hypothesis has been difficult to test. Field studies involved things like leaving out banquets of differently colored worms fashioned of pastry and coming back to see what the birds had taken. But while researchers saw that the common type was favored, they were unable to show that birds actively switched their favorite from one type to another as frequencies of different types changed. On the computer, however, researchers created a virtual population of differently patterned black-and-white winged moths, based on the wing pattern of actual underwing moths. The computer then drew sample moths from the virtual population and offered them to the birds. Pecked moths were considered killed and were removed from the population. Researchers saw that the birds tended to attack the common types and pass on the uncommon types, just as predicted, as different types waxed and waned in frequency. It took researchers two months to train each blue jay to recognize on-screen moths as food items, but once they did, researchers say the birds went at the images with such vigor that they had to place a protective shield over the screen to keep the jays from shattering the monitors. Although the blue jays were slow to catch on, some animals respond instantly to a computer-generated meal. When shown a computer-generated insect, toads ''will look at it, hop over to it and actually put their tongue on the screen trying to get it,'' said Dr. David Clark, an animal behaviorist at Alma College in Michigan who is also doing virtual experimentation. A praying mantis, he said, will stalk a virtual fly and lunge its legs at it. Dr. Clark has also worked with spiders and finds that females do their come-hither leg tapping at the sight of virtual males performing just the right courtship behaviors. He said he had been able to tease apart the important elements of courtship by creating male spiders of varying color patterns (something he said would have killed real animals if done with paint) and programming them to perform combinations of behaviors that no actual spider would ever do. | What Do Blue Jays Like to Eat? Ask a Virtual Moth |
1055324_2 | General Pinochet. Only one candidate in next year's presidential election expressed support for the Spanish and British actions, Gladys Marin of the Communist Party. ''I couldn't be more happy,'' she told local television. ''This Government has been unwilling to bring this genocidal criminal to justice over the last eight years, so it is up to the Spanish to do it.'' The leading leftist candidate, Ricardo Lagos of the Socialist Party, was far more cautious. Mr. Lagos gently scolded General Pinochet for not having anticipated his arrest abroad, but the candidate said he did want to get involved in a judicial matter. The two leading conservative candidates predictably criticized the arrest, and some rightist politicians urged the Government to break relations with London in protest. Supporters of General Pinochet pledged to mobilize street demonstrations demanding his release, while the Communist Party and human rights groups promised marches supporting the British action and a possible Spanish prosecution on charges of crimes against humanity. But today was just another Sunday for most Chileans, who packed Santiago's parks on a splendidly sunny spring day. A few anti-Pinochet activists left white carnations at the British Embassy as a token of thanks, while about 500 pro-Pinochet protesters peacefully returned tonight to the Spanish and English diplomatic residences. They were blocked by the police from getting too close, so they honked car horns and waved Chilean flags. The police reported arresting six protesters in scattered incidents around the buildings during the day. Trying to explain the calm, Mireya Garcia, secretary general of the Group of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared, said: ''After 25 years of absolute impunity for violators of human rights, it takes a while for the people to absorb this news and understand its importance and dimensions.'' For all the normality, the arrest of General Pinochet opened a revealing window into a new Chilean society, one run by democratically elected civilians side by side with a still-influential military. President Fidel Castro of Cuba, who for years was portrayed as the Devil incarnate in the Chilean media, was shown on television in a very human light, reacting to the arrest with confused amusement. News clips of Chilean exiles celebrating the arrest received prominent play. The same program included an interview with Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, General Pinochet's son. ''Countries have lost wars and committed real genocide,'' he said, ''but that is not what happened here.'' | Most Chileans React Moderately to Arrest |
1055692_4 | really want to take cost out, let's redesign to free up some real estate under the vehicle for an all-aluminum shaft.'' The aluminum design is now standard. Sometimes new materials become available for use in automobiles because of an advance in another field. That happened with pistons, which lucky drivers never see. The introduction of superhard aluminum alloy pistons has yielded longer oil-change intervals, better mileage, quieter running and lower weight. The new pistons shed more heat, expanding less than their lower-tech cousins. They fit more tightly, which means the pistons can be shorter. Shorter pistons mean that engines can be mounted lower; hoods, in turn, can be lower, which translates into aerodynamically advanced car designs. Aluminum has also given engine designers the flexibility to eliminate some familiar parts like the oil pan. This simple stamped-steel part with its leak-prone gasket is fast disappearing from cars as auto makers optimize engine design to cut weight while increasing strength. It may seem that plastics and aluminum could threaten steel's dominance in auto manufacturing, but steel is still the leading material in cars, even though there is less of it. In today's cars, steel accounts for 56 percent, or 1,810 pounds on average. Twenty years ago, almost 60 percent, or 2,129 pounds, of the average car was steel. TRYING to get on the lighter materials bandwagon, the steel industry is pushing a $22 million initiative that has produced a sample car. The car will never run. Rather, the 447-pound ultralight steel auto body should inspire designers to develop new uses for steel, especially in lightweight and high-strength forms, said Darryl Martin, the American Iron and Steel Institute's senior director for automotive applications. Even the makers of bolts and nuts are getting into the alternative materials act. Emhart Automotive, a fasteners maker owned by Black & Decker, has invested $500,000 to equip two recreational vehicles, dubbed ''mobile innovation centers,'' to take its technology to auto plant gates. Paul Gustafson, Emhart's president, said the mobile crew invited engineers to bring out their toughest problems that could be solved using new fasteners and processes. Emhart, Mr. Gustafson said, doesn't make money from the ''what'' that it sells. It makes money from the production technology it offers. ''We don't see a plastic fastener,'' he said. ''We see an opportunity to develop a new system.'' Tim Moran is a business and automotive writer in the Detroit area. | A Look Ahead: Nylon in the Engine, Plastic for the Body |
1055711_5 | a sequence of cars. But do we actually have to drive them? I would argue that there is no natural paradox here, that a great problem in this country is our tendency to imagine that our love of automobiles makes us love driving, a really exasperating, time-wasting and tiring activity that is ruining our society. Conversely, just because we should give up driving doesn't mean we have to give up cars. Now, I live part of the year in Paris, where there is no need for a car (there are abundant buses and taxis and a fast Metro). I have come to appreciate, as New Yorkers all appreciate, I imagine, the extra time that life gives you if you don't spend it driving and parking and servicing and filling up a car. A few hours every day of extra life. A more intimate connection to what you see and hear around you, feet on the ground. Physical activity, hence fitness. These are not luxuries poor Californians can easily achieve. But I sense a tiny, growing ripple of the like-minded who do walk or ride buses or bikes out of principle and predilection, and who move to a place where this style of life is possible instead of to a suburb where you have to get in the car to buy a loaf of bread. People are beginning to figure it out -- some dumpy condos built near the Oakland terminus of one of San Francisco's BART lines sold out in days, almost to the amazement of the developers. IN Beijing in 1987, just a little more than a decade ago, there were very few cars, but jillions of bicycles, the air alive with merry thriiiinngs of bicycle bells. It was delightful. You said to yourself that if the Chinese had any brains they would spare their society the destructive, dirty, expensive automobile phase and go directly to something more modern, egalitarian, efficient and peaceful -- really good mass transit, better bikes. But of course they didn't. They have bought the powerful symbol, too. Did we push cars on them, as the West pushed opium on them? Or is it an evolutionary phase that societies go through, that European societies have gone through and left behind? Or is the desire people have for cars an innate wish for a carapace in which a human becomes more swift, more organized (cup holder, | A Passion for Cars -- Just Don't Make Her Drive Them |
1055807_3 | to get early release under the region's peace agreement struck last April. The women, Anna Corry and Pat McCool, had served 15 years for involvement in a discotheque bombing in the town of Ballykelly that killed 11 off-duty British soldiers and 6 civilians in December 1982. (Reuters) ASIA -- CHINA: DEADLINE WITH HANOI -- China and Vietnam agreed to resolve their territorial disputes by 2000. The agreement was made during a meeting between Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of China and the visiting Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai. Their two nations' conflicting claims to the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea have flared in recent years and remain a contentious issue. Relations between the two neighbors were normalized only in 1991 after a brief but bloody conflict over their frontiers in early 1979. (Agence France-Presse) MIDDLE EAST TURKEY: KURDS TO LOSE BACKING -- Syria is ready to comply with Turkey's demands for an end of its support for Kurdish rebels and will give Ankara the right to verify that it carries out its commitment, Turkey's Prime Minister, Mesut Yilmaz, said. Turkey had accused Damascus of supporting the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party and harboring its leader, Abdullah Ocalan. But Mr. Yilmaz said that Mr. Ocalan has been in Russia for the last week. (Agence France-Presse) AFRICA -- CONGO: U.N. FUND PULLS OUT -- After losing a million dollars in equipment in widespread pillaging, the United Nations Children's Fund announced that it would suspend operations in rebel-controlled regions in Congo. Its withdrawal will stop aid to 630,000 people in the region. Defense and Foreign Ministers from 11 African countries are scheduled to meet Sunday in the Zambian capital of Lusaka to seek an end to the civil war. (Agence France-Presse) GUINEA-BISSAU: STRIFE RESUMES -- Peace groups sought to halt fighting in Guinea-Bissau between loyalist troops and rebels as the West African state threatened to slide back into civil war after a three-month truce. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS ARGENTINA: MENEM-BLAIR TALKS -- President Carlos Saul Menem will hold a discussion next week with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain about a possible end to the arms embargo that Britain imposed on Argentina after the 1982 Falklands war. Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella of Argentina said a visit to Britain planned by Mr. Menem beginning Oct. 27 would allow Argentina to convey its position that the weapons ban is so inappropriate that | World Briefing |
1052195_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-11 U.S. Intensifies Threat To Use Force Over Kosovo The Clinton Administration intensified its threat to use force against Yugoslav military forces as a flurry of diplomacy tried both to persuade President Slobodan Milosevic to end his crackdown in Kosovo and to maintain NATO unity behind the use of force. A1 Russia vowed to veto any attempt by the United Nations to sanction air strikes against Yugoslavia and warned of ''serious international consequences'' if NATO proceeded with force to halt the ethnic conflict in Kosovo Province. A10 The American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke has so far failed to win concessions on a pullback of troops or a return of refugees in Kosovo during talks with President Milosevic, diplomats said. A10 New Voice in Global Crisis European governments are challenging the United States over how to address the world financial crisis, suggesting that new ideas and leadership are needed as the turmoil persists and Congress continues to block new money for the International Monetary Fund. A1 The president of the World Bank publicly broke with the approach that the United States and the International Monetary Fund have taken in managing the global crisis, as President Clinton argued anew that ''we must find a way to temper the volatile swings of the international marketplace.'' A6 Nerve Gas Link Found to Iraq French tests have found traces of chemicals linked to the nerve gas VX on Iraqi warheads, but France has delayed disclosing the results because officials do not want to undermine Iraq's push to lift economic sanctions, according to several weapons experts and diplomats. French officials denied that they were deliberately withholding results. A1 A bill that would allow the Clinton Administration to spend nearly $100 million to aid Iraqi opposition groups seeking the ouster of President Saddam Hussein is moving rapidly through Congress, with final approval virtually certain. A8 Russia Urges Calm for Protests Russia's Prime Minister made an extraordinary appeal for calm as millions of Communists and trade unionists prepared nationwide strikes over the ravaged economy. A3 Possible Holocaust Case The European Parliament lifted the immunity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front, allowing a German prosecutor to open a criminal investigation against him on a charge of belittling the Holocaust. A5 U.S. Warning on Mideast Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright issued a new warning that the time for negotiating peace was running out, | NEWS SUMMARY |
1052181_3 | it from rebuilding its weapons programs. It was the first American report, in June, that revealed the presence of components found in decomposed VX in missile warheads destroyed by Iraq and dug up in April by United Nations weapons inspectors. That report led to Iraqi demands for laboratory studies outside the United States. Tests in France and Switzerland followed in the summer. The Swiss tests, all agree, appear to be negative, with no traces of VX components found. Weapons experts and diplomats said today that a technical team assembled in New York two weeks ago by the Special Commission, known as Unscom, expected to be able to discuss final results from Switzerland, the Untied States and France. The Americans and the French did not have results ready. Some diplomats accuse the United States of also withholding information because its scientists did not find VX components on its second batch of samples, so as not to cast doubt on its first tests. France told the Unscom technical experts that it had four or five more samples to test. Today experts said that there is strong evidence that those outstanding samples had revealed two chemicals found in VX -- though not only in VX. But the Iraqis would be hard-pressed to explain what the chemicals were doing on warheads that Iraq said contained other substances. The Iraqis used Sarin gas in the 1980s in attacks on Iran and on their own Kurdish population. The French say that the results may be known in a matter of days. The Iraqi warheads being studied were discovered at a weapons-demolition site north of Baghdad. Commission officials haggled with Iraqis for weeks before being allowed to take some metal fragments from the shells out of the country in May for testing in the United States. ''Forty-four fragments were brought to the U.S. from the Al Hussein destruction site, a site where al-Hussein missiles were destroyed in Iraq, and they were analyzed using two scientific techniques,'' said Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, at a briefing for journalists on Sept. 18. ''On about a quarter of those 44 fragments, the analysts found traces of decomposed VX.'' ''The results were then tested or reviewed by a special Unscom team,'' Mr. Bacon said. ''This is a team of 13 people from seven different countries appointed by Unscom to review the findings of the U.S. lab. That team included representatives from | France Detects Iraqi Nerve Gas, Experts Assert |
1057153_3 | for disarmament in the Belfast agreement. Meanwhile, the officials and experts provided an ominous picture of the I.R.A.'s military power. Since 1969, when the sectarian violence erupted in the province, the I.R.A. has killed more than half of the 3,200 victims of the conflict. They have lost about 300 guerrillas. Their arms are hidden in bunkers and tunnels on both sides of the border, but mostly here in the Irish Republic. The arsenal, estimated at 100 tons, includes several tons of Semtex, the explosive used to give added power to homemade bombs. Some of the weapons are buried in holes and caves in farmland in lightly populated areas in the Irish counties of Louth and Cavan. The Irish police and army have found dozens of arms caches over the years, and often seem able to make such finds at a politically opportune moment. . The Irish police and army are occasionally alerted to arms caches by civilian hikers and picnickers. Other discoveries have been made after the police notice or are informed of electric lights burning late at an uninhabited farmhouse. In such hiding places, I.R.A. operatives, using ordinary coffee grinders, pulverize nitrate fertilizer widely used in farming and mix in sugar to control the burn rate of the eventual blast. A few pounds of Semtex adds to the bomb's power. A video-cassette-sized packet of Semtex can blow a car to smithereens. In August in the town of Omagh, in Northern Ireland, such a bomb placed by an I.R.A. splinter group killed 29 people. The I.R.A. denounced the attack, but retains the means to make one of its own if it became impatient about the peace effort. In 1996, the I.R.A. became impatient with the stalled peace talks and killed two people and caused millions of dollars in damage with an explosion in the Docklands area of London. Within 10 days, the British Government made a significant political concession. The skilled use of Semtex has rendered obsolete I.R.A. weapons like the ''drogue bomb,'' an armor-piercing projectile, used against police and army vehicles, made from a baked-bean can with a copper nose. Protestant guerrillas, by comparison, are only lightly armed. At the start of the conflict, some of them were still using Martini-Henri rifles, so old that the guns are noted by Rudyard Kipling in a poem on the Zulu War. The I.R.A. arsenal comes largely, officials said, from shipments from | Leverage and Folk Memory Keep I.R.A. Armed |
1057158_5 | and wanted to generate headlines. Mr. Kirchner said he would drive past the weedy clearing where the Palace once stood and stop to meditate on the genuine chutzpah of Mr. Daynor's ambition. Alone in his car, he said, he would think to himself, ''Now here's a guy who had to build something with his own bare hands.'' But it was not until the town was poised to auction the site in 1997 that Mr. Kirchner went into action. Like the Palace's original builder, Mr. Kirchner said he initially suffered the ridicule of city officials. But in a recent interview, Mayor Anthony Campanella said he was thrilled that the Palace of Depression might come back to life. ''We're largely a farming community down here, with a fairly thriving glass industry,'' Mayor Campanella said, ''but outside that there's really nothing for the tourists. The Palace of Depression would really be something for tourists to see because a lot pass through on their way to Atlantic City or the Jersey Shore.'' Mr. Kirchner said community support for his efforts had been tremendous. Bits and pieces of the Palace, long hidden in local basements or displayed on mantels, have been coming out of the woodwork: statues made from bottle caps and crushed glass, for instance. And dozens of residents have volunteered to help with the excavation. ''Every little piece we've already recovered is a bit of Americana,'' said Robert Blough, Vineland's zoning officer, who works with Mr. Kirchner. ''This guy's story is the story of America. It shows real ingenuity and craftiness, and what kind of people we really are.'' Delbert J. Brant, a retired newspaper reporter who now serves as Vineland's informal municipal historian, said that there had been another effort to rebuild the Palace in the early 1970's but that it failed from a lack of money. ''This is the first serious attempt since then,'' he said. ''It's going to be tough. There's not as much standing now as there was back then. But I think it'll be very interesting to see what they come up with.'' Other small towns around the nation have managed to ignite their own tourist industries with off-kilter attractions. Vineland is hoping that the Palace of Depression can attain the same sort of wacky acclaim achieved by Cadillac Ranch, a set piece of a half-dozen or so rusting Cadillacs plunged hood deep in the scrub grass off | Trying to Resurrect A Palace of Junk; City Longs for Folk Art of Depression That It Tore Down Long Ago |
1057164_1 | a 6,000 member regional police force. The governing Popular Party won the second highest vote total in the Basque elections and 16 seats. Rosa Diez, a Socialist leader, said election results showed that the Basques ''don't want adventures but a stable framework.'' Each of the competing parties tried to present itself as the best guarantor of a permanent peace in the three-province Basque region. The opening of the acclaimed Bilbao Guggenheim Museum last year has become a symbol of the region's economic and cultural resurgence that might be cemented with a permanent end to separatist violence. E.T.A., whose initials in the Basque language stand for Basque Homeland and Liberty, announced its first ''indefinite'' cease-fire in a Sept. 16 communique. It cited ''unique opportunities'' for peace after 30 years of guerrilla attacks that resulted in about 800 deaths. Political leaders in Madrid say the rebels were pressed by arrests of their commandos and by street demonstrations demanding peace, while they also drew inspiration from the recent peace accord in Northern Ireland. In a sign that the results of the Basque vote were not likely to jeopardize the fledgling peace initiative, a masked man identified as an E.T.A. spokesman said in a British Broadcasting Corporation television interview on Saturday that the unilateral cease-fire was ''firm and serious.'' But the conservative Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, has vowed not to negotiate with E.T.A. until it permanently renounces violence and lays downs its arms -- steps the rebels have not taken. Euskal Heritarrok, which has not formally condemned E.T.A.'s violence, was widely considered an unlikely partner in the new Basque government despite its third-place finish. The group is the successor to Herri Batasuna, or Popular Unity, which changed its name before the campaign, apparently fearing that it might be declared illegal. Last December, the Supreme Court sentenced the entire 23-member leadership of Herri Batasuna to seven years in jail for collaborating with the E.T.A. On Saturday, Mr. Aznar blasted a statement by the E.T.A. spokesman in the BBC broadcast that the rebels would not apologize for the separatist violence, calling it an ''insult to the memory of the victims of terrorism.'' The masked spokesman had said, ''It is the Spanish state that should be asking for forgiveness, for denying our people self-expression and the right to exist.'' The Basque region is home to 2.1 million people who comprise just 5 percent of Spain's population. | Voting in Basque Region Helps Moderates, and Peace |
1053928_0 | Despite growing anxiety that global financial problems might soon affect Europe, the president of the new European Central Bank rejected demands today to relax monetary policy in an effort to spur economic growth. In a toughly worded message aimed in part at European political leaders, the central bank said there was no need for worldwide reductions in interest rates or other forms of ''policy activism'' to jump-start economic growth. ''There is certainly some kind of slowdown, but not a crisis,'' said Wim Duisenberg, who as president of the European Central Bank now oversees monetary policy across the 11 countries that will adopt the euro as a single currency on Jan. 1. ''Proposals for a reassessment of capital controls as an acceptable policy option, or recent calls for worldwide, uniform interest rate reductions, are inappropriate as they do not address the very nature of the problems,'' he said. Mr. Duisenberg's remarks, which came after a meeting of the bank's governing council, underline a growing divergence between monetary policy in Europe and the United States. While the Federal Reserve has begun lowering American interest rates amid fear of a significant slowdown in the economy, the European bankers are barely flinching from their original course and remain preoccupied with establishing the new currency's credibility. A surprising effect of that policy has been the strength of existing European currencies, like the German mark and the French franc, which essentially mirror expectations for the euro. Traders, far from being skittish about an untested currency in the offing, have begun buying the current national currencies as a haven from global shocks in Asia, Latin America and Russia. The mark and the franc are nearly 10 percent stronger against the dollar than they were in August. In recent days, the European Central Bank has come under increasing pressure from national leaders to either reduce interest rates or support other measures to keep European growth from slipping. In Germany, Chancellor-elect Gerhard Schroder has called for lower rates, and his designated finance minister has repeatedly assailed the German central bank's, and by extension the European bank's, tight-money policies as misguided. The French Cabinet continues its complaints against those policies. Most economists predict that growth in the so-called euro zone will remain above 2.5 percent through the end of 1998 but will substantially slow next year. The continuing problems in Asia and Latin America are expected to curtail demand for | No Need for World Rate Cut, European Bank Chief Says |
1053976_0 | A committee of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops declared yesterday that the church authorities ought to do more to promote qualified women to positions of lay leadership in the church, thereby increasing the ranks of those who serve in such jobs as hospital administrators, school superintendents and even chancellors of dioceses. In a statement written by the bishops' Committee on Women in Society and in the Church, the committee says, ''We emphasize the need to appoint women to positions that entail substantive responsibility and influence, so that the church may reap the full benefit of their talents.'' The statement, titled ''From Words to Deeds,'' also called for a greater appreciation of women's leadership abilities and asked for a spirit of collaboration between men and women in the church. But it did not challenge or even discuss the church's position that the priesthood is restricted to men. Instead, by noting those offices that may be held by lay people within the code of canon law, the statement effectively described church leadership as something that extended beyond those who were ordained. ''We assume that all roles in the church are open to women, unless stated otherwise by canon law,'' the statement says. That distinction is crucial, especially as Pope John Paul II has said the restriction of the priesthood to men is definitive and closed to discussion. As if to add a new emphasis to his words, another bishops' committee made public a separate document yesterday, intended, it says, ''to assist the faithful in their acceptance of what the church teaches'' about the priesthood. That document, written by the Committee on Doctrine and titled ''Ten Frequently Asked Questions About the Reservation of Priestly Ordination to Men,'' says the male priesthood is a fundamental element of the faith, received directly from Jesus, who called only men as his apostles. ''The basis for this teaching is the authority of Christ himself,'' the document states. A spokesman for the bishops' conference said it was a coincidence that the two documents were made public on the same day. The statement on women, said Auxiliary Bishop John C. Dunne, chairman of the committee that wrote it, ''is saying to the church, to all of us, 'Let's be open to what women can be.' '' Before writing its statement, the committee spent two years meeting with lay people and priests from around the country, said Bishop Dunne, Auxiliary | Church Urged To Do More For Women In Leadership |
1052856_0 | The Senate today unanimously approved a compromise bill that would require the Government to deal with countries that persecute citizens for religious beliefs by using measures ranging from the mildest private rebuke to tough economic sanctions. The bill, the International Religious Freedom Act, would not force the President to impose automatic sanctions but would allow him to decide whether and how to act against violators. It would require the State Department to issue annual reports of each country's record on religious freedom, and would require the President to take action based on those reviews. As a check on the Administration, the bill would create a 10-member independent commission that would publish its own review of religious liberties. ''The tragic reality is that literally millions of religious believers elsewhere in the world live under constant, oppressive fear at the prospect of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured or even killed, simply for their religious faith,'' said Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the Republican whip. The bill grew from an effort more than a year ago by the Christian Coalition and other conservative religious groups to require the Government to step up its fight against religious persecution from Sudan to China. It struck a chord in the corridors of Capitol Hill as well as in churches and synagogues across the country, and was soon embraced by religious organizations including the Episcopal Church and the American Jewish Committee. ''No government has the right to tell people how to worship and certainly not the right to discriminate against them or persecute them for the way in which they choose to express their faith in God,'' said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. But it took weeks of closed-door negotiations before the Senate today approved a compromise measure, 98 to 0, after agreeing to give the President greater discretion in determining which penalities to impose. Senate leaders whisked the bill to the House, where speedy approval is expected this weekend. Administration officials said Mr. Clinton would sign the bill, reversing earlier threats of a veto. Passage of the legislation would fulfill a promise that House and Senate Republican leaders made earlier this year to conservative religious groups, handing conservatives a rare legislative accomplishment to tout in campaigns leading to Congressional elections less than a month away. Supporters of the legislation cited a stream of gruesome incidents -- from the killing of Christians in Pakistan and Sudan | Bill to Punish Nations Limiting Religious Beliefs Passes Senate |
1057530_5 | neck ''a gold chain so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch.'' And there's Fanon's accuser, Inman Armholster, the sort of ornery ''fat white man who exists only in Georgia.'' But if these characters are thorough stereotypes, Mr. Wolfe's main men (Charlie Croker, Conrad Hensley and Raymond Peepgass) are more three-dimensional, more fully fashioned human beings. Writing from their point of view, Mr. Wolfe endows them with frustrations, fears and conflicts that turn them into recognizable individuals while at the same time using their picaresque adventures to try to create the sort of big work of social realism, based on research and reporting, that he has long advocated as a means (in his view, the means) of capturing the Zeitgeist of ''this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping baroque country of ours'' as it slouches towards the millennium. Certainly ''A Man in Full'' aspires to giving the reader an inside look at how deals are struck in big city politics, how real estate empires can be built on debt, how alpha males struggle to achieve dominance on the football field, in business and in high society. And Mr. Wolfe does give us some dazzling, funny, wrenching set pieces, all rendered in his exclamatory, adrenaline-laced prose, that take us from a plantation deep in the heart of Georgia to a prison in Alameda County in California, from a glittering art opening in Atlanta to a numbing night shift in a warehouse stocked with frozen food. In his controversial 1989 Harper's manifesto for ''the new social novel,'' Mr. Wolfe dismissed the notion that American life was too ''chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous'' to be captured -- roped, tied down and branded -- by contemporary fiction writers, and the strongest sections of ''A Man in Full'' do in fact leave us with a sense of what it's like to live in the ''billion-footed'' world of today. The book's hokey, stage-managed ending, however, suggests that Mr. Wolfe sees the world as such an absurd place -- such a chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous place -- that he could cavalierly (or desperately) tack on a ending that has virtually nothing to do with what has gone before, a conclusion that subjects his characters to fates that seem preposterous even in the ''age of anomalies'' so energetically conjured up in this bold but flawed new novel. BOOKS OF THE TIMES | Wolfe Turns 'The Bonfire' Upside Down |
1057545_2 | Kong on Dec. 1. Air New Zealand is giving passengers who buy a full-fare first- or business-class ticket from Los Angeles to Sydney, Auckland or London a 3Com Palm III organizer. Travel must begin before Nov. 15. Virgin Group's Virgin Atlantic has opened a 2,200-square-foot lounge for first-class passengers in the south terminal of Gatwick Airport in London. Designed to accommodate 180 people, the lounge has a bar, a beauty salon, showers, a business center, a study, an observation room with four telescopes, a game room and a movie theater that can be reserved for private meetings. AMR's American Airlines and US Airways are giving passengers on the US Airways Shuttle 500 miles in each carrier's frequent-flier program for every segment flown between New York and Boston or Washington. To qualify, travelers must be registered in each carrier's plan; the offer expires on Sept. 30, 1999. American and US Airways signed a marketing agreement earlier this year. Rating the Airlines Egon Ronay, the London-based hotel and restaurant critic, recently surveyed the trans-Atlantic economy-class service of 10 United States and overseas airlines and, not surprisingly, found it sorely lacking. Mr. Ronay and his staff flew each airline at least twice between August and October, during the day and at night, and rated each for check-in procedures and efficiency; comfort and size of seats; friendliness and efficiency of staff; quality of food, in-flight entertainment and pilots' in-flight comments, and the condition of lavatories. In a complicated ratings procedure, Virgin Atlantic came out on top over all with a score of 66 percent, followed by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (64 percent), Continental Airlines (59 percent), Air France and U S Airways (58 percent), Delta Air Lines (57 percent), UAL's United Airlines (55 percent), British Airways (51 percent), American Airlines (48 percent) and Northwest Airlines (47 percent). In the food rating, Air France scored highest, with 54 percent, followed by Delta, KLM and Virgin Atlantic (50 percent); US Airways (43 percent); American Airlines (38 percent); British Airways (34 percent); Continental and United (29 percent), and Northwest (25 percent). Mr. Ronay chastised all airlines for their ''lamentable attitude toward passengers' convenience and comfort'' and called the seats ''corset-like and knee-crunching,'' the food ''disgusting'' and the lavatories ''inadequate.'' ''We were surprised at the poor conditions and discomfort, redeemed only by the friendliness of the majority of in-flight staff and the sometimes good in-flight entertainment,'' he said. | Business Travel; An international arrivals hall at Kennedy will soon be replaced by a temporary structure. |
1057650_0 | To the Editor: An Oct. 27 Science Times article, ''Make Way for the Moose, They're Heading South,'' reports that more people are killed by moose than grizzly bears. I have no desire to minimize the danger to man of a 1,200-pound bull moose in rut, but it is important to point out that while there are a million moose in the United States' northern tier, there are about 800 brown bears in all of the lower 48 states. Moreover, the vacationer driving along in his car is likely to stop to get a closer look at a moose, which is normally a docile animal, but he is likely to avoid the grizzly bear like the plague. So, on a per-encounter basis, I doubt that the moose is the more dangerous of the two animals. We should not fear the moose but respect it as a large, wild creature with a mind of its own. Excessive fear has brought on the demise of many wild animals; witness the current condition of the grizzly bear population. CARL SEMENCIC West Hempstead, N.Y., Oct. 27, 1998 | Don't Fear the Moose |
1057589_2 | through Africa, experts said, it is changing the demographic profile of the continent, the daily rhythm of life, and the outlook for tens of millions of people. Experts also stress that AIDS is making its way through large countries like India, China and Brazil, where the huge populations result in a faster spread of disease. Most affected are people between 10 and 24 years old. Of the estimated 7,000 daily infections around the world, half are occurring in this age bracket, the report said. Despite the enormity of the problems affecting Africa, attention seems to have shifted from the disease, largely because it seems to have been contained in the advanced industrialized nations. ''I don't think many people are aware of the scale,'' said Lester Brown, president of World Watch Institute, a nonprofit environmental organization in Washington D.C. ''This alters rather dramatically the population trends in Africa. In some countries, as much 20 to 25 percent of the population is H.I.V. positive,'' he said in a telephone interview today. ''In looking at global epidemics,'' he added, ''one has to go back to the 16th century and the introduction of smallpox in the Aztec population of what is now Mexico to find anything on that scale, and before that, to the bubonic plague in Europe in the 14th century, to see that kind of heavy toll.'' Experts like Mr. Brown and Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, say that, barring a miracle in the pharmaceutical industry that discovers radical remedies for AIDS, countries like Botswana and Zimbabwe will loose as much as a fifth of their population within the next decade. Mr. Brown echoed the comments of other experts who have expressed alarm that much of the industrialized West seems to have shelved efforts to aid afflicted developing nations. Until the World Health Organization released a survey in June, much of the data used by the United Nations was provided by the Governments of the affected countries, which often grossly understated the scale of infection because they were worried that it might interfere with tourism, or out of a nationalistic tendency to avoid the issue. Correction: October 29, 1998, Thursday An article yesterday about a United Nations report on the impact of AIDS on the population of several countries misstated the number of affected countries that are sub-Saharan. It is 29; 34 is the total number of countries in the report. | AIDS Is Slashing Population Of Africa, U.N. Survey Finds |
1057649_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Cell Phones Are Everywhere, but Good Manners May Not Be'' (news article, Oct. 25): In addition to the discomfort they inflict on others, people who cannot disconnect themselves from their businesses inflict an equally sorry violence on themselves. One feels sorry (a little) for these people who have taken so much on themselves that they cannot leave it for even a short time, or who have so little faith in their colleagues or subordinates that they cannot trust them to do their jobs. I used to check up anxiously on my employees, who would tell me that everything was fine and I should stay away as long as possible. I was pleased to find that they were right, so I don't do it anymore. MICHAEL KORTCHMAN Southold, N.Y., Oct. 27, 1998 | Turn Off Your Phones |
1055978_2 | far larger payment the United States, a founding member of the United Nations, continues to owe the organization $1 billion in the face of harsh criticism from other nations. ''Great nations keep their word,'' Secretary General Kofi Annan said last week in a speech here. Continued delinquency by the United States, Mr. Annan added, could only undermine the nation's prestige and its credibility in times of crisis. Still the back dues go unpaid, not because American politicians and diplomats are insensitive to criticism, but because payment of the arrears has been linked to a hot-button issue in domestic American politics, abortion. Probably no issue embodies such a blend of personal conviction (or ambivalence) and political calculation. Over the many months that the United Nations issue has dragged on, Democrats and Republicans have seen more political advantage in sticking to their respective positions than in resolving the dues problem with the United Nations. Moreover, Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, has been a longtime critic of the United Nations (and the State Department, despite an apparent rapport with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright) and has seemed in no hurry whatever to see that the United States pays up. The divisiveness of the United Nations issue, especially as it has been intertwined with abortion restrictions, was illustrated in April, when the Senate approved legislation to pay the arrears. The vote, 51 to 49, was largely along party lines, with most Republicans' backing the bill, most Democrats' opposing it, and the President's threatening a veto. The House had earlier approved the bill in a voice vote. Today a bipartisan group that is pushing for full payment of the dues was outraged. ''The failure of the Congress and the Administration to agree on funding the United Nations is irresponsible and a national embarrassment,'' said David Birenbaum, chairman of the group, the Emergency Coalition for U.S. Financial Support of the United Nations. The coalition includes former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretaries of State James A. Baker 3d and George P. Shultz. In explaining his veto Mr. Clinton said, ''The Congress persisted in tying our United Nations dues to unrelated and controversial social provisions, which endanger the health of women and deny them even basic information about family planning, even though studies show that countries where women have access to strong family planning actually have fewer abortions.'' | Clinton Vetoes Measure to Pay $1 Billion in Late U.N. Dues |
1055924_0 | ESTRONET.COM THIS hormone-pumped network is not the place to look for thinner thighs in 30 days or a recipe for chocolate cupcakes. Estronet.com is one of a half-dozen or so raunchy sites aimed at the 20-something woman interested in, well, sex. (Last week, the network merged with the Chickclick network, which is oriented more toward teen-agers, and is now the host for 22 sites.) An independently minded group of young women is behind an eclectic group of sites, including Bust, Wench, Gurl, Swanky, Hissyfit, Skirt and Minxmag. Some sites in the network are aimed more at teen-agers, but even the presumably more mature sites, like Bust and Wench, are fairly shallow and obsessed with sex. In the Obsession issue of Maximag.com, for example, the leading articles are ''Loving Latex: One Woman's Obsession'' and ''Sex Positive for the New Millennium.'' Some of the content at Estronet, particularly at Bust.com and Mousy. com, rival the Starr report for risque material. Scrolling through Mousy, you might wonder if these aren't actually pornography magazines for men in disguise. But there are no pictures, only personal confessions aplenty, and no topic is too intimate. One slight departure is Wench. com, which, contrary to its perjorative name, aims to explore women's roles in society. There are a few articles on national politics and two on sexism in computer software packaging and cartoons on Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. The feminist bent in Estronet is not so much political as anti-high fashion. For example, several sites criticized Vogue's requirement that Oprah Winfrey lose 20 pounds before gracing its cover. Heather Irwin, Estronet's founder, said the network intended to get beyond Vogue to address more taboo topics like date rape and menstruation. And although her site has drawn plenty of contributors, not too many people are reading them -- at least not yet. Estronet had fewer than 100,000 visitors a month at the time of its merger, said Media Metrix, which tracks Web usage. LIBRARY/WEB SITES FOR WOMEN Nina Teicholz has reported on technology for public radio and is a freelance writer in New York. | On the Edge (and Over It) |
1051045_2 | council representative, 26 state representatives, 8 state senators and 20 agency officials with specific responsibility for the environment). Then, the resident can compose a message that is automatically sent as E-mail to whichever officials are selected, or as a fax, if the recipient has no E-mail address. It is all free for the petitioners and letter writers. Advertisers and media partners pay the freight. Messages can also be sent to the White House or to Congress, Mr. Sheshunoff said, but the central intent is to address local issues. ''The President already received a half-million E-mails a month, but for a city council member to receive 10 letters on a single subject can have a real impact,'' he said. The letters are treated as private mail, Mr. Sheshunoff said. E-The People takes no note of their content and promises it will sell none of the demographic data collected. Mr. Sheshunoff's initiative operates from an office on the 19th floor of a tower in downtown Austin, part of a suite of offices that are home to Alex Sheshunoff Management Services, the company run by his father, a well-known banking consultant. Mr. Sheshunoff fils prowled his small room recently, a thatch of sandy hair brushing his forehead, occasionally grabbing for a purring cellular telephone while a team of young programmers hunched over keyboards frantically tapping in data. An American flag dominated one wall while a map of the United States filled another, showing the route of an 80-city transcontinental bus tour that Mr. Sheshunoff has been running to spread the word. The bus, decorated to resemble a mailbox, left Austin on Aug. 1 and has made its way across the Southwest, up the Pacific Coast and across the prairies into the Midwest, New England and New York. It is heading south on its return to Texas. So far, 45 newspapers have agreed to go into partnership with E-The People, meaning they will feature a link to the site on their own Web pages and share with E-The People any advertising revenues generated by surfers traversing that link. Among those signed up are The San Antonio Express-News, The Oregonian in Portland and The Daily News in New York. Mr Sheshunoff is hoping for 100 media partners. Mr. Sheshunoff once considered a career in network television. While a student at Yale, he did some work for ABC News, as a production assistant and then reading | Got Cause and Computer? You Can Fight City Hall |
1052597_1 | Nations to lift sanctions imposed after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Although French diplomats have denied withholding results, and said they expected that the final French tests would show no traces of VX, today's statement by the French Foreign Ministry neither confirmed nor denied the reports. Instead, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman said that French experts would make a presentation at the meeting, now scheduled for Oct. 22 and 23, that ''would allow an appreciation of the scientific methods used by the three laboratories'' of the United States, France and Switzerland. That language suggested France's scientific findings as well as those of the Swiss may have differed in methodology from the American procedures. Some diplomats here said, however, this may set the scene for an inconclusive result in which no one gets blamed. Before sanctions are lifted, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed, and the United Nations Special Commission, charged with overseeing that process, must be confident that Iraq cannot rebuild them. Iraq has often accused the United States of making misleading charges aimed at delaying any lifting of the punishing economic sanctions. But if tests find traces of VX, Iraqi credibility would be further weakened. Iraq officially suspended all inspections by the special commission on Aug. 5 and refused again on Wednesday to reopen the way for a resumption of these forays. The United Nations said it would not consider any action on lifting sanctions until the inspections resumed. Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the special commission, said the group had planned to call for a new meeting of experts even before the French controversy arose. ''There is the matter of sampling to discuss and then the whole issue of VX,'' and how much of it Iraq had produced. Iraq and the United Nations have also clashed about one of the special commission's chief inspectors, Scott Ritter, who quit in protest recently, charging that the United Nations and the United States were easing up on inspections, seeking to avoid further confrontations with Iraq. Richard Butler, who heads the commission, accused Mr. Ritter of divulging secrets about the commission's work. Today, in a letter released to the press, Mr. Ritter's lawyers asserted he has a constitutional right to speak his mind and will continue to do so despite a threat of prosecution. The lawyers asked Mr. Butler to ''retract'' a statement charging Mr. Ritter with breaking the law. | France Seeks Talks on Iraqi Chemical Tests |
1058161_1 | lakes, with geysers spewing water into the air from corroded Italian-made iron pipes. And though the Tripoli branch of the project is supposed to carry 660 million gallons of water a day, the amount flowing now is still a relative trickle. Libyan engineers say the current volume is just 106 million gallons, only two-thirds of what Tripoli needs every day for nonagricultural purposes alone. The vast project is also running behind schedule, slowed by financial constraints that foreign experts say have forced the Libyan Government to postpone some essential projects. Still, Libyan engineers said in interviews here that 87 percent of the work on the Tripoli section had now been finished, and they expressed confidence that all of the work would be completed in early 2000. In a country without a single free-flowing river of its own, water flowing at full stream through the pipe, more than 12 feet in diameter, would be enough to irrigate vast new agricultural projects. It is intended to fulfill the dream first sketched in 1974 by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, who said his plan was not only to provide Libyans with a sure supply of water, but also to make the desert bloom. The line that ends here, about 15 miles northeast of Tripoli, begins about 600 miles to the south, at a station deep in the Sahara that serves as a collection point for water drawn from more than 100 underground aquifers, some more than 1,500 feet beneath the sands. The line that reaches Tripoli is part of the second phase of the two-part Man-Made River Project. The first, which begins deep in another part of the desert hundreds of miles to the east, ends near the coastal town of Benghazi. It began to carry water in 1994. But even that section still requires additional construction and drilling, and it is providing only one-eighth of the 530 million gallons of water a day that is its maximum capacity. In the Tripoli section, among the work that remains unfinished is a section of the pipeline that is supposed to end at Tarhuna, about 40 miles southeast of Tripoli, where American officials have said Libya has been building what would be the world's largest underground chemical weapons plant in a hollowed-out mountain. As recently as 1996, United States officials warned that the weapons plant might be completed as early as this year, but | Sidi Saye Journal; The Thirsty Lift a Glass To a River And Qaddafi |
1051172_2 | appalling ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. Others are more rarely discussed but undoubtedly more important for the United States, like the possible fissuring of Canada because of conflicts over the rights of regional and ethnic populations. And some are simply startling, like the revelation that Romania's fertility rate doubled in the course of one year (1966-67), because of a political decision. In 1965, having concluded that Romania needed to grow, the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu abruptly banned most types of abortion, the country's primary method of birth control, while increasing official discouragement of contraception. The result was that a huge number of Romanian women carried pregnancies to term in the next year. So many medical personnel were themselves forced to take pregnancy leaves that mortality for mothers and children in childbirth also skyrocketed, due to lack of care. The message that pervades this book is that population numbers, though important, are often less significant than the interpretation given to those numbers, especially by ambitious politicians. Demographic conflicts do not result from primordial group tensions but from calculated political decisions and campaigns. In Canada, it was ambitious regional politicians from Quebec and the western provinces, and not any inevitable logic of population numbers, that strengthened regional parties and threatened secession. In Bosnia, Serbs, Croats and Muslims had lived, worked, studied and married in a truly multi- ethnic society before that mixing was deliberately undone by politicians seeking to extend their control of regional populations. In the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment is periodically stirred up by politicians in need of an issue. In short, Teitelbaum and Winter suggest that social conflict stems not from demography but from politics. When ethnic divisions are not made into battle lines, different groups can cohabit quite well. Those leaders and groups that denounce ethnic mixing and attack ethnic groups for fear of the conflict they might unleash are thus creating exactly the problem they say they are trying to avoid. Given their birthrate declines, Teitelbaum and Winter point out, almost all developed countries will have to become more multiethnic through immigration in order simply to survive. As communities mix, these nations and their leaders are going to have to decide if a homogenous ethnic identity is worth fighting for. The numbers of the dead in the former Yugoslavia suggest not. Jack A. Goldstone teaches sociology and international relations at the University of California, Davis. | Who's Counting |
1051514_0 | Passengers boarding flights to foreign countries or returning to the United States on nonstop flights from foreign countries will now be asked for a name and telephone number for next of kin. The new rule, which was created by a 1990 law but opposed by the Air Transport Association as too expensive to carry out, finally went into effect Oct. 1. The law grew out of the 1988 sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Trans World Airlines crash in 1996 and the Swissair crash on Sept. 2 made the need more apparent. Some airlines will ask for the information at the gate, others will do it at check-in, still others will have travel agents do the work. Steven Okun, special counsel to the Department of Transportation, said no fines were envisioned; the department simply wants compliance. One loophole: passengers can refuse to provide the information. BETSY WADE TRAVEL ADVISORY | Names of Next of Kin Requested for Flights |
1051326_1 | in the top 20 percent of your class, you might enjoy the same marketability as if you graduated in the top 10 percent at a lesser-known school. ''From a name recognition standpoint, we would be more attracted to someone in Columbia, even if the person was not at the top of the class,'' said Diane Ross, the recruitment administrator for the Washington legal powerhouse Verner Liipfert Bernhard McPherson & Hand. The booming job market, however, is temporarily making school distinctions less important. ''Everything I've read says it's a wonderful market for law students,'' Ms. Ross said. ''There are more options for everyone.'' Should the market change, though, a J.D. from Columbia would prove a better bet, according to some recruiters. But don't start filing those transfer papers just yet. If your post-graduation goal is to hang your legal shingle in Manhattan, the advantages of transferring to the bigger-name school narrow. Both Fordham and Columbia have strong reputations among New York firms and boast extensive alumni networks within the legal community -- an important factor in hiring, according to Carol Sprague, the administration director for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. ''The network in New York is incredible for both of those law schools,'' Ms. Patton said. ''A person won't go wrong either place.'' There may be some differences, however, in the schools' employer markets, added Ms. Patton, who recommended visiting extensively with career counselors at each school to discuss not only your individual goals and circumstances, but also the firms at which graduates tend to land. Ultimately, worrying about the size of your pond may prove to be less important than finding out who fishes there regularly. Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. Each week, she will respond to readers' questions about career and workplace issues. Send them by E-mail to working@nytimes.com or by mail to Working, Money & Business, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. Editors' Note: August 15, 1999, Sunday The Working column in the Money & Business section of Oct. 4, 1998, posed and answered a question about the relative advantages for a law student of remaining at Fordham University, where he had achieved membership on the law review staff, or transferring to Columbia University, which the column described as a ''bigger pond.'' Though no name was used, the question referred to the student in the first person -- as ''I'' | WORKING |
1056623_1 | rapidly changing the American food chain. This year, the fourth year that genetically altered seed has been on the market, some 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton and potatoes that have been engineered to either produce their own pesticides or withstand herbicides. Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it. The reason is not hard to find. The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and Drug Administration, has decided we don't need to know it, so biotech foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning, the industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously as the linchpins of a biological revolution -- part of a ''new agricultural paradigm'' that will make farming more sustainable, feed the world and improve health and nutrition -- and, oddly enough, as the same old stuff, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned. This convenient version of reality has been roundly rejected by both consumers and farmers across the Atlantic. Last summer, biotech food emerged as the most explosive environmental issue in Europe. Protesters have destroyed dozens of field trials of the very same ''frankenplants'' (as they are sometimes called) that we Americans are already serving for dinner, and throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food be labeled in the market. By growing my own transgenic crop -- and talking with scientists and farmers involved with biotech -- I hoped to discover which of us was crazy. Are the Europeans overreacting, or is it possible that we've been underreacting to genetically engineered food? After digging two shallow trenches in my garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes that Monsanto had sent and opened up the Grower Guide tied around its neck. (Potatoes, you may recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from seed but from the eyes of other potatoes.) The guide put me in mind not so much of planting potatoes as booting up a new software release. By ''opening and using this product,'' the card stated, I was now ''licensed'' to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would | Playing God in the Garden |
1056940_3 | fuel in tractors that plant, fertilize and harvest the corn, and in petroleum-based fertilizer. But using waste for fuel -- especially waste that might otherwise be burned and in the process dump carbon dioxide back into the air -- could allow production of seven gallons of ethanol from one gallon of oil. And whatever the feedstock, whether trees or grasses, using it makes room for new growth, which will draw carbon back out of the atmosphere. This would be true, backers point out, wherever ethanol from cellulose might catch on, in this country or abroad, especially the third world, where demand for motor fuel is rising. In the United States, retail distribution of ethanol in its near-pure form -- a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent unleaded gasoline -- is minuscule. But it is more widely distributed as ETBE, a gasoline additive used to raise octane and to reduce carbon monoxide emissions. Ford and Chrysler expect to turn out hundreds of thousands of vehicles that can run on ethanol or gasoline, to take advantage of credits offered under the Federal fuel economy rules, so a market is growing. The stumbling block has been price. To compete, ethanol has to cost about one-fourth less than gasoline, because it has less energy per gallon. BC International sees an initial niche for ethanol as the basic ingredient of ETBE; later, the company says, it could compete with gasoline directly. What would help, experts say, is using ingredients that are available free, or that others will pay to dispose of. In California, one area has banned burning of rice straw because of air pollution, and that could be a potential fuel for an ethanol plant, Mr. Gatto said. The plant here, on the banks of the Mermentau River, is designed to produce 20 million gallons a year -- less than a pint for every car in America -- but several others using cellulose are planned around the country. One company, Masada Resource, of Birmingham, Ala., says it will break ground next year on a plant in Middletown, N.Y., that will use the cellulose in household garbage. In that case, sales of ethanol will not turn a profit but will help offset the cost of garbage disposal, in a region where a large landfill is scheduled to close soon. It will not use KO11, but a different proprietary process for rendering the cellulose | New Technology Turns Useless Agricultural Byproducts Into Fuel for Autos |
1056580_1 | and thus he left his interlocutor with an experience of a gap in understanding where once he felt he had something. In short, Socrates had an uncanny gift for bringing others to the brink of anxiety. In the give-and-take of a short exchange, he was able to lead his conversational partners to a recognition that although they took their lives to be incredibly important, they did not really understand what they were doing, or why, or why it was a good idea for them to be doing that rather than something else. At this point, the interlocutor would typically rush off, supposedly called back to the concerns of daily life. Concern about getting ahead in life -- closing a business deal, winning a court case, getting into the right school -- would be used to distract one from the more profound anxiety that one had no idea what a truly successful life might be, and thus one had no idea what ''getting ahead'' meant. Socrates is the only figure who is willing to stand still. He alone can tolerate the anxiety of not knowing. He asks questions and refuses to move in any direction until he knows where he is going. ''The Art of Living'' is Alexander Nehamas's own joyful attempt to stand still. Philosophy, for him, can be seen as made up of two very different ways of responding to the figure of Socrates. The dominant tradition follows the later Plato and tries to provide answers to Socrates' questions. Philosophy in this mode is made up of theoretical, impersonal arguments about our obligations to others, the nature of the good life, what we can know and what there is. But Nehamas is out to invigorate another neglected mode. In this Socratic mode, there is an enhanced emphasis on what kind of life one leads, what kind of self one becomes, when one lives with the question of how to live. For Nehamas, Socrates' ''major accomplishment is that he established a new way of life, a new art of living,'' and in so doing constituted himself as the unique individual he became. The question for Nehamas is: how can one possibly follow suit? There is no easy answer to this question. As Nehamas points out, one cannot simply ask questions a la Socrates: that is to become a banal imitator. Rather, if one is truly to follow in this Socratic | University Presses; The Examined Life |
1056677_1 | want to work,'' said Mark Oldman, managing director of Vault Reports, a New York company that provides job seekers with detailed information on internships and employers. It would be unrealistic, he added, for companies to expect college students to know their exact career paths. Besides, your internship choices hardly seem off the wall. On the contrary, all of them point in the general direction of public relations. And far from raising alarm bells, the accumulation of so much workplace experience in your college years is likely to please potential employers, whatever path you pursue. ''Most employers see internships, even in fields that are not directly relevant to the one you end up in, as a way of gaining the soft skills needed in an office,'' Mr. Oldman said. ''There are things common to most businesses: gaining a professional demeanor, knowing how to fit within a hierarchical institution, not stepping on toes. These are things you learn only by being on the job.'' Price Hicks, who directs the intern program for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, agreed. ''I don't think employers want to spend their time acclimating a person to the realities of everyday work life,'' she said. Even more broadly, internships are a signal to employers that you are equipped to deal with life after college. Mr. Oldman said intern coordinators believe that ''internships in general are a real sign of maturity and initiative -- that someone hasn't spent his summers flipping burgers or twirling the lifeguard whistle.'' If eyebrows are raised about the diversity of your experience, pitch your background as a plus. ''In addition to showing that you can work in a variety of environments, it suggests you might have something interesting to contribute to your new office,'' Mr. Oldman said. What's more, having explored several options, you are now better qualified to choose the field that's right for you -- and to avoid job-hopping in your post-college years. ''One of the great things about internships,'' Mr. Oldman said, ''is that they help you decide where you don't want to go.'' Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. Each week, she will respond to readers' questions about career and workplace issues. Send them by E-mail to working@nytimes.com or by mail to Working, Money & Business, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. WORKING Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. | Victory In Variety |
1056682_2 | A. In many situations, the drug is not new, but has been used in a new setting. Tamoxifen has been used in the treatment of breast cancer for 25 to 30 years. It is an estrogen-like compound that in some tissues blocks the effect of estrogen and in other tissues works in a similar way to estrogen. In some tissues, it stops cancer cells from growing, while estrogen stimulates them. This year, tamoxifen was given to healthy women at high risk for breast cancer and was shown to reduce the incidence of the disease. So we're going from reactive treatment to prevention. The implications are enormous. Q. Who should get tamoxifen? A. We don't know. We do know that in the ground-breaking study that was reported this year involving 13,000 women, they had a 50 percent reduction in breast cancer cases. The study was stopped at 3.6 years because of the astonishing success. And the women who were taking a placebo were given tamoxifen. Q. What was the criteria for the patients in the tamoxifen study? A. Women considered at higher risk -- having a mother, sister or daughter with breast cancer. Age, because a woman who is 60 has a four times higher risk of developing breast cancer than a 40-year-old. Reproductive history -- whether you've had children or whether you had your first child at an older age or whether your first menstrual period was at a very young age. All of these seem to be tied together because they probably reflect an increased exposure to estrogen. And whether you've had any other breast conditions requiring biopsies. Even those that are benign seem to indicate a slightly higher risk. Q. Are there risks with tamoxifen? A. It has side effects -- there was an incidence of uterine cancer that was increased by two to threefold and an increased incidence in blood clots, mostly seen in women over 50 and those that are not active. Q. Are there better drugs? A. There's raloxifene. In the short time that it's been followed, raloxifene has not had the major side effects of tamoxifen. Raloxifene doesn't stimulate the uterus. Raloxifene may be a much safer drug. Q. Is there anything better in development? A. Every pharmaceutical company has got a highest priority group working on an even better designer estrogen. The ideal would be one that turns on cells where estrogen has | Q&A/Isidore Tepler; Making Strides Against Breast Cancer |
1054620_5 | said ''how very pleased'' he was, ''personally and as President, that the Nobel Prize Committee has rewarded the courage and the people of Northern Ireland by giving the Nobel Peace Prize to John Hume and to David Trimble.'' He added ''a special word of thanks'' to Mr. Mitchell, who issued a statement praising Mr. Hume and Mr. Trimble as ''fully deserving of this honor.'' Mr. Hume, nominated for the Peace Prize twice before, is widely credited with being the single most important influence for peace in Northern Ireland. For 30 years he has spoken out against violence as a member of a short-lived Northern Ireland assembly in the early 1970's and then as a member of the British Parliament and the European Parliament. He has made frequent trips to the United States to encourage investment in Ulster and to dissuade Irish-Americans from furnishing money for the I.R.A. He was a founder of his party in 1970 to represent ''nationalist'' sentiment. In Northern Ireland, a nationalist is someone wanting closer ties and even union with Ireland but, unlike republicans, unwilling to countenance bloodshed to reach the goal. Mr. Hume began the process that led to April's settlement five years ago, with a decision to meet secretly with Mr. Adams, an outcast among nationalists because of his identification with the I.R.A. Those talks led to a cease-fire in 1993 that prompted hopes for an end to the violence. Those hopes were dashed 17 months later when the I.R.A. set off a bomb in London. Though he said he was devastated by the act, Mr. Hume pressed on, and his efforts produced a second cease-fire and brought Mr. Adams to the negotiating table. Mr. Trimble, by contrast, is a late-comer to accommodation with his opponents. A former law professor, he began his political life as an enemy of the party he now leads and an agitator against the last peace settlement, the Sunningdale Agreement, which died in 1974. As a member of the hard-line ''vanguard'' movement at that time, he said, ''I would personally draw the line at violence and terrorism, but if we are talking about a campaign that involves demonstrations and so on, then a certain amount of violence may be inescapable.'' In 1995 Mr. Trimble, already a member of the British Parliament, attracted much attention by leading Orange Order Protestant marchers at Drumcree Church into a police formation set up | 2 Ulster Peacemakers Win the Nobel Prize |
1054570_0 | When the Vatican released Pope John Paul II's latest encyclical on Thursday, it published a document by a trained philosopher who explores and amplifies a historic church position that faith and reason cannot be separated. He does so in a style that some Roman Catholic scholars say might even make it a useful text for undergraduate courses. But scholars said the encyclical, ''Fides et Ratio'' (''Faith and Reason''), which was addressed to the bishops, should not be read simply as a document of interest primarily to them and students, but one that comes with a message for a worldwide, growing church. The encyclical contains a critique of past intellectual trends and a look ahead. John Paul II examines and rejects various philosophical trends that he says have abandoned the search for truth. And noting that Christianity is about to enter its third millennium, the Pope declares the church to be reason's defender against intellectuals who have given up on discovering absolute truth. The Pope, said the Rev. Avery Dulles, professor of religion and society at Fordham University, is ''saying that the church has a duty to defend human reason and, paradoxically, people outside the church don't seem to be doing it.'' Philosophy is the Pope's academic specialty. As a priest in Poland, the Rev. Karol Wojtyla received his doctorate in the subject from Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1960. But his encyclical proclaims anew ideas with a long history in Catholic thinking. ''It's a timely restatement of a particular position that goes back to the 13th century and was re-emphasized in the 19th century but particularly needs to be said today,'' Father Dulles said. ''I think it comes from his heart.'' The 150-page document contains some specialized language in its discussion of trends in philosophy. But some sections are written in a style accessible to a broader audience. In its earliest chapters, for example, the Pope says that some questions -- like ''Who am I?'' and ''Does life have a meaning?'' -- are universal. In so doing, he strikes at a resonant chord with contemporary culture, in which much public discussion has focused on the need to re-establish a sense of community and discover shared social values. ''It's very upbeat in its overall tone,'' said the Rev. Robert Sokolowski, who teaches philosophy at Catholic University of America, in Washington, in an assessment echoed by others who have read the encyclical. | Catholic Scholars Call Message a Timely Critique |
1054606_0 | In a decade when frantic and information-sodden people must rely on handy aids like ''Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes'' and ''Dating for Dummies,'' can't someone do the same for the Pope, who at the age of 78 keeps producing long and idea-packed encyclicals? ''Wojtyla in 90 Minutes''? ''John Paul II for Dummies''? If such an abbreviated treatment existed, here are three observations it might include on the remarkable document, ''Fides et Ratio'' (''Faith and Reason''), that the Pope has issued as his papacy ends its 20th year. First, the tone of ''Fides et Ratio'' is positive and embracing. The Pope is resolute, not surprisingly, in his affirmations of the truths of faith but measured in his criticisms. Even when worrying about contemporary nihilism, the document has none of the apocalyptic pitch this Pope occasionally reaches (''the culture of death''); nor does it scold. His appraisals of trends in current thought are sharp but almost always accompanied by appreciative acknowledgments of their strengths and insights. Second, ''Fides et Ratio'' is an extraordinary vote of confidence in the human mind and the capacity of human reason to reach objective truth and real knowledge. Be bold, is the Pope's exhortation to philosophers, and by extension to thinking people generally. (''Every man and woman is in some sense a philosopher.'') Take on ''the fundamental questions which pervade human life,'' he urges, questions that arise from both the wonder of existence and the challenge of suffering and death. There is an obvious irony in the fact that the Catholic papacy, once viewed as the leading enemy of the inquiring mind, is now urging philosophers to overcome their ''false modesty'' and go where they fear to tread. Philosophy should recover its ''sapiential dimension'' and its ''metaphysical range'' -- its concern for the practical wisdom that people can live by and its stretch for a truth that, however imperfect and inevitably analogical, goes beyond ''the factual and the empirical.'' John Paul II is aware that this appeal will appear ''daunting'' to many contemporary thinkers, and he recognizes that their resistance to such ambitions arises in part from the bleak experience of a bloody age and from a fear that any strong claims to truth ultimately encourage intolerance. He tries to turn this argument around: it is the moral vacuum created by human reason's abandonment of its search for fundamental truths, he maintains, that breeds totalitarianism; and it is | Beliefs |
1054625_8 | Reinharz, who took over the presidency in 1994. Dr. Reinharz, 54, born in Israel, is fiercely devoted to Brandeis, where he earned his Ph.D. Traveling around the country, often with his wife, Shulamit, a Brandeis professor of sociology and women's studies, Dr. Reinharz has given a new face to the institution. He has also grasped the value of celebrity, attracting people like Ann Richards and Anita Hill as visiting lecturers and persuading Robert B. Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, to take a professorship. ''What I have done is really clearly define and articulate what we are all about,'' Dr. Reinharz said. ''Tempering our Jewish identity did not work. I have defined our mission very clearly and without embarrassment as having four pillars: Jewish sponsorship, total non-sectarianism, a commitment to social justice and excellence.'' It is on the pillar of excellence, that Brandeis sees its work most clearly in the future. Applications are brisk, and Brandeis has drawn some first-class students by offering them hefty scholarships regardless of their parents' incomes. But the university still suffers from being a second choice for many of the brightest on campus. It has been frustrated at not being able to crack the top 25 list in the university rankings put out by such publications as U.S. News and World Report. But a recent book by Hugh David Graham and Nancy Diamond, ''The Rise of American Research Universities,'' (Johns Hopkins, 1997) ranked colleges based on faculty publications and citations. After controlling for institutional size, it ranked Brandeis ninth over all and first among a group of ''rising'' research universities. Facing Problems With Clear Mission Eleven faculty members belong to the National Academy of Sciences, and 27 belong to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, high numbers for a small institution. Yet by not veering far from a Jewish identity, Brandeis faces a potential problem in attracting the very best from all walks of life. Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said Brandeis, from which he graduated, must ''find a way to translate the values of religion without making it religious.'' ''Once Brandeis loses its Jewishness, it becomes just another university and pushes away its donor base,'' Mr. Levine said. ''Moreover, Brandeis faces the same challenges as all research universities. For the first time since the days Brandeis was founded, universities are not a growth industry.'' This is the calculation that | Brandeis at 50 Is Still Searching, Still Jewish and Still Not Harvard |
1039949_4 | good opportunity,'' said Thomas J. Dolan, president of Xerox Business Services, Xerox's $2 billion outsourcing arm. ''Pitney wants to get into documents, we want to get into mail, so the competition is going to be intense.'' That threat has not stopped numerous analysts from posting strong buy recommendations on Pitney's stock. Small wonder: Pitney has had 14 consecutive quarters of earnings increases. That, combined with a hefty stock buyback program and a two-for-one stock split last year, has pushed its market capitalization, which was $7 billion in 1996, to $15 billion and growing. ''It's still the gorilla in the mailing services business,'' said Amit Chopra, of Credit Suisse First Boston. And for now, mail is still a thriving business. Robert Reisner, the Postal Service's vice president for strategic planning, said, ''Sure, interest in the Internet is growing, but even America Online still sells its services primarily by mail.'' Companies continue to funnel advertising away from television and print media into direct mail -- often, using mailing lists they pried from the Internet. Mail has even received a lift from electronic shopping, which generates mailed invoices. ''The Internet, despite E-mail, has resulted in substantially more mail, not less,'' said B. Alexander Henderson, an analyst with Prudential Securities Research. Moreover, Pitney has had plenty of time to plan for change. As far back as 1992, George B. Harvey, then the chairman, was forming task forces, hiring outside consultants, even sending anthropology students to study how customers process messages -- all to figure out whether desktop computers and changes in the way people communicate meant that mail was on the way out. ''People were drawing all kinds of doomsday scenarios,'' recalled Meredith B. Fischer, vice president for corporate marketing. Warding off those scenarios took a toll on Pitney. The company, already struggling with the aftermath of some bad investments in overseas businesses, took numerous write-offs related to training and factory retooling. Then the Postal Service issued regulations that prevented Pitney from collecting postage money from customers in advance, a practice that had enabled Pitney to earn more than $25 million a year in the ''float,'' or interest income. Although operating earnings remained healthy, by 1995 investors had had enough and share prices plunged. ''We gave them too many bad surprises,'' Mr. Critelli recalled. A year later the task forces came back with a few surprises of their own. Digital technologies, they reported, were | Not Your Father's Postage Meter; Pitney Bowes Survives Faxes, E-Mail and the Internet |
1039899_5 | a team from the Unit for Housing and Urbanization at Harvard's Graduate School of Design to help. The Moroccan Government then donated land outside Fez that the agency would be able to develop and sell to raise money for its operations. Now the World Bank is providing the Moroccan Government with a loan of more than $20 million for infrastructure improvements, emergency repairs and short-term loans for tenants and homeowners in the medina. The plan involves some small-scale modernizing interventions, for example to provide limited access in the medina for ambulances and fire- and sanitation trucks to replace the donkeys, which happen to be heavy polluters. Some miniparks will also be created, because the medina has no places for children to play. Already about 200 buildings have received some sort of emergency help in the last several years from ADER-Fez. Because the medina is so overcrowded, the agency is not always able to find temporary homes for people in crumbling buildings during the repairs. One of the oddest sights in Fez is of families living in the middle of construction projects. The Ansari family, for example, live behind a pile of rubble that, not long ago, had been the outside of a house next to theirs. Scaffolding shores up what remains of their walls. Workers on ladders busy themselves with repairs. And in a room open to their small central courtyard, now muddied by construction equipment, the Ansaris calmly sit at a low round table, sipping sweetened Moroccan tea and watching television. Some of the agency's more conspicuous successes, besides the Bou Inaniya, include the restoration of the Foundouk Nejjarine, for example, a lodge, then a mosque that has now become a handsome woodworking museum in the carpenters' quarter. But the Ansaris' house encapsulates the crucial connection being made here between the preservation of local culture and daily life -- a profound idea, once you think of the medina in Fez, its community, both physically and socially, as a living work of art. Trying to Avoid A Theme Park In the end the question is whether it will really be possible to make the place more amenable to tourists yet not turn it into a theme park. Can housing in the medina be improved, and the prices of houses made to rise, giving a lift to the economy, without gentrifying the community? With Fez especially burdened by building codes and | Preserving A City's Soul; Fez Repairs Monuments And Nurtures Its Residents |
1039886_2 | on his brain in preparation for surgery to control seizures. The 22-year-old patient agreed to participate in Dr. Hart's study, which involved naming and categorizing images of everyday objects, while the grid of 174 small electrodes was still in place. A mild electric current applied between two electrodes temporarily disables that part of the brain. In the experiment, the researchers focused on an area at the base of the brain that was linked to word recognition. By applying the current at specific times while the patient was viewing an image, and noting whether word recognition was disrupted, the scientists could determine how long it took to process the information. The answer: about four-tenths of a second for a familiar object, and up to about three-quarters of a second for a less familiar one. Beyond those intervals, the current had no effect. The researchers say that the experiment is further evidence that information builds up gradually (if rather quickly) in the brain. Investigation of this process could help in understanding how information is lost when a person suffers a stroke or develops Alzheimer's disease. Growing Smarter Weeds Weeds may be pests, but they are n't dumb: They can make use of the best that genetic engineering has to offer and still keep their essential weediness intact. Scientists have known that genetically altered traits like resistance to herbicides can be transferred from crops to related weeds through cross-pollination. But it was thought that the resulting hybrid weeds would produce fewer seeds or have other characteristics that would make them less aggressive. Researchers in Denmark and at Ohio State University have shown that weeds related to oil seed rape, the source of canola oil, have the best of both worlds: They not only acquire genetically altered traits from the crop, but produce as many seeds as unaltered weeds. So a herbicide-resistant hybrid will not be crowded out; indeed, if a field is then sprayed with herbicide, only resistant weeds will remain. One way to avoid passing on altered traits, the researchers suggest, would be to change the genetic engineering process to modify the DNA outside the nucleus of a plant cell rather than inside it, as is now done. DNA from the nucleus is contained in the pollen, which is carried throughout a field by the wind or insects; DNA from the cytoplasm outside the nucleus can only be passed on through seeds. | Science Watch |
1039937_0 | AN upstart Australian company hopes to capitalize on two trends -- the aging of female baby boomers and the growing popularity of dietary supplements -- to promote a new herbal treatment for the symptoms of menopause. Novogen Ltd., a medical research company based in Sydney, introduced Promensil, a supplement for menopausal women made from red clover, in the United States in April. It is running a $5 million advertising and promotional campaign to establish the product in a field already crowded with many other herbal and prescription remedies. According to Novogen, the red clover from which Promensil is made is a source of four plant estrogens that can replace the ovarian estrogens, or hormones, that decline in menopausal women. The ads for the product, by Lotas Minard Patton McIver in New York, feature a black-and-white photograph of a woman and a four-color picture of Promensil's packaging. The ads contend the product will help make ''midlife as nature intended. ''What time takes away, new Promensil successfully replaces: estrogens,'' the ads continue. ''Safe, natural plant estrogens derived from specially cultivated Australian red clover.'' Warren Lancaster, vice president for North America at Novogen, said the number of women 45 years and older in the United States who are on the verge of menopause was expected to grow from 9.1 million in 1996 to 10.2 million in 2000 and 13.5 million in 2010. Of the 10 million or so women in this country now undergoing midlife changes, he said eight million had symptoms and two million of them were taking prescription drugs to manage the symptoms. ''We want to establish Promensil as the leading brand in the market, and we've got to get the message of the health benefits of plant estrogens out there,'' he said. Novogen has been running ads in health food and medical trade publications, as well as in health-oriented consumer magazines like Prevention. Last month it broadened the campaign to magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Cooking Light and Martha Stewart Living. Budgeted at $3.5 million, the ad campaign is scheduled to run through February. Novogen, which is 8.5 percent owned by Protein Technologies International, a subsidiary of DuPont, is not alone in its efforts. According to the Competitive Media Reporting unit of VNU N.V., Enzymatic Therapy, a privately held distributor of dietary supplements based in Green Bay, Wis., spent more than $800,000 in the first quarter of this year | Campaigns for supplements for that midlife event contend that Mother Nature knows best. |
1039892_3 | modest increase in cancers in children whose mothers had used electric blankets during pregnancy and a lesser increase in children who had used such blankets. This prompted a warning label on all electric blankets and a redesign of the product that reduced EMF exposure to the background level produced by household wiring. But subsequent studies have not borne out the 1990 finding, and this year a large National Cancer Institute study concluded that a causal relationship between childhood brain tumors and EMF's from appliances, including electric blankets, was unlikely. Other studies that examined several adult cancers also found no relationship to the use of electric blankets. CELLULAR PHONES -- Like electric blankets, cell phones create EMF's. In 1990, a woman who had used a cell phone extensively for two years developed a brain tumor just behind her right ear, where she typically placed the phone's antenna. Her husband filed suit against the manufacturer, saying that the phone's EMF's had caused his wife's cancer. In 1993 he appeared on the CNN program ''Larry King Live'' to proclaim his assertion, which prompted three lawsuits from other cell phone users making similar claims. In response, the industry paid for independent safety studies, which have yet to clearly link cell phones to cancer. Although it is not possible to prove that EMF's are safe, there is still no convincing evidence of harm from the kind of EMF's that cell phones emit. While the incidence of brain tumors has risen slightly in recent years, there has been no disproportionate increase in tumors near the ears, despite a meteoric rise in cell phone use. As the council points out in its report, by far the most serious hazard associated with these phones is their use while driving. Last year a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that drivers who use cell phones are four times as likely as nonusers to have an accident. ASBESTOS IN SCHOOLS -- Asbestos that is contained in a solid substance is harmless. But when it becomes crumbly, airborne and inhaled, it can lodge in body tissues, where it can sometimes cause cancer. Asbestos insulation to protect against fire was required in schools until 1973, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned its use to reduce children's exposure. The 1980's produced two Congressional acts requiring schools to inspect for asbestos hazards and clean them up. Despite the fact that | Personal Health; Health Scares That Weren't So Scary |
1039895_0 | ALMOST exactly three months ago, Craig Dahl, a 26-year-old park concessions worker, took his last hike, setting out on a steep, winding trail above Two Medicine Valley in the southeast corner of Glacier National Park in Montana. He never returned. Three days later, on May 20, rangers discovered the grisly scene: Mr. Dahl's partly consumed body cached in a clump of vegetation down slope from a trail. From the physical evidence, searchers surmised that a female grizzly bear and her two cubs had preyed upon Mr. Dahl. Then, working with the tools of forensic science, experts identified the culprits, tracked them down and had them destroyed. Yet in many ways the mystery was just beginning. Research suggested that the female was a grizzly, nicknamed Chocolate Legs for her distinctive coloring, who had been identified as a problem bear in 1983, captured, and moved to the park's back country. She lived the normal life of a bear in the wild until 1997, when she and her cubs again became bold around people. What triggered that change? Why, a year later, did the bears stalk, kill and eat a human -- predatory behavior extremely rare among grizzlies? On average, bears kill two people a year in North America, with the number equally split between grizzlies and the far more numerous black bears. In Glacier and Yellowstone, the national parks in the United States with the most grizzly bears, the frequency of fatal attacks is considerably less. Between 1910 and this year, bears have killed 10 people, including Mr. Dahl, in Glacier; in Yellowstone, the total is 5 since 1839. Nearly all attacks on humans result from a bear's defense of its cubs, its food, or itself, said Christopher Servheen, coordinator of the Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly bear recovery program. ''Grizzlies are generally nonpredatory toward people,'' he said. Still, weighing up to 1,000 pounds, grizzlies are formidable predators, and their attacks, fierce enough in their own right, are often sensationalized in popular accounts to make the big, powerful bears seem more ferocious and dangerous than they are. Because wildlife officials hope to allay that fear and because the 1,000 or so grizzlies left in the lower 48 states -- from a presettlement population estimated at 50,000 -- are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, they thoroughly investigate every bear attack. Within days of discovering the remains of Mr. Dahl, scientists | The Tale of Three Bad News Bears Who Became Killers |
1038517_0 | New Yorkers praying for rain these last few weeks have instead been deluged with falling bricks and flying scaffolding. On Monday morning, three weeks after Times Square was tied up by a scaffolding collapse at the Conde Nast building, a section of masonry popped loose from the 40th floor of a building on Lexington Avenue, showering the streets below with thousands of small pieces of brick. These latest incidents have not yet matched last December's epidemic, when bricks tumbled from the side of a 39-story building on Madison Avenue, masonry plummeted from three other buildings and a six-story structure collapsed on 42d Street. But they were enough to remind New Yorkers of their vulnerability in a high-rise city. As a rule, regulations governing construction, maintenance and safety have been amended after disaster strikes, not before. In 1979, after falling stone killed a Barnard College freshman, the city created Local Law 10, which requires owners of buildings taller than six stories to inspect facades and parapets facing public walkways. After the Madison Avenue incident last year, the City Council adopted additional reforms proposed by the Giuliani administration, including a law requiring inspections of all walls of a building, not just the one facing the street. The Mayor and his Buildings Commissioner, Gaston Silva, have also been pushing the Council to require the licensing of general contractors, much as architects, plumbers and electricians are licensed. New York City is one of the few jurisdictions in the country that does not require licenses of the people who actually supervise entire projects. Monday's incident could have been disastrous had the bricks not hit a sixth-floor parapet on the way down and broken into small pieces. Workmen have been crawling around the building's facade for months, trying to fix chronic leaks. The building code requires a protective shed to shelter pedestrians on the sidewalk below, even when only repairs are involved. But nobody built a shed, and nobody in authority seems to have noticed. Peter Vallone, the City Council Speaker, has now proposed a special task force to improve safety at construction sites. That is not a bad idea given the number of new buildings going up and the inevitable deterioration of older buildings. But common sense and better inspection could also do much to increase safety on the city's streets. | Another Flurry of Falling Bricks |
1040358_1 | of Donegal, Seamus Heggarty, said in his funeral sermon. ''Both of you are very welcome.'' He added that the peace agreement approved by a large margin in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic was ''the only alternative.'' ''There is no other,'' he said. Mr. Trimble has refused to talk to Mr. Adams or his Sinn Fein colleagues in the Assembly, and the two adversaries are likely to clash over whether Mr. Adams gets a post in the new Northern Ireland government. But the Sinn Fein leader has expressly condemned the Omagh attack, which claimed both Protestant and Catholic lives. In Dublin, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern announced that the Irish Republic would take what he called draconian legal measures to fight terrorism. He said Parliament would be summoned in two to three weeks to consider them. The steps, if approved, will make it easier to convict people of membership in a terrorist organization. But, significantly, they do not include a renewal of preventive detention, allowing internment of suspects without trial. Such detention remains legal but has not been used in years. In the 1970's, Britain interned hundreds of I.R.A. suspects, but this backfired when inmates went on hunger strikes in the early 1980's, becoming internationally known and, in a few cases, dying for their cause. Bernadette Sands, the sister of the first hunger striker to die, Bobby Sands, is now prominent in the 32 County Sovereignty Committee, which vehemently opposes the Northern Ireland peace agreement. She announced today that she and her partner, Michael McKevitt, were quitting their home in the Irish Republic near Dundalk, a few miles from the border, because they felt their children were being threatened by townspeople who suspected the family was involved in the attack. British newspapers have identified Mr. McKevitt as the supposed head of the Real I.R.A., the group that carried out the bombing. In an interview with Irish national television, Ms. Sands denied any involvement by the couple, but declined to condemn violence for political ends. Her tough talk contrasted starkly with the muted outrage on the streets of Omagh today. This afternoon, on a bridge over the River Strule, a few hundred yards from where the bomb exploded at about 3 P.M. on Saturday, people came to stare silently at several hundred bouquets and at British soldiers guarding the area. Both Catholics and Protestants here were cynical about the cease-fire announced late | Ulster Buries Bomb Victims, Fearful for Peace Accord |
1035768_0 | SHAPIRO-Rebecca (Mandel). On July 31 (Ab 8). Devoted wife of the late Rabbi Solomon K. Shapiro Z'l. Beloved mother of Eli, Vivian, Harold, Stanley, Abraham and Moshe. Cherished by eleven grandchildren. Also survived by sisters and brothers, sister-in-law and brothers-in-law, son-in-law and daughters-in-law, nephews and nieces, and cousins. She will be deeply missed by family and friends. Chapel services at Shomrei Hadaas, 14th Avenue, and 39th Street, Brooklyn, Sunday 12:00. | Paid Notice: Deaths SHAPIRO, REBECCA |
1035841_2 | world soybean market. Pesticides and silt runoff from their farms are fouling the rivers and wildlife. At the same time, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia have formed a trading bloc to make them more globally competitive. To better get their soy products to market from this region, they want to dredge and straighten the rivers here in ways that could greatly alter the ecosystem. Finally, a consortium of international energy companies is building a gas pipeline across the Pantanal, from gas-rich Bolivia to energy-starved Sao Paulo. Ironically, though, the Pantanal may also be saved by globalization and the Internet. For one thing, the residents of the Pantanal now have a chance to strengthen their traditional life style, which is based on keeping the land natural, by selling eco-tours and naturally fed beef to world markets ready to pay a premium for eco-friendly products. Moreover, having global companies involved here can be an asset. They bring highly sophisticated technologies that are less harsh on the environment -- like barges that can navigate river bends with high-tech propellers so the rivers don't have to be straightened. And most important, these global companies want to work in other countries and they are now finding that with the Internet, environmentalists in one country are quickly relaying how a company behaves to environmentalists in other countries, and this can either open doors or close them. ''There is no hiding place anymore for bad corporate behavior in a world of globally interconnected activism,'' said Glenn Prickett, who heads Conservation International's corporate program. ''Customers, regulators and shareholders everywhere can now reward or punish companies for what they do in faraway places like the Pantanal. Global companies are also learning that by supporting conservation programs they can improve the image of their global brand among customers who increasingly value the environment.'' For instance, Ford Motor is now financing Conservation International's research on the Pantanal, its wildlife management program here and the conversion of Pantanal cattle ranches into private reserves. To be sure, these global companies are not saving the Pantanal because they've fallen in love with its endangered species, but rather because they believe they can sell a lot more Jaguar cars if they are seen as saving the jaguars of the Pantanal. And if that's what it takes to save this incredibly beautiful ecosystem and way of life, then God bless Henry Ford and the Internet. | Foreign Affairs; Surfing the Wetlands |
1037117_0 | The world's Anglican bishops voted overwhelmingly today to endorse a resolution declaring homosexual activity to be ''incompatible with Scripture'' and advising against the ordination of homosexuals. The resolution, adopted by 526 votes to 70, represented a victory for an international group of conservative bishops, particularly those from the fast-growing Anglican churches in Africa and Asia. The resolution was approved at the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade gathering of the leaders of Anglican churches representing 73 million Anglicans in 160 nations. In their resolution, the leaders of the Anglican Communion said they believed marriage was a lifelong union of a man and a woman and opposed priests' blessing same-sex unions. But they also said that Anglican leaders wanted to assure homosexuals ''that they are loved by God'' and condemned an ''irrational fear'' of homosexuals. The strength of the vote shows that the leadership of the Anglican Communion stands to the right of the American branch, the 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church, on issues relating to homosexuality. Although the resolution is nonbinding, it lends support to conservative Episcopal bishops, who have failed for a decade to block their more liberal colleagues from ordaining gay men and lesbians. Such ordinations have taken place in dioceses like Newark, where John S. Spong is Bishop. Two years ago, ruling in the case of a retired Bishop, Walter C. Righter, who had been charged with heresy by several other bishops for having ordained a gay man as a deacon, a church court deeply distressed conservative bishops by declaring that the Episcopal Church lacked a core doctrine against such ordinations. In recent years, too, an unknown number of Episcopal priests have quietly blessed same-sex unions, as have some other Protestant ministers and liberal rabbis. Bishop James M. Stanton of Dallas, who was among the bishops who brought the charges against Bishop Righter, hailed the resolution today as a ''victory for the Gospel.'' He added that in the United States ''it will have a strengthening effect on the faithful.'' But Catherine S. Roskam, an assistant bishop in the Diocese of New York, said she would ignore the resolution. ''I'm not taking the language of condemnation back to my constituency,'' she said. ''It has rendered itself irrelevant to my work as a bishop.'' Like all statements of this conference, the resolution is not binding on the Episcopal Church or any of the other 37 church provinces of the Anglican Communion. But | Anglican Conference Takes Tough Line on Homosexuals |
1041954_0 | Prime Ministers Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Tony Blair of Britain said today that the Northern Ireland peace agreement would succeed despite a terrorist bombing 10 days ago and that the new security measures they propose would help curtail future attacks. The bombing, by a Roman Catholic splinter group calling itself the Real I.R.A., killed 28 people in the town of Omagh. The Prime Ministers, after meeting in County Mayo, western Ireland, emphasized that the new security measures would not cause political problems in the new Northern Ireland Assembly. The Assembly, which will reconvene on Sept. 14, will deal with a number of volatile political and security issues as it carries out the agreement, which gives minority Catholics more power and the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic more influence in the affairs of the mostly Protestant northern British province. The two leaders said the security measures, expected to be approved by their Parliaments next week, were aimed at cracking down on a handful of paramilitary dissidents who have not called cease-fires, as have the Irish Republican Army and all the major Protestant guerrilla groups. But the Governments' decision to enact laws making it easier to convict suspected terrorists has been attacked by both Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., and by hard-line Protestant leaders. Sinn Fein says they are too harsh; the hardliners say they are too soft. The two Governments have insisted that the new measures, whose legal texts have not been disclosed, are ''draconian.'' Martin McGuinness, the No. 2 Sinn Fein official and a member of the new Assembly, said today that the proposals were tantamount to internment, the preventive detention of suspects without trial. The Blair Government eliminated internment last year. It is still possible under Irish law, but Mr. Ahern said he has no immediate plans to use it. The Governments have clearly tried to show the public that, in the wake of the latest terrorist atrocity, they they are doing something. At the same time they do not want to push either Catholics or Protestants in the Assembly into hard-line positions on questions like prisoner release and disarmament of paramilitaries. | Ulster Accord Will Survive Terror, Premiers Say |
1041972_0 | Russia's effective devaluation of the ruble last week has sent panic throughout the world's emerging markets, with the Latin American economies likely to be among those that suffer the most. The crisis has pummeled the region's markets, caused currencies throughout the region to drop and forced interest rates so high that some bankers are urging customers not to borrow. Analysts are lowering what had been healthy growth estimates for Latin America for next year and perhaps beyond. The market turmoil is being compared to the most painful financial disasters in memory, including the regional debt crisis that plunged dozens of Latin countries into recession in 1981 and took more than a decade to unsnarl. No one is yet predicting long-term economic disaster on that scale. In many Latin countries, reforms including the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the overhaul of banking systems and the establishment of private pension systems have strengthened local economic resilience. Barring unforeseen further disasters, analysts still expect the region to grow this year. Warburg Dillon Read is predicting regional growth of 2.8 percent in 1998, down from 5.2 percent in 1997. But what may be most frustrating in financial capitals from Monterrey to Buenos Aires is that today, faraway contingencies such as whether China devalues the yuan or Japan reforms its economy seem likely to have as much to do with market stability as Latin America's own beleaguered policy makers. Indeed, this year's Latin malaise has come largely from Asia. ''After Mexico's devaluation in 1994, people feared the crisis would spread to other regions, but it didn't,'' said Gray Newman, senior Latin American economist at Merrill Lynch & Company. ''Things calmed down. The difference between then and now is that today contagion is alive and with us. The difficulties in Japan and Russia are moving to Venezuela and Mexico.'' Continuing a wave of selloffs since the ruble was devalued, Mexico's Bolsa index fell 3.39 percent today, Brazil's Bovespa index dropped 3.93 percent and Argentina's Merval index was off 2.69 percent. In Venezuela, where last week's worldwide panic has been felt most acutely, the stock index was off 1.43 percent. Investors have been fleeing Latin markets for months. The Venezuelan stock market has plunged 62.73 percent for the year to a 29-month low. The Mexican Bolsa is down 37.77 percent, and if losses from the declining peso are taken into account, it is down 48.74 percent for the | Economic Turmoil in Russia Takes Toll in Latin America |
1042035_0 | Better watch what you type. A new generation of software is emerging to permit employers to record not just which Web sites employees browse, but also which programs they use, memos they write, E-mails they send -- in short, every keystroke. Win What Where, a software company in Kennewick, Wash. (www.winwhatwhere.com), released its entrant into the field this month, a program called Win What Where, which costs $285 for each desktop computer in which it is installed. The company says its software keeps a record of every keystroke, mouse click and command. In June, Tech Assist of Largo, Fla. (www.toolsthatwork. com), began distributing Desktop Surveillance in North America, a comprehensive computer-monitoring program by the British company Omniquad. The software costs $55 per computer and has been on sale in Europe for about eight months. Desktop Surveillance is being marketed as the ''software equivalent of a video surveillance camera on the desktop.'' It permits third-party observers to view, in real time or in playback, exactly what tasks a user is performing and what keystrokes he or she is entering. Each program lets employers hide the fact that the software is running on an employee's computer. Desktop Surveillance even allows a record of the employee's activities to be E-mailed to a supervisor without an employee's knowledge. Officials from both Tech Assist and Win What Where said they saw a demand from employers concerned about employees' wasting time on their computers. They also said that employers wanted a record in case the employees sued or were sued. Still, Richard Eaton, president of Win What Where, said his company had struggled with whether to produce software that could be used to invade employee privacy. ''There was a lot of turmoil internally about monitoring keystrokes,'' Mr. Eaton said. ''It just seemed like too much, but it was the No. 1 request from our customers.'' Julie Allen, senior product manager for Tech Assist, said Desktop Surveillance could be set only to record an employee's actions when certain off-limits activities occurred, such as when an employee visited a sex-related Web site. ''Companies have proper use policies for computers and the Internet,'' she said. ''This is just an enforcer of those policies.'' NEWS WATCH | A Different Type Of Computer Monitor |
1039060_2 | present church) and began ordaining ministers. Over the years, Moravians have become known for their music and hymns, their widespread missionary work and a focus on ecumenism. Lately they have been growing outside Europe and North America. Of the more than 730,000 Moravians in 19 provinces worldwide, about 40 percent live in Tanzania. ''It's the fastest-growing area of the church,'' Mr. Weinlick said. By contrast, the church's North American presence is small, with 29,000 members in the Northern Province, scattered among 13 states and 2 Canadian provinces. (There is also a Southern Province, with about 20,000 members, based in Winston-Salem, N.C.) Ms. Ward, 56, holds a doctorate from the Claremont School of Theology in California, is married to a Moravian pastor and has four adult children. She will be consecrated as a bishop on Nov. 1. Her role will be that of spiritual leader, without the administrative duties that also occupy bishops in other churches. A Moravian bishop serves as a pastor to the church's pastors. Bishops also ordain deacons and consecrate presbyters, the Moravians' two, essentially identical orders of ministry. And, Ms. Ward said, ''we really are charged with praying for the church and for individuals.'' As for the process by which bishops are elected, Mr. Weinlick said it was intended to produce someone from the church's mainstream, a person known as a good listener and speaker, who can relate to different people. At the six-day synod that ended on Tuesday in Bethlehem, Ms. Ward won on the third ballot. ''Because of the quickness with which they reached the decision,'' Mr. Weinlick said, ''we felt it was a consensus and what we'd say is God's will.'' He added that he thought the time for this had come, given that the province began ordaining women to the clergy in 1975. In her acceptance speech, Ms. Ward asked for delegates' prayers and said, ''We never know what will happen when we respond to God's call.'' She also said the path to her election began long ago, when church leaders opened the way for women to become pastors and administrators. ''We never know what will happen when men, clearly led by God's inclusive spirit, choose to break open tightly bound fists full of power and authority,'' she said in the speech. ''And so I understand that what is happening here today takes place in a much wider context, a much longer journey.'' | Religion Journal; Women Smash Yet Another Barrier |
1039076_0 | The political debate on global warming, long dominated by arguments over science and economics, is spilling over into pulpits and pews as religious organizations speak out about morality, faith and the Kyoto Protocol. Major church groups in the United States are mounting an unusually broad and active campaign to persuade the Senate to approve the protocol, an international agreement to fight climate change that was negotiated in Japan last year, leaders of the effort say. Many Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Jewish groups, including black churches and some evangelicals, have joined the campaign, although Roman Catholic bishops are still considering their stance on global warming and some of the nation's more conservative Christian groups, like the Southern Baptist Convention, are not participating. In a letter to President Clinton and the senators, 22 member churches of the National Council of Churches pledged to work for approval of the Kyoto Protocol, calling it ''an important move toward protecting God's children and God's creation.'' The Kyoto treaty calls on developed countries to make deep cuts in emissions of heat-trapping gases like the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, with the United States reducing 1990 levels by 7 percent over the next 10 to 15 years. The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the council's general secretary, said the group wanted the climate issue to be ''a litmus test for the faith community.'' Ms. Brown said the churches would demand that the United States lead the way on fighting global warming without requiring actions by the developing world, a condition the Senate has already set. And in an unusual grass-roots campaign, an interfaith coalition, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, plans to have members of the clergy and lay lobbyists focus on senators from nine states that stretch from Appalachia across the Midwest. The states include West Virginia and Michigan, where the coal and auto industries are powerful opponents of the treaty. Some of the region's senators, like Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, both Republicans, are considered especially influential in the climate debate. In October, the churches will bring together about 100 people in Columbus, Ohio, to coordinate the advocacy work in congregations across the region, organizers say. ''This is two parts ground swell and one part mobilization,'' said Paul Gorman, the executive director of the religious partnership. ''This is really about the future of religious life itself.'' Kim | Religious Groups Mount a Campaign To Support Pact on Global Warming |
1039066_2 | hazard came on Thursday, when a strong wind began nudging Mr. Fossett farther northward, toward the ''parking lot.'' As an emergency measure, Mr. Rice asked Mr. Fossett to climb to about 29,000 feet, the height of Mount Everest. Even at that altitude, the balloon was only 7,000 feet higher than the northward current that had to be avoided. As the hours passed, the team waited to see if the maneuver had worked. But by early yesterday the crisis seemed to be past. Mr. Fossett was told to remain at 28,000 feet to stay out of trouble. Meanwhile, the balloon had changed its course due east toward Australia, as planned. The maneuver had succeeded. Mr. Fossett's team, with which he communicates by E-mail, using a lap-top computer and the Satcom-C satellite, believes he now stands a fair chance of completing the rest of the trip, although any delays caused by failing winds could deplete his supply of propane fuel and force him down in the vast South Pacific, far from any shipping lane. Without the technological progress of the last 20 years, Mr. Rice said, it would not have been possible to get this far. Twenty years ago last Tuesday, Mr. Rice was acting as the meteorologist for the Double Eagle II as it completed the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. ''Back then, you just plotted your course with a pair of dividers and off you went,'' Mr. Rice said. ''But today we have Global Positioning Satellite tracking, we have a great communications satellite, and we have these wonderful atmospheric models from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that allow us to calculate precisely where to look for the winds we need.'' In recent years, scientists have tried to improve climate forecasting with the help of powerful computers, using programs that combine data from many different places. These programs, or models, take into account fine details of air pressure, temperature, moisture, wind speeds, altitudes and directions. A forecaster must gather as many data as possible from satellites, aircraft and sensors on the ground and the sea to fill in the blanks in a model, which then computes probable conditions at any specific place and time. If Mr. Fossett succeeds in circling the world, he will win the Budweiser Cup and a $1 million prize offered by the Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. Half of the prize will be donated to charity. | Balloon Nears Halfway Point on Global Flight |
1039074_0 | Three weeks after the scaffolding collapse at the Conde Nast building, the most critical part of the repair effort was completed yesterday. About 9:30 A.M., workers extricated an elevator cab on the 24th floor from the twisted wreckage of exterior elevator tower and scaffolding and lowered it to the ground. An 8-ton, 30-foot section of the elevator tower and the scaffolding were also removed. ''This is a huge amount of concentrated weight and the most critical stage in the dismantling of the damaged scaffolding,'' said Richard Kielar, a senior vice president of Tishman Realty and Construction Company and the building's construction manager. ''This is a tremendous relief to everyone involved in the project.'' On July 21, the collapse of a section of the 700-foot-high scaffold sent sections of the elevator tower plunging to West 43d Street and through the roof of the Woodstock Hotel across the street, killing an elderly woman. The collapse, the city's worst construction accident in more than a decade, closed Times Square for days and forced hundreds of people from their homes and businesses. The lowering of the elevator cab took three days of preparation and involved 25 to 30 workers, Mr. Kielar said. The cab, like other portions of scaffolding, will be taken to an undisclosed location in Brooklyn so engineers can examine it for clues to the accident's cause. There is one more critical procedure to come, Mr. Kielar said: dismantling the scaffolding on the 21st and 20th floors, where the upper part of the scaffolding overlaps the lower part. ''The 19th floor is damaged, but the removal of the bottom 18 floors would be routine,'' he said, adding that he expected all the scaffolding to be removed by Monday. The stretch of 43d Street between Avenue of the Americas and Broadway might reopen around Thursday, Sunny Mindel, a spokeswoman for the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, said yesterday. The 274 residents evacuated from the Woodstock Hotel cannot return yet because damage to the building is still being assessed, Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Buildings, said yesterday. Scaffolding punctured the roof in four places, pierced the 10th-floor ceiling and damaged the parapet. Engineers are also trying to determine whether there was structural damage. ''To do that they have to open up the walls and examine structural steel,'' Ms. Fink said, adding that the plumbing and heating systems would | Crucial Maneuver Completed In Repairs at Times Square Site |
1039047_0 | The cameras flashed and clicked. People stood on tiptoe to get a better look over the crowd. It was the last World Philosophy Congress of the 20th century, and some of the most important philosophers were onstage Wednesday evening in the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel: Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Strawson and Donald Davidson. You might have thought that Plato and Socrates and Aristotle themselves had assembled for a symposium. When the cameras finally stopped flashing, the philosophers blinked and trained their thoughts on a single question: ''What have we learned from philosophy in the 20th century?'' The air fairly crackled with anticipation. Quick-witted Mr. Quine, a 90-year-old Harvard philosopher who is the premier 20th-century proponent of naturalism, the view that philosophy is a part of science, went first. ''I should have thought up an answer to that one,'' he said. ''I'm going to have to pass.'' Everyone laughed, but he wasn't kidding. Indeed, all six philosophers seemed to be confused about whether they were supposed to give little speeches or take part in a roundtable discussion. So Mr. Strawson, a 79-year-old Oxford metaphysician and philosopher of logic, was up to bat. His plan was to focus on the ambiguity of the word ''we.'' Is the question about what we have learned collectively or what each of us has learned individually, he asked: ''If it's the former, the possibility of any reply seems remote. And if it's the latter, there is no shortage of replies.'' That's not to say, he added, that any compelling answers will be found among them. People mistakenly believe that only the last two decades of philosophy are worthy of attention, Mr. Strawson said. Truths may be hard to come by, but at least there are paradoxes to savor. Mr. Strawson offered one: Plato is generally taken to be the founder of philosophy and Descartes the founder of modern philosophy. And yet these days, Mr. Strawson said, ''to accuse a philosopher of Platonism or Cartesianism is a pretty serious charge.'' Mr. Davidson, an 81-year-old philosopher at Berkeley who has written about the relationship between our identity as people and our existence as physical objects, dodged the question. So instead, he discussed how ''very American'' philosophy had been in the 20th century, and then reconsidered: ''To be honest, it was mostly Harvard.'' Today, he said approvingly, it is more international. From there, he went on to | Think Tank; At the End of a Century of Philosophizing, the Answer Is Don't Ask |
1038261_3 | diseases, for example, high cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease or vitamin E supplements to prevent Alzheimer's disease. Epidemiological studies are best at identifying very powerful associations, like the one between smoking and lung cancer. When the relationship between factors is weaker, like the link between alcohol and breast cancer, epidemiological studies are less helpful and often produce contradictory results. Also, the larger the study and the longer it has been carried out, the more certain you can be of the findings, because researchers can better account for factors that could lead to a spurious conclusion. Observational studies are of two main types: case-control studies and cohort studies. In a case-control study, researchers compare factors found among people with a certain disease to factors among a comparable group of people without that disease. Thus, a study of people with ulcers revealed that infection with the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was far more common among them than in people without ulcers. But doctors could not be certain the bacterium was a cause until they showed that curing the infection could cure ulcers. In a cohort study, large groups of people are followed for a long time. Researchers try to identify factors -- possible causes and preventives -- associated with illnesses that develop over time. Among the most helpful of these studies has been the 45-year-old Framingham Heart Study and the huge Nurses Health Study. By adjusting their data statistically to account for the influence of extraneous factors that might confound the findings, researchers can often zero in on important associations, like a much lower death rate from heart disease and a small increase in breast cancer risk among women who take postmenopausal estrogen. CLINICAL TRIALS: A study that randomly assigns people to two treatment groups, with neither the researchers nor the participants knowing which group is which until the study is completed, is the gold standard of scientific research. To be sure that estrogen replacement -- not some other characteristic of women who choose to take hormones -- is responsible for their lower risk of heart disease, women must be randomly assigned to take hormones or a look-alike placebo, then followed for years to determine their fate. Of course, not every suspected association can be subjected to a clinical trial. Given the overwhelming evidence for the risks of smoking, it would be unethical to assign one group to smoke and | Personal Health; A Study Guide to Scientific Studies |
1038269_5 | the people,'' said Dr. Alison Jolly, a primatologist at Princeton University who studies ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar. ''It's so easy to say that what matters is the animals or what matters is the people. Pat has been able to say that what matters is both.'' Among her many prized honors is the Knight of the National Order of Madagascar, bestowed in 1995 by the President of a country that now knows the rewards of saving its rain forests. Dr. Wright is executive director of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and international coordinator of Ranomafana National Park, the rain forest in Antananarivo, Madagascar, rescued by her determination to save the only known home of the newly found lemur. Dr. Wright is now in her 13th year of studying lemurs, most recently the diademed sifaka, a large, black diurnal primate. ''I've finally come out of the dark,'' she noted, which makes her work attractive to Earthwatch volunteers, amateur researchers who pay to help support environmental research all over the world. Nowadays, Dr. Wright and an expanded research team work intensively during the six months a year that are not cyclone season. Though Dr. Wright and co-workers still sleep in tents without electricity, the campsite now has two buildings: a research station and a dining hall. The onetime rice-and-beans diet has been enhanced as well by a local cook who persuaded Dr. Wright to send him to cooking school. During the off-season, Dr. Wright teaches courses on primate conservation and behavior and ecology at Stony Brook. There she is joined by her second husband, Jukka Jernvall, a Finnish paleontologist and developmental biologist who works at the University of Helsinki when she is in Madagascar. He visits her there and they spend a month together each summer in Finland. ''We have a tricontinental marriage,'' she said, obviously pleased with the unusual arrangement. She is also pleased with her study subjects. The sifaka, a spectacular leaping lemur that at 15 pounds is the biggest of the living lemurs, is a lot easier to track than owl monkeys. One by one, each animal is tranquilized and fitted with a color-coded nylon necklace. Once a year, the animals are weighed and measured, tooth impressions are taken and their reproductive condition noted. ''As with most other species of lemurs, the female sifaka rules the roost,'' | Scientist at Work: Dr. Patricia Wright; Saving Madagascar's Bounty for Its Lemurs and Its People |
1038259_1 | -- in this case, data transmitted by wireless networking. This area of research may seem farfetched, but it is really the logical extension of devices like pacemakers, implants that simulate hearing for the deaf, and neuro-stimulators, which send small electrical charges through nerves to alleviate certain kinds of pain. In a metaphorical sense, the morphing of man and machine is already taking place. Among Silicon Valley digit-heads, the human brain and its products are commonly alluded to as ''wetware,'' while intelligence is expressed in ''bandwidth'' -- as in, ''A lot of valuable wetware was invested in that product, but we couldn't sell it to a bunch of low-bandwidth vulture capitalists.'' At the same time that electronics is making its way into the human body, biological organisms are instructing chip design. British Telecom is investing in Soul Catcher not only for the long-term potential of brain-chip implants but on the assumption that, conversely, the workings of the human central nervous system can teach chip makers about network efficiency. After all, while our information storage capacity and computational skills are limited compared with those of computers, the responses of even a 1-year-old child to stimuli like pain, light or sound suggest that the nervous system is a far more robust network that the fastest Ethernet. Biology is already invading computer architecture. Two University of Rochester professors -- Dr. Animesh Ray, a biologist, and Dr. Mitsunori Ogihara, a computer scientist -- collaborated two years ago in building a rudimentary device that uses nucleotides to perform functions typically handled by transistors in a silicon processor. And across the continent, in Santa Clara, Calif., engineers at a company called Affymetrix are making computer chips containing DNA to diagnose genetic mutations. Will the merging of machine and organism bypass evolution or is it merely an extension of the evolutionary process? Peter Cochrane, the head of research at British Telecom as well as a futurist and a specialist in ''human-computer interfaces,'' embraces the latter view. In fact, he says the future of the human species depends on our continuing and expanding ability to process information. If not, he wrote in a 1996 column for The Daily Telegraph in Britain, ''systems more efficient at information processing may supplant us.'' In some ways, the spread of the Internet suggests that people are already on the threshold of a major evolutionary step as information-processing organisms. Communication over the Internet breaks | The Melding of Mind With Machine May Be the Next Phase of Evolution |
1038346_4 | safety harnesses dangling 35 stories above the street. The workers were pulled into a lower window by firefighters. Despite that accident, city officials said yesterday, Horn Exterior has an excellent safety record and is a sought-after exterior repair company for tall aging office buildings. Earlier this year, the company was brought in to stabilize and repair the walls at 540 Madison Avenue. An executive familiar with the work on the Bear Stearns building said yesterday that though the building is relatively new by New York standards -- it was completed in 1967 -- it appeared that some of the metal ties that hold the bricks to the understructure of the building were badly rusted, at least along the top of the east side. But the dark brown brick apparently did not show signs of cracking or bulging that would hint to engineers that there was such a problem, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In 1996, Raphael Bassan Consulting Engineers, a Manhattan firm, inspected the building under a city law that requires owners of buildings taller than six stories to inspect facades facing public walkways every five years. The firm classified the building as safe in 1997. A week ago, Horn Exterior Renovation installed stainless steel pins in the area of brick that fell yesterday, a common stabilizing procedure when bricks are to be removed temporarily nearby to install flashing. A Horn worker inspected the area yesterday, before work began, the executive said. ''Everything looked fine,'' the executive said. But after the collapse, inspection of the brick shards revealed that the original brick ties that should have held the section in place were rusted so badly that they were thin in the middle. The executive said that the rust probably occurred because the building has not been caulked and waterproofed properly and water had seeped between the brick and the understructure over the years. A city official confirmed yesterday that rusted ties had been found by city engineers, but was unable to confirm the details of the executive's account. Mr. Rubenstein, the spokesman for the building's owners, said, ''They are now actively engaged in waterproofing the building.'' ''They are not the long-term owners,'' he said, adding, ''They've taken steps to correct the seepage.'' As city engineers worked at the top of the building yesterday, frustration often mounted for hundreds of New Yorkers below who were stopped | In Midtown, Yet Another Shower of Bricks; Panic on Lexington Avenue, but No One Is Injured; Streets Are Closed |
1038246_1 | by the highest twinning rates for Caucasians anywhere, on the archipelago of Aland and Aboland in southwestern Finland. On the nearby mainland, twins were far less common. The researchers analyzed the birth records from pre-industrial times of 81 mothers of twins from the archipelago and 86 mothers of twins from the mainland, pairing each mother of twins with a comparison mother who had a single birth. They found that on the archipelago, where the twinning rate was 21.3 percent, the number of children successfully raised to adulthood was enhanced when a woman bore twins. But on the mainland, where the twinning rate was 14.9 percent, women had greater reproductive success when they gave birth to single babies. In their report in the current issue of Nature, the researchers concluded that on the archipelago, where crop failures were rare and fish readily available, the plentiful and constant food supply gave twinning a selective reproductive advantage. But on the mainland, where crop failures and famines were common, having to nurse two babies at once would have been disadvantageous. Twins and women who bore them would be less likely to survive than singletons and thus less likely to pass on a tendency to produce fraternal twins. According to the researchers, the finding is consistent with expectations derived from life-history theory, which in effect say that populations should make hay while the sun shines. When resources are plentiful and predictable, living creatures should reproduce while they can and while their offspring have the best opportunity for survival. This explanation of difference in twinning rates may account in part for the fact that while nearly all twins born even today to mothers in Africa or Asia are identical twins, the majority of twins born in Westernized countries, where the food supply is more certain, are fraternal. But what would cause identical twinning? The late Dr. Alan Guttmacher, an obstetrician and an expert on population growth, analyzed twinning rates worldwide and concluded that a tendency to produce identical twins was not inherited. He found that there was no increased tendency to bear identical twins among women who had such twins in their family line. He theorized that identical twinning was more like a birth defect, the result of a noxious influence that causes the embryo to divide. But this defect was probably not something Dr. Guttmacher thought was necessarily harmful. He himself was an identical twin. | Study Finds More Fraternal Twins in Lands of Plenty |
1040904_1 | in development are new antibiotics, biodegradable plastics, a tooth-protecting solution and cancer drugs. All are being created and produced inside the ''evil weed.'' This is possible because tobacco is an ideal natural factory for recombinant techniques. Classic recombinant technology uses genetically altered bacteria, raised in large fermentation tanks, to produce the desired molecules. The method is cumbersome and costly -- actual production, on top of R&D costs, requires a large capital outlay for lab equipment and expensive supplies. Because bacteria are simple things, there's a limit to what they can produce. Plants, in contrast, are prolific, tireless and multi-talented. ''If bacteria are a biological toolbox with a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers, then a plant is like a complete wood shop and machine shop,'' says David R. McGee, senior vice president with Biosource Technologies, a California company that is growing antibiotics in Kentucky tobacco fields and has built the world's first manufacturing facility to process bioengineered tobacco. Various plants are useful in ''molecular farming,'' but tobacco stands out. ''It's the lab mouse of the plant world, the plant on which a lot of original genetics work was done,'' says Arnold Foudin, a biotechnology scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture. Two methods are used to create new substances in tobacco. One, used by Croptech Corporation, a company in Blacksburg, Va., is to splice genes directly into the tobacco plant's genome. The second, used by Biosource Technologies, produces new proteins by genetically altering the tobacco mosaic virus -- one of the best-understood viruses of any kind -- then mechanically ''infecting'' tobacco plants using high-pressure sprayers. This altered virus commandeers the plant's cellular machinery to produce more of the desired new protein. These techniques could provide a new outlet for thousands of small tobacco farmers whose livelihoods are linked to the precarious future of the cigarette industry. Rod Kuegel of Owensboro, Ky., whose family has grown tobacco since the turn of the century, began ''molecular farming'' six years ago, setting aside five acres of tobacco to grow drugs for Biosource. For this he makes a $700 to $800 profit per acre -- less than what he would make growing for cigarette companies, but double what he would make growing corn. The new technology is also good for the spirit. ''It's great,'' Kuegel says, ''to have something positive about tobacco for a change.'' Thomas Maeder writes frequently about science and biotechnology. | Tobacco Can Be Good for You |
1041269_1 | along the shore, I have encountered a wide variety of sailors, crew and boats. Sure, there are vessels whose bills for new sails alone would pay my annual mortgage. But there are smaller, older boats owned and crewed by people just as passionate and skilled as those with bigger wallets. The deal in racing is pretty straightforward: we (unpaid amateurs) trade our labor for the fun and excitement (and sandwiches) of crewing on boats we could never afford and would not want to maintain. One new sail can easily cost $3,000 and the most competitive skippers replace a full set of up to six every year. Some boats I have crewed on bristle with technology, neon numbers blaring from the mast. Others are badly maintained, even dangerous, as sharp metal things snap and pop and bash you in the face. Like every boat, every crew is also slightly different, a delicately mixed stew of skills, aptitudes and temperaments. You need some brawn and brains, chutzpah and calm, not to mention fast reflexes, strong arms and a sturdy sense of humor. Somehow, 5 to 10 adults with varying skills, who often have no relationship on land, must work together seamlessly on the water. Having a skipper who encourages true teamwork helps. My skipper on a J30 named Kamchatka, a burly Russian named Nick, likes to win but is not, thank heaven, a screamer. He even provides beer and whisky after the race, well aware that motivated crew members are worth wooing. I have danced around the foredeck of a J24, which is a little like trying to mambo with a butterfly. I have ridden the deck of a Pearson 34 like a cowboy on a bucking bronco in 25 knots, other boats' spinnakers and mains shredding all around us, my hair plastered to my scalp with sea spray. What I keep missing, no matter where and what I sail on, is more women. I know they are out there somewhere. Female sailors at every level need to gain as much experience as possible under every condition. Too often it is assumed we cannot, or will not, do whatever job there is. And there remains one place where being a ''girl sailor'' is not only perceived as a disadvantage but a contradiction in terms: on most boats over 30 feet, otherwise known as big boats. When it came time to audition crew | The Joy of a 'Girl Racer' and a Wish for More |
1041244_0 | Tens of thousands of people here in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic to the south observed a painful minute of silence at 3:10 this afternoon, the exact time a week ago today that a terrorist bomb killed 28 people in the center of this small market town. The bomb, which left 220 wounded, 75 of whom are still in hospitals, was the deadliest terrorist atrocity in 29 years of sectarian violence in this mostly Protestant British province. A Roman Catholic splinter guerrilla group, the Real I.R.A., claimed responsibility for the attack. The police are questioning two men, but no one has been charged with the crime. ''They wanted a united Ireland,'' said Amanda Heffernan, a clerk, speaking of the Real I.R.A., which wants the Republic to take over the North. ''Now we're united in grief.'' The blast was commemorated in public assemblies in dozens of cities and towns here and in the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. The Irish President, Mary McAleese, spoke briefly. Her father's pub near the border with the Irish Republic was blown up by Protestant terrorists 25 years ago. The Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, who has advanced harsh legal measures to combat terrorism, attended the ceremony at the courthouse in Omagh, a few hundred yards from where the bomb went off. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott represented the British Government. The Real I.R.A., which split from the Irish Republican Army this year, has announced a cease-fire. And today, another Republican splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, followed suit. This means that all major paramilitary groups, Catholic and Protestant, are now observing cease-fires, a development officials say should enhance the peace agreement approved in referendums here and in the Irish Republic. The Irish National Liberation Army's last admitted attack was on June 25, when a car bomb destroyed part of the border town of Newtownhamilton, wounding 11 people. The group's statement -- announced at the west Belfast headquarters of its political representatives, the Irish Republican Socialist Party -- means that only one anti-British organization in Northern Ireland, the Continuity I.R.A., a relatively small group, has yet to call a truce. ''We recognize that the political situation has changed since the formation of I.N.L.A.,'' the statement said. ''We recognize that armed struggle can never be the only option for revolutionaries.'' Noting that the people of the whole island of Ireland ''have spoken clearly as to | Irish North and South Mourn Terror Bombing |
1041188_0 | This summer's floods on the Yangtze River in central China and the Songhua River in northeastern China have already left nearly 14 million people homeless, indirectly affected 240 million more and damaged more than 50 million acres of land. The flood season is not yet over, but the death toll, estimated at 2,000 by Chinese authorities, shows that flood management has improved since the 1954 floods that claimed 30,000 lives. In the past four decades, the Government has built extensive dike systems and created emergency overflow areas to divert water from densely populated urban centers. There is now growing concern that maintenance of these flood management systems, particularly in the Yangtze region, may be neglected as the Government pours billions of dollars into the ill-conceived Three Gorges Dam. When completed in 2009, the dam will create a lake nearly 400 miles long, displace 1.2 million people and inundate important archaeological sites. Chinese authorities have long cited flood control on the Yangtze as a primary justification for the project. The latest floods, they say, prove the need for the dam. But analysts with the International Rivers Network, a conservation group, argue that much of the flooding has taken place in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, fed by tributaries whose waters would not be controlled by the Three Gorges project. In fact, the presence of the dam might actually result in worse flooding disasters in the future. By creating a false sense of security, the dam could attract more development to flood-prone areas and lead to reduced investment in downstream dikes. If the dam failed to control a large flood, the fatalities and economic loss could be worse than if it had not been built. After the Mississippi floods in 1993, the United States Government rethought its flood-management strategies. Hydrologists and geologists now consider large dams only marginally useful in flood control because the reservoirs are typically kept high for power generation, with only limited capacity to accommodate surging flood waters. Instead, many argue that restricting development on flood-susceptible land, carving out more overflow areas for flood waters and making buildings flood-resistant are smarter ways to protect lives and property. The Chinese have been battling floods on the Yangtze for centuries. A single mammoth dam would probably not have averted the recent disaster. But its construction could siphon resources from more effective flood management strategies. | Managing Flood Waters in China |
1041140_4 | family will owe taxes and a 15 percent penalty on the account's investment growth. And though financial aid rules vary from college to college, many count state plans as scholarships or a child's property -- treatment that can compromise eligibility for grants. Still, for many people, the tax benefits may outweigh these disadvantages. Gains on investments in regular mutual funds are taxed at a parent's capital-gains rate, generally 20 percent, but growth in a state plan is taxed only when used, and then at the child's tax rate, which is usually 15 percent. Many states also exempt gains in their plans from state taxes. Moreover, several new plans use an asset-allocation method that financial planners favor, investing in portfolios of several stock and bond funds that grow more conservative as a child ages. Fidelity, which edged several rivals to win the new plan business for Delaware, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, sees it as an important part of college financing's future. Fund companies cannot sell the plans directly because only states can legally sponsor them. ''When we looked at the changes in the tax laws, these programs represent for most people the best alternative,'' said Stephen Mitchell, senior vice president at Fidelity. THOUGH less popular now, the guaranteed plans would be revitalized if stocks sank or college inflation accelerated. Indeed, risk-averse investors seem willing to shed a few percentage points of gains for the security of a guarantee. ''I don't feel like we are losing anything,'' said Gwen Martino, a school librarian in Brookfield, Ohio. By saving $100 a month for the last six years, she and her husband, Daniel, have amassed nearly enough to buy Daniel Jeffrey, 9, and Alessandra, 6, a year's tuition each at an Ohio public college. ''Granted, we could make more, but isn't that always the gamble with the stock market? You could make more but you could also lose your shirt,'' Mrs. Martino said. As for the Education I.R.A., contributions are limited to just $500 annually; its biggest selling point is its tax-free status: all gains accumulate free of Federal taxes, provided the funds are used for school. That makes it ''the hands-down winner in terms of tax advantage'' among college financing alternatives, Mr. Mitchell said. Parents thinking about investing in both a state-sponsored plan and an Education I.R.A. should think again. You cannot contribute to both, at least in the same year. SPENDING IT | Studying the Fine Print In Tuition Saving Plans |
1042404_0 | The recent panic in world markets has weakened Latin American currencies and drastically reduced the wealth of many Latin corporations, raising prospects that governments in the region may be forced to take Draconian measures to contain the crisis. Financial authorities in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina and other nations have allowed interest rates to rise, spent billions of dollars of reserves to support their currencies, and tinkered with other limited steps. But, perhaps hoping that market calm will eventually prevail, they have avoided more drastic steps such as aggressively squeezing cash out of circulation, analysts said. Today, the Mexican peso crossed an unwelcome threshold, dropping in value to settle at a rate above 10 to the United States dollar. ''The Latin countries are using their second-stage defenses, hoping that these external shocks won't last very long,'' said Luis R. Luis, a managing director at Scudder Kemper Investments in Boston. ''They want to avoid having to impose really Draconian monetary policies. But if this continues, they're really going to have to jack up the interest rates.'' Most Latin markets got a breather today after a week of panicked trading that saw foreign investors flee from the region and local traders cash out of equities to buy dollars. Mexican stocks, which have fallen by more than half in dollar terms since the beginning of the year, rose 3.22 percent, with confidence bolstered in part by a more modest rise in Brazil's larger stock market. Argentina's benchmark index rose nearly 1 percent; the Chilean and Peruvian markets were off slightly. Venezuela, the sick man of the region, was the exception -- its stock index plummeted 4.52 percent. But gloom among investors and business executives across Latin America continued to deepen. Fears persist that the collapse of the Russian ruble could play out here, either with a devaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar or, in what would be far worse, the Brazilian real. Adding to the uncertainty was a belief that the International Monetary Fund, short of cash, is sitting on its hands, even though several Latin American economies are floundering. The fund has invited Latin finance ministers to meet next Thursday in Washington to discuss joint responses. Finance Minister Pedro Malan of Brazil and Economy Minister Roque Fernandez of Argentina have said they will attend. Mexico's Treasury Secretary, Jose Angel Gurria, and several others have not yet announced their intentions. But because the I.M.F., after | Even as Latin Markets Plunge, Drastic Remedies Are Avoided |
1037527_0 | An article on July 20 about problems consumers face when seeking to determine if food has been genetically modified misstated the practices of one supermarket chain, Whole Foods Market Inc. of Austin, Tex. It does not require suppliers to guarantee that products they sell to the company are free of gene-altered ingredients. The chain asked suppliers for such a restriction, but the suppliers said they were unable to comply. | Corrections |
1036289_5 | regional conference. Capping a year of unusual diplomatic activity, Mr. Castro is also to visit Portugal and South Africa before the end of 1998. But there is much more than mere political symbolism involved in Cuba's rapprochement with the English-speaking Caribbean. Despite severe economic problems of its own, including fuel and power shortages, drought and a lack of foreign exchange, Cuba has begun a major effort to provide economic and other assistance to its neighbors. Cuban officials say that more than 200 Cuban doctors, teachers, sports coaches, engineers and other technicians are working in Caribbean nations. In addition, about 250 students from Caribbean countries have been granted full scholarships to study at Cuban universities. In Grenada, Cuban engineers are helping design a new national stadium, and some Grenadians have been flown to Cuba for medical care. To help St. Kitts and Nevis recover from a hurricane, Cuba sent farmers there seeds and tons of fertilizer. The Cuban effort helps fill a large gap left by a diminished American profile in the region. American aid to the Caribbean fell nearly 90 percent between 1985 and 1995, to $26 million from $226 million, and the United States Agency for International Development has closed its regional office in Barbados. ''We have a lot of needs and we have not been getting support,'' Mr. Mitchell, the Prime Minister of Grenada, said in an interview here after returning from his visit to Cuba last year. ''Our traditional friends have indicated that the days of grants, aid and soft loans are gone. We cannot understand this. People know we are in trouble, and we need help.'' The Clinton Administration has also stirred resentment among its Caribbean allies by pressing the World Trade Organization to end an arrangement that guaranteed Caribbean bananas preferential access to European markets. As a result, the United States' political and economic leverage throughout the region has weakened, and Cuba's is growing. ''The young people are on my back,'' Mr. Mitchell explained. ''They voted for me, and if it were not for them, I would not be in power today. People want their lives improved, they want health care, they want jobs, they want opportunity, and I can't deliver. But I have to deliver for them and I am willing to accept help from anyone, so long as it is done on our terms and does not interfere with our independence and sovereignty.'' | Cool to U.S., Caribbean Hails Castro All the More Warmly |
1035916_0 | FROM PLATO TO NATO The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. By David Gress. 610 pp. New York: The Free Press. $28. Where is the West? Even if the question is confined to America, the answer is not easy. Practically all parts of the United States except for those with their toes in the Atlantic have been included in ''the West'' at some stage. Zoom out for a global view and the question becomes almost nonsensical. The Western world includes a Japan-sized chunk of the Far East, among other anomalies. Global positioning satellites may nowadays guide your BMW home, but the West remains elusive. One achievement of ''From Plato to NATO,'' by David Gress, a fellow of the Danish Institute of International Affairs, is to demonstrate that history can be as misleading as geography in finding it. The story of the West used to be told as if it were a simple one. What Gress calls ''the Grand Narrative'' described ''a synthesis of democracy, capitalism, science, human rights, religious pluralism, individual autonomy and the power of unfettered human reason'' whose progress could be traced from its beginnings in Athens in the fourth century B.C. to its climax in 20th-century America. This narrative held sway in American higher education from around the 1920's to the mid-1960's. Much of Gress's book is a retelling of that story, with the rough edges restored. On closer examination, the moral values of the ancient Greeks, for example, turn out to be rather more foreign to current ideas than some would have us believe. Hector's pride, for instance, is not easy to reconcile with what are taken to be Western ideals of virtue. Gress's account of the evolution of the idea of the West also has room for crucial elements that were often neglected, like the individualism and nationalism that the Germanic tribes -- formerly cast merely as invading barbarians -- brought to the feast of the Roman Empire. As a historian, Gress is understandably more interested in historiography than some of his readers will be. Although the changing attitudes of German scholars toward Greece is indeed central to his story of how our concept of the West was formed, there will be those who want more history of the world and less history of history. It would be a pity if his sometimes tortuous historiographical arguments and difficult logic put off readers who will | Our Crowd |
1036206_3 | programs. Advantages: Going to remote locations teaches self-reliance and provides immersion in other cultures. ''Those students who travel and see the world learn a lot about themselves,'' said Diane Anci, associate director of admissions at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. ''They come back with an unbelievable ability to make connections.'' Downside: Some children are not ready for a solo adventure. Residential Internship Programs Dynamy, in Worcester, Mass., provides a structured living environment, counseling and three unpaid internships. The yearlong program, for applicants ages 17 to 22, begins with three weeks of canoeing and rock climbing through Outward Bound. Advantages: Provides guidance, supervision and the chance to work in a variety of challenging fields that are traditionally hard to break into, like advertising or television. ''Some kids can pack a suitcase and take off, '' said David Rynick, executive director of Dynamy. ''Others need the support.'' Downside: An expensive solution: the fee is $10,250 and housing $3,600. Good Works Nonprofit groups -- religious, cultural, humanitarian -- can usually make use of a willing worker. Government programs like Americorps and private national service organizations like Americare, based in New Canaan, Conn., also welcome help. Advantages: Looks good on a college application, is beneficial to society, expands horizons. Joshua Wray, 19, of Durham, N.C., said he was ''just getting by'' in high school. At the end of September, he is to help manage computers in a Senegalese village as part of a nonprofit program connected to the Ecopartners Project at Cornell University. He is to get room and board but must pay his own plane fare. ''My friends said, 'Go to college first, and then do it,' '' he recalled. ''But if I went to college, I'd never be able to do this again.'' Downside: Low or no wages, and some youths need more supervision. A Job Many jobs will pay handsomely for something a teen-ager already knows, from fooling around on a computer or car to mowing the lawn. And a little bit of training -- say, in bartending or truck driving -- will greatly increase income. Advantages: Teen-agers have a chance to grow up and support themselves. Downside: A temporary gig could become a lifelong career. But, as Larry Griffith, the director of admissions at the University of Delaware, says, ''There's a snobbery in academia, but there are perfectly legitimate hair salon schools. Some people have a different path.'' LINDA LEE | 'So, Like, What Do I Do Now?' Some of the Alternatives |
1036220_6 | A super grapefruit. Something crazy in the mix, like disco lemonade,'' she sang. Like designers trying to anticipate what hemlines or colors will appeal a year from now, Ms. Smith and her colleagues have their eyes fixed over the horizon of what is currently in stores. If Mount Everest was yesterday's destination, its aroma may be tomorrow's perfume. ''Fragrance has left the realm of what it was originally, an expression of character, and entered the realms of fashion and experience and beyond,'' said Paul Austin, business development manager and trend forecaster at Quest, the fragrance company. Once a forecaster nails a trend, a perfumer has a host of ways of responding to it. One is to use head-space technology -- essentially sampling the air around a flower, or the breeze off the Pacific Ocean, and reproducing the aroma in a laboratory. Givaudan Roure has developed a machine called ScentTrek; nestled in hot air balloons the company has sent whizzing over the top of rain forests, it forages for new smells. International Flavors and Fragrances used a similar technology for its client Rei Kawakubo, the designer of Comme des Garcons, whose new perfume, Odeur 53, contains notes of burnt rubber, sand dunes and plastic baby dolls. So much for the language of flowers. Adrian Joffe, managing director of Comme des Garcons and Ms. Kawakubo's husband, said Odeur 53 was not a perfume but ''a sequence of smells and associations.'' The company is advertising it as an ''anti-perfume.'' Through extensive polling, the folks at Quest can tell what ingredients smell like peace or sex or clean laundry to the majority of the population. Forecasters like Mr. Austin graze the culture for trends, match them up with the data base of stored associations-as-smells and hope that a perfume star is born. Both Mr. Austin and Ms. Smith like to give the trends they spot snappy names. Mr. Austin has identified 38, including ones called Master of Time and High-Tech Nature. Then there's First Aid. ''It's the whole idea of looking to the pharmacy for inspiration, looking for something that's clinically pure and perhaps anti-nature,'' he said. ''It's a mini-millennial concept that also incorporates the notion of white. We saw a lot of white gauzes in the fashion collections, and then there were those Helmut Lang slashes, those wounds. A friend of mine said we're all licking our wounds from being fashion victims. So | Catching a Whiff of the Future; For a 'trend trekker,' if SoHo is today's destination, its aroma might be tomorrow's perfume |
1036257_2 | psychiatry at the University of Western Australia who helped evaluate the research. The study -- which focused on Japan, Denmark, Colombia, Nigeria, India, the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Britain, Ireland and the United States -- found that schizophrenics generally responded better to treatment in less developed countries than in more technologically developed ones. The study also found that schizophrenics in Colombia, Nigeria and India suffered less severe symptoms than those in Britain and the United States, a difference attributed to cultural factors like stronger extended families and greater financial pressure to hold a job. Joseph Westermeyer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota who has done extensive research on the mentally ill in Southeast Asia, said that in less developed countries, ''People who have paranoid delusions tend to focus them more on powerful spiritual forces, like demons or gods.'' ''If they feel their life is being taken out of their control they might look to things like sorcery, ghosts or the animistic forces in nature,'' he added, or to ''black magic'' directed at them by relatives or neighbors with whom they are having a dispute. Hearing Voices An obsession with ''sources of great power'' is a common thread among all delusional paranoids, said Irving Gottesman, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. In the United States, paranoid delusions ''usually involved God or Jesus'' until well into this century, Dr. Gottesman said. Then came radio, which carried messages from unseen voices from far away, followed by television, which distilled broad national experiences into intensely personal images. With the advent of broadcast technology, Dr. Gottesman said, ''We went from Jesus to the C.I.A. without a break, really.'' Dr. Westermeyer added: ''In the United States, you don't see nearly as many mentally ill people anymore who have delusions and hallucinations with regard to God and the saints as you did 20 or 30 years ago, when I first doing this work. In our secular society, it's more a matter of, well, the President or the C.I.A. is affecting my behavior by radio waves or microwave receivers in my teeth.'' Extreme cases like the shootings in the Capitol aside, the source of most violence by paranoid schizophrenics is closer to home, Dr. Westermeyer said. ''You actually get more of that kind of violence on a pedestrian level -- people ascribing the evil in their lives to a spouse, to parents, | The Nation: Delusions; Paranoia Is Universal. Its Symptoms Are Not |
1036058_3 | significance of the religious ceremony itself. In part to temper that feeling, many synagogues now insist that children complete a community service project as part of their bar mitzvah training. Rabbi Herbert Brockman of Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden tells a story of a boy who refused to get dressed on the morning of his bar mitzvah because he heard his parents arguing the night before about details of his party. ''If you discuss the color of the napkins, the child will believe that's what's important,'' Rabbi Brockman said. ''Doing community service is a way to focus on why this is meaningful and not just a party.'' He encourages parents to discuss the meaning of the child's Torah portion, not the seating arrangements. ''What other culture says to a 13-year-old that you're going to lead us, then we're going to tell you were wonderful and smother you with love?'' Rabbi Brockman said. Social action is a large part of synagogue life at Mishkan Israel, with many ongoing community service projects. There is a large vegetable garden tended by congregants who donate the produce to soup kitchens and needy families. Members also organized a library at a drug treatment center in New Haven so people there could read to their children while they waited. Sarah Schaefer, a Mishkan Israel member who is now 16, worked at the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen for her project three years ago. She's continued her Jewish studies and the community service that started with her bat mitzvah. ''I'd never been to a soup kitchen before and I thought I could make a difference by donating my time,'' Sarah said. ''A big part of Judaism is community service and giving back. Being there opened my eyes to different people. The homeless people were friendly and nice. I've been back since.'' Matthew Levy, 13, who became a bar mitzvah last fall at Temple Israel in Westport, helped out at Bridgeport's Longfellow Elementary School in an after school program for kindergarten through second grade. During his spring break he went with his father to South Carolina rebuild one of the churches there that had been burned in racial violence. ''I feel that the community service portion is probably the most important step into Jewish adulthood,'' Matthew mused. ''The ritual was important and I'm not knocking the party, but helping other people is what you do in real life.'' | Restoring Mitzvah To the Traditions Of the Bar Mitzvah |
1036080_4 | homes in Norfolk -- a modular cape of 1,290 square feet that gets most of its heat and electricity from the sun, and an Adirondack-style camp built for the Yale School of Forestry in 1941 within a 6,800 acre forest. Its cabins use the sun for energy and hot water. In Lakeville a modern house that is underground uses the earth as an insulator, and in Salisbury a 2,500-square-foot Scandinavian-inspired house has Swedish low-flush toilets, a Finnish masonry fireplace that uses only one and one-half cords of wood in an average winter and other conservation technologies. The tour is sponsored by the nonprofit People's Action for Clean Energy Inc., based in Canton. Tickets and a map cost $12 and may be obtained by calling (860) 693-4813. Art Indoors in Kent Joy Brown's sculptures and the paintings of William Oberst and Suzanne Howes-Stevens provide a rewarding exhibition on view through Aug. 30 at the Bachelier-Cardonsky Gallery on Main Street in Kent. Mr. Oberst's technical skill as a classical painter underlies his contemporary take on his subjects, influenced by a degree in philosophy. His figures almost seem to speak to each other and his canvasses are often six feet tall. Ms. Brown has created a signature style of figure sculpture -- balloon-like, airy creatures, large but not fat, moon-faced and charming in black and red stoneware that she fires in a Japanese kiln. Two paintings by Ms. Howes-Stevens, called ''Transformations'' and ''Seekers,'' are grounded in Greek mythology and imbedded with old maps, conveying a sense of timelessness. The gallery is open on Friday through Sunday from 11 to 5. The number is (860) 927-3129 for more information. Church Fair in Ridgefield St. Stephen's Church in Ridgefield will once again hold one of the longest-running church fairs in the region. Its Nutmeg Festival will be 92 years old when it takes place on Saturday from 10 to 4 on the grounds at 351 Main Street. In addition to raffling off a 1998 Volkswagen Beetle, the fair will offer furniture, bric-a-brac, antiques, fine art, books, records, jewelry, crafts, home-baked pies, cakes and cookies, and fresh produce from local growers. Food booths will supply Caribbean, Greek, New England country and Southern-style cooking. Visitors will be entertained by the Jackson Pike Skifflers, can tee off at the new miniature golf course, and there will be pony rides and games for children. Admission is free. ELEANOR CHARLES | CONNECTICUT GUIDE |
1036064_2 | seven years. Investigators have many questions. For example, can estrogen and progesterone slow bone loss and prevent fractures? Why is it that women seem resistant to heart disease before menopause but vulnerable afterward? (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women 65 and older.) Are studies correct in suggesting that estrogen decreases a woman's risk of heart disease by 40 percent? But is there a risk to taking hormones, too? Do estrogen and progesterone reduce the incidence of heart attacks, strokes and endometrial cancer but make women more vulnerable to breast cancer? Can hormones be used to treat Alzheimer's disease? The Einstein clinical center has 4,561 participants from the New York City area and is one of 40 centers nationwide. The study in the New York area is being overseen by Einstein and the Montefiore Medical Center, the Einstein teaching hospital. Montefiore has a Women's Health Initiative satellite clinic in Hartsdale. In the observational study, researchers want to build a database of information on women older than 50 to uncover certain risk factors of coronary heart disease, cancer and fractures. They will track the participants' health and life styles for an average of nine years while testing different hypotheses until the monitoring period ends. The study is collecting blood samples from all the women for future gene studies. If, for example, a new gene is discovered that appears linked to breast cancer, scientists can then go back and examine the blood of all the women who got breast cancer during the study. If those women have the gene, then that gene is an indicator that a woman may be more susceptible to breast cancer. Unlike past studies, the Women's Health Initiative does not focus on a specific disease like cancer. ''We're looking at all the factors that are affecting women's health,'' said Dr. David H. Barad, a co-investigator and associate professor and director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Albert Einstein. Dr. Barad added, ''There is no bias in the study.'' Researchers are not assigning women to specific groups, biasing the results. For example, women who appear to need more calcium because of low bone density are not enrolled in the calcium/vitamin D study unless a computer randomly assigns them to that study. The Women's Health Initiative is also unusual, Dr. Frishman said, because it is studying minority | Volunteers Join a Study of Women Over 50 |
1036338_2 | brightest are headed to business school instead of law school. A graduate of New York University Law School who joins a leading firm will make $91,000 a year, not precisely peanuts but nearly $30,000 less than a counterpart from the university's Stern School of Business. At Stanford, law school and business school graduates were neck and neck in starting pay in 1978 and in 1988, but the school's new M.B.A.'s are making 50 percent more than its law graduates this year. What makes the pay all the more noteworthy is that an M.B.A. has become something of a commodity. In 1965, fewer than 10,000 were granted. As recently as 1977, the nation was producing 48,000 M.B.A.'s a year -- a figure sufficiently alarming to prompt Lawrence Fouraker, the dean of the Harvard Business School, to predict a collapse in starting salaries. Since then, the number has risen to 94,000, almost two and a half times the number of law degrees. The sheer volume of M.B.A.'s is deceptive, though. The graduating classes of elite schools have grown little. The explosion has happened among the more than 600 programs that do not make it into the top 25 nationally ranked schools. Two-thirds of the degrees are awarded to part-timers who stay on the job, who tend to be subsidized by their employers and who are looking to change career tracks or move into middle management. More than a fifth are getting degrees to start businesses, according to a recent survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council. Starting salaries for the mass of M.B.A.'s have hardly climbed into the stratosphere. This year, the typical M.B.A. with some experience will earn almost $60,000, compared with $25,000 in 1980, or the equivalent of $49,000 in today's dollars. At the high end, M.B.A. pay packages are also swelling from a clutch of extras. A typical offer from an investment bank consists of a $75,000 salary, a $25,000 ''stub year bonus'' for the rest of 1998, and $30,000 in signing and moving money. Other companies lure recruits with second-year tuition, ''settling in'' allowances and other goodies like forgivable loans. High-technology companies and venture capital firms give stock options and equity stakes. ''Consulting pays better in cash,'' says Mark D. Homan, 30, a graduate of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who will receive stock options at Cisco Systems, the networking giant. ''But if you | A Top M.B.A. Is a Hot Ticket as Salaries Climb |
1042569_2 | and adults don't always have all the answers. In that sense, it's a manifesto of the Nickelodeon philosophy.'' The rugrats are led by Tommy, a bald, scrappy underdog, and fretful Chuckie, who sports a tangle of orange-red hair and Buddy Holly-esque square-framed glasses. The twins Lil and Phil function as a Greek chorus. Then there's Angelica, the bratty, bossy know-it-all who lords it over the babies from her lofty 3-year-old perch but invariably gets her comic comeuppance. The babies don't talk in front of grown-ups but hold marvelously skewed discussions about the mysterious adult world. For instance, Lil and Phil have deduced that a wristwatch is actually called a ''time'' because the grown-ups are always pointing to their wrists and saying, ''Look at the time!'' The show is filled with child-friendly slapstick. In one episode, Tommy joins Grandpa for a supermarket run in search of a box of Reptar cereal (Reptar is the faux-Godzilla toy craze within the series). Tommy sneaks off and accidentally clears off shelves, turns a huge pile of watermelons into a tsunami and sleds down a crumbling display on a cereal box, laying waste to the store. Many throwaways gags are aimed at baby-boomer parents watching with their children. Tommy's mother, Didi, frequents a frozen yogurt and antique emporium named Cold 'n' Oldies. At the mention of ''Dances With Wolves,'' one slow-witted dad says, ''I didn't see it; I don't really like musicals.'' And what other children's show would refer to the Velvet Underground in a punch line? The satire is more pointed in sending up modern-day family issues, like overauthoritative parenting experts (''These pop-up books foster delusional behavior!'' one barks). Angelica's mother, Charlotte, is a go-go corporate raider with a cell phone glued to her ear and pet fish named Vesco and Boesky. She explains her work to Angelica this way: ''A corporation is like a big, hungry monster. My job is to find plenty of smaller, weaker monsters for it to eat.'' After wrecking a big deal (by destroying the presentation props), Angelica tremulously asks, ''Mommy, are you going to fire me?'' In a medium of overgrown animals and jumpsuited superheroes, ''Rugrats'' goes for authenticity in its setting and concerns. ''It's about a contemporary American family that lives in the real world; it just happens to be animated,'' says Mr. Scannell. Tommy's father, Stu, and Angelica's father, Drew, are brothers with a vigorous sibling | In 'Rugrats,' Babies Know Best |
1042779_1 | from tropical hardwoods. By continuing to buy large supplies of the woods to repair and build these and other structures, the city, environmenalists say, is helping to destroy the tropical rain forests. Protesters have called for the Parks Department to stop buying the wood, and a bill before the City Council would require the city to buy only tropical hardwoods certified as being responsibly harvested. ''Each day we lose an area of rain forest as large as the five boroughs,'' said A. Gifford Miller, a Councilman from the East Side of Manhattan and the author of the bill. Mr. Miller wants the city to use more recycled plastic instead of hardwood. New York is North America's largest municipal consumer of tropical wood -- mainly ipe (pronounced EE-pay), a strong wood used on boardwalks and bridges, and a related wood, bethabara, which is used for the weathered-looking gray slats on park benches. Mr. Miller said the city spent roughly $800,000 annually on tropical hardwood. Marc Matsil, chief of the Parks Department's natural resources group, said none of the tropical woods used by the department were on the state's endangered species list. Moreover, ''We're moving toward replacing tropical woods with recycled plastic,'' Mr. Matsil said. Last November, the department met with environmental groups and decided to spend $375,000 on recycled plastic for park benches. However, there are safety concerns about the strength of currently available plastics and of domestic woods, Mr. Matsil added. ''It would be thoroughly irresponsible to put recycled plastic on a surface that has to support a fire truck or ambulance,'' he said. But environmentalists disagree with the department. ''No, ipe is not endangered,'' said Trilby MacDonald, a spokeswoman for Rainforest Relief, an environmental group that unfurled a large banner at the Coney Island Steeplechase two weeks ago to protest the use of hardwoods. ''But harvesting it requires destroying an entire acre of forest just to find two or three ipe trees.'' As for the safety concerns, ''Other cities are using plastic for their boardwalks,'' she asked. ''Why can't we?'' Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern said a complete change to recyclable materials might just have to wait for technological progress. ''Mother Nature has made this wonderful wood that cannot yet be duplicated artificially,'' he said. ''Science hasn't developed a substitute for wood for boardwalks any more than it has for newsprint.'' COREY KILGANNON NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: NEW YORK UP CLOSE | To Save Rain Forests, a Call for Plastic in the Parks |
1042776_1 | quiet residential neighborhood of the 90-foot radio tower operated by Highpoint Enterprises of Staten Island. At more than 300 feet above sea level, Todt Hill is the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard, and thus ideal for a radio antenna. ''But we've always found it ugly, disruptive and a health risk,'' said Elaine Reiss, a lawyer and Todt Hill resident. Trucks rumble through the neighborhood to work on the tower and drive over neighbors' property, she said, and residents fear that electromagnetic radiation may cause or have caused illnesses. Robert C. Gunther, vice president of Highpoint Enterprises, said he has always been baffled by community opposition. There are four other radio antennas in the vicinity of Todt Hill, one of them 350 feet high. A September 1997 report by Lucent Technologies, commissioned by Highpoint, showed no electromagnetic radiation in excess of various health-risk standards. ''But I'm controversial because I'm the one going through a public hearing,'' said Mr. Gunther. He said transferring Highpoint's 35 clients, who include Consolidated Edison and AT&T Wireless, would be costly and would disrupt telecommunications in New York. Mr. Gunther's father, Frank, who is now 90, built the tower in 1967 for his own use as a ham radio operator. But he later leased the tower to some businesses, which was permissible under the permit. When his own business, Highpoint Enterprises, sought to build a second tower in 1977, the application was opposed by residents and the Board of Estimate. After years in court, the permit for a new tower was approved but the idea was abandoned. Inexplicably, the permit to operate the original tower was never renewed when it expired either in 1987 or 1991 (Highpoint attorneys are unsure of the date). In early 1997, the Board of Standards and Appeals gave Highpoint notice of the lapsed permit and the company applied for a new permit in May 1997, which led to public hearings and renewed dispute. The Board of Standards and Appeals says it will hold a public review of the case on Sept. 11 and will put the issue to a vote on Sept. 15. ANTHONY RAMIREZ NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: TODT HILL Correction: September 6, 1998, Sunday A picture caption last Sunday with an article about a radio tower in Todt Hill, Staten Island, misidentified the tower pictured. It was a state police antenna, not the shorter transmission tower operated nearby by Highpoint Enterprises. | Showdown Coming Over Radio Tower |
1042881_0 | In his heyday in the late 1950's, Mao Zedong called a mass campaign to kill sparrows, accused of eating too much grain. The result was disastrous as insect populations soared. Since then, awareness of ecology in China has changed, to say the least. But it took this summer's disastrous floods and an unusual public outcry to jolt the Government into admitting past mistakes and vowing sweeping changes in policy. As less-than-record rains caused record damage, China said it would halt logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River system and restore lakes and wetlands downstream that used to soak up excess water, but were drained to make farms. Execution will not be easy, since the new policy threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of loggers and farmers. ERIK ECKHOLM | August 23-29; Chinese Leaders Vow To Mend Ecological Ways |
1036962_0 | A $1 billion satellite that went dead and disappeared six weeks ago while observing the sun has begun transmitting brief signals, and NASA officials said yesterday that they hoped the spacecraft could return to duty. The satellite, the Solar and Helio spheric Observatory, was launched in 1995 as a joint project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency. The satellite has been very productive, observing quakes on the sun and many other features revealing the dynamics of solar activity. Scientists had been looking forward to its observations next year, when solar activity will reach a maximum. | National News Briefs; A Satellite Lost in June Is Sending Signals Again |
1036897_2 | expected long-term traffic growth. Signing Once and For All Budget Rent a Car is joining the ranks of other rental companies with ''paperless'' express service. The Budget service, called Fastbreak, is being phased in over the next few weeks at major United States airports. Other rental companies, including Hertz and Avis Rent a Car, have similar programs. At Budget, enrollment is free; customers fill out a master rental agreement detailing their preferences, from collision damage waiver to type of vehicle. Then, at 25 airports (including Kennedy International, La Guardia, O'Hare International, Los Angeles International and Logan International in Boston) customers will be able to bypass the rental counter, taking the bus from the terminal to the Budget lot and picking up their cars there. At 80 additional airports, customers can stop at the counter to check their reservation status on a printout, show their driver's licenses and pick up the keys to their car. In both cases, a receipt will be printed out on the spot when the car is returned. Card With a Dividend U S Airways and Nationsbank have started a Dividend Miles Visa Platinum card that allows members to earn 1.2 miles for each dollar spent. Card members receive a 5,000-mile bonus the first time they use the card and double miles on U S Airways ticket purchases. They also get a $99 companion ticket for a trip in the continental United States each year after their anniversary date of joining, $75 off a new membership to U S Airways Clubs and a year-end account summary. The annual membership fee is $125. Their Kind of Town Chicago is the city most often visited by business travelers domestically and London is the most popular internationally, according to a recent survey of 227 corporate travel managers by Runzheimer International, the consultants in Rochester, Wis. Respondents were asked to name the 10 cities most often visited by their companies' employees traveling on business. On the domestic list, after Chicago, which was mentioned by 54 percent of respondents, other major destinations were New York, named by 44 percent; Atlanta, 41 percent; Los Angeles, 40 percent, and Dallas, 39 percent. London was cited by 54 percent of respondents, with Paris a distant second at 28 percent, followed by Toronto, Mexico City and Tokyo. Both Chicago and London also topped their respective categories the last time the survey was taken, two years ago. | Business Travel; Airlines are beginning to offer special fall sale fares to Europe, but travelers will need to act fast. |
1039257_2 | the field test, in Crystal Lake, Ill., mostly found the new sound ''pleasant,'' after taking a week or so to get used to it. Strangely enough, an advantage was that they could easily distinguish their new telephones from ringing doorbells, alarm clocks and fire alarms. In 1956, ovens, wristwatches and the contents of people's pockets tended to remain silent. Maybe now we are in the jungle after all, surrounded by all these new species and needful of more varied and sensible auditory cues. Even if we don't have perfect pitch, we're not completely tone deaf or rhythmically obtuse, most of us. If birders can learn to distinguish dozens of characteristic songs and telegraphers could handle Morse code, we should be able to cope with a few simple electronic warbles and trills. ''One of the advantages of auditory feedback is that it's 360 degrees,'' says Cynthia Sikora, a psychologist researching electronic sounds for Bell Labs, now the research arm of Lucent Technologies. ''You don't have to be looking in a particular direction. It allows you to multitask and use your attention selectively. The problem with visual feedback is, you have to be attending.'' On the other hand, our frequent confusion about electronic sounds suggests that they are somehow directionless. This turns out to be true, especially for the pure 2,000- or 4,000-hertz tones coming from a tiny vibrating crystal. A metal bell is a complex object, and it reverberates with a rich set of harmonics and overtones -- and these, bouncing off walls, give a bit more information to a pair of human ears. Several corporate research laboratories are devoting serious effort to creating different sounds for future telephones, computers and other devices. Bell Labs, for example, is constantly bringing people in to test new sounds. Or is it the people being tested? Recently members of groups were assigned different ''personalized'' rings, and then asked to recognize them. ''They were pretty good at doing some of them,'' says another researcher, Linda Roberts. ''Other ones they couldn't tell.'' That's even after going through the Familiarization Phase, the Learning Phase and the Test Phase. Rhythms were the easiest. Roberts and Sikora have been experimenting with what they they punningly call ''earcons'' -- icons not for the eye. They have employed a professional sound designer and musician in New York to make the sounds brilliant and pleasant and identifiable. You might think in terms | Fast Forward; What the Beep Is Going On? |
1039638_3 | ''to crush these people.'' Mr. Ahern added that the Irish Government would ''ruthlessly repress'' the terrorist group, which is believed to comprise about 100 Catholic dissidents splintered away from the main Irish Republican Army. The splinter group is believed to have ties with a political party, the 32-County Continuity Committees, which opposed the peace agreement. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain called the blast ''an appalling attack of savagery and evil by people who are determined, whatever the cost to innocent people, to wreck the prospects for peace.'' Queen Elizabeth II expressed shock at the bombing. She offered ''my heartfelt sympathy to the bereaved.'' John Hume, the moderate Catholic leader who is the principal initiator of the peace effort, said the terrorists were ''trying to destroy the agreement.'' They are ''undiluted fascists,'' he added. Ian Paisley Jr., son of the hard-line Protestant leader, said the attack was the result of coddling of republicans by the British and Irish Governments, which have begun the early release of paramilitary prisoners. He accused Dublin and London of creating ''an endless bloody violent circle.'' Paddy McGann, a local official in Omagh, said the Protestants and Catholics in the town had lived peaceably together, free of terrorist attacks for years. He noted that the attacks, attributed to Catholic dissidents, came on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, an important feast day for Catholics. ''I hope whoever did this say their prayers tonight,'' he added. In Washington, President Clinton condemned the attack. Mr. Clinton is scheduled to visit Northern Ireland on Sept. 3, and his spokesman said the President had no plans to cancel the trip. ''I renew my pledge to stand with the people of Northern Ireland against the perpetrators of violence; they will find no friends here,'' Mr. Clinton said in a statement. ''On behalf of the American people, I condemn this butchery.'' The Governments of Britain and the Irish Republic, sponsors of the peace effort, have repeatedly stated that terrorism by dissident groups would not destroy the effort, under which a new Northern Ireland Assembly convened in June to work out a new political structure that would give Northern minority Catholics more power. But today's attack could lead to retaliation by Protestant paramilitaries, which in turn would put pressure on the I.R.A. to end its cease-fire and return the province to the sectarian warfare that has killed more than 3,200 people since 1969. | Bomb in Ulster, Exploding Among Shoppers, Kills 28 |
1039357_1 | have to be more careful.'' While serving as a role model for the teen-agers, she has also learned from them, she said. ''Most of these kids have never seen,'' said Ms. Wurzer, who lost her sight only four years ago, to complications from diabetes. ''I've learned from them how they deal with that.'' Camp Helen Keller is a six-week, tuition-free summer day camp run for the last 25 years by Helen Keller Services for the Blind, a private not-for-profit organization. It is the state's only recreational camp exclusively for visually impaired children. This summer there were 41 campers, ranging in age from 4 to 15. The camp director, Deborah Costa, who is also coordinator of Suffolk County Rehabilitation Services, said that the teen-agers in the program attend school in a mainstream setting and that before this summer many did not know other visually impaired people of their own age. ''The teen years are particularly difficult,'' said Ms. Costa, ''and these kids have unique social needs which are often not met. By being in a group with other kids who share similar issues, they form friendships and are a natural support for one another.'' As at other summer camps, the program at Camp Helen Keller consists of sports, arts and crafts, music, dance and swimming. In addition, the teen-agers are instructed in the skills of daily living such as independent grooming and cooking. They also receive mobility training for safe traveling, said Ms. Costa, by taking bus trips to local malls and learning to ask for directions, to cross the street and to navigate to a local ice-cream parlor. When safety is an issue, the group is accompanied by a sighted staff member. It is vital for the teen-agers to know that they can be independent, said Ms. Wurzer, who is learning Braille and plans to return to college this fall to become either a social worker or a teacher for the blind. ''When I lost my sight,'' she said, ''the most difficult adjustment for me was that I lost my independence. I couldn't drive anymore and I had to depend on other people. But I moved on, and I hope I can give that message to these kids.'' A weekly confidential rap session for the teen-agers with a social worker provides a forum for them to deal with emotional issues and discuss their feelings. But most of the campers said | For the Blind, a Camp Leader Who Can Relate |
1039670_0 | Size has gradually become the guiding principle in commercial and naval shipbuilding. Take the $450 million Grand Princess, which made her maiden voyage in May. She is the world's most expensive cruise ship and the largest in sheer tonnage. In silhouette, though, she looks like a Dustbuster. And the Jahre Viking, an oil tanker that is the world's largest ship, is little more than a gigantic steel box with an engine astern. Time has brought high technology: Warships no longer need oarsmen or a set of sails but a stable platform for aircraft. No mean economies of scale here, the ships below perhaps plead a case for the days of yore, when grace and wind ruled the seas. PETER C. T. ELSWORTH | Ideas & Trends; Armchair Sailors on the Seven Seas |
1039375_2 | the next rung. At lunch, most youngsters fully or partly feed themselves because a slatted table provides grasping room for a hand to steady their balance. The theory is that by using the intellectual part of the brain to move and repeat small steps helps the brain find fresh paths to accomplish what most individuals can do by rote. The conductor individualizes the exercises for each child, but doing them in small groups adds an upbeat, competitive motivation to the process. ''We do things in small parts,'' said Zsuzsanna Deer, a Hungarian who is the camp's conductor and was trained at the Peto Institute. ''And we encourage the children to go beyond what they can, or what they think they can, do. Most important, they must adapt to the environment rather than have the environment adapt to them. We do not use wheelchairs.'' The camp, which is nonprofit and partly financed by donations, is not the only one offering conductive education in the summer. But it is unusual in combining it with a swimming program to further challenge the body and a daily computer session to challenge the mind. ''Actually, we have had a summer program in conductive education for three years,'' said Donna Sherry, Phoebe's mother and the driving force behind the expanded program. ''But this is the first year we have been able to broaden it into a camp. And the kids love it. My daughter loves to move, wants to move. And when they are in class together, the kids feed off each other. Phoebe has made great strides.'' So has Claudia, her mother, Dr. Karyn Hirsch, said. ''Huge strides,'' Dr. Hirsch said. ''We build on the smallest progress. ''I'm a doctor. The American medical system is better at treating acute illnesses than with a chronic medical condition. With these methods, the kids get to feel a sense of accomplishment.'' The discussion took place at United Cerebral Palsy's Westchester headquarters, which offers its pool to the camp. There John Lee -- he uses both names -- has had a foam flotation noodle wrapped around his waist and, with empty bleach bottle containers grasped in each hand, is swimming. He was terrified of the water at the start of camp. The youngsters even develop the confidence to poke gentle fun at themselves. Sarah, who has now fast-forwarded to walking 70 steps, loses her balance and laughingly jokes about | Meeting Big Challenges With Small Steps |
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