MTA Strike in New York

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Commuters lined up in Queens to board a Long Island Rail Road train to Manhattan

December 21, 2005
In Final Hours, M.T.A. Took Big Pension Risk
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

On the final day of intense negotiations, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it turns out, greatly altered what it had called its final offer, to address many of the objections of the transit workers' union. The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.

But then, just hours before the strike deadline, the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority's soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation's largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.

Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.

It seemed a small figure, considering that the city says that every day of the strike will cost its businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues. But the authority contends that it must act now to prevent a "tidal wave" of pension outlays if costs are not brought under control.

Roger Toussaint, the president of the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, said the pension proposal, made Monday night just before the 12:01 a.m. strike deadline, would effectively cut the wages of new workers by 4 percent.

"They're trying to beat down wages for our new workers," Mr. Toussaint said yesterday.

In the days immediately before the strike deadline, the union kept hammering the point that the authority's pension demands would save little over the life of a three-year contract.

Indeed, not just Mr. Toussaint but some other New Yorkers are questioning whether it was worthwhile for the authority to go to war over the issue when the authority's pension demands would apparently save less over the next three years than what the New York City Police Department will spend on extra overtime during the first two days of the strike.

"What they'd be saving on pensions is a pittance," Mr. Toussaint said.

Robert Linn, a former New York City labor commissioner, questioned the transportation authority's decision - with the backing of the mayor and governor - to go to the mat over pensions with a union that can exact huge pain on the city in a year when the authority was enjoying a $1 billion surplus.

"They might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject," Mr. Linn said. "It not just the considerable economic power of this union, it's also the timing," just before Christmas. "It's tremendously problematic."

Gary J. Dellaverson, the authority's director of labor relations, said he and the authority's other negotiators had tried to be flexible in making the pension offer.

"We tried to remold our position, to be reflective of their issues and still be consistent with our finances and our bargaining goals - what we considered a good faith effort to close the deal," he said.

Labor negotiations resemble high-stakes poker, and it was not until a few hours before the strike deadline that the authority 's chairman, Mr. Kalikow, showed his hand, making an offer far different from what he had previously said was his final offer.

With the transit workers' union demanding raises above inflation, Mr. Kalikow raised his wage offer so that raises would average 3.5 percent a year for three years, up from 3 percent in his previous offer. Responding to the union's demand that he not raise the retirement age, Mr. Kalikow also dropped his proposal that future transit workers not qualify for a full pension until age 62, up from 55 for current workers.

But then he put his new demand on the table, that new workers contribute 6 percent of their wages to finance their pensions - a demand that clashed with Mr. Toussaint's oft-repeated refusal to sell out the "unborn," meaning new workers.

Mr. Dellaverson declined to spell out how much that proposal would save each year. "Pension changes always have small effects at the beginning and grow over time," he said.

John J. Murphy, a pension expert and former executive director of the New York City Employees' Retirement System, said he computed that the authority's pension proposal would have a modest saving at first: $2.25 million in the first year, $4.8 million in the second year and $7.8 million in the third year.

But he said the plan would achieve significant savings, more than $160 million in the first 10 years, with some officials estimating that it would save more than $80 million a year after 20 years.

Mr. Dellaverson said it was important for the authority to try to control its pension outlays even in a year when it had a surplus. The authority's pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year, triple the amount in 2002.

"If you know a tidal wave is coming and you can still play around in the surf because it's not here yet, anyone would think that's foolishness," Mr. Dellaverson said.

That wave, he suggested, is a continued rise in pension costs and the authority's forecast of a $1 billion deficit in 2009.

Mr. Dellaverson said the week of negotiations at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown were unusual because the union made hardly any firm counteroffers. "The longer you wait to start to address the problem," he said, "the more dramatic the changes must be to address them."

He said the union made no new offer countering the authority's pension offers. The union, he said, asked for an 8 percent raise a year, without ever specifying how many years of 8 percent raises it wanted.

He said that just before negotiations broke off on Monday, "We made another offer, even though the union had never countered our earlier offer," he said. "From a tactical standpoint, it's unusual in my little business."

Several union officials said Mr. Toussaint was often reluctant to make a new proposal - for instance, lowering a wage demand - because the clamorous dissidents in the union might seize on such a move to accuse him of selling out.

E. J. McMahon, a budgetary expert at the Manhattan Institute who favors reducing government pension costs, said there were wise and unwise aspects to the authority's focus on pensions in the bargaining.

"On one hand, the transit workers are the hardest union to bring this up with," he said. "On the other hand, this has really put a spotlight on the pension issue."

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Jersey City, New Jersey

Photo from dbeards3 's Homepage on Webshots

I grew up approximately one mile from this classic movie palace. All of the movies that I was able to see were shown either in this Stanley Theater or in the Loew's Theater in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The photographs that follow detail the incredible ornate interiors that made going to the movies a magical excursion into another world in my youth.

There was only one other movie theater called The State, but it was not anywhere near as elaborate as these other two. Quite different than the multiplex boxes of our modern era.

With thanks to dbeards3 at webshots.com

Photo from dbeards3  's Homepage on Webshots

It is so much a part of my memory of childhood, going to this ornate location to watch movies, and the ushers were always there in uniforms with flashlights. They would come right to your seat if you made noise or disturbed anyone around you.

The staircase on either side led up to the balcony, where sometimes some "bad kids" would sit and throw water baloons down on people below. As a kid I couldn't even imagine how much trouble I would be in with my parents if I even considered such activity. I was a probably a nerdy type of child, but God knows I made up for this in later years

Photo from  dbeards3 Homepage webshots.com

Another photo of the Lobby of the Stanley Theater in Jersey City , New Jersey.

I was born in Jersey City, and this was the theater closest to my home where I would go on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and watch movies. It is almost overwhelming to experience the rush of memories that flood through me when I look at these photographs.

Photos from  dbeards3 @webshots.com

I mean, just look at this stage.

At one point in my family history my father served as Mayor of Jersey City.

Every year at Christmas my father would hold The Mayor's Christmas Party on this very stage. They would actually have live entertainment, like the Three Stooges in person.

There would be thousands of children there and every child would get a gift. There were thousands of prizes, with raffle like tickets drawn from the entry tickets. One Christmas my younger brother John went up to the stage to get his prize because the ticket he was holding matched the number called. My father firmly and quickly whispered a few words to my bewildered brother who was probably about seven at this time. The Mayor's aides walked him swiftly into the wings and the numbers continued to be called without further adieu.

Not always easy being the Mayor's son!

Photo from dbeards3 at webshots.com

The detail and old world workmanship is hard to believe in modern times.

My own father had attended movies in this theater in the days when movies cost pennies.. The movies he watched as a boy were black and white. He always talked about some series called Tom Mix. I think it was a cowboy character. We have come a long way to Jurassic Park.

It seems like all this is from another lifetime.

Photo from dbeards3  at webshots.com

The Promenade in the lobby of The Stanley Movie Theater in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Those are real, solid marble colums. It is so amazing to find these photographs. It is almost too much for me all at once. Especially at Christmas time when I am sentimental even more than my usually overly sentimental self.

Taken to a New Place, by a TV in the Palm

In-Laws in the Age of the Outsiders

Scott Menchin

December 18, 2005
Home for the Holidays
In-Laws in the Age of the Outsider
By BENEDICT CAREY

SHE was in the kitchen trying to bond with her boyfriend's mother and help prepare the food when the older woman made a remark that effectively shut the conversation down.

"I asked to try one of the chicken wings she was cooking, and she says, 'Oh, these might be a little too spicy for what you're used to,' " said Serene Hammond, 25, of Washington, recalling a cookout she attended five years ago.

Ms. Hammond said she felt odd at the time, and later, insulted. Her father is Haitian, her mother Irish, and she is fair-skinned. The boyfriend's family is black.

"The way I took that comment was, 'Well, this is too hot for what y'all white people eat,' " said Ms. Hammond, who since founded a group called the National Advocacy for the Multiethnic, a clearinghouse for multiracial education. "I said, 'No, I'm from Louisiana.' " She added, "I think a lot of white women who date black men get some of that treatment."

Whether innocent or intentional, even a casual remark or gesture can turn a rainbow holiday feast into a version of "Meet the Parents" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" - without the laughs and tearful hugs.

According to Census data, the number of mixed families and couples is increasing each year, from 4.4 percent of all marriages in 1990 to 6.7 percent in 2000. Fully a third of marriages involving Hispanics are interracial, ditto for Asian marriages, and the rate among black Americans is now about 13 percent, and among whites 7 percent, Dr. William Frey of the Brookings Institution concluded from a further analysis of the data.

Many families are delighted or unfazed by having an outsider join them. But many others know another reality: the imminent arrival of a new spouse or girlfriend who is a cultural foreigner almost always amplifies the anxiety they already feel as they try to live up to the holiday-card photos they send out with everyone hugging the Irish setter, or gathered around the tree, psychologists say. It is hard not to resent having to play ambassador when routine domestic relations themselves are tense, when it's hard enough to keep dad and junior from coming to blows at Thanksgiving, say, or to ease the awkwardness between sisters who are not speaking.

Artful entertaining, psychologists say, requires some understanding of both the traps inherent in hosting a cultural outsider and the opportunities.

Most obviously, the new person can buffer or distract from simmering family problems by acting as an outside witness of the family's behavior and an obligatory conversation partner, family therapists say. When a new person enters any closed group, whether in business, sports or in a family, sociologists have found, there is a tacit agreement that the newcomer initially take a place on the margin: often literally, by sitting against the wall, say, a few chairs away from the insiders. Typically, in a family gathering, people take turns approaching the new arrival and opening communication, which can divert attention away from the usual jealousies and grudges that are inflamed in the family's usual rituals.

"Particularly if this person is interesting, he or she can become an attraction," said Dr. Calvin Morrill, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine who studies group interaction.

A guest who has suffered personal hardship, as an immigrant for instance, might also serve to shrink, at least temporarily, the more petty claims of unfairness that swirl around the table at any family gathering.

Psychologists who study interracial marriages have found that two things are particularly divisive and troublesome to these couples. One concerns children. In-laws almost by definition have strong opinions about their grandchildren or future grandchildren - about how they should be raised and where, and how they might be treated by peers. This topic is best left for another time.

"This issue may be most volatile when the husband is black and the wife is white - white wives' parents sometimes reject the offspring and reject the black husband simultaneously," said Dr. Stanley Gaines, a senior lecturer in psychology at Brunel University in England, in an e-mail.

The second problem is the tendency of people to resort to racial stereotypes - when conflict arises, "even if the conflict initially had nothing to do with race per se," Dr. Gaines added.

The bottom line, psychologists say, is that holiday gatherings are perhaps the worst time to try to settle longstanding disputes. Racial stereotyping does not go down well with gravy, no matter how justified the underlying conflicts.

Smaller misunderstandings are almost unavoidable, therapists say. "I think you have to expect that there's going to be some discomfort, some awkwardness when you're entertaining this new person, and to prepare for that" and weather it, said Dr. Constance Ahrons, a psychologist in San Diego and author of the book, "We're Still Family."

When possible, she said, prepare other family members beforehand as well, by informing cousins, aunts and uncles as much about the new spouse or boyfriend as possible. "You may find that some family members decide not to come at all, because they're uncomfortable with the situation," she said. If one of those people came, it might be asking for worse trouble, she said.

Entertaining a guest of a different race or religion can also provide an excuse for one of the most effective strategies to soothe and preempt family discord: structured activities.

In a study of how family reunions affect personal relationships, Dr. Laurence Basirico, dean of international programs at Elon University in Elon, N.C., interviewed 566 readers of Reunions Magazine, a journal for planning reunions of all kinds. Those surveyed included families across the country who attended large gatherings. In his analysis, Dr. Basirico found that the most satisfying reunions were those that were highly planned, with scheduled events each day that were mostly optional.

If the new visitor is a fundamentalist Christian who objects to watching a Harry Potter film, or a Muslim who would rather skip the late-night drinking, they are warned and have an out.

"They simply take a pass, and there are no conflicts over these small decisions about what we should do and when, which can turn into big arguments, especially if you don't know what some of the underlying cultural differences may be," Dr. Basirico said in an interview.

Keep in mind, too, that it is not only the hosts who are worried and plotting. Dr. Ahrons recently had as clients a gay couple, one black and the other white, who, she said, spent weeks preparing for a visit to the white man's family, who was very uncomfortable with the relationship. The pair role-played a bit, and did some of their own scheduling. And they had their own plan for defusing trouble.

"One thing they planned was simply to get out of the house regularly," she said. "They would just excuse themselves at a certain time and off they went to get a drink."

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

The Supremes.

The Supremes.
A Bit of Liverpool.
Detroit: Motown, 1964.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (273)

Bill Haley and His Comets.

Bill Haley and His Comets.
Decca, 1958.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (266)

Meet the Beatles.

The Beatles.
Meet the Beatles.
[Scranton, Pennsylvania]: Capitol Records, 1964.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (274)

Elvis

Elvis Presley.
New York: RCA Victor, 1956.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (265)

ST. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1967.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (275

Rolling Stones

England's Newest Hit Makers: The Rolling Stones.
New York: London, 1964.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (276)

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan.
New York: Columbia, 1962.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress
Courtesy of Columbia Records (271)

Little Richard

Little Richard.
Here's Little Richard.
Hollywood: Specialty Records, ca. 1950.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (268)  

The Animals

The Animals, Includes Their Hit Single, "House of the Rising Sun."
MGM. 1964.
Album cover.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress (272)

Avian Flu

NIH Uses Live Viruses for Bird Flu Vaccine
By LAURAN NEERGAARD

WASHINGTON - In an isolation ward of a Baltimore hospital, up to 30 volunteers will participate in a bold experiment: A vaccine made with a live version of the most notorious bird flu will be sprayed into their noses.

First, scientists are dripping that vaccine into the tiny nostrils of mice. It doesn't appear harmful - researchers have weakened and genetically altered the virus so that no one should get sick or spread germs - and it protects the animals enough to try in people.

This is essentially FluMist for bird flu, and the hope is that, in the event of a flu pandemic, immunizing people through their noses could provide faster, more effective protection than the troublesome shots - made with a killed virus - the nation now is struggling to produce.

And if it works, this new vaccine frontier may not just protect against the bird flu strain, called H5N1, considered today's top health threat. It offers the potential for rapid, off-the-shelf protection against whatever novel variation of the constantly evolving influenza virus shows up next - through a library of live-virus nasal sprays that the National Institutes of Health plans to freeze.

"It's high-risk, high-reward" research, said Dr. Brian Murphy, who heads the NIH laboratory where Dr. Kanta Subbarao is brewing the nasal sprays - including one for a different bird-flu strain that appeared safe during the first crucial human testing last summer.

"It might fail, but if it's successful, it might prevent hundreds of thousands of cases" of the next killer flu, Murphy said.

FluMist is the nation's nasal-spray vaccine that prevents regular winter flu. Developed largely through Murphy's lab, it's the only flu vaccine made with live but weakened influenza viruses.

The new project, a collaboration with FluMist manufacturer MedImmune Inc., piggybacks cutting-edge genetics technology onto that vaccine to create a line of FluMist-like sprays against different bird flus.

"That is a great, great idea," said Dr. John Treanor of the University of Rochester, among the flu specialists closely watching the project.

Regular winter flu shots are made with killed influenza viruses, and the government is stockpiling experimental bird-flu vaccine made the same way. But those bird-flu shots don't work as well as hoped. They require an incredibly high dose, delivered in two separate injections, to spark a protective immune response in people.

"In theory, a live-virus vaccine might actually work better. We don't know that because we've never tried one before," Treanor said.

Influenza is like a magician, constantly changing its clothes to avoid detection, thus making it difficult to develop effective vaccines.

Studding the virus' surface are two proteins called hemagglutinin - the H in H5N1 - and neuraminidase, the "N". They act as a wardrobe: There are 16 known hemagglutinin versions, and nine neuraminidases.

They're also what triggers the immune system to mount an attack, particularly hemagglutinin, the protein the body aims for when it makes flu-fighting antibodies.

When people catch the flu, they usually get H1 or H3 flu strains, which their bodies can recognize because variations have circulated among humans for decades.

Occasionally, genetically unique strains emerge. Until 1997, H5 strains had never been seen outside of birds. The virus essentially put on a coat that human immune systems didn't recognize. The result: Since 2003, a particularly strong H5N1 strain has infected more than 130 people in Asia, killing at least 70.

H9 and H7 strains also recently have jumped from birds to people, although so far they haven't been nearly as dangerous.

Researchers hope to create at least one live-virus nasal spray for each "H" subtype, a project costing about $16 million of the NIH's annual $67 million budget for flu vaccine research.

"The hemagglutinin is the major protective antigen, so that is what we're focusing on," explained Subbarao, a molecular geneticist who heads the project.

First on her list are the riskiest known bird flus: H5N1, with human tests planned for April. H9N2, which recently underwent the first round of human testing in an isolation ward at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Then an H7 strain, followed by an H6 strain believed to share genes with the H5N1.

"By no means are we confident we're picking the right strain" to make first, because flu mutates so easily, Subbarao cautioned.

She chooses vaccine strains from those that U.S. scientists who are monitoring influenza in Asia cull from ducks, chickens and geese, and ship home for research.

Subbarao must customize those strains for safe vaccination: First, using a new technique called reverse genetics, she selects genes for bird-flu H and N antigens and removes genetic segments that make them dangerous. Then she adds the remaining gene segments to the regular weakened FluMist virus.

Stocks of the custom virus are grown in fertilized chicken eggs. Each is then carefully cracked by hand to drain out virus-loaded liquid that in turn is purified and put into a nasal spray.

In a high-security section of the lab, Subbarao dons a biohazard suit and exposes vaccinated mice to various bird flu strains.

Then it's time for human testing - in a hospital isolation ward just in case the weakened virus could infect someone.

It shouldn't, because "those problems don't exist in FluMist," said Murphy, citing studies of regular FluMist in day-care centers where youngsters routinely pass viruses back and forth.

Some studies have found that people can shed virus shortly after receiving regular FluMist. But, "to spread infection, you'd need much more (virus) than replicates in the nose," he said.

Hopkins researchers gave the first of Subbarao's vaccine candidates - the H9N2 spray - to 30 volunteers last summer. To be sure they couldn't spread the virus by coughing or sneezing, the volunteers underwent daily tests of their noses and throats.

The vaccine appeared safe. Scientists now are analyzing whether it also spurred production of flu-fighting antibodies, a sign that people would be protected if they encountered the H9N2 strain. Subbarao expects results by February.

In April, pending final Food and Drug Administration permission, Subbarao will put an H5N1 spray to a similar test.

Here's the catch: Each flu strain has subtypes. An Indonesian version of H5N1, for example, was recently discovered that differs from a Vietnamese strain on which Subbarao's nasal spray - and the government's stockpiled shots - are based. She's now testing whether her vaccine protects mice against that new Indonesian strain.

If a novel flu strain begins spreading among people, how will Subbarao tell if her stored nasal vaccines are a good match to fight it?

NIH also will store blood samples from the people who test those sprays. Say a new H9 strain sparks an outbreak. That virus will be tested against those blood samples, and NIH could predict within a day which spray candidates work. If one does, the government could order doses manufactured from that frozen stock; if none do, scientists would have to try to brew a new vaccine.

How quickly doses could be manufactured is a different issue. All influenza vaccines, shots or spray, currently are brewed in chicken eggs, a time-consuming process that other research is seeking to improve.

"These are research projects," Murphy stresses - the nasal-spray concept could fail.

But he's optimistic. Live-virus vaccines, he maintains, are better immune stimulators.

Story from REDORBIT NEWS: http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=332782

Published: 2005/12/17 12:00:00 CST

© RedOrbit 2005

Answers to Arcane Questions

Extra: Does Anything Eat Wasps? ; The Answer to Life's Most Baffling Questions: Exclusive Extract From the Must-Have Book for Christmas
Just four weeks ago, a science book with a print-run of 2,500 was published. Five reprints later, it's sold 100,000 copies, is number three in the Amazon bestsellers list, and is tipped throughout the book trade to be this year's essential Christmas read. 'Does Anything Eat Wasps?' is a compilation of puzzling queries and informed answers from the Last Word section of the 'New Scientist' magazine. Started over a decade ago, the column grapples with everyday science and has a huge following. If you've ever wondered why we have eyebrows or pondered the possibility of living on beer alone, this book has the answers to these and many more of life's smaller questions. Read our exclusive eight-page extract and you'll also finally discover what likes to have wasps for lunch...

Why do geese fly in 'V' formations?

I read a while ago that there are several competing theories as to why geese fly in a 'V' shape. Does anyone know the definitive answer?

Bruce Shuler

PLYMOUTH, MICHIGAN, US

When the lead bird completes a flap of its wings two vortices are shed, one from each wing tip. These vortices consist of a rolling tube of air, the upper portion of which is moving forwards and the lower part rearwards. Should a following bird complete a downward stroke into the top of a vortex, the momentum change of the air caught up in the stroke is much greater than had the vortex not been present. Consequently the lift for a given stroke size is greater, and the following bird needs to do less work. To make use of this phenomenon the following two birds must be behind the wing-tips of the lead bird in a V-formation, and the birds behind them should be similarly placed. This leads to an obvious question: why don't birds take up the position on the inside wings to form a tree formation? The answer is that they would be subject to vortices on both wings that were not synchronised, making flying difficult.

David Mann LONDON

Why do millipedes have so many legs?

Ever since finding a millipede in my bath, I've wondered why this creature has so many legs. What advantage do they provide and how did it get them?

Sarah Crew ONGAR, ESSEX

Millipedes and earthworms have similar lifestyles. Both burrow in soil, eating dead and decaying vegetation, but they have evolved very different methods for forcing their way through soil. Worms use the strong muscles in their body walls to build up pressure in the body cavity, and so develop the forces needed to push forward or widen a crevice in the soil. Millipedes, however, use their legs to push through the soil. The more legs the animal has, the harder it can push. Millipedes are different from centipedes. They have very large numbers of short legs because long legs would be a liability in a burrow. Centipedes, which spend their time on the surface or among leaf litter, have fewer, longer legs.

R McNeill Alexander

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Does anything eat wasps?

In a recent conversation about food chains, a colleague wondered if anything ate wasps. Someone suggested 'very stupid birds'. Does anyone know any more about this?

Tom Eastwood,

LONDON

The lowly wasp certainly has its place in the food chain. Indeed, the question should possibly be 'what doesn't feed, in one way or another, on this lowly and potentially dangerous insect?' Here are a few that do, the first list being invertebrates: several species of dragonflies (Odonata); robber and hoverflies (Diptera); wasps (Hymenoptera), usually the larger species feeding on smaller species, such as social paper wasps (Vespula maculata) eating V utahensis; beetles (Coleoptera); and moths (Lepidoptera). The following are vertebrates that feed on wasps: numerous species of birds, skunks, bears, badgers, bats, weasels, wolverines, rats, mice and last, but certainly not least, humans and probably some of our closest ancestors. I have eaten the larvae of several wasp species fried in butter, and found them quite tasty.

Orvis Tilby,

SALEM, OREGON, US

Is it dangerous to eat green potatoes?

And do similar problems lurk in species related to potatoes, such as yams or aubergines?

Emily Jane Horseman,

BUXTON, DERBYSHIRE

When a potato is exposed to light, its solanine content escalates as a natural protection against being eaten by foraging animals. It is, after all, meant to propagate a new plant rather than be consumed. Solanine gives potatoes a bitter taste and checks the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This causes dry mouth, thirst and palpitations. At higher doses it can cause delirium, hallucinations and paralysis. The green in a toxic potato is harmless chlorophyll, but it acts as a warning that the potato has an elevated level of solanine. The entire potato should be discarded. The same applies to potatoes that have begun to sprout and to potatoes that show black streaks from late blight. The fatal dose of solanine for an average adult is between 3mg and 6mg per kilogram of body weight, or between 200mg and 500mg in total, depending on body weight. Properly stored potatoes contain less than 200mg per kilogram, so a fatal dose could, arguably, be obtained from as little as 1kg if a person had a small body mass. Solanine is concentrated in the potato skin, so peeling removes between 30 and 90 per cent of this toxin, which runs counter to the old saying that 'the skin is the best part'. In the past, potatoes were stored unwashed in paper sacks and dumped on the bottom shelf or darkest place in the vegetable store. The modern practice of washing potatoes and packing them in clear plastic increases solanine risk. On exposure to light at 16C the solanine content quadruples every 24 hours. At 75C it can be nine times greater and can reach to 1,800mg per kilogram in the skin. Other nightshades, such as tomatoes, aubergines and capsicums also contain solanine in varying quantities, depending on the degree of ripeness and whether they are infected with blight.

Craig Sams,

HASTINGS, EAST SUSSEX

How big is a mole tunnel network?

Is it constantly developing the network and do areas become redundant? How far does the average mole tunnel in its lifetime? And if moles are fiercely solitary, do individual networks overlap? If not, how do they find each other to ensure future mole generations?

Alan Rowe,

INSCH, ABERDEENSHIRE

The depth and extent of a mole's (Talpa europaea) tunnel system will vary considerably depending on a number of factors, such as the type of soil and the height of the local water table. Earthworms and other invertebrates that enter the tunnel system are the moles' main source of food, so it is likely that a mole living in a worm-rich meadow will need a less extensive tunnel system than a mole that inhabits a tunnel system in an acidic soil where worm numbers are much lower. Moles do extend their tunnel systems when necessary and they will abandon those that are no longer needed or productive. Their digging activity increases in the autumn when the colder soil temperatures send earthworms (and their mole hunters) deeper below the surface. In the spring, earthworms start to return to the surface layers of the soil and there will be much more mole activity as they begin to make new surface tunnels or repair old ones. Moles are largely solitary animals outside their spring breeding season and they will drive out those of their species that intrude into their tunnel systems. However, in areas where mole populations occur at high densities their tunnels may overlap. During the mating season in February and March, the males become far more mobile and will frequently leave their territories in search of mates. Much of this travelling is done at ground level but they can also make use of existing tunnel systems. Females are probably located by scent, but very little is known about the mating behaviour of moles.

Andrew Halstead,

PRINCIPAL ENTOMOLOGIST ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, LONDON

How do dock leaves soothe nettle rash?

And are they effective on any other plant or insect stings?

Tim Crow,

HIGHNAM, GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Being stung by a nettle is painful because the sting contains an acid. Rubbing the sting with a dock leaf can relieve the pain because dock leaves contain an alkali that will neutralise the acid and therefore reduce the sting. Bees and ants also have acidic stings, so dock leaves should help, but other alkalis, such as soap or bicarbonate of soda, are usually better. However, a dock leaf is useless against wasp stings, which contain an alkali. This is unfortunate because wasps are nasty little critters whose sole aim in life is to ruin picnics and barbecues. If you want to neutralise a wasp sting you should use an acid such as vinegar. The only problem is you'll smell of pickles for the rest of the day.

Peter Robinson,

LIVERPOOL

Will a cat survive a fall from any height?

A friend of mine reckons that you can drop a cat from any height and it will survive unhurt because its terminal velocity is lower than the speed at which it can land unhurt. Can someone confirm or refute this, because kittens in my house now look strangely at my friend. I'm sure this can't be true, can it?

Anna Goodman,

OXFORD

I'm reminded of a study reported in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association in 1987 by WO Whitney and CJ Mehlhaff, two New York vets, entitled 'High-rise Syndrome in Cats'. The study was also summarised in Nature a year later. Briefly, the authors examined injuries and mortality rates in cats that had been brought to their hospital following falls ranging from between two and 32 storeys. Overall mortality rates were low, with 90 per cent of the cats surviving, a fact that supports the correspondent's ailurophobic friend. However, the study unexpectedly found that the incidence of injuries and death peaked for falls of around seven storeys, and then actually decreased for falls from greater heights. The Nature article presents three main variables that determine injury and mortality rate " the speed reached by the moggy, the distance in which said moggy is brought to a stop, and the area of moggy over which the stopping force is spread. While concrete streets work in nobody's favour when it comes to stopping falling items, cats suffer relatively little injury (compared to their owners) because they do indeed reach lower terminal velocities and absorb the shock of stopping so much better. A falling cat has a higher surface area to mass ratio than a falling human, and so reaches a terminal velocity of about 100km per hour (about half that of humans). They are also able to twist themselves so that the impact is spread over four feet, rather than our two. And, as they are more flexible than humans, they can land with flexed limbs and dissipate the impact forces through soft tissue. To answer the paradoxical increase in survival rates once seven storeys has been reached, the authors suggested that an accelerating cat tends to stiffen up, reducing its ability to absorb the impact. However, once terminal velocity is reached, there is no longer any net force acting on the cat, and so it will relax, increasing both its flexibility and the cross-sectional area over which the impact is dissipated once the cat hits the ground. I'd still keep your friend away from your kittens, if I were you. Few buildings in your home town of Oxford are seven storeys high, but there are plenty of rivers about.

John Bothwell,

MARINE BIOLOGICAL

ASSOCIATION,

PLYMOUTH, DEVON

Why do bruises change colour?

I can see why bruises would be red or purple, but what accounts for the yellowish-green colour? And why do they often take a day or two to appear?

Rick Rossi,

BIRMINGHAM

A bruise occurs when small capillary blood vessels break under the skin. The haemoglobin in this leaked blood gives the bruise its classic red- purplish hue. The body then ropes in white blood cells to repair the damage at the site of the injury, which causes the red cells to break down. This produces the substances that are responsible for the colour changes. The breakdown products of haemoglobin are biliverdin, which is green, and then bilirubin, which is yellow. Later, the debris at the bruise site clears and the colour fades.

Claire Adams,

BELMONT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Bruises sometimes take a long time to appear because the damage can occur deep in the body tissues. The body under the skin is not, of course, an amorphous mass " it has discrete muscles and organs, separated by planes of fibrous tissue (these can be seen clearly when looking at joints of meat from the butcher). When blood leaks from damaged vessels it is often prevented from reaching the skin's surface quickly by these planes of tissue, or it may simply take a while to diffuse through subcutaneous tissue. The fibrous tissue sheaths also explain why a bruise occasionally appears some distance from the original impact " the leaking blood has tracked under the sheath and surfaces only where the fibrous tissue ends.

Stewart Lloyd,

CONSULTANT OCCUPATIONAL PHYSICIAN, BRIGG, NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE

Why do people have eyebrows?

Question asked by Ben Holmes, EDMONTON, CANADA

My father has alopecia so he doesn't have eyebrows. In warm weather, sweat runs into his eyes and makes them sore; in wet weather he has to keep wiping the rain out of his eyes. So your eyebrows divert sweat droplets and raindrops from running directly into your eyes. You would be very uncomfortable without them.

Valerie Higgins,

TELFORD, SHROPSHIRE

We use our exceptionally mobile eyebrows to communicate our emotions. The position of the eyebrows emphasises expressions on the human face, thus giving others an accurate picture of the individual's mood. This gives a good indication of whether a person is friendly or whether they might be dangerous to approach.

Alison Venugoban,

NGUNNAWAL, ACT, AUSTRALIA

How many species live on or in our bodies?

And what is the total population of these guests?

Roger Taylor,

WIRRAL, MERSEYSIDE

The microorganisms that inhabit the body of a healthy human being are known as the normal microbial fauna, and they come in two different types " those that are permanently resident and those that are transient. Of course, any number of fascinating and nasty parasites can join this microbial community and make the human body their home. In his seminal work Life on Man (Secker & Warburg, 1969), bacteriologist Theodor Rosebury gives a full biological and historical account of the microbes that live on the average human. The figures that he grapples with are mind-boggling. For example, he counted 80 distinguishable species living in the mouth alone and estimated that the total number of bacteria excreted each day by an adult ranges from 100 billion to 100 trillion. From this figure it can be estimated that the microbial density on a square centimetre of human bowel is around 10 billion organisms. Microbes inhabit every surface of a healthy adult human that is exposed to the outside, such as the skin, or that is accessible from the outside " the intestines, from mouth to anus, plus eyes, ears and airways. Rosebury estimates that 10 million individual bacteria live on the average square centimetre of human skin. However, this figure can vary widely throughout the almost 2 square metres that make up the surface area of a human. In the oily skin that is found on the side of the nose or in a sweaty armpit, the figure can increase tenfold, while once inside the body, on the surface of the teeth, throat or alimentary tract, these concentrations can increase a thousandfold. Yet, while the figures appear huge, he estimates that all the bacteria living on the external surface of a human would fit into a medium-sized pea, while all those on the inside would fill a vessel with a capacity of a mere 30Oml.

As to the total number of species that are inhabiting a healthy body, estimates vary as more species are discovered on a seemingly regular basis, but Mark Pallen, a professor of microbiology based at the Queen's University of Belfast, reckons that the figure is in excess of 200. 'There are more than 80 that live in the mouth alone, and studies that have been carried out at the Unit of Ecology and Physiology of the Digestive System in Jouy-en- Josas, France, suggest that at least another 80 live in the gut, with many others living on our skin.

Of course, it's not just bacteria and viruses that make people their home. In his books Fearsome Fauna (WH Freeman, 1999) and Furtive Fauna (Penguin, 1992), Roger M Knutson describes the wide range of parasites that live on and inside you. These tend to be macroscopic organisms, and some of them can be pretty gruesome creatures. Lice are perhaps the most common of these body dwellers. None the less, they tend to be more itchy than damaging " unlike ticks, which can cause any number of nasty and exotic diseases from royal farm virus to Omsk haemorrhagic fever. Then there is the scabies mite, which is believed to infest millions of humans worldwide, and is able to burrow into the body to hide itself, causing a nasty itch. Fortunately, its close relative, the follicle mite, which is found on everybody in the world, happily munches dried skin cells and causes far less aggravation. And not all body parasites creep and crawl " you can find fungi in your hair and mould in your skin folds if you look closely enough. Inside your digestive tract you can, among others, find the protozoan that causes amoebic dysentery, 20-metre beef tapeworms and a hookworm that has a penchant for finding its way into your bloodstream. Other creatures in your blood can include the hermaphroditic Shistosoma worm, which can lead to a bloody and scarred bladder, while in your lymphatic system you may find the 12cm Wucheria worm. In your liver you may come across the bile-loving Clonorchis sinensis fluke and, perhaps most horrifying of all, the brain can house Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that just loves the warmth it finds inside your skull, reproducing in its millions until you drop down dead.

How much does a human head weigh?

Obviously, I can measure the volume of my head by simple water displacement, but I can't tell its density, nor can I work out the weight and density of its various components.

Bruce Firsten,

MIAMI, FLORIDA, US

Measuring the weight of your head involves effectively isolating it from the rest of your body. Decapitation has the obvious disadvantage of you not being alive to see the results. However, there is a solution. Your neck vertebrae are responsible for holding your head's weight. If you hang upside down from your feet the vertebrae in your neck move apart slightly because of the weight of your head pulling on them. To weigh your head you must simply lower yourself slowly on to a scale while hanging upside down. You continually observe the distance between the top vertebra of your neck and your skull, using, say, an ultrasound scanner, and the instant the vertebra starts moving toward the skull you stop and read the scales. Because your neck is not imparting any force on to your head this isolates your head from your neck, thus giving an accurate measure of your head's weight.

Andy Phelps,

BURNHAM-ON-SEA, SOMERSET

As a canoeist and kayaker, I remember when learning to do an Eskimo roll that my instructor told me to make sure that however much I needed a breath, the last thing to leave the water as my body emerged should be my head. He said the average human head weighs around 4.5kg. Unfortunately, I found that to be a lot of extra weight to lift clear of the water using only the blade of a paddle!

Andy Wells,

GRANTOWN-ON-SPEY, HIGHLANDS

Does bromide in tea dampen your libido?

After a friend complained about the overzealous attentions of a lover, I came across a reference in Paul Ferris's 'Sex and the British' to the use of bromide in tea as a means of curbing soldiers' sexual appetites. Is this advice I could pass on to my friend?

Chloe Dear,

EDINBURGH

Bromides are used as a sedative. The libido reduction is a side- effect. The use of bromide salts as a sleeping draught appears in the novels of Emile Zola, indicating their effects were recognised at some time in the 19th century. In a reference to using bromides to reduce libido, the comic and author Spike Milligan wrote in Rommel? Gunner Who?: 'I don't think the bromide had any lasting effect. The only way to stop a British soldier feeling randy is to load bromide into a 300lb shell and fire it at him from the waist down.'

John Rowland,

DERBY

How do black trousers make your bum look smaller?

I recently remarked to a female friend of mine that a lot of the girls in Swindon wear black trousers and denim jackets. She told me it was because black trousers 'make your bum look smaller'. Is this true? Can it be scientifically proven?

Neil Taylor,

SWINDON, WILTSHIRE

Yes, your bum does look smaller when you dress in black, at least if viewed from behind. The reason is that we can only perceive shapes if what we see appears in different shades or colours. If one wore white trousers the shape of your behind could be inferred from the slight shadows cast by its contour. In black clothing, the shadows are invisible and the shape appears flat. This is the reason why people with dark skin often seem to age well compared with pale- skinned people. Wrinkles and lines, which are visible mainly by virtue of the fact that they create shadows, are harder to detect on darker skin. It is also the reason why facial features need to be greatly exaggerated on dark bronze sculptures. Of course, your bottom will reveal its true size in profile, but black, especially matt, will save you a lot of exercise and dieting.

Glyn Hughes,

INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER AND SCULPTOR ADLINGTON, LANCASHIRE

Why do 'pictures' reappear on mirrors?

When condensation forms on a clean bathroom mirror, you can draw pictures in it. When the condensation evaporates, the pictures disappear. But when it forms again, they reappear. Why?

Glyn Williams, DERBY

When you draw an image in the condensation mist, you leave traces of finger grease (or, if you have just washed, grease plus shampoo or soap). The film is transparent, so you don't see it when the condensation clears. The next time water vapour condenses on the cold mirror, there is a difference in droplet size between condensation on clean glass and on contaminated glass. In some cases, it is the contaminated glass that encourages droplet formation, and then you see the image as positive rather than negative. But usually water-loving surfactants such as soap reduce the formation of droplets and generate a smoother, clear film of water, contrasting with the grey mist on the surrounding glass.

Hugh Wolfson,

ALTRINCHAM, CHESHIRE

Why do rubber bands spontaneously melt?

I find an ageing rubber band on my desk that has turned into a sticky mess. After a few more months, the sticky mass solidifies and becomes brittle. Why?

Stuart Arnold,

MUNICH, GERMANY

Natural rubber is made of polyisoprene chains that slip past each other when the material is stretched. When raw, the substance is too sticky and soft to be of much use, so it is toughened with the addition of chemicals such as sulphur that create cross-links between the chains, making the rubber stiffer and less sticky. This process is called vulcanisation. With time, ultraviolet light and oxygen in the air react with the rubber, creating reactive radicals that snip the polyisoprene chains into shorter segments. This returns the rubber to something like its original state " soft and sticky. Meanwhile, these radicals can also form new, short cross- links between chains. This hardens the rubber and eventually it turns brittle. Any vulcanisation agents left in the rubber contribute to the process. Whether a rubber band goes sticky or hard depends on the relative rates of these processes, and these rates in turn depend on the rubber's quality, such as what additives, fillers and dyes it contains " and how it is stored.

The Editor

Why are Guinness bubbles white?

When I buy a pint of Guinness there is no doubt the liquid is black. Yet the bubbles that settle on top, which are made of the same stuff, are white. The same is true of many types of beer. Why?

Stewart Brown, BRISTOL

In the interests of science I poured myself a Guinness and waited until the rising bubbles had formed a creamy head. I put a little of this in a dish and examined it through a low-powered microscope. Unlike bath foam, which has many semi-coalesced bubbles, Guinness foam is made mainly of uniformly sized, spherical bubbles of about 0.1mm to 0.2mm in diameter, suspended in the good fluid itself. Near the edge of the drop of foam it was possible to find isolated examples of bubbles, and by viewing objects held behind these it was clear that they were acting as tiny divergent lenses. Just as a clear spherical marble, which has a higher refractive index than the surrounding air, can act as a strong magnifying glass, so spherical bubbles in beer diverge light because the air they contain has a lower refractive index than the surrounding fluid. As a result, light entering the surface of the foam is rapidly scattered in different directions by multiple encounters with the bubbles. Reflections from the bubbles' surfaces also contribute to this scattering. Some of the light finds its way back to the surface, and because all wavelengths are affected in the same way we see the foam as white. Light scattering from foam is akin to the scattering from water droplets that causes clouds to be white. This is called Mie scattering. I drained the glass. On closer inspection, the head of Guinness is actually creamy coloured, and a drop or two that remained in the bottom of the glass had a light brown colour. Although bulk Guinness appears black, it is not opaque. In the foam there is not so much liquid " most of the space is taken up by air. But because light is scattered from bubble to bubble the intervening brew does absorb some of it, providing a touch of colour. To ensure reproducibility, the experiment was repeated several times.

Martin Whittle,

SHEFFIELD

Why does runny honey suddenly turn solid?

Jars that have remained clear for years can, over the space of a couple of weeks, change into solid sugar while the jar remains motionless on its shelf. Temperature does not seem to be a factor " the process can occur in winter or in summer.

Billy Gilligan,

READING, BERKSHIRE

Bee-keepers argue about this, as honeys from different sources behave differently. Honey is a supersaturated solution of various proportions of sugars (mainly glucose and fructose), and is full of insect scales, pollen grains and organic molecules that encourage or interfere with crystallisation. Glucose crystallises readily, while fructose stubbornly stays in solution. Honeys like aloe honey, which is rich in glucose and nucleating particles, go grainy, while some kinds of eucalyptus honey stay sweet and liquid for years. Unpredictably delayed crystallisation means a nucleation centre has formed by microbes, local drying, oxidation or other chemical reactions. Crystallisation can also be purely spontaneous, starting whenever enough molecules meet and form a seed crystal. Some sugars do this easily, others very rarely. By seeding honey with crystals, or violently stirring air into it, you can force crystallisation. Products made this way are sold as 'creamed' honey. The syrup between the sludge crystals is runnier and less sweet than the original honey, because its sugar is locked into crystals. Gently warm some creamed honey in a microwave until it dissolves, compare the taste of the syrup with the sludge " you will be astonished.

Jon Richfield,

SOMERSET WEST, SOUTH AFRICA

Which is less environmentally damaging, blue or white loo paper?

I always use blue toilet paper because it matches my bathroom decor. However, a friend told me that I should only use white, because coloured paper is more damaging to the environment. My local supermarket sells a huge variety of colours with any number of patterned varieties too. Is it true that some varieties are more environmentally damaging? And if so, why? Is kitchen roll even worse than toilet paper?

John Shaw,

DRIFFIELD, EAST YORKSHIRE

If your friend means that the dyes are ecologically harmful, forget it. Chemically active groups on the dye molecules cling to the cellulose, which is why the colours don't run and leave you fundamentally decorative after you apply them. The dyes are like a mousetrap that has caught a mouse: the mouse, in demonstrating its bite, has become harmless. Much as the trap is hard to reset, the dyes are hard to release from the paper. Dyes are expensive, and toilet paper requires only traces, so even the most environmentally unaware manufacturer will prefer safe dyes that are simple to handle, and can be applied stingily, typically in parts per million. When the paper reaches the sewage works, the immobilised molecules soon succumb to bacteria, so they do not accumulate in the environment. If you doubt this, buy a job lot of toilet paper, fold wads of say 10 squares, each of a single colour, bury them separately in moist garden soil, and in a month or two exhume them and observe the result. In good soil you will do well even to detect your test pieces after the earthworms have done their work. Much the same applies to kitchen paper, except that its strength while it is wet may mean it breaks down more slowly. Its persistence probably does more to provide bacteria with a durable home than harms the environment in any way. Anyway, what about the bleaches necessary for producing white toilet paper? If you really want to be politically correct, go for garbage grey.

Jon Richfield,

SOMERSET WEST, SOUTH AFRICA

Why is the sea blue?

I always believed that the sea looked blue because it reflected the colour of the sky. On holiday in Malta the sea was a very clear, deep azure blue inside caves where there was no reflected sky. What caused this colour?

Peter Scott, NORFOLK

Seawater appears blue because it is a very good absorber of all wavelengths of light, except for the shorter blue wavelengths, which are scattered effectively. The light attenuation is caused by the combined absorption and scattering properties of everything in the water, along with the water itself. Changes in the sea's colour are primarily due to changes in the type and concentration of plankton. Tropical oceans are clear because they are lacking in suspended sediment and plankton, which contrasts with the popular misconception that tropical waters have a high biological productivity. In fact, they are virtually sterile compared with the cooler, plankton-rich temperate ocean regions. Inorganic particulates and dissolved matter also reflect and absorb light, which affects the clarity of the water.

Johan Uys,

BELLVILLE, SOUTH AFRICA

Reflection of light contributes to the colour of the open sea, but does not determine it. Even pure water is slightly bluegreen, because it filters out the red and orange content of light. However, impurities in seawater, especially organic substances, affect its appearance far more drastically. In caves like those described, the light coming in must travel through a greater thickness of seawater than the light we usually see. The strong absorption of wavelengths other than blue and green intensifies the ethereal effect. In fact, such light contains so little red that navy personnel who have been on submarine duty for several days find everything looks unnaturally ruddy when they return to the surface.

Jon Richfield,

SOMERSET WEST, SOUTH AFRICA

Why do the equinoxes not always fall on the same date?

I was always under the impression that the equinoxes fell on 21 March and 21 September, dividing the year into four equal parts along with the solstices. However, I often read that the equinox will fall on a day other than the 21st. Surely there has to be an equal division of the seasons, relying on the Earth's orbit around the Sun? What could possibly change this?

Kingsly Richard,

TOULOUSE, FRANCE

The spring and autumn equinoxes are defined as the point in time when the sun is overhead at midday local time on the equator (in astronomical terms, the time at which the sun crosses the celestial equator). On the equinoxes there is an equal length of day and night everywhere in the world. The precise date of the equinoxes varies slightly; in the northern hemisphere the spring equinox usually falls on either 20 or 21 March and the autumn equinox on either 22 or 23 September (in the southern hemisphere the dates are reversed). This variation is simply because some years are leap years, so there is a shift in the calendar of a day or so relative to the seasons. The equinoxes occur on exactly opposite sides of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, but it is interesting that the dates on which they fall do not divide the year into two equal halves. Take the average dates of the equinoxes and the mean length of the year, and the autumn equinox falls 186 days after the spring equinox, whereas the spring equinox is only 179.25 days after the autumn equinox. This is because the Earth's orbit is elliptical and the Earth is closest to the Sun in early January. In accordance with Kepler's second law, which states that a line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time, this is the part of the year when the angular velocity of the Earth in its orbit is greatest. As a result, the half of Earth's orbit from the autumn to the spring equinox takes less time to complete than the half between the spring and autumn equinox, when the Earth is further from the sun and moving more slowly. Consequently, spring and summer, during which there are more than 12 hours of daylight, last nearly seven days longer in the northern hemisphere than in the southern.

Robert Harvey,

Swindon, Wiltshire

How much of Britain is taken up by roads?

Question asked by Stephen Webb, WEST MERSEA, ESSEX

The short answer is that the concrete jungle of roads covers less than 1 per cent of the UK's surface area. The small size of this amount is particularly apparent when our green and pleasant land is seen from the air. The internet community called Sabre (Society for All British Road Enthusiasts) has been hard at work to arrive at this figure. Our best estimate, derived from various and sometimes conflicting government data, is that there are 425,121km of public roads, comprising 3,589km of motorways, 56,696km of A-roads (of which 7,921km are dual carriageway), 32,850 km of B-roads, 89,686km of C-roads and 242,300km of unclassified roads. Allowing average paved widths of 26 metres for motorways, 18 metres for dual carriageways, 12m for other trunk roads, 8m for B-roads, 4m for C- roads and 3m for unclassified roads, gives a total area of almost 2,200 square kilometres of road. The total area of the UK is usually given as 241,590 square kilometres, so about 0.9 per cent of the land area is road. A rather higher figure, about 1.3 per cent, is sometimes proposed if the total width of land occupied by roads, including verges and hedgerows, is included. This is a less appropriate measure because road verges contribute significantly to wildlife habitat and biodiversity, and cannot seriously be called roads. More detailed statistics can be found in the discussion on the Sabre message boards under the thread 'road surface area' at http: //groups.msn.com/TheSABRERoadsWebsite

Biff Vernon,

MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE MEMBER, SABRE, LOUTH, LINCOLNSHIRE

Why does frost on windows make leaf patterns?

Question asked by Bob Clarke, NEW MINAS, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA

Waking up to frosty bedroom windows is becoming a thing of the past, thanks to the insulating properties of double glazing and cosy central heating. But if you are still stuck with single glazing, on winter mornings your view will be obscured by fern-like patterns of frost. Panes of glass lose heat quickly on cold nights, cooling the water vapour molecules in the indoor air nearest the glass. The temperature of the water molecules in the air can fall below 0C without them actually freezing. But as soon as this supercooled water vapour touches the cold glass, it turns directly to ice without first becoming water. Tiny scratches on the surface of the glass can collect enough molecules to form a seeding crystal from which intricate patterns then grow. Up close, the crystal surface is rough with lots of dangling chemical bonds. Water vapour molecules latch on to these rough surfaces and crystals can grow quickly. The structure of the elaborate branching depends on the temperature and humidity of the air, as well as on how smooth and clean the glass is. When the air is dry, the water molecules condense slowly out of the air and cluster together in stable hexagons. The six straight sides of these crystals are relatively smooth with very few dangling bonds, giving water vapour molecules little to hang on to. Feather- like patterns are more likely to form on clean windows and when the air is heavy with water molecules. Under these conditions, lots of water vapour molecules bombard the seed crystal and there is no time for the stable hexagons to form. Instead, the molecules latch on to the dangling bonds that stick out of any bumps in the crystal, which means the bumps grow even faster. These bumps eventually grow into large branches, and in turn the bumps on the branches become lacy fronds.

The Editor

Why do you still feel the sea's motion after you have got off a boat?

When I returned home after a day of sailing lessons, I still had the feeling that the room was moving up and down. Why is this?

Richard Matthews (aged 9), OXFORD

In order for you to estimate your location, your brain combines information from a variety of sources, including sight, touch, joint position, the inner ear and its internal expectations. Under most circumstances, the senses and internal expectations all agree. When they disagree, there is imprecision and ambiguity about motion estimation, which can result in loss of balance and motion sickness. On boats, seasickness may develop because of conflict between sensory input and internal expectations about motion. Developing 'sea legs' is nature's cure for seasickness: you become accustomed to anticipating the boat's movements and prepare to adjust your posture accordingly. When you finally go ashore, you may feel your body continuing to do this for hours or even days afterwards, making it seem as if the room is moving and sometimes even leading to nausea. A few unfortunate people experience persistent symptoms lasting months or even years. Exactly why their symptoms persist so long isn't understood, but they can be treated. Sailing isn't the only activity that causes illusory motion after-effects. Overnight rail passengers sometimes say they can feel the 'clickety-clack' of the track in their legs after they leave the train. And astronauts returning to Earth commonly experience vertigo, nausea, difficulty walking and sensory flashbacks. The longer one is exposed to the unfamiliar motion, the more prominent and long-lasting are the after- effects.

Timothy Hain, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL THERAPY AND HUMAN MOVEMENT SCIENCES, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, US

and Charles Oman, MAN VEHICLE LABORATORY, MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, US

For how long can you survive on beer alone?

And do different beers " ale, lager, stout, mild " confer a better chance of survival?

John Eden NARARA, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA

Beer has had a reputation since antiquity as being a staple in the diet, often called 'liquid bread'. In ancient Egypt, workers received beer as part of their salary, as did the ladies-in-waiting of Queen Elizabeth I of England. In 1492, one gallon of beer per day was the standard allocation for sailors in the navy of Henry VII. This high reputation for beer came about because it was made from malted barley, which is rich in vitamins. This is still true today. A quick check using nutritional tables shows that a pint can provide more than 5 per cent of the daily recommended intake of several vitamins, such as B9, B6 and B2, although other vitamins such as A, C and D are lacking. It is of course unethical to conduct an experiment to see whether one can live on beer alone. However, during the Seven Years War of 1756"63, John Clephane, physician to the English fleet, conducted a clinical trial. Three ships were sent from England to America. One " the Grampus " was supplied with plenty of beer, while the two control ships " the Daedalus and the Tortoise " had only the common allowance of spirits. After an unusually long voyage due to bad weather, Clephane reported that the Daedalus and Tortoise had 112 and 62 men respectively requiring hospitalisation. The Grampus, on the other hand, had only 13, arguably a clear-cut result. Needless to say, the sailors' allowance of eight pints of beer per day is no longer within the accepted confines of current moderate alcohol consumption. One can only speculate on the state of their livers. Living on beer alone may be a fantasy for some, but it is not a good health strategy.

C Walker BREWING RESEARCH

INTERNATIONAL, NUTFIELD, SURREY

I offer the following answer: I'm 39 and still alive.

Chris Jack ST ALBANS, HERTFORDSHIRE

Does beheading hurt?

And, if so, for how long is the severed head aware of its plight?

William Wild OXFORD

Yes, beheading hurts. How much depends on the executioner's skill, or lack of it. When Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed at Fotheringay Castle in 1587, a clumsy headsman gave her three strokes without quite managing to sever her head. The headsman then had to saw though the skin and gristle with his sheath knife before the job could be regarded as complete. The profound, protracted groan Mary gave when the axe first hit left the horrified witnesses in no doubt that her pain was excruciating.

Dale McIntyre

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

A detailed report comes from Dr Beaurieux, who experimented with the head of the murderer Languille, guillotined at 5.30am on 28 June 1905. (From A History of the Guillotine by Alister Kershaw) 'Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds ... I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying, or as in those just dead. It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: 'Languille!' I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions ... Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves ... After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out. It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead. The whole thing had lasted 25 to 30 seconds.'

Mike Snowden LONDON

How fat would you have to be to become bulletproof?

Ward van Nostrom BY EMAIL

The damage a bullet does is measured in two ways: the depth of penetration and the amount of tissue damage per centimetre of penetration. A 9mm handgun round " the most common type " is quoted in The Compendium of Modern Firearms by K Dockery and R Talsorian (Games, 1991) as being able to penetrate approximately 60cms of human flesh before it stops, doing an average of 1 cubic centimetre of damage per centimetre of penetration. In reality the distance penetrated is often much less, because rounds hit bones or pass through the target. This data is also based on a body tissue average. Because fat is about 10 per cent softer and less dense than muscle, the figure of 60cm may be too little.

Thomas Lambert BASLOW, DERBYSHIRE

Why does lemon juice stop cut apples and pears from browning?

Brian Dobson

ALTON, HAMPSHIRE

To answer this question first we need to understand why some plant tissues go brown when cut. Plant cells have various compartments, including vacuoles and plastids, which are separated from each other by membranes. The vacuoles contain phenolic compounds which are sometimes coloured but usually colourless, while other compartments of the cell house enzymes called phenol oxidases.

In a healthy plant cell, membranes separate the phenolics and the oxidases. However, when the cell is damaged " by cutting into an apple, for example " phenolics can leak from the vacuoles through the punctured membrane and come into contact with the oxidases.

In the presence of oxygen from the surrounding air these enzymes oxidise the phenolics to give products which may help protect the plant, favouring wound healing, but also turning the plant material brown. The browning reaction can be blocked by one of two agents, both of which are present in lemon juice. The first is vitamin C, a biological antioxidant that is oxidised to colourless products instead of the apple's phenolics.

The second agents are organic acids, especially citric acid, which make the pH lower than the oxidases' optimum level and thus slow the browning. Lemon juice has more than 50 times the vitamin C content of apples and pears. And lemon juice, with a pH of less than 2, is much more acidic than apple juice as a quick taste will tell you. So lemon juice will immediately prevent browning.

You could also prevent cut apples browning, even without lemon juice, by putting them in an atmosphere of nitrogen or carbon dioxide, thus excluding the oxygen required by the oxidases.

Stephen C Fry

INSTITUTE OF CELL AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Why is it colder at the South Pole than the North Pole?

TP Ladd MIRFIELD, WEST YORKSHIRE

Much of the temperature difference between the two poles can be explained by their difference in elevation. The North Pole (monthly average temperatures in winter of around -30C) lies on sea ice on the surface of the Arctic Ocean while the South Pole (at around - 60C) is 2,800 metres above sea level on the ice sheets of the Antarctic continent. The background variation of temperature with height (in Antarctica about -6C per kilometre gain in height) thus accounts for over half the difference. Also, the 'thinner' (and hence colder, drier and less cloudy) atmosphere overlying the South Pole reflects less heat back to the surface than its northern counterpart. Much of the remainder of the temperature difference can be explained by the contrasting atmospheric circulation regimes in the two hemispheres. The continents of the northern hemisphere drive quasistationary 'planetary waves' in the atmosphere. These waves transport heat polewards and also 'steer' mid-latitude depressions into the north polar regions. The continents of the southern hemisphere are smaller and lower than those in the north, so the southern hemisphere planetary waves (and associated heat transport) are smaller. The high mountains of Antarctica also block the poleward movement of mid-latitude depressions, which rarely penetrate into the interior of the continent. Finally, the atmosphere at the North Pole receives some heat from the underlying Arctic Ocean.

John King

BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY, CAMBRIDGE

What would happen if aliens stole the moon?

Steven Nairn EDINBURGH

The most immediate difference would be the disappearance of the tides. Both the sun and moon influence the tides, but the moon is the dominant force. Remove the moon and the daily rush of the tides would recede to a gentle ripple. The next omen of doom would be wild swings in the Earth's rotational axis from a position almost perpendicular to the ecliptic plane all the way to being practically parallel to it. These swings would provoke drastic climate changes: when the axis points straight up, each point on the globe would receive a constant amount of heat throughout the year but, when the axis lies parallel to the ecliptic, Earthlings would spend six months sweltering under the unending blaze of the sun, only to spin round and shiver for the next six months, hidden on the frigid surface of the Earth's dark side. Of all calamities, though, the creature to be pitied first is the marine organism called 'nautilus'. This mollusc lives in an elegant shell shaped like a perfect spiral partitioned off into compartments. The nautilus only lives in the outermost partition, and each day adds a new layer to its shell. At the end of each month, when the moon has completed one revolution around Earth, the nautilus abandons its current compartment, closes it up with a partition, and moves into a new one. Remove the moon and the nautilus lies stranded, forever locked in the same chamber and wishing ruefully for the days when it could look forward to a new home.

Andrew Turpin

NEW MOAT, PEMBROKESHIRE

Why do dew drops form at the top of grass blades?

There have been many times that I have unzipped the flap door on my tent while still in my sleeping bag to see that a heavy dew had fallen during the night. Being so close to the dew-laden grass, I always notice that the individual drops occupy an apparently precarious position at the very tips of grass blades. How do they get there and how do they stay there?

John Lamont-Black

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE

This process is called guttation. On the surface of leaves there are stomata or pores through which water is lost by transpiration. At night, the stomata close, causing a reduction in transpiration. Drops of water are then forced out of the leaf through special stomata or hydathodes. These special stomata are found along the edges of the leaves or at the tips. It is believed that guttation is caused by high root pressure. Grasses often force water out of the tips of their blades, as your wide-awake camping correspondent noticed. Guttation also happens in potatoes, tomatoes and strawberries on their leaf margins.

Frances Tobin

MANLY, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA

Could you move a large ship by pushing it with your hands?

Suppose a large ship, such as the 'QE2', is floating freely alongside a quay and no forces such as wind or sea currents are acting on it. If I stand on the quay and push the side of the ship, will it move, even very slowly and slightly? Or is there some sort of limiting friction caused by all those water molecules around the hull that can only be overcome by a much larger threshold force?

Trevor Kitson

MASSEY UNIVERSITY, NEW ZEALAND

While I was a conscript in the service of King George V, on several occasions I moved a destroyer under the circumstances described by your correspondent. At slack tide in Harwich harbour in Essex, and with a slack breeze, I leaned my belly against a stanchion on one ship, stretched with both hands across the narrow gap to a similar stanchion on the ship that was lying alongside, and pulled hard. For perhaps half a minute there seemed to be no result, but slowly the gap between them began to diminish until the two ships came quietly, and without fuss or noise, into contact. And, left alone, they remained in contact. Then, by reversing the process over a similar timescale, and substituting a push for a pull, the two ships returned to their starting positions. The process was remarkably simple.

The QE2 is just a trifle larger than a Royal Navy destroyer but I believe that the only difference would be in the timescale required to move the ship. Should your correspondent find an, admittedly unlikely, opportunity to try this experiment with such a large vessel I would advise that he takes care not to hold his breath while pulling.

Ken Green

TINTAGEL, CORNWALL

Take the sting out of Christmas

Does Anything Eat Wasps? is published by Profile Books in association with the 'New Scientist' and normally sells for pounds 7.99, but readers of 'The Independent on Sunday' can buy copies for the special price of just pounds 6.99, including free p&p. To order this perfect Christmas stocking filler, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 or send a cheque, made payable to Independent Books Direct, to PO Box 60, Helston, TR13 OTP. Place your orders by 12 December to make sure you get your copy in time for the 25th. You can also join the Last Word column's debates by buying the New Scientist or logging on to www.newscientist.com/ lastword.ns, where you can pose your own question or answer another.

Story from REDORBIT NEWS: http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=314550

Web 2.0

   
 Published on O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/)
 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
 See this if you're having trouble printing code examples

What Is Web 2.0
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum's rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

In the year and a half since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.

1. The Web As Platform

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

Figure 1 shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media. It's very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.

For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was "The web as platform." Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What's more, two of our initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People don't often think of it as "web services", but in fact, ad serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first widely deployed "mashup" (to use another term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth congestion.

Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further, understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it's possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional Web 2.0 design patterns.

Let's drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference.

Netscape vs. Google

If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So let's start with a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.

Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the "horseless carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.

In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be commodities, and value moved "up the stack" to services delivered over the web platform.

Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.

At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn't just a collection of software tools, it's a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs--the lever of power in the previous era--is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Google's service is not a server--though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers--nor a browser--though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.

While both Netscape and Google could be described as software companies, it's clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other companies that got their start in the 1980's software revolution, while Google's fellows are other internet applications like eBay, Amazon, Napster, and yes, DoubleClick and Akamai.

DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense

Like Google, DoubleClick is a true child of the internet era. It harnesses software as a service, has a core competency in data management, and, as noted above, was a pioneer in web services long before web services even had a name. However, DoubleClick was ultimately limited by its business model. It bought into the '90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots; that size mattered, and that the internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other web ad scoring companies.

As a result, DoubleClick proudly cites on its website "over 2000 successful implementations" of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers apiece.

Overture and Google's success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as "the long tail," the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web's content. DoubleClick's offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What's more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.

The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

Not surprisingly, other web 2.0 success stories demonstrate this same behavior. eBay enables occasional transactions of only a few dollars between single individuals, acting as an automated intermediary. Napster (though shut down for legal reasons) built its network not by building a centralized song database, but by architecting a system in such a way that every downloader also became a server, and thus grew the network.

Akamai vs. BitTorrent

Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized to do business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges. While it serves the benefit of the individuals at the edge of the web by smoothing their access to the high-demand sites at the center, it collects its revenue from those central sites.

BitTorrent, like other pioneers in the P2P movement, takes a radical approach to internet decentralization. Every client is also a server; files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file.

BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party. There's an implicit "architecture of participation", a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:

• Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users.
  
• Yahoo!, the first great internet success story, was born as a catalog, or directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. While Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal to the collective work of the net's users remains the core of its value.
  
• Google's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it the undisputed search market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.
  
• eBay's product is the collective activity of all its users; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity, and the company's role is as an enabler of a context in which that user activity can happen. What's more, eBay's competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new entrant offering similar services significantly less attractive.
  
• Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page--and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company's own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with "most popular", a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the "flow" around products. With an order of magnitude more user participation, it's no surprise that Amazon's sales also outpace competitors.

Now, innovative companies that pick up on this insight and perhaps extend it even further, are making their mark on the web:

• Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust, applying Eric Raymond's dictum (originally coined in the context of open source software) that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," to content creation. Wikipedia is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a profound change in the dynamics of content creation!
  
• Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, two companies that have received a great deal of attention of late, have pioneered a concept that some people call "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. In the canonical example, a Flickr photo of a puppy might be tagged both "puppy" and "cute"--allowing for retrieval along natural axes generated user activity.
  
• Collaborative spam filtering products like Cloudmark aggregate the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam, outperforming systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.
  
• It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.
  
• Even much of the infrastructure of the web--including the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python code involved in most web servers--relies on the peer-production methods of open source, in themselves an instance of collective, net-enabled intelligence. There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on SourceForge.net. Anyone can add a project, anyone can download and use the code, and new projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost entirely on viral marketing.

The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.

Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?

At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog "seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain."

One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this "the incremental web." Others call it the "live web".

Now, of course, "dynamic websites" (i.e., database-backed sites with dynamically generated content) replaced static web pages well over ten years ago. What's dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a perennially changing page, with "permalinks" for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than, say a bookmark or a link to a single page.

RSS also means that the web browser is not the only means of viewing a web page. While some RSS aggregators, such as Bloglines, are web-based, others are desktop clients, and still others allow users of portable devices to subscribe to constantly updated content.

RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability. This use is actually a return to one of its roots: RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's "Rich Site Summary", which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows. Netscape lost interest, and the technology was carried forward by blogging pioneer Userland, Winer's company. In the current crop of applications, we see, though, the heritage of both parents.

But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. Tom Coates remarks on the significance of the permalink:

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The "blogosphere" can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others' sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

Interestingly, two-way links were the goal of early hypertext systems like Xanadu. Hypertext purists have celebrated trackbacks as a step towards two way links. But note that trackbacks are not properly two-way--rather, they are really (potentially) symmetrical one-way links that create the effect of two way links. The difference may seem subtle, but in practice it is enormous. Social networking systems like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, which require acknowledgment by the recipient in order to establish a connection, lack the same scalability as the web. As noted by Caterina Fake, co-founder of the Flickr photo sharing service, attention is only coincidentally reciprocal. (Flickr thus allows users to set watch lists--any user can subscribe to any other user's photostream via RSS. The object of attention is notified, but does not have to approve the connection.)

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The "echo chamber" that critics decry is also an amplifier.

If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.

3. Data is the Next Intel Inside

Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software.

This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?

In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While we've argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects.

Look at the copyright notices at the base of every map served by MapQuest, maps.yahoo.com, maps.msn.com, or maps.google.com, and you'll see the line "Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas," or with the new satellite imagery services, "Images copyright Digital Globe." These companies made substantial investments in their databases (NavTeq alone reportedly invested $750 million to build their database of street addresses and directions. Digital Globe spent $500 million to launch their own satellite to improve on government-supplied imagery.) NavTeq has gone so far as to imitate Intel's familiar Intel Inside logo: Cars with navigation systems bear the imprint, "NavTeq Onboard." Data is indeed the Intel Inside of these applications, a sole source component in systems whose software infrastructure is largely open source or otherwise commodified.

The now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application's core data will eventually undercut its competitive position. MapQuest pioneered the web mapping category in 1995, yet when Yahoo!, and then Microsoft, and most recently Google, decided to enter the market, they were easily able to offer a competing application simply by licensing the same data.

Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers.

Imagine if MapQuest had done the same thing, harnessing their users to annotate maps and directions, adding layers of value. It would have been much more difficult for competitors to enter the market just by licensing the base data.

The recent introduction of Google Maps provides a living laboratory for the competition between application vendors and their data suppliers. Google's lightweight programming model has led to the creation of numerous value-added services in the form of mashups that link Google Maps with other internet-accessible data sources. Paul Rademacher's housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.

At present, these mashups are mostly innovative experiments, done by hackers. But entrepreneurial activity follows close behind. And already, one can see that for at least one class of developer, Google has taken the role of data source away from Navteq and inserted themselves as a favored intermediary. We expect to see battles between data suppliers and application vendors in the next few years, as both realize just how important certain classes of data will become as building blocks for Web 2.0 applications.

The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

For example, in the area of identity, PayPal, Amazon's 1-click, and the millions of users of communications systems, may all be legitimate contenders to build a network-wide identity database. (In this regard, Google's recent attempt to use cell phone numbers as an identifier for Gmail accounts may be a step towards embracing and extending the phone system.) Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of "distributed 1-click" that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem. In the area of calendaring, EVDB is an attempt to build the world's largest shared calendar via a wiki-style architecture of participation. While the jury's still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it's clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the "internet operating system", will enable the next generation of applications.

A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.

Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

4. End of the Software Release Cycle

As noted above in the discussion of Google vs. Netscape, one of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product. This fact leads to a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a company:

1. Operations must become a core competency. Google's or Yahoo!'s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements.
   

   It's no accident that Google's system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google's success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

   
   

   It's also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, as "the duct tape of the internet." Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

   
   
2. Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.
   

   Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site."

   
   

   Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour. This is clearly a radically different development model! While not all web applications are developed in as extreme a style as Flickr, almost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era. It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won't be able to beat Google: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."

While Microsoft has demonstrated enormous ability to learn from and ultimately best its competition, there's no question that this time, the competition will require Microsoft (and by extension, every other existing software company) to become a deeply different kind of company. Native Web 2.0 companies enjoy a natural advantage, as they don't have old patterns (and corresponding business models and revenue sources) to shed.

5. Lightweight Programming Models

Once the idea of web services became au courant, large companies jumped into the fray with a complex web services stack designed to create highly reliable programming environments for distributed applications.

But much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.

Similarly, Amazon.com's web services are provided in two forms: one adhering to the formalisms of the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services stack, the other simply providing XML data over HTTP, in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State Transfer). While high value B2B connections (like those between Amazon and retail partners like ToysRUs) use the SOAP stack, Amazon reports that 95% of the usage is of the lightweight REST service.

This same quest for simplicity can be seen in other "organic" web services. Google's recent release of Google Maps is a case in point. Google Maps' simple AJAX (Javascript and XML) interface was quickly decrypted by hackers, who then proceeded to remix the data into new services.

Mapping-related web services had been available for some time from GIS vendors such as ESRI as well as from MapQuest and Microsoft MapPoint. But Google Maps set the world on fire because of its simplicity. While experimenting with any of the formal vendor-supported web services required a formal contract between the parties, the way Google Maps was implemented left the data for the taking, and hackers soon found ways to creatively re-use that data.

There are several significant lessons here:

1. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. The complexity of the corporate-sponsored web services stack is designed to enable tight coupling. While this is necessary in many cases, many of the most interesting applications can indeed remain loosely coupled, and even fragile. The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset!
   
2. Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle.
   
3. Design for "hackability" and remixability. Systems like the original web, RSS, and AJAX all have this in common: the barriers to re-use are extremely low. Much of the useful software is actually open source, but even when it isn't, there is little in the way of intellectual property protection. The web browser's "View Source" option made it possible for any user to copy any other user's web page; RSS was designed to empower the user to view the content he or she wants, when it's wanted, not at the behest of the information provider; the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators. The phrase "some rights reserved," which was popularized by the Creative Commons to contrast with the more typical "all rights reserved," is a useful guidepost.

Innovation in Assembly

Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. The Web 2.0 mindset is good at re-use. A new service like housingmaps.com was built simply by snapping together two existing services. Housingmaps.com doesn't have a business model (yet)--but for many small-scale services, Google AdSense (or perhaps Amazon associates fees, or both) provides the snap-in equivalent of a revenue model.

These examples provide an insight into another key web 2.0 principle, which we call "innovation in assembly." When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways. Much as the PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell making a science out of such assembly, thereby defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development, we believe that Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others.

6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform. In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that "Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come."

Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And as we've discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers.

But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the "2.0-ness" is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform.

To date, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example.

iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure. Data management is most clearly the heart of their offering. They are services, not packaged applications (although in the case of iTunes, it can be used as a packaged application, managing only the user's local data.) What's more, both TiVo and iTunes show some budding use of collective intelligence, although in each case, their experiments are at war with the IP lobby's. There's only a limited architecture of participation in iTunes, though the recent addition of podcasting changes that equation substantially.

This is one of the areas of Web 2.0 where we expect to see some of the greatest change, as more and more devices are connected to the new platform. What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it? Real time traffic monitoring, flash mobs, and citizen journalism are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.

7. Rich User Experiences

As early as Pei Wei's Viola browser in 1992, the web was being used to deliver "applets" and other kinds of active content within the web browser. Java's introduction in 1995 was framed around the delivery of such applets. JavaScript and then DHTML were introduced as lightweight ways to provide client side programmability and richer user experiences. Several years ago, Macromedia coined the term "Rich Internet Applications" (which has also been picked up by open source Flash competitor Laszlo Systems) to highlight the capabilities of Flash to deliver not just multimedia content but also GUI-style application experiences.

However, the potential of the web to deliver full scale applications didn't hit the mainstream till Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. The collection of technologies used by Google was christened AJAX, in a seminal essay by Jesse James Garrett of web design firm Adaptive Path. He wrote:

"Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
  
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  
• and JavaScript binding everything together."

AJAX is also a key component of Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr, now part of Yahoo!, 37signals' applications basecamp and backpack, as well as other Google applications such as Gmail and Orkut. We're entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.

Interestingly, many of the capabilities now being explored have been around for many years. In the late '90s, both Microsoft and Netscape had a vision of the kind of capabilities that are now finally being realized, but their battle over the standards to be used made cross-browser applications difficult. It was only when Microsoft definitively won the browser wars, and there was a single de-facto browser standard to write to, that this kind of application became possible. And while Firefox has reintroduced competition to the browser market, at least so far we haven't seen the destructive competition over web standards that held back progress in the '90s.

We expect to see many new web applications over the next few years, both truly novel applications, and rich web reimplementations of PC applications. Every platform change to date has also created opportunities for a leadership change in the dominant applications of the previous platform.

Gmail has already provided some interesting innovations in email, combining the strengths of the web (accessible from anywhere, deep database competencies, searchability) with user interfaces that approach PC interfaces in usability. Meanwhile, other mail clients on the PC platform are nibbling away at the problem from the other end, adding IM and presence capabilities. How far are we from an integrated communications client combining the best of email, IM, and the cell phone, using VoIP to add voice capabilities to the rich capabilities of web applications? The race is on.

It's easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you've explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn't found in the local cache. Lacking an answer there, the system would query the broader social network.

A Web 2.0 word processor would support wiki-style collaborative editing, not just standalone documents. But it would also support the rich formatting we've come to expect in PC-based word processors. Writely is a good example of such an application, although it hasn't yet gained wide traction.

Nor will the Web 2.0 revolution be limited to PC applications. Salesforce.com demonstrates how the web can be used to deliver software as a service, in enterprise scale applications such as CRM.

The competitive opportunity for new entrants is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.

Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies

In exploring the seven principles above, we've highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we've explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let's close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  
• Trusting users as co-developers
  
• Harnessing collective intelligence
  
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
  
• Software above the level of a single device
  
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

The next time a company claims that it's "Web 2.0," test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.

Tim O'Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc., tim@oreilly.com
President and CEO

Copyright © 2005 O'Reilly Media, Inc

Ukrainian couple has 17th child, lays claim to largest US family

Lou Rawls' Last Days?

Lou Rawls' Last Days?

12/16/2005 6:36 PM, E! Online
Joal Ryan

A singing great "is not expected to live much more."

Grammy winner Lou Rawls is ailing from lung and brain cancer, the Arizona Republic first reported Friday. The paper cited statements made at a court hearing Thursday by the entertainer's estranged wife.

Nina Rawls told a judge in Maricopa County, Arizona, that her husband's condition once was so grave that he had been given a one-month-to-live prognosis.

"By his doctor's own admission," a tearful Nina Rawls said, per the Republic, "he is not expected to live much more."

But Rawls, who turned 70 on Dec. 1, was well enough to take a phone call Thursday night from the newspaper in his Los Angeles hospital room.

"Don't count me out, brother," Rawls told the paper. "There's been many people who have been diagnosed with this kind of thing, and they're still jumpin' and pumpin'."

Rawls' publicist has not gone into specifics on his client's condition, noting only that Rawls has been diagnosed with cancer and is receiving "various treatments."

By Nina Rawls' account, the newspaper reported, the singer was diagnosed with lung cancer one year ago, and brain cancer about seven months ago.

The revelations about Rawls' health were made public in a hearing on the soul man's request for an annulment from Nina Rawls. The pair wed on New Year's Day 2004, per IMDb.com. According to the Republic, Rawls is accusing his bride of funny money business.

Rawls and Nina Rawls, 35 years his junior, are the parents of an infant son.

A onetime collaborator of rock/soul/gospel legend Sam Cooke, Rawls' recording career as a solo artist dates back more than 40 years. In all, he has released more than 75 albums. His distinctive deep voice has won him three Grammys, and scored a gold-record hit with the 1976 slow-dance groove, "You'll Never Find (Another Love Like Mine)."

Home for Holidays, Rocking the Nest

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Jake Goss, 19, a freshman at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, is back at home on Long Island for the holidays. He's happy to see family and friends, he says, "but when I go away, I totally enjoy my freedom."

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Patricia and Timothy Goss of Long Island with their son Jake, a freshman at the University of South Carolina in Columbia

December 17, 2005
Home for Holidays, Rocking the Nest
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

Jennifer Larsen is home for the holidays, at least in spirit.

Ms. Larsen, 20, a junior at Kean University in Union, N.J., rushed home on Dec. 9, dropped two bags of laundry at the foot of her bed, stayed just long enough to recharge her cellphone, then ran out the door.

"Since Jennifer came back from school, she's been running in and out of here, and I never know when she's coming home," her mother, Debbie Larsen, said Sunday, staring at her wristwatch as she spoke in the empty family room of her home in Aberdeen, N.J. "Who sees her anymore?"

This is the time of the year when parents and their children reunite for the first long spell since the duffel bags were loaded into the minivans and hauled off to college dorm rooms. Papers are in, exams are over and dirty laundry is dragged home - the quarters ran out in November - to be done over the long winter break.

While parents of freshmen look forward to a magical time of renewed family ties and the return of familiar household rhythms, others know this darker truth: In many homes, chaos ensues.

Letting go, those parents say, is difficult. But bringing the young adults back into the fold - after months of late nights, binge eating and utter freedom - is not always easy.

"It's hard to comprehend my son's concept of time," said Mark Beal of Toms River, N.J., a public relations executive who works in Manhattan.

Mr. Beal, whose 21-year-old son, Drew, is a junior at the College of New Jersey in Ewing Township, was in for a surprise on Friday when he left his home for work at 5 a.m., briefcase in one hand, coffee in the other.

"I'm walking out the door, and here comes Drew, holding the morning paper, just getting home from a long night of poker with his college buddies," Mr. Beal said. "You can't make heads or tails out of it."

Mary Ford of Fairfield, Conn., a mother of three whose 19-year-old daughter, Amy, is a sophomore at Fordham University in the Bronx, said they had trouble connecting at times, especially when Amy was home from school, burning up the phone lines until late in the evening.

"Hours and hours of social plans being made over the phone," she said. "I just can't deal with it."

At college, instant messaging all day, watching all-night marathons of "Sex and the City" and sleeping until noon are just part of the way life is lived. There's no one to check in with. No one needs to know your plans. Freedom reigns. And most parents are fine with that.

But take that lifestyle and try inserting it into a household where parents have become better at adapting to an empty home than their child thought possible, and it can be nerve-racking.

"A parent who has a child at college does not go to bed wondering, 'Is he or she home yet?' " said Karen Levin Coburn, a co-author of "Letting Go: A Parents' Guide to Understanding the College Years" and an assistant vice chancellor for students at Washington University in St. Louis.

"But once a child is back home and a parent wakes up at 2 in the morning and realizes their child is still out, they can't turn off the parent-worry button. They start wondering, 'Where is my kid?' "

Even the most understanding, patient parents find themselves asking for just a little bit of courtesy and communication, please.

"She tells me she's coming from school, so I have dinner waiting for her, but then I never hear from her again," said Wanda Shenkman of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., whose daughter, Erica, is a sophomore at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. "I don't find out until the next day that a friend picked her up at the train station and that she went there to spend the night."

Patricia and Timothy Goss of Wading River on Long Island, whose 19-year-old son, Jake, is a freshman at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, said they were not used to amending their own plans.

"As parents, you develop your own set of routines when the kids are away," said Mrs. Goss, whose two older daughters have graduated from college. "But when they're home, there are a lot of extra hours you have to spend cooking, cleaning and washing clothes.

"It's always nice when they come home," she said. "And it's always nice when they leave."

Ms. Coburn, who has two children who have graduated from college, said that the minute those duffel bags cross the threshold, parents should re-establish ground rules.

"They need to sit down, adult to adult, and ask their children: 'What can we do to work this out? What are our expectations of one another?' But they also need to acknowledge that their children went out in the world, survived and came back, and they need to show them some respect for that."

Their children say they, like, couldn't agree more.

"My mom is really excited to talk to me and catch up on things when I first get home," Jennifer Larsen said. "But then I end up being in her way, and she can't wait to get me out of the house again.

"But what about when I come home and she gets in my way?" Ms. Larsen continued. "What about the times I need to unwind after a long month at school, or I need to study for an exam, and she asks me to take my little brother to the mall or run a bunch of other errands, then who is being inconvenienced?"

Erica Shenkman agrees.

"I come home sometimes and find my mom's ironing board set up in the middle of my room with piles of clothing on top of it, and the television is still on," she said. "Sometimes I come home and find that one of my brothers has put his clothes in my closet, and I'm like, 'Hello, why is my room being used as a dumping ground?' "

Jake Goss said he would rather dwell on the positive aspects of being both home and away.

"I'm happy to come home, because I have my family, my friends, and real food waiting for me, and that makes it tough to complain," he said. "But when I go away, I totally enjoy my freedom. I like not having to report to anyone."

Parents say they have two choices if they want to survive the winter break: Stand firm or adapt.

Some choose to lay down the law: "Just because you're back from college, don't expect the house rules to change," Mrs. Goss said.

But others - who say they'll look the other way as laundry and dirty dishes pile up, cereal boxes and milk jugs are left on kitchen counters and footsteps are heard at 3:56 a.m. (but who's keeping track?) - choose simply to lie down.

"There's only so much energy I can invest," Ms. Ford said. "After that, I just go to bed."

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to To

Pixair Animation

The Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of 20 years of animation by Pixar. Here, Geefwee Boedoe Sullivan and Boo Monsters.
(Photo by - ©Disney/Pixar)

The Museum of Modern Art will present an exhibition of animation by Pixar, observing its 20th anniversary.
(© Disney/Pixar) December 13, 2005

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

An invasion of animation
MoMA's 'Pixar' exhibit blends reality, memory and fantasy

BY ARIELLA BUDICK
STAFF WRITER

December 18, 2005

Monsters, bugs, cute little fish and superheroes have taken over the Museum of Modern Art, turning its austere, white galleries into bright oases of pop culture. There are pot-bellied, polka-dotted hominids, futuristic pastel settlements, phosphorescent deep-seascapes, hopping penguins and huge, toothy sharks.

Most of the museum is still consecrated to the gods of high art, but serious square footage has been given over to "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation," a kinetic, crowd-pleasing show surveying all of the studio's films: "Toy Story" and its sequel; "A Bug's Life"; "Monsters, Inc."; "Finding Nemo"; and "The Incredibles." It features drawings, paintings, collages and sculptures produced in the process of bringing fantasy to the screen.

It's an exhibit with an agenda. Pixar's people and MoMA's curators alike want to prove that animation involves a lot more than mere technology. As Pixar's creative guru John Lasseter puts it in a wall text, "Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist."

With the company's enthusiastic cooperation, curators Steven Higgins and Ronald Magliozzi have selected 500 objects to illustrate the studio's deep dependence on traditional media. The emphasis is on the handmade look, on the creative process and on the technical virtuosity of the artists.

Setting the scene

The first thing that animators conceive is the world that the characters will inhabit. "Toy Story" grows out of a child's cozy bedroom. "Finding Nemo" takes place amid sublime undersea panoramas full of animate vegetation and leering fish. The setting for "The Incredibles" is a space-age suburbia full of ominous shadows, Cubist buildings and postwar Modernism, Palm Springs-style.

This stage is set through "colorscripts" - storyboards without the story - that map out the mood, atmosphere and overall look of the movie. This preliminary scene-setting functions as the element in a drama that has yet to be written.

The characters are first imagined and later refined through multiple drawings and sculptures. Edna Mode (aka "E," the Lilliputian fashion designer in "The Incredibles") underwent numerous revisions, and the show tracks 14 separate incarnations. She started out tall and mannish, but was ultimately shrunken to a cuter size and bedecked with a pair of oversized glasses and an Anna Wintour bob.

For Sullivan, the tall and goofy titan of "Monsters, Inc.," Jerome Ranft modeled a set of sculptural studies. "Sulley" evolved from a creature with six eyes and oodles of curling tentacles to a much more conventional beast who looks like one of the Wild Things from Maurice Sendak's classic children's book.

Familiar images

The resonance of Pixar's creations with such artists as Sendak cuts to the heart of its creative power. More than most of the Modernists housed at MoMA, Pixar depends on a shared set of associations and a conventional set of images. The worlds they create are imaginative, but not too much: They depend utterly on familiarity.

Dominique R. Louis' colorscript monster looks like a cousin of Goya's "Saturn," the horrific god who devours his son. Downtown Monstropolis is a cross between Brooklyn and Rome, with a landmark church that looks remarkably like St. Peter's Basilica. Luigi's Tire Shop from the upcoming film "Cars" is modeled on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, built of rubber tubing.

Pixar's invented universe triangulates between reality, memory and fantasy. Its artists fine-tune a set of cultural references until they are intimately known but still seem fresh.

Pixar's products seem particularly conservative in the context of a museum dedicated to the self-renewing avant-garde. The imagery churned out by these animators harkens back to the cityscapes of the Renaissance. They depend on a sense of realism, a convincing 3-D mapping of a place, successful illusion. Modernism, on the other hand, has always been dedicated to radically reconfiguring such modes of representation.

Which means that in some ways, it's odd to find Pixar celebrated with such fanfare at MoMA. But that's only if you focus too much, as the exhibit does, on the handmade and traditional. Few of these items, however clever, can really hold their own as unique art objects worthy of more than passing interest. And none of them would matter at all if the final product weren't the film itself, bright, magical and uncannily alive on the screen.

Bringing objects to life

The finest and most compelling moments of "Pixar" are a series of short films by Lasseter. In one, a pair of Luxo desk lamps - daddy and junior - enact a brief family drama involving a bouncing ball. In another, a unicycle, abandoned in a corner of a decrepit bike shop, dreams of being used and appreciated. Both shorts transpose physical gestures of joy and despair onto inanimate machines, brilliantly endowing them with feelings and hopes.

These shorts serve as an effective metaphor for what Pixar itself is trying to do by harnessing technology for the purpose of expression. The museum needn't have emphasized the studio's craft so intensively. The best evidence for the animators' nondigital intuition is the films themselves, brilliant hybrids of art and technology that don't need a museum to prove their cultural worth.

ARTifacts

In addition to screenings of Pixar's films and the studies and sculptures on display, "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation" features two works created specially for the exhibition. "Artscape," a digital film directed by Andrew Jiminez and projected onto a vast wall, allows viewers to experience what it might be like to enter and explore the works on paper hung elsewhere in the exhibition.

Even more gasp-inducing is a zoetrope populated by the endearing characters of "Toy Story." The zoetrope was an early piece of cinematic technology that used light to create the optical illusion of an unfolding narrative. In Pixar's custom version, multiple miniature Buzzes and Woodys are glued to a huge disk that revolves, once every second, around a central spindle.

As the figures circle and the strobe lights flash, the figures seem to move: Buzz bounces on a giant rubber ball, Woody straddles a bucking bronco, and Wheezy propels little green creatures into oblivion.

WHEN & WHERE "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation." Through Feb. 6 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., Manhattan. For exhibition hours and admission prices, call 212-708-9400 or visit www.moma.org.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

National Security Agency Eavesdropping

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, left, and Vice President Dick Cheney leave a closed briefing in the U.S. Capitol Friday, Dec. 16, 2005 after talking with leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke)

Dec 16, 6:17 PM (ET)
By KATHERINE SHRADER

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dismayed lawmakers demanded on Friday that Congress look into whether the highly secretive National Security Agency was granted new powers to eavesdrop without warrants on people inside the United States.

"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," declared Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He promised hearings early next year.

President Bush refused to discuss whether he had authorized such domestic spying, saying to comment would tie his hands in fighting terrorists.

Nor would other officials confirm or deny whether the nation's largest spy agency was permitted to gather communications from Americans under a presidential directive signed in 2002.

Instead, they asserted in careful terms that the president would do everything in his power to protect the American people while safeguarding civil liberties.

"I will make this point," Bush said in an interview with "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.""That whatever I do to protect the American people - and I have an obligation to do so - that we will uphold the law, and decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people."

The reported program, first noted in Friday's New York Times, is said to allow the agency to monitor international calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States. But the paper said the agency would still seek warrants to snoop on purely domestic communications - for example, Americans' calls between New York and California.

"I want to know precisely what they did," said Specter. "How NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he wanted to know exactly what is going on before deciding whether an investigation is called for. "Theoretically, I obviously wouldn't like it," he said of the program.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said, "This shocking revelation ought to send a chill down the spine of every American."

Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush chief of staff Andrew Card went to the Capitol Friday to meet with congressional leaders and the top members of the intelligence committees, who are often briefed on spy agencies' most classified programs. The Times said they had been previously told of the program. Members and their aides would not discuss the subject of the closed sessions Friday.

Some intelligence experts who believe in absolute presidential power argued that Bush would have the authority to order searches without warrants under the Constitution.

In a case unrelated to NSA eavesdropping in this country, the administration has argued that the president has vast authority to order intelligence surveillance without warrants "of foreign powers or their agents."

"Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority," the Justice Department said in a 2002 legal filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review.

Other intelligence veterans found difficulty with the program in light of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed after the intelligence community came under fire for spying on Americans. That law gives government - with approval from a secretive U.S. court - the authority to conduct covert wiretaps and surveillance of suspected terrorists and spies.

In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency would not provide any information on the reported surveillance program. "We do not discuss actual or alleged operational issues," he said.

Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former NSA general counsel, said it was troubling that such a change would have been made by executive order, even if it turns out to be within the law.

Parker, who has no direct knowledge of the program, said the effect could be corrosive. "There are programs that do push the edge, and would be appropriate, but will be thrown out," she said.

Prior to 9/11, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance activities to foreign embassies and missions - and obtained court orders for such investigations. Much of its work was overseas, where thousands of people with suspected terrorist ties or other valuable intelligence may be monitored.

The report surfaced as the administration and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill were fighting to save provisions of the expiring USA Patriot Act that they believe are key tools in the fight against terrorism. An attempt to rescue the approach favored by the White House and Republicans failed on a procedural vote.

Bush and War

Apple Polishers

Video crush

Apple Polishers
Explaining the press corps' crush on Steve Jobs and company.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005, at 7:04 PM ET

I don't hate Apple. I don't even hate Apple-lovers. I do, however, possess deep odium for the legions of Apple polishers in the press corps who salute every shiny gadget the company parades through downtown Cupertino as if they were members of the Supreme Soviet viewing the latest ICBMs at the May Day parade.

The Apple polishers buffed and shined this morning in response to yesterday's Steve Jobs-led introduction of the new video iPod. The headlines captured their usual adoration for the computer company: "Apple Scores One Against Microsoft In Video Battle" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer); "Video iPod Premieres in Apple's Latest Showcase of Dazzling New Gadgets" (San Francisco Chronicle); "iPod Evolves from Sound to Sight") (Detroit Free Press); "The Video iPod: It Rocks" (Fortune); "Apple Seeds New Markets With Video Version of iPod" (Globe and Mail).

The pairing of the V-iPod announcement with news that the iTunes store will sell Desperate Housewives and other ABC fare drove the story to Page One of USA Today and onto the biz fronts of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Among American newspapers, the New York Times is easily the most enamored of things iPod, having run 63 stories with the word "iPod" in the headline in the last 12 months. That's almost as many as the Post and the Los Angeles Times combined.

What explains the press corps' exuberance for Apple in general and the iPod in particular? After all, the portable video player isn't a new product category—Archos, RCA, Samsung, and iRiver got there months and months ago. The excitement can't be due to the undersized screen, which measures only 2.5 inches diagonal, or the skimpy two hours of battery life when operated in video mode. As I paged through a Nexis dump of the V-iPod coverage, I searched in vain for a single headline proclaiming "Apple Introduces Ho-Hum Player" or an article comparing the V-iPod's technical specs to those of competing brands. At least the techie readers of Engadget, free of the Apple mind-meld, recognize the V-iPod as a deliberately crippled by copy protection, low-res, underpowered video appliance that is merely Apple's first try in the emerging market of video players.

The inordinate amount of attention paid to Apple's launches must be, in part, a function of the company's skill at throwing media events, stoking the rumor mills, and seducing the consuming masses. All this, plus the chatter-inducing creativity of Apple's ad campaigns, and its practice of putting its machines in pretty boxes make writing about Apple products more interesting than assessing the latest iterations of the ThinkPad or Microsoft Office.

Another thing that sets Apple product launches apart from those of its competition is co-founder Jobs' psychological savvy. From the beginning, Jobs flexed his powerful reality-distortion field to bend employees to his will, so pushing the most susceptible customers and the press around with the same psi power only comes naturally. Although staffed by dorks and drizzlerods, Apple projects itself and its products as the embodiment of style and cool. The population of Apple's parallel universe? A paltry 1.8 percent of PCs worldwide.

But reality distortion doesn't account for how Apple has captured 74 percent of a market it didn't invent with a device it didn't engineer single-handedly. It was Apple's good luck to develop and improve its player during the period that Sony, the previous king of portable entertainment, acted like a music company eager to discourage the spread of MP3s rather than a hardware company keen on developing the replacement for the Walkman. Still, you've got to give Jobs and company credit for producing an aesthetically blessed product and then wisely making it compatible with Windows machines a half-year after its November 2001 introduction rather than fencing it inside the Mac ghetto. In doing so, Apple gave Windows users a way to partake of the Apple mystique for $300 without having to buy a new computer, learn a new operating system, and invest in replacement software.

Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint. The next is Apple's perpetual role as scrappy underdog—reporters love cheerleading for the underdog without ever pausing to explore why it isn't the overdog. (This is why the Brooklyn Dodgers will always rate higher in the minds of writers than the superior New York Yankees.) Apple incites fanaticism about its products via ad campaigns and evangelist outreach programs designed to make its customers feel as though they're part of a privileged and enlightened elite. One unnamed loser at Slate says today's V-iPod news made her want to rush out and buy one, even though she already owns two iPods, one of which she bought three weeks ago.

This mock ad for iProduct cracks the fetishistic code of the Apple cult:

Apple iProduct. You'll Buy it. And You'll Like It.
Do you like Apple products? Do you live for every product announcement, every incremental upgrade, every rumor and screenshot? Do you wank and blare and drone and fucking gurgle about Apple products morning, noon, and night? Then get ready for iProduct. You'll be blown away. No matter what it is.

If the press corps possessed any institutional memory, it would recall the introduction of the Apple III+, the Lisa, the Macintosh Portable, the Mac TV, the Newton, the Apple G4 Cube, and eWorld. All were greeted with great press fanfare before falling off the edge of the world. Hell, all the press corps really needs to put Apple products in perspective is a few short-term memory neurons focused on the fanfare visited upon recent, mediocre iPod releases. Only a year ago the company received excited press notices when it introduced the iPod Photo, now acknowledged to be a failed product. I searched Nexis to find a mention of the iPod Photo in the hundreds of V-iPod newspaper stories from today and found only one. Of the wildly heralded but totally average iPod Shuffle, released in January 2005, I found only two.

When the V-iPod's super-duper, long-lasting, big-screen replacement shows up in 12 months, the press will have forgotten this second-rate box, too.

******

Interest declared: I have worked for Slate since it was founded by the cult of Microsoft, an Apple competitor, about 10 years ago. Slate is now owned by the Washington Post Co., which is controlled by a family cult of Class A stock owners led by Donald E. Graham.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Guinea Pig Santa

A guinea pig wears a Santa Claus costume at an animal show in Moscow November 27, 2005. Moscow's Club of Friends of Guinea Pigs organised an exhibition of their favourite pets on Sunday that included a fashion show and a sprinting contest. REUTERS/Sergei

Africa and International Aid

Edel Rodriguez

December 15, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX
Hale'iwa, Hawaii

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

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Wiretaps, Domestic Spying

Doug Mills/Associated Press
In 2002, President Bush toured the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., with Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence

December 16, 2005
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Dealing With a New Threat

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy.

Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Concerns and Revisions

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping.

According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens."

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

The Legal Line Shifts

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

Barclay Walsh contributed research for this article.

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