CertiFiabLe!

NY Times.com: The Cute Factor

2006-01-03T16:01:00.000+08:00

January 3, 2006
The Cute Factor
By NATALIE ANGIER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn't enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

"Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"

"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!"

"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"

A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."

The 6-month-old, 25-pound Tai Shan - whose name is pronounced tie-SHON and means, for no obvious reason, "peaceful mountain" - is the first surviving giant panda cub ever born at the Smithsonian's zoo. And though the zoo's adult pandas have long been among Washington's top tourist attractions, the public debut of the baby in December has unleashed an almost bestial frenzy here. Some 13,000 timed tickets to see the cub were snapped up within two hours of being released, and almost immediately began trading on eBay for up to $200 a pair.

Panda mania is not the only reason that 2005 proved an exceptionally cute year. Last summer, a movie about another black-and-white charmer, the emperor penguin, became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Sales of petite, willfully cute cars like the Toyota Prius and the Mini Cooper soared, while those of noncute sport utility vehicles tanked.

Women's fashions opted for the cute over the sensible or glamorous, with low-slung slacks and skirts and abbreviated blouses contriving to present a customer's midriff as an adorable preschool bulge. Even the too big could be too cute. King Kong's newly reissued face has a squashed baby-doll appeal, and his passion for Naomi Watts ultimately feels like a serious case of puppy love - hopeless, heartbreaking, cute.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.
Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Observing that many Floridians have an enormous affection for the manatee, which looks like an overfertilized potato with a sock puppet's face, Roger L. Reep of the University of Florida said it shone by grace of contrast. "People live hectic lives, and they may be feeling overwhelmed, but then they watch this soft and slow-moving animal, this gentle giant, and they see it turn on its back to get its belly scratched," said Dr. Reep, author with Robert K. Bonde of "The Florida Manatee: Biology and Conservation."

"That's very endearing," said Dr. Reep. "So even though a manatee is 3 times your size and 20 times your weight, you want to get into the water beside it."

Even as they say a cute tooth has rational roots, scientists admit they are just beginning to map its subtleties and source. New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine, which could explain why everybody in the panda house wore a big grin.

At the same time, said Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived.

"Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let's not worry about complexities, just love me," said Dr. Dutton, who is writing a book about Darwinian aesthetics. "That's where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow."

Quick and cheap make cute appealing to those who want to catch the eye and please the crowd. Advertisers and product designers are forever toying with cute cues to lend their merchandise instant appeal, mixing and monkeying with the vocabulary of cute to keep the message fresh and fetching.

That market-driven exercise in cultural evolution can yield bizarre if endearing results, like the blatantly ugly Cabbage Patch dolls, Furbies, the figgy face of E.T., the froggy one of Yoda. As though the original Volkswagen Beetle wasn't considered cute enough, the updated edition was made rounder and shinier still.

"The new Beetle looks like a smiley face," said Miles Orvell, professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. "By this point its origins in Hitler's regime, and its intended resemblance to a German helmet, is totally forgotten."

Whatever needs pitching, cute can help. A recent study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin in a red jacket or a smirking polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.

"It made a huge difference," said Sonia A. Duffy, the lead author of the report, which was published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. "The kids expressed more confidence in the cartoons than in the warnings themselves."

Primal and widespread though the taste for cute may be, researchers say it varies in strength and significance across cultures and eras. They compare the cute response to the love of sugar: everybody has sweetness receptors on the tongue, but some people, and some countries, eat a lot more candy than others.

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards. The police enliven safety billboards and wanted posters with two perky mouselike mascots, Pipo kun and Pipo chan.

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening."

In this country, the use of cute imagery is geared less toward blurring the line of command than toward celebrating America's favorite demographic: the young. Dr. Orvell traces contemporary cute chic to the 1960's, with its celebration of a perennial childhood, a refusal to dress in adult clothes, an inversion of adult values, a love of bright colors and bloopy, cartoony patterns, the Lava Lamp.

Today, it's not enough for a company to use cute graphics in its advertisements. It must have a really cute name as well. "Companies like Google and Yahoo leave no question in your mind about the youthfulness of their founders," said Dr. Orvell.

Madison Avenue may adapt its strategies for maximal tweaking of our inherent baby radar, but babies themselves, evolutionary scientists say, did not really evolve to be cute. Instead, most of their salient qualities stem from the demands of human anatomy and the human brain, and became appealing to a potential caretaker's eye only because infants wouldn't survive otherwise.
Human babies have unusually large heads because humans have unusually large brains. Their heads are round because their brains continue to grow throughout the first months of life, and the plates of the skull stay flexible and unfused to accommodate the development. Baby eyes and ears are situated comparatively far down the face and skull, and only later migrate upward in proportion to the development of bones in the cheek and jaw areas.

Baby eyes are also notably forward-facing, the binocular vision a likely legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestry, and all our favorite Disney characters also sport forward-facing eyes, including the ducks and mice, species that in reality have eyes on the sides of their heads.

The cartilage tissue in an infant's nose is comparatively soft and undeveloped, which is why most babies have button noses. Baby skin sits relatively loose on the body, rather than being taut, the better to stretch for growth spurts to come, said Paul H. Morris, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Portsmouth in England; that lax packaging accentuates the overall roundness of form.

Baby movements are notably clumsy, an amusing combination of jerky and delayed, because learning to coordinate the body's many bilateral sets of large and fine muscle groups requires years of practice. On starting to walk, toddlers struggle continuously to balance themselves between left foot and right, and so the toddler gait consists as much of lateral movement as of any forward momentum.

Researchers who study animals beloved by the public appreciate the human impulse to nurture anything even remotely babylike, though they are at times taken aback by people's efforts to identify with their preferred species.

Take penguins as an example. Some people are so wild for the creatures, said Michel Gauthier-Clerc, a penguin researcher in Arles, France, "they think penguins are mammals and not birds." They love the penguin's upright posture, its funny little tuxedo, the way it waddles as it walks. How like a child playing dress-up!

Endearing as it is, Dr. Gauthier-Clerc explained that the apparent awkwardness of the penguin's march had nothing to do with clumsiness or uncertain balance. Instead, he said, penguins waddle to save energy. A side-to-side walk burns fewer calories than a straightforward stride, and for birds that fast for months and live in a frigid climate, every calorie counts.

As for the penguin's maestro garb, the white front and black jacket suits its aquatic way of life. While submerged in water, the penguin's dark backside is difficult to see from above, camouflaging the penguin from potential predators of air or land. The white chest, by contrast, obscures it from below, protecting it against carnivores and allowing it to better sneak up on fish prey.

The giant panda offers another case study in accidental cuteness. Although it is a member of the bear family, a highly carnivorous clan, the giant panda specializes in eating bamboo.

As it happens, many of the adaptations that allow it to get by on such a tough diet contribute to the panda's cute form, even in adulthood. Inside the bear's large, rounded head, said Lisa Stevens, assistant panda curator at the National Zoo, are the highly developed jaw muscles and the set of broad, grinding molars it needs to crush its way through some 40 pounds of fibrous bamboo plant a day.

When it sits up against a tree and starts picking apart a bamboo stalk with its distinguishing pseudo-thumb, a panda looks like nothing so much like Huckleberry Finn shucking corn. Yet the humanesque posture and paws again are adaptations to its menu. The bear must have its "hands" free and able to shred the bamboo leaves from their stalks.

The panda's distinctive markings further add to its appeal: the black patches around the eyes make them seem winsomely low on its face, while the black ears pop out cutely against the white fur of its temples.

As with the penguin's tuxedo, the panda's two-toned coat very likely serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it helps a feeding bear blend peacefully into the dappled backdrop of bamboo. On the other, the sharp contrast between light and dark may serve as a social signal, helping the solitary bears locate each other when the time has come to find the perfect, too-cute mate.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

NY Times.com: A Remake of a Charity Song, by the Elite of Indie Rock

2005-10-07T14:15:00.000+08:00

October 5, 2005
A Remake of a Charity Song, by the Elite of Indie Rock
By JESSE FOX MAYSHARK

If parody can be called a form of flattery, then Sir Bob Geldof has cause to blush.

Twenty-one years after he gathered a group of musicians for the all-star "Do They Know It's Christmas?" benefit single, a similarly sprawling group of performers is asking a snarky follow-up question: "Do They Know It's Halloween?"

The single, being released next week to benefit Unicef, features indie-rock luminaries like Beck and the Arcade Fire, and pokes fun at what many see as the original Band Aid song's culturally patronizing attitude toward the third world.

" 'Do they know it's Christmas?' What a ridiculous question to ask someone!' " Nicholas Diamonds, the Canadian musician who helped write and produce the new single, said in an e-mail message. He said the idea for the song just "popped into my head one day."

"I thought, why not take the absurdity one step further?" he said. "What about Halloween?"

Mr. Diamonds, leader of the recently defunct band the Unicorns and the new band Islands, proposed the song while visiting a fellow Canadian musician and old friend, Adam Gollner, in Los Angeles, and the two of them quickly wrote it. Then they used connections to assemble a diverse group of performers to record it, including the comedian David Cross, the punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren and members of Sonic Youth, the Postal Service and Rilo Kiley.

"We respect Band Aid's ability to raise so much money for relief efforts, but their lyrics seem so misguided and inappropriate," Mr. Gollner, 28, a member of the band Dessert, wrote in an e-mail message. "Africa isn't a land 'where nothing ever grows' and 'no rain nor river flows.' And how are lines such as 'Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you' supposed to be helpful?"

Where the Band Aid anthem aimed to export Christmas cheer, "Do They Know It's Halloween" is a trick entreaty credited to the North American Halloween Prevention Initiative that asks for global assistance in fighting the horrors of All Hallows' Eve: "Latvia, Laos, Chad, Peru," the lyrics plead, "we need their help or else we're through/ They don't know the fear/ we endure once a year."

The 30-some participants were recruited via connections and chance encounters, but there was no group singalong à la "We Are the World," the 1985 hit single for African famine relief. Mr. Diamonds and Mr. Gollner recorded the basic tracks in Los Angeles, and the vocalists either dropped by separately or, like the Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq, sent in their lines from afar.

On the resulting track, Beck recounts horrors like "children on streets, begging for treats," while Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs beg, "Help us! Help us! Save our souls!"

Connections also helped on the production end. Mr. Gollner, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, used to be the editor of the New York edition of the hipster lifestyle magazine Vice, and he and Mr. Diamonds approached the Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi about releasing the song on the magazine's sister label.

The song's cheekiness resonated with Vice, a brand better known for cold-eyed sarcasm than bleeding hearts. "There's so much irony and comedy in this, it fits in really well with the Vice sensibility," Mr. Alvi said, in an interview at Vice's industrial loft offices in Williamsburg.

He initially struggled to find a way to finance the project before Sony Connect, the online music service of the Sony Corporation, provided the necessary backing. (The Connect Web site started selling downloads of the song two weeks before its wide release.)

Unicef's longstanding Halloween fund-raising campaign made it a natural beneficiary. Mr. Diamonds, Mr. Gollner and Mr. Alvi all said they collected money for the organization as young trick-or-treaters.

A Unicef spokeswoman, Marissa Buckanoff, noted the agency had no official involvement in "Do They Know It's Halloween?" But she praised the effort. "It's very impressive that they were able to bring all of these people together," she said.

Ms. Buckanoff said trick-or-treaters collect about $3 million to $5 million for the agency. That dwarfs the $10,000 to $20,000 in sales that Mr. Alvi said he expects the song to generate.

The participants in "Do They Know It's Halloween?" were alternately amused and confused by the project. Mr. Gollner said the singer-rapper Peaches at first thought the Bush administration was trying to ban Halloween.

The only contributors young enough to actually trick or treat this year, the middle-school-age sisters in the Seattle indie duo Smoosh, saw the project simply as "a lot of fun," Asy, 13, the singer-keyboardist, said in an e-mail message. "I thought the song was really cool," she added. As for what Sir Bob might make of it all, Mr. Gollner said he hoped the elder statesman of rock charity would take no offense.

"Sir Bob is not the enemy," Mr. Gollner said. "He's done some incredible things."

The FT hotties

2005-09-15T13:37:00.000+08:00

The FT apparently employs a good number of talented young hotties (sorry, I know I sound like the odious Paris Hilton. Who ever thought you could use "hottie" and "FT," although they do sort of rhyme, in the same sentence?) in its foreign news bureaus. A few days ago those of us closely working with the website's content (at least, the appreciative few) drooled over Tokyo bureau chief David Pilling*, who looked very good in the ad for his live Q&A with FT readers.

The geeky ones will like Sathnam Sanghera*, although I prefer how he looked sans the glasses* three years ago. And Seoul correspondent Anna Fifield*, who recently launched her North Korea 'diary', is quite a stunner. The Hottie of the Day is Berlin bureau chief Betrand Benoit.

The thing that makes these people extremely sexy is that they're incredibly smart and talented, apart from being good-looking. These are people who fit the term 'Resume God' to a tee. Being gorgeous was just the icing on the already-scrumptious cake.

Now if only they could put up a bureau in Manila and do some internal hiring.

*Images © Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2005.

Bootylicious-ness triggers a return to healthy eating

2005-09-02T10:55:00.000+08:00

Two days ago, I made a trip to the grocery with my friend Angel to stock up on supplies. I was overjoyed to discover that my friendly neighborhood SM supermarket was again stocking enormous 500g tubs of Nestle Yogurt, which at P112 apiece is more cost effective for a yogurt addict like me. Lately, I hadn't been able to indulge my love for the cultured bacteria-laced dairy product because of prohibitive prices. Inflation, rising fuel prices and civil strife (ha ha) had driven the price of my beloved Nestle yogurt (and that is the only brand I ever consume, because the European brands taste too bland or sour) from P21 for a 125ml cup (and that was two years ago) to P30. Imagine consuming a cup every day-- that translates to P210 a week, or a whopping P900 a month, which is half of one month's rent. Without batting an eye, I of course immediately snapped up two tubs in Strawberry and Juicy Mango.

The yogurt is really in line with my desire to start eating and living more healthily. Four weeks of eating honey-cured pork chop steaks, stir-fried veggies, and fried rice mixed with bits of meat and veggies (drool...) had me worrying about my ballooning hips, my cholesterol count and my poor lard-filled arteries, in that order. My pork chop diet brought to mind the dire warnings issued by my father, who warned us all to start eating healthy, or else we would suffer the same fate as my mother, who died of a stroke when she was 44. He practiced what he preached, as the meat in household dishes was replaced by tofu.

Of course, I did not always eat pork chop steaks. Before that, I was on a relatively healthier wheat bread, lettuce, cucumber, tomato and tuna sandwich diet. I ate rice meals only on weekends, and I usually ate steamed squidballs paired with a vegetable salad. I attempted to start a personal fitness program, and for two weeks, I was moderately successful: 10 minutes of stair climbing during the first week, then a game of badminton during the next. The Church of Healthy Living would've approved, and lovingly welcomed me into their fold with a congratulatory bowl of gluten and artichoke salad.

Six months of eating the same thing for breakfast and dinner, no matter how good it tasted and how healthy it was for me, led to eventual cravings for other stuff. And what I'd missed the most was MEAT: juicy, tender bits of meat with a bit of fat oozing and glistening on its surface. My roommate had also initiated me into the pleasures of eating Chowking beef chao fan. And I also missed cooking--the comforting rituals of chopping, slicing, defrosting, frying and stewing.

So there began a slide into the hedonistic depths of sinful eating (the Church of Healthy Living had by then placed me on probation). Every day, it was either pork chop and veggies, or fried squidball and veggies (the veggies were conditional to my continued membership in the Church). Sometimes i would mix the leftover veggies with some fried rice (I would usually cook too much rice on purpose so I would have some left over for the next day) to come up with some sort of yang chow-java rice hybrid. Why every day? When I come to really love a particular sort of food, I don't mind having it every day.

Two waistline inches and one jean size later (not to mention one co-worker complimenting me on the SIZE of my gluteus maximus muscles--they must definitely be doing a lot of work for them to grow that BIG, ha ha), it was back to healthy eating for me. So I filled my grocery cart with stuff like tofu, broccoli, cabbage, oatmeal, fruit and yogurt. I was still going to cook up a storm, but rice meals would be limited to lunch on weekdays, and all day on weekends (it's important to leave a pig-out/treats clause when you're cutting back on things, so that you don't totally feel kawawa). Breakfast would be the convenient oatmeal with milk, instant choco and honey, and dinner would be a spare little sandwich, two fruits of my choice, and a cup of my beloved yogurt. This way, I am obliged to eat fruit, which I have sadly neglected to include in my daily diet, even when I was trying to eat healthy (I did eat fruit cocktail a lot for dessert, but I was told that did not count).

All I have to do now is start exercising. Which may or may not happen in the near future, if I succumb to the lure posed by the Sex and the City and X-Files videos I ordered (ahh, so much to watch, so little time), and the joys of Darna, Encantadia, Desperate Housewives, Iron Chef (so that's why I overeat!) and the dozens of little diversions to be found on the boob tube.

Anyway, here's to living longer and healthier. : )

NY Times.com: Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose

2005-08-17T08:12:00.000+08:00

August 16, 2005
Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose
By BENEDICT CAREY

Juicy gossip moves so quickly - He did what? She has pictures? - that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they wanted to.

"I heard a lot in the hallway, on the way to class," said Mady Miraglia, 35, a high school history teacher in Los Gatos, Calif., speaking about a previous job, where she got a running commentary from fellow teachers on the sexual peccadilloes and classroom struggles of her colleagues.

"To be honest, it made me feel better as a teacher to hear others being put down," she said. "I was out there on my own, I had no sense of how I was doing in class, and the gossip gave me some connection. And I felt like it gave me status, knowing information, being on the inside."

Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction.

People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

"There has been a tendency to denigrate gossip as sloppy and unreliable" and unworthy of serious study, said David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of "Darwin's Cathedral," a book on evolution and group behavior. "But gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership."

When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue.

Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal: people devote anywhere from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip, and men appear to be just as eager for the skinny as women.

Sneaking, lying and cheating among friends or acquaintances make for the most savory material, of course, and most people pass on their best nuggets to at least two other people, surveys find.

This grapevine branches out through almost every social group and it functions, in part, to keep people from straying too far outside the group's rules, written and unwritten, social scientists find.

In one recent experiment, Dr. Wilson led a team of researchers who asked a group of 195 men and women to rate their approval or disapproval of several situations in which people talked behind the back of a neighbor. In one, a rancher complained to other ranchers that his neighbor had neglected to fix a fence, allowing cattle to wander and freeload. The report was accurate, and the students did not disapprove of the gossip.

But men in particular, the researchers found, strongly objected if the rancher chose to keep mum about the fence incident.

"Plain and simple he should have told about the problem to warn other ranchers," wrote one study participant, expressing a common sentiment that, in this case, a failure to gossip put the group at risk.

"We're told we're not supposed to gossip, that our reputation plummets, but in this context there may be an expectation that you should gossip: you're obligated to tell, like an informal version of the honor code at military academies," Dr. Wilson said.

This rule-enforcing dynamic is hardly confined to the lab. For 18 months, Kevin Kniffin, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, tracked the social interactions of a university crew team, about 50 men and women who rowed together in groups of four or eight.

Dr. Kniffin said he was still analyzing his research notes. But a preliminary finding, he said, was that gossip levels peaked when the team included a slacker, a young man who regularly missed practices or showed up late. Fellow crew members joked about the slacker's sex life behind his back and made cruel cracks about his character and manhood, in part because the man's shortcoming reflected badly on the entire team.

"As soon as this guy left the team, the people were back to talking about radio, food, politics, weather, those sorts of things," Dr. Kniffin said. "There was very little negative gossip."

Given this protective group function, gossiping too little may be at least as risky as gossiping too much, some psychologists say. After all, scuttlebutt is the most highly valued social currency there is. While humor and story telling can warm any occasion, a good scoop spreads through a room like an illicit and irresistible drug, passed along in nods and crooked smiles, in discreet walks out to the balcony, the corridor, the powder room.

Knowing that your boss is cheating on his wife, or that a sister-in-law has a drinking problem or a rival has benefited from a secret trust fund may be enormously important, and in many cases change a person's behavior for the better.

"We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy," said Sarah Wert, a psychologist at Yale. "Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal."

Talking out of school may also buffer against low-grade depressive moods. In one recent study, Dr. Wert had 84 college students write about a time in their lives when they felt particularly alienated socially, and also about a memory of being warmly accepted.

After finishing the task, Dr. Wert prompted the participants to gossip with a friend about a mutual acquaintance, as she filmed the exchanges. Those who rated their self-esteem highly showed a clear pattern: they spread good gossip when they felt accepted and a more derogatory brand when they felt marginalized.

The gossip may involve putting someone else down to feel better by comparison. Or it may simply be a way to connect with someone else and share insecurities. But the end result, she said, is often a healthy relief of social and professional anxiety.

Ms. Miraglia, the high school teacher, said that in her previous job she found it especially comforting to hear about more senior teachers' struggle to control difficult students. "It was my first job, and I felt overwhelmed, and to hear someone say, 'There's no control in that class' about another teacher, that helped build my confidence," she said.

She said she also heard about teachers who made inappropriate comments to students about sex, a clear violation of school policy and professional standards.

Adept gossipers usually sense which kinds of discreet talk are most likely to win acceptance from a particular group. For example, a closely knit corporate team with clear values - working late hours, for instance - will tend to embrace a person who gripes in private about a colleague who leaves early and shun one who complains about the late nights.

By contrast, a widely dispersed sales force may lap up gossip about colleagues, but take it lightly, allowing members to work however they please, said Eric K. Foster, a scholar at the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University in Philadelphia, who recently published an analysis of gossip research.

It is harder to judge how gossip will move through groups that are split into factions, like companies with divisions that are entirely independent, Dr. Foster said. "In these situations, it is the person who gravitates into a intermediate position, making connections between the factions, who controls the gossip flow and holds a lot of power," he said.

Such people can mask devious intentions, spread false rumors and manipulate others for years, as anyone who has worked in an organization for a long time knows. But to the extent that healthy gossip has evolved to protect social groups, it will also ultimately expose many of those who cheat and betray. Any particularly nasty gossip has an author or authors, after all, and any functioning gossip network builds up a memory.

So do the people who are tuned in to the network. In one 2004 study, psychologists had college students in Ohio fill out questionnaires, asking about the best gossip they had heard in the last week, the last month and the last year. The students then explained in writing what they learned by hearing the stories. Among the life lessons:

"Infidelity will eventually catch up with you," "Cheerful people are not necessarily happy people" and "Just because someone says they have pictures of something doesn't mean they do."

None of which they had learned in class.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

FT.com: Richard Tomkins: The demise of highbrow culture

2005-08-16T09:21:00.000+08:00

Richard Tomkins: The demise of highbrow culture
By Richard Tomkins
Published: August 15 2005 18:23 | Last updated: August 15 2005 18:23

I have suddenly become beset by anxiety over the future of the western canon, and not just because I am scurrying off on holiday with a stash of pulp fiction to read on the beach. I just have this feeling, only scantily supported by facts, that interest in great literature, great art and great music is about to fall off a cliff.

Of course, people have long worried about the future of the “high” arts amid the rise of pop culture and consumerism and what is seen as a dumbing down of culture generally. But in spite of occasional scare stories about the closure of opera companies, lower turn-outs for classical music or the decline in literary reading, the highbrow has managed to survive, and even in some respects thrive.

My response to that, however, is: and so it damned well should. After all, in the west, more people are benefiting from higher education than ever before, we have an increasing amount of leisure time at our disposal and rising incomes are making people more aspirational. But above all – and this is the source of my worry – the arts are getting an enormous boost from the ageing of the baby boom generation, a boost that must inevitably fade once the demographic bulge has passed.

It is not just by virtue of their sheer numbers that the boomers are benefiting the arts, nor even that they are reaching that age where they are acquiring a taste for the finer things in life just at the time when they have the money and time to indulge it. It is a combination of these two factors with a third: boomers are exceptionally well-disposed towards the arts because of the cultural influences that were at work during their formative years.

As the boomers grew up in the 1960s, the people who led the cultural revolution against the materialism, orderliness and perceived philistinism of their forebears were inspired by the values of the bohemian subculture, which were anti-materialistic, permissive and creative. The heroes of these times were not great warriors or explorers but artists and intellectuals.

I am not for a moment going to pretend that many boomers, even the hippies and drop-outs of the era, lived out the bohemian ideal for long. But as they became older and richer, they did preserve some of the elements of bohemian culture, such as disdain for vulgar displays of wealth, an obsession with the authentic and natural and an abiding mistrust of progress. And they never lost their deeply ingrained sense of the importance of art, books and ideas.

There is another thing, too. Bohemianism traces its descent directly from the romantic movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries, with its lofty idealism, exaltation of emotion above reason, and preoccupation with artistic genius. And when we think of classical music, great literature or the best opera, where does nearly all of it come from? Why, the romantic era, of course. Even Shakespeare owes his reputation to the romantics, having been idolised as a genius by them.

In sum, high art could not wish for a larger or more receptive audience than the one it has today. But what happens when the boomers are too old to attend concerts or read books?

We have seen the problems looming in figures from the US showing an extraordinary decline in literary reading among young adults. The National Endowment for the Arts reported last year that the percentage of people aged 18 to 24 reading novels, poetry or plays had declined from 60 per cent to 43 per cent in the 20 years to 2002. Other figures from the NEA have shown how the performing arts are playing to ever-older audiences – a big deterrent for commercial sponsors, by the way.

Figures such as these, combined with a large dollop of instinct, lead me to believe that the high arts will turn out to be almost completely irrelevant to the lives of youngsters entering adulthood today. They may study them sufficiently to pass examinations, but they will feel no affinity at all for the outpourings of dead white European males who lived in a time so different from our own. This, after all, is the postmodern age whose undercurrent is not romantic idealism but its opposite: cynicism and irony. Works once admired by the boomers are just as likely to be ridiculed by upcoming generations for their earnestness, pomposity and lack of recognisable brand names.

Besides, almost everything about classic works makes them ill-suited to the digital era. The performing arts require audiences to be strictly passive, sitting motionless in stony silence at predetermined venues, at a time when mass culture is becoming ever more interactive and available on demand. Classic works require high levels of concentration and long attention spans at a time when people are extraordinarily busy, frequently multi-tasking and typically surrounded by other media. The high arts are stuffy and formal at a time when people want to be casual and relaxed. High culture implies superiority and elitism at a time when cultural relativism holds such attitudes as outdated and intolerant.

Oh, I know what you are going to say. The Harry Potter phenomenon shows youngsters still have the will to read long books, and look at all the young people turning out for the BBC Proms, the classical musical festival now playing at London’s Albert Hall.

Take it from me, though: if you have not read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment yet, I would pack that for the beach this year – quick, while it is still in print.

richard.tomkins@ft.com

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

Moderately schizoid and narcissistic

2005-08-16T09:17:00.000+08:00

The results of an online personality test I took:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

NY Times Modern Love column: Here's Looking at You, Kid

2005-08-09T08:01:00.000+08:00

Here's Looking at You, Kid
By SPIKE GILLESPIE

I woke up happy one morning, not taxed by too much work, not depressed, not sleep deprived. But my brain, forever searching for something to worry about, could not let this placid moment be and quickly started an argument with an imaginary boyfriend.

"No," I insisted, "You are not moving in. Things are good the way they are, and I'm not moving any of my stuff around to make room for yours. I don't need a man in my house or my life."
I'd probably been completely single - not merely partner-free but free of dating, too - for a good four or five years at that point. And single is how I've spent the vast majority of my adult life. (I'm now 41.)

The longest relationship I ever had weighed in at about four years. That was with my son's father, to whom I was never married, and who left for good when the kid was 2.
Single suits me fine. I have moments of deep, aching loneliness, but they never last long. If I live the rest of my days alone, I don't think I'll be sorry.

And yet, despite my proclamations advocating the single life, I confess it is entirely possible I am protesting too much. Because while I have found a way to be content being single, I have not fully eradicated my lifelong desire for a mate. I know this is a mixed message - I love being single/I want a partner - and it is the deepest conflict in my life.

Being single used to mean I wasn't good enough or thin enough or whatever enough. These days I'm single in part because I am no longer willing to put up with what I used to in order to prop up one collapsing relationship after another. And therein, I suppose, lies the rub. Compromise, I tell my 14-year-old son, is the foundation of any successful relationship. You have to be willing to overlook some things.

But I've overlooked enough things: cheating, obesity, addiction, unemployment and possibly covert homosexuality. And I am no longer willing to compromise in what I want from whom I desire. Also, I'm at an age at which I'm set enough in my own ways that the reality of having to fit someone else's quirks and needs into my own space seems a rather tall order.

But I do love men. Love them. And so, in lieu of a real boyfriend, I have come to rely on a string of male companions who have satisfied many, if not all, of my guy needs.

In six years there have been six men, each sharing two characteristics: none have been lovers, and all have been younger. In some cases much younger. And a couple of times much younger.
I mull causes for being repeatedly drawn to guys young enough to be my nephews. Am I a predator? Noncommittal? Do I have a need to mother these young men?

The best I can come up with is this: I think I like young guys, especially guys in their 20's, because, at heart, I am a guy in my 20's. I have no real desire to marry. I don't want (more) kids. I dress in jeans and flannels. I ogle beautiful young women. I enjoy takeout. I decorate my house with pieces of paper I find on the ground, and most of my furniture comes from the trash.

But there are other reasons I love younger men. Because, despite appearances, these are not interchangeable Lego Men that I nonchalantly replace when one disappears (and eventually they always do). Each has been kind and adoring (at least for a while). And in all but one instance, each has been an improvement over his predecessor.

Erik, five years my junior, was a self-proclaimed sex nut who was probably only teasing me with all his sex talk so I would feed him and slip him the small loans he always needed.

Bob, who could recite poetry on command, appealed to my inner English major. Six years younger than I, he was nice about my obvious crush. I finally proclaimed love for both his mind and his mortal coil in a greeting card, dreaming the Shakespearean reference might win his heart.

It did not.

Shawn was all e-mail, another tease. Thirteen years between us. Also between us were his girlfriend and a mean streak.

Ben, 16 years younger, was the nephew of my good friend. He and I became intensely close when he moved home after college awaiting assignment from the Peace Corps. My attraction to him wasn't lust based, though he certainly is very attractive, but his voice matched the voice of my kid's father, my longest, truest love. Maybe that created in me some innate bio-urge, my aging womb begging for one more chance before the old biological clock slammed shut my last window of opportunity.

I joked with him about my urges, noting that turning 40 made me feel the need either to have another baby or start raising chickens. Within the week Ben had built me a coop, announcing, hammer aloft, "This is my version of Planned Parenthood for you."

AFTER Ben left for Belize, I started to fish around in the supernatural realm, asking the universe to resolve this deep conflict of mine, being happy alone yet feeling some deeper pull to find one-on-one love, a conflict that's been nicely side-stepped, of course, in my headlong pursuit of these younger men I couldn't have.

My questions led me to the teachings of the psychic Sonia Choquette, who suggests making a wish box into which you place your three greatest desires. As I understood it, this helps you admit things you might be afraid to wish for out loud.

I didn't want to be stupid with my wishes. In my life I have been humbled by many things: an abusive father, a malignant ovarian tumor, a child who nearly died at birth. I decided to wish carefully. Rather than wish for a partner, I asked only for clarity: Do I want a boyfriend or don't I?

Not long after, an ex-boyfriend resurfaced. A decade of being apart had dulled my bad memories, and I found myself slipping toward resmittenism. Which is when I did a very dumb thing.

I placed his business card in the wish box, convinced the feelings he'd evoked offered me not only an affirmative answer (YES! cried the Magic 8 Ball, It is certain! You DO want a boyfriend!) but went on to tell me who that person was.

Of course this backfired. He didn't call. And I quickly slipped from resmitten to retortured, envisioning him laughing maniacally each time he walked past his telephone, not calling. Thankfully some old therapy bubbled up and intervened before I could get to the part where I started listing all of the things about myself I should change to make him want me. Instead I extracted the card and took a match to it, not in a psychotic fashion, but merely for ceremony.

The card, coated in some sort of plasticky finish, failed to burn, but it did give off choking fumes.
Still, I had my answer. I did want a partner. I replaced the wish for clarity with a wish for a strong, fulfilling, monogamous relationship with a mutually loving partner.

In addition, also based on the advice of Sonia, I wrote down the traits I wished for in my ideal man:

Loves me.

Loves my kid.

Doesn't want kids.

Loves sex.

Plays guitar.

Isn't an addict.

Loves Japan.

Good looking.

Independent.

Monogamous.

Funny.

Unfortunately I failed to put age appropriate, and shortly after I put the list in my wish box, the singer-songwriter Southpaw Jones played at a show where I was the M.C. As I stood introducing him, I was overwhelmed with some bolt of lightning feeling I couldn't explain. It startled me and I blurted out to the large audience that here was a man I wished were older because I would jump him in a heartbeat.

Southpaw took it in stride, claiming to be 37, then admitting that number was 10 years too old, then covering his bases by saying he thought 14 years was a good age spread between partners. His grace under my Mrs. Robinson pressure (as well as his gorgeous performance that night) stuck with me.

I sent him a long letter in which I re-emphasized my crush upon his tender heart and wished there was some way for us to time travel across our chronological chasm. I did so from the clear stance of an older woman who knows she's an older woman and recognizes the difference between fantasy and reality. I did not literally proposition him, only wished he'd been around when I was his age.

Maybe, more accurately, I wished that when I was his age I'd had the confidence to make sincere and bold statements of love to good-hearted and deserving men.

Instead, too shy, too unclear of what I wanted, all I could do was lube myself up with alcohol and fall into bed with one man or another, all of them terribly wrong. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to voice what I want now and must have wanted then, too, the thing we all want, the most simple and elusive thing in the world: to be and feel truly, deeply loved, and to share that love with equal depth.

I invited Southpaw to supper, hoping simply for friendship, which I promptly got. He likes me, gives me gifts, sings me songs, laughs at my jokes, does not rush to go. He is not my boyfriend and never will be, but his presence in my life has been like a bridge for me, carrying me out of my ambivalence, letting me see what's possible, opening my heart.

Some day, soon enough, Southpaw will find a girlfriend, a woman closer to his own age, whom he will love deeply and who will love him back equally.

And I'll be happy for him. It's what he deserves. It's what we all deserve.

Spike Gillespie, who lives in Austin, Tex., is working on a book about anger for Seal Press to be published in spring 2006. This essay is adapted from the anthology “Single Woman of a Certain Age,” to be released in October by Inner Ocean Publishing.

NY Times.com: All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt

2005-07-27T08:15:00.000+08:00

All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Some of us in the news media have been hounding President Bush for his shameful passivity in the face of genocide in Darfur.

More than two years have passed since the beginning of what Mr. Bush acknowledges is the first genocide of the 21st century, yet Mr. Bush barely manages to get the word "Darfur" out of his mouth. Still, it seems hypocritical of me to rage about Mr. Bush's negligence, when my own beloved institution - the American media - has been at least as passive as Mr. Bush.

Condi Rice finally showed up in Darfur a few days ago, and she went out of her way to talk to rape victims and spotlight the sexual violence used to terrorize civilians. Most American television networks and cable programs haven't done that much.

Even the coverage of Ms. Rice's trip underscored our self-absorption. The manhandling of journalists accompanying Ms. Rice got more coverage than any massacre in Darfur has.

This is a column I don't want to write - we in the media business have so many critics already that I hardly need to pipe in as well. But after more than a year of seething frustration, I feel I have to.

Like many others, I drifted toward journalism partly because it seemed an opportunity to do some good. (O.K., O.K.: it was also a blast, impressed girls and offered the glory of the byline.) But to sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."

I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915.

Serious newspapers have done the best job of covering Darfur, and I take my hat off to Emily Wax of The Washington Post and to several colleagues at The Times for their reporting. Time magazine gets credit for putting Darfur on its cover - but the newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today.

The real failure has been television's. According to monitoring by the Tyndall Report, ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of the Darfur genocide in its nightly newscasts all last year - and that turns out to be a credit to Peter Jennings. NBC had only 5 minutes of coverage all last year, and CBS only 3 minutes - about a minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths. In contrast, Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by the three networks.

Incredibly, more than two years into the genocide, NBC, aside from covering official trips, has still not bothered to send one of its own correspondents into Darfur for independent reporting.
"Generally speaking, it's been a total vacuum," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, speaking of television coverage. "I blame policy makers for not making better policy, but it sure would be easier if we had more media coverage."

When I've asked television correspondents about this lapse, they've noted that visas to Sudan are difficult to get and that reporting in Darfur is expensive and dangerous. True, but TV crews could at least interview Darfur refugees in nearby Chad. After all, Diane Sawyer traveled to Africa this year - to interview Brad Pitt, underscoring the point that the networks are willing to devote resources to cover the African stories that they consider more important than genocide.

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads.

So while we have every right to criticize Mr. Bush for his passivity, I hope that he criticizes us back. We've behaved as disgracefully as he has.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

FT.com: Lucy Kellaway: The likeability craze

2005-07-18T14:49:00.000+08:00

Lucy Kellaway: The likeability craze
By Lucy Kellaway
Published: July 17 2005 16:50 Last updated: July 17 2005 16:50

Last week I received a message that went as follows.

“Ms Kellaway: I read your column from time to time. I still don’t understand why the Financial Times carries it. After reading your July 11 column ‘Caught between horror and the need to get on with life’, I now know why I don’t like you. A reader.”

On the first score, and just in case any other readers don’t understand why the FT carries this column, it is (I think) to do with variety. Some people like having stories such as “Trade data undermines US bonds” diluted by lighter pieces about having Danish pastry crumbs stuck in your keyboard.

Others prefer to take their trade data stories neat, in which case they are best advised to turn this page quickly.

What interests me about this reader’s e-mail is the second point. I have often been told I’m irrelevant, superficial, ignorant, unfeeling, cynical and self-centred. This is the first time, though, that someone has felt the need to share the news that they don’t like me.

In fact the last time I suffered such a direct attack was at primary school, and then it came in a singsong whine: “I don’t like you, you’re not my friend.”

Even so, I would probably have let this e-mail go were it not for the fact that a “likeable” craze is sweeping corporate America. Being liked is the new big thing that determines success, according to various self-help books that will be taken on holiday this year by armies of ever-optimistic business people.

Those of us who aren’t likeable need not despair: the good news is that we can become so by following a few easy steps. The best guidebook is The Likeability Factor – How to Boost your L-Factor and Achieve your Life’s Dreams, by Tim Sanders, a “leadership coach” at Yahoo.

My first response to the title is negative. The word likeability has an unpleasant echo of the maddening old British Gas ad: “Cook, cook, cookability – that’s the beauty of gas!” My second one is more positive. Sanders’ last book was the bestseller, Love is the Killer App. The corporate love craze that it expounded was really the worst management fad ever, and if the new book suggests a retreat down the emotional scale to mere liking, we should all welcome that.

In this new effort, Sanders breaks down likeability into four manageable chunks: friendliness (I agree with this), relevance (why?), empathy (this can be overrated) and authenticity (a bad idea). The message is that we can increase our L-Factor just as we can increase our fitness. It’s all about smiling at people and wagging your tail. The L-Factor is going down a storm in the US if reviews on Amazon are anything to go by. “C R A C K . . . That’s the sound of Tim hitting it out of the park again!” writes one reviewer. “Grab a copy to use on your success journey!” writes another.

What is striking about Likeability is not its banality but its wrongness. We know that being a bastard does not help your “success journey”. However, there is no evidence that being nice does either. If you think about it for five seconds it is obvious that the people who are good leaders are the ones whom you respect. Business is tough and to do well you need a thick skin.

And even if likeability were really important, it is not something that can be learned from a book. I do know a few people who have acquired likeability (and a few who have lost it along the way) but that was because their circumstances changed: maybe they had a near-death experience or maybe they just grew up a bit. Going round doing a lot of smiling and empathetic nodding doesn’t make you likeable. It makes you ludicrous.

Which brings me to the worst thing of all – wanting to be liked. This is one of the greatest weaknesses of managers. It is up there with being a psychopath in terms of the damage it can do to a company. Strong leaders do what is right or what they have to do and if people don’t like it, then too bad. By far the worst managers I have ever had were ones longing to be liked by everyone. They tended to agree with the last person they had spoken to and shied away from doing difficult things.

The likeability craze leaves me nostalgic for the old days when big companies were run by big, beastly people such as Lord King, the former head of British Airways, who died last week.

I interviewed him fifteen years ago and even then his bombastic rudeness struck me as exceptional. His leadership skill was enormous – at least for some of his career. But his L-Factor: zero. He didn’t find my portrait in the FT to his taste and the following morning he was on the phone to the editor of the FT threatening to cancel all British Airway’s advertising in the paper. Again, not much L-Factor on show there.

So what about my own likeability or lack of it?

Managers and columnists are in a different camp. If you write about crumbs in keyboards, it probably does matter a bit that people like you. Which means maybe I should worry about the reader’s e-mail after all.

However, a distinction should be made between being liked and who you are liked by. I don’t see much virtue in being liked in general. It all depends on the person doing the liking. If they are people whom I would like myself, I mind very much. Otherwise I only mind a little. And my personal success target is to try minding not at all.

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

Sleazy guy magnet

2005-07-18T14:25:00.000+08:00

Something disgusting happened to me last week: a married officemate made a pass at me. And despite my lame attempts to give him the brush-off (which consisted mainly of taking an eternity to reply to his messages, responding in monosyllables, and logging off early from the chat app so as not to receive overtures--can't he take the hint??), he persists in his pathetic and utterly detestable attempts to flirt with me.

I guess the problem with me is that I always try to be nice. Contrary to my snobbish exterior, I'm really Pollyanna at heart. That's why I can't really bring out my inner bitch (I believe every woman has one, except maybe for Mother Teresa). So even though I'm dying to tell him to f*ck off and just do his job (hey dude, that's what we're being paid for), one thing hindering me is that we are co-workers in such a small company. Whatever we do, we will always bump into each other, and it's always best to avoid any unpleasantness (heck, in the first place, working here hasn't always been peachy keen). Second, I could always turn out to be wrong, and so end up with my foot in my mouth.

That leaves me with just grinning and enduring the status quo, even though I so badly want to snap his bloody philandering neck. And it makes me hate and get angry at myself for whatever it is men of his ilk (and he hasn't been the first) see in me that makes them think I am a pushover. My friends say it's because I look naive, demure, prim and proper (does that read
gullible?). That leads me again to question: Do nice girls (just like nice guys do) finish last? But that also begs the question: Am I truly a nice girl? How do you define 'nice,' anyway? I don't
feel like one, because I know in my heart of hearts I've done some pretty bad things.

What will hopefully save me from the crackling flames of hell is my vow never to knowingly consort with a married man. And maybe it's also never thinking of myself as a good person (and hence always striving to be one) that saves me.

Sorry about the anger. I just hate it that I'm a sleazy guy magnet.

Sathnam Sanghera: Lessons in teaching

2005-07-18T10:17:00.000+08:00

Sathnam Sanghera: Lessons in teaching
By Sathnam Sanghera
Published: June 30 2005 19:07 Last updated: June 30 2005 19:07

In the event, there were only three truly excruciating moments during my day at Darrick Wood School in Orpington, working as a volunteer for businessdynamics, a charity that attempts to enthuse kids about the world of work: (1) when I tried to divide my class of 25 14- to 15-year- olds into groups of six and struggled for some 30 seconds with the mental arithmetic; (2) when one of the boys came up and enquired: “How much do you earn, sir? Is it more than £30,000, sir? Are you rich, sir? What car do you drive, sir?”; and (3) when another of the boys put his arm around one of the girls and asked: “Mister S – do you think she could be a model?”

I say “only three” because after my training session with Usha Nair, a ballsy executive coach and programme manager for businessdynamics, I was expecting more wobbles. She had informed me that the programme I’d be delivering to class 10XW was designed for 16- to 18-year-olds, not 14- to 15-year-olds, was usually delivered over two days, not one, and had never been tried in this particular school before. “But I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she had added. “Just relax.”

A fortnight later, as I walked into the school’s reception area, I was finding it a little difficult to “just relax” for a number of reasons – not least the fact that, as a single man in my 20s, I am not good with teenagers, who, judging from the newspapers I read, are generally hoodie-wearing, Crazy Frog record-buying, alcopop-swilling maniacs.

When I had initially volunteered, scenes from the film Dangerous Minds had flickered through my mind: after an initial struggle with the rough, inner-city kids, I would win them over with my West Midlands charm, inspiring them to become the Richard Bransons of the future. But the stressful reality of the situation was now evident: I was a private school-educated journalist going into a state school to tell a bunch of kids that business was jolly exciting. And I didn’t feel any less stressed when the impressive PR accompanying me told me that during one of her own volunteering sessions, the boys in her class had spent the entire time taking photos of her bum on their mobiles.

Luckily, two things swung in my favour: (a) the kids at the school, based in a leafy suburb of Kent, turned out to resemble the inner city kids in Dangerous Minds as much as I resemble Michelle Pfeiffer and (b) Usha Nair, who was as at ease in front of a class of kids as I am in front of a curry, was willing to take over whenever I lacked confidence or lost control, which turned out to be around 80 per cent of the time.

The programme I was to deliver required me to divide the students into groups, get them to develop a new business idea (in this case, a magazine) and present a business plan at the end of the day to a bunch of business angels (represented by Usha, me and the PR), with the aim of securing financial backing (represented by a box of Quality Street and a some cheapo FT-branded alarm clocks for the winning team).

To help develop their business plans, I was supposed to talk them through basic business concepts such as marketing, human resources, finance and corporate social responsibility. I began with HR, asking the class if they knew what kind of management positions existed at the top of companies. Ten kids stuck their hands up straight away. “Sales director!” shouted one. “Chief executive officer!” shouted another. It was only when another voice squeaked, “Head of design and development!” that I spotted my error: I had handed out sheets of paper with the answers.

It was hardly a confident beginning, but no one seemed too worried by it and I moved on rapidly. Gradually, I found myself feeling less terrified and, later, there was even a period of about two minutes when Usha and the PR left the classroom and I managed to hold the attention of 25 teenagers without a riot breaking out.

Those two minutes felt a little like the first two minutes riding a pushbike for the first time: thrilling but infused with the certain knowledge that a series of very painful falls was coming. But the presentations at the end of the day made the many bruises worthwhile: the kids got into the work and spoke articulately and enthusiastically about cash flows and turnover and profit margins. Frankly, the delivery was better and clearer than many presentations I have sat through in the real world.

Indeed, I recommend that British FT readers consider volunteering some time to businessdynamics, which runs in excess of 1,700 programmes in more than 1,000 schools nationwide.

Schools need help in teaching children about business. Something needs to be done, too, about the fact that so few students dream of a future in business. A recent businessdynamics survey showed that almost half of students are not attracted to a career in business, and my conversations with class 10XW reflected this: most said they wanted to work in the media.

Of course, if you volunteer, some of your students may misbehave, some may ask you how much you earn, some may take pictures of your bum and some may just blink back at you with a bored, disdainful look that says: I’d rather be downloading a Crazy Frog ring tone. But I bet you’ll find it useful – not only in terms of what you can teach, but in terms of what you can learn about the incredibly difficult job that teachers do every day of their stressful lives.

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

Darna!

2005-07-14T15:24:00.000+08:00

I have a secret addiction: the Pinoy telefantasy Darna (click here too for an amazing profile on this superheroine compiled by a Brit. It even has the original and translated lyrics of the series' theme. He probably asked his friendly neighborhood Pinay nurse or au pair to translate for him).

My initial motivation for watching the show was to see how they fleshed out Darna, an important Filipino pop culture figure. Later on, as the series progressed from okay to awful to downright hilarious, I couldn't help but stay hooked. You know how it is when you can't take your eyes off an impending train wreck, even though you know there's going to be a gruesome mishmash of bodies? That's how it is with me and Darna. No matter how the show got worse (two nights ago, us loyal viewers got introduced to the Divas Impaktitas, a trio of winged but strangely fangless--I figured those fake plastic fangs would impede their ability to spout dialogue--vampiresses heavily influenced by borrowings from the movies Van Helsing and Coppola's Dracula), I kept watching, if merely for its campy entertainment value, and my daily bonding ritual with a friend which involved discussing the latest episode's plot loopholes and speculating on what would happen next.

There is also another thing that keeps me watching: Darna may be among the few superheroes to achieve work-life balance. Early on in the series, I remember cheering for her when she finally got the balls to stand up to lola Aio (her mentor--or is it tormentor? Lola Aio is a bit of a killjoy, you see, demanding Narda's unwavering devotion to duty 24/7) and demand that she be allowed to pursue a romantic relationship with the hapless Efren. Since then they have gone on a beach vacation (nixed due to force majeure), gotten engaged, broken up and gotten back together again (recently, she even had a wedding gown fitting!). I'm not really sure how things will go at this point, as she is due to be stabbed by her father Mulong, who was enslaved by the Queen of Darkness and turned into one of her chief aides.

If the wedding does push through, it'll be a wealth of new plot material (which will sadly remain unexplored, as Darna appears to be ending her run soon on GMA 7). How will Narda/Darna cope with her new responsibilities as wife and mother? Will she take it easy during her pregnancy, and who will take up the slack for her (don't tell me it's going to be those annoying Wonder Kids)? Will she suffer a miscarriage during one of her obviously choreographed forays to save the Philippines (and I say the Philippines, because I've never seen her go to Israel to thwart a suicide bomber, or to North Korea to drop Kim Jong Il down the mouth of an active volcano, so her turf probably remains confined to our local shores), resulting in renewed conflict with hubby Efren? What happens if she needs to rush out and save people from a burning building while cooking dinner?

Until then, Darna will remain my tagapagligtas from dreary weekday evenings.

So I like him (again), after all

2005-07-11T15:29:00.000+08:00

I went out V with again last night. We had a nice long chat over a bowl of halo-halo in Chowking. The surprising thing was, I didn't feel so unassured about myself like in our first meeting. Our roles were reversed: I did most of the talking and he was content with just listening. And I finally stopped feeling like an intellectual and spiritual featherweight.

He complimented me thrice on the way I looked (uy flattered!), even though I just threw on a pair of jeans scheduled for laundry duty, an old house shirt, and my least favorite brown jacket. And it was sweet of him to bring me some noodles from Singapore, where he'd just been on a business trip.

As usual, our conversation topics ranged from the mundane (Desperate Housewives and where I wash my clothes) to the weighty (more of our mutual existentialist ruminations on life. I wonder sometimes, do I take myself too seriously?). I've begun to like him again, although not with the same intensity as before. In many ways, he fits the bill for Twinkle's Ideal Guy: smart, articulate, reads me poems, idealistic, chivalrous and sensitive. V is the sensible choice: somehow I know he is incapable of deliberate jerk-like behavior. And yet, you can't love a man only in your head--it's as if he articulates a lot of ideas, but not emotions. I also feel that he's too straight-laced for me. I guess that's how it always is with girls: we are always attracted to bad boys because we like the feeling that we are chasing after, and trying to tame, something elusive. So I suppose that's what it boils down to: V is not attractive enough (to me, at least) because he doesn't have a bad bone in his body.

FT.com: Lucy Kellaway: Sitting at your desk during attacks

2005-07-11T14:47:00.000+08:00

Lucy Kellaway: Sitting at your desk during attacks
By Lucy Kellaway
Published: July 10 2005 18:59 Last updated: July 10 2005 18:59

Last Thursday morning, four long, long days ago, I cycled intto work feeling out of sorts. It was drizzling, I had a hangover, and only the vaguest notion of what I was going to write my column about. The previous night I had been at a party to launch my Martin Lukes book. For a glorious couple of hours I had felt fêted – the very centre of the universe – and had downed a lot of wine in celebration.

My idea was to write something on the themes of vanity, ego and success. Based on my three seconds in the limelight, I wanted to describe how tempting it is to believe the nice things people say, and what this must do to you if you live in the limelight all the time. How would it feel to be someone really important, permanently surrounded by people who endlessly confirm your own splendid view of yourself? My (somewhat obvious) conclusion was that every successful person needs someone to stand by their side with a very sharp pin.

This sliver of an idea was going to need a lot of work. Yet rather than do any, I dispatched a few glib e-mails about the night before and then felt the need for coffee, a Danish pastry and a Diet Coke. I started to search for my vending card, turned my handbag upside down, couldn’t find it, so trawled the building looking for someone willing to lend me theirs.

In the newsroom a group of people was standing by the television. There had been bombs on Tubes and buses. Someone was talking about al-Qaeda.

Oh God – my daughters, I thought. Two of them had been on the Underground that morning travelling to school through central London. And my husband’s magazine, Prospect, is in Bloomsbury, just the shortest of stone’s throws from two of the bombs. Though I knew my daughters would already be safely at school, and that my husband would surely still be slouching around in his pyjamas at home, I had to check.

Having confirmed they were indeed fine, what was I then supposed to do? The mundane details of an office morning – Danish pastries, half-baked columns and lost vending cards – have no meaning when you are watching pictures of people on stretchers in familiar London streets and a bus with its roof torn off.

Something like this leaves everyone adrift. There is shock and fear, and pity. But there is also the adrenalin generated by big events, and the accompanying guilt at finding any thing so awful exciting.

The trouble for Londoners was that it was hard to know what box to put this into. Was this like the IRA bombs, in which case the right response was a jolt of horror for the people caught in it, but otherwise pride in getting on with normal life?

Or was this something different that touched a 9/11 nerve – a truly terrifying attack which Londoners had been waiting for and which required a bigger mental shift?

And how bad was it anyway?

How many were dead? No one seemed to know.

At midday we all crowded round to watch Tony Blair, the prime minister, addressing the nation on TV. A group of cynical journalists, we watched in silence. Though I was shocked at what he was saying, somewhere in my mind I was also trying to push away the image of the impersonator, Rory Bremner, who does him so brilliantly.

Part of me was rolling my eyes at the way the pauses between his clauses have got so wide you could drive a bus through them. And then the image of a bus reminded me of the one with its roof blasted off.

What tone is right when you are safe and sitting at your desk but such events are happening outside? How soon after something like this is it acceptable to talk about something else? How soon can you laugh?

By lunchtime the working day seemed to have stopped. There were no press releases from public relations companies. There were no mobile phones. Meetings were cancelled – which was nice, but it felt ominous too.

My only e-mails were from Americans, none of whom I had ever met, and mostly saying they would pray for me and all my country folk, and asking if I was safe.

This was both touching and exasperating. Of course I’m blinking OK, I thought. There are 10m people in London, and at that point only two were confirmed dead.

Eventually I was so overcome by the need for food that I tried to go out and buy something, only to be told by a woman at the door that the police were advising staff not to leave the building. Again, a flash of irritation. The bombs had already exploded, so advising people against nipping out for a sandwich did not seem the most logical of responses.

Mid-afternoon, with no work done, I left to go to a dentist appointment. Outside, the sun had come out after the morning’s rain and millions of Londoners were walking. The crowds were so thick on Cheapside that I had to get off my bike and push.

It was odd, but it didn’t feel sad at all. It was nice to know how very many people work in these offices. They were all fine and alive and possibly filled with the notion that as they were neither dead nor hurt, they should walk the long way home with good grace.

When I got to the dentist, the waiting room was empty. Sorry, said the receptionist, we’re closing. Suddenly I was my normal self again. “Why didn’t you ring to tell me?” I snapped.
She smiled and gave me the reprimand I deserved. “It’s not a normal day,” she said.

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

FT.com: Lucy Kellaway: Skiving is fun for a hard worker

2005-07-04T07:29:00.000+08:00

Last week I underwent an unsettling change of mind on everything I have ever believed about management, about work and about business. For 10 years I have been the office detractor, endlessly saying how hopeless managers are, what stupid nonsense they talk and what idiotic things they do. Over the years I have written hundreds of columns, mostly variations on the same theme. Corporate ethics? Daft and disingenuous. Companies as families? Sickeningly bogus. Employee surveys? Who is fooling whom?

Now I am taking it all back. Or at least some of it. From now on I am going to be a workplace Pollyanna, preaching that work is a wonderful thing.

The book that brought on this rethink is not Contagious Success! or Virtuoso Teams or Performance at the Limit, or any of the other gung-ho management titles stacked up unread on my desk, on the shelves and all round me on the floor. It is Bonjour Paresse, last year’s French best-seller that has already helped 300,000 French readers learn how to work even less hard than they work already. Now the book is out in the UK (under the much less amusing name Hello Laziness) and I fell on it expecting to find Corinne Maier, an economist and manager at Electricité de France, to be a woman after my own heart. But as I turned the pages I was taken over by the unaccustomed feelings of disapproval, self-righteousness and sense-of-humour failure.

Her theory is this. Salaried work is the new slavery: companies ask a lot from workers and give them nothing back. Most of what office workers do is pointless or downright wicked. However hard we work most of us are condemned to being middle managers anyway. So why bother? Her answer is for everyone to skive for life. To pick up our pay cheque and do the absolute minimum.

Her analysis of the problem is wrong, and her solution is a recipe for making office workers, who are now merely unfulfilled, downright miserable. First, white-collar work is not, as she claims, pointless. At least it might be pointless in a deep, existential way – but everything is pointless viewed thus, and in any case, that way madness lies. Back in real life, selling things that people want to buy and employing people in the process actually strikes me as one of the least pointless things there is.

Are managers useless? Some are, obviously. I bet there are quite a few close to where you are sitting now. But on the whole managers as a class cannot be useless at all. Business is competitive. Making money in almost any sector in almost any country is hard. So it follows that any company that pulls this off must be doing an awful lot right.

I still think that a lot of what managers get up to is time-wasting, and that they talk a lot of guff. But if one measures companies by what comes out, one is inclined to be a bit less scathing. Are we all replaceable? Yes, of course we are. But so what? We knew that anyway.

This most definitely does not lead to her conclusion that salaried work is slavery. I can think of two big differences right off: slaves did not have health insurance and could not job-hop if they did not fancy what they were doing.

Even if one did accept her ludicrously grim view of company life, her remedy – that we become professional slackers, avoiding any responsibility and hiding away in areas in which we will not be much noticed – is one of the worst I have ever heard. This fails to understand the point of work. We need to feel some sense of connection, however weak, to the place where we work. We need to believe that what we do matters, even if just a tiny bit.

Many years ago I did a job that I thought entirely pointless, and for a while lived according to the Hello Laziness principles. I have never been so unhappy in my life. Instead of spending my time doing anything, I frittered it away crying in the loo.

The book is full of French intellectual snobbery, which as an English intellectual snob I find problematic. Maier derides French managers for being too busy going to their pointless little meetings to read Foucault. The idea that managers should wallow in this post-Freudian Gallic clap-trap is truly alarming.

More generally, should we require managers to be cultured? I suppose it is nice if they have read the odd book as it will probably (though not necessarily) make them better company if you find yourself sitting next to them at dinner. But does it make them any better at their jobs? Martin Taylor is the most cultured businessman I can think of. Bob Ayling had also read a lot. Did their erudition help them in running Barclays and British Airways? I do not know if either would agree, but my hunch is: absolutely not.

In spite of my new Pollyanna persona I do not want to leave anyone with the idea I am against skiving. In fact I am a huge fan, and am actually planning to slope away early today and go to the sales to buy myself an utterly uncalled for party dress.

The point about skiving is that it is enjoyable only against a background of industry. When I have worked quite hard, or done something I am pleased with or when I am cross with my employer, I feel I deserve a skive. So I then do it shamelessly and with great enjoyment. There is an art to skiving, and although I am quite good at it, I could get better. A slackers’ guide that gives tips on how to skive to advantage, or on how to work a bit less hard in general – now that would be a book I would like.

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

The (reluctantly) thrifty audiophile

2005-06-30T05:22:00.000+08:00

You know times are really getting hard when people fight tooth and nail to get theire 20% jeepney fare discount, and when even the loss of 50 cents change makes one wince.

As for me, I've decided to cost-cut by trying out one of those CD burning services widely available in a country like ours where our desire to satisfy our tastes outstrips the moolah in our pockets. This particular one has been vouched for by my roommate, who likes the fact that you can return a disc for re-burning if you're not satisfied with it's quality. The service is supposedly free, you just provide the disc for the songs.

Given the prohibitive price of CDs nowadays, CD burning is definitely the practical way to go. There's my four-song criteria for buying a CD--I have to like at least four songs in the album before I consider it worth buying. Even then, that's not a foolproof way to pick CDs because you never know which albums are keepers. As an example, I was besotted by John Mayer's Room for Squares before, but now I can't stand listening to it.

I've been tripping a lot lately to Britrock and Britrock sound-alike bands, so I'm planning to have these songs burned as my first formal foray into the world of music piracy:

Chocolate - Snow Patrol
Evil - Interpol
Dakota - Stereophonics
Mr Brightside - The Killers
The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore - Keane cover (Walker Bros)
Spitting Games - Snow Patrol
Run - Snow Patrol
Gravity - Embrace
How to Be Dead - Snow Patrol
A Heart to Hold You - Keane
Brass in Pocket - The Pretenders >> Heard this in the movie "Lost in Translation" and instantly fell in love with it.
Grazed Knees - Snow Patrol
Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand
Angels - Robbie Williams
She's the One - Robbie Williams
Misunderstood - Robbie Williams
Thinking of You - Paul Weller
Have a Nice Day - Stereophonics
Paranoid Android - Radiohead
Wishing on a Star - Paul Weller
If I Could Only Be Sure - Paul Weller
Don't Make Promises - Paul Weller
Karma Police - Radiohead
This Fire - Franz Ferdinand

Mortified

2005-06-30T01:57:00.000+08:00

Jan, I'm so mortified you've read my Friendster blog. Or, more precisely, I'm mortified because my blog announced its existence to the four dozen or so people connected to my network. But you are right. What is the point of blogging (especially given my motives) if I were to conceal my journal's existence from the world wide web (especially from that one person whom I'm dying to get noticed by)?

Blogging is an exercise in bravery. It requires plenty of courage to let people into your head and allow them access to your most private thoughts. On the upside, blogs can be doors into people's souls. So it was with that rarely-felt little electric thrill that I pasted A's blog address on my browser (o, ganda ng segue ano?) and proceeded to take a peek into his innermost thoughts. What I found there made me like him even more, because my man has a tender, sensitive little soul. It was obvious in the cloyingly mushy, even clumsily-written paragraphs and verses that were reminiscent of a high school kid's journal entry, or perhaps something a high school junior would submit to the literary page of his school newspaper.

Still, many of the words he wrote still ring true to this day, X number of years later. His entries reflected my generation's growing nostalgia for the past, especially our wish to go back to a day and age (childhood, for example) when things were simpler and life was less complicated. He spoke of frustration at the general state of mankind (sana magka-world peace na daw). He and I are both fans of letter-writing, particularly of love letters--to me, if a man can pin down his thoughts and feelings coherently on a sheet of paper (never mind if it's not floral or perfumed--remember our guy friends begging for stuff from our stationery collection so they could write to their crushes?), then there has to be some depth to that man. And you don't find everyday a guy who posts collections of love poetry on his blog. He's not too big on animal welfare though, but I'm sure I could teach him a thing or two about that.

A successfully managed to further endear himself to me (not that he has to work very hard at it). I think my blog is even starting to read like his. That's something for a girl who staunchly refuses to watch "The Notebook," and who cringed all throughout "Sweet November." But then, she cried buckets of tears at "A Walk to Remember."

My Day Becomes Eclectic

2005-06-28T06:30:00.000+08:00

I discovered this great Internet radio site called kcrw.com. Siyempre it appeals to my pretentiously artsy-fartsy musical sensibilities (ha-ha!). Natuwa lang ako kay Mr Harcourt, he's backed many of the bands I like.

Read this article on New York Times.com:

June 26, 2005
The Star Maker of the Semipopular
By JAIME WOLF

Jesca Hoop is a striking, dark-haired 29-year-old from Northern California who writes and sings twisty, sprawling, lyrically abstract songs, featuring strange sonorities and offbeat rhythms. Her music sounds as if it comes from an imaginary country, and she sings in the accented English of someone from that country. In the fall of 2003, Hoop was living in a van in Sonoma County, 35 miles north of San Francisco, when late one morning she was awakened by a call on her cellphone. The voice on the other end belonged to Nic Harcourt, a disc jockey and host of a weekday music program, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' on the Los Angeles public-radio station KCRW. Harcourt had received a copy of some unreleased self-produced ''demo'' recordings of Hoop's and had begun playing them on the air. Her song ''Seed of Wonder'' was especially popular: when it spun, the studio's phones lighted up and listeners in their cars pulled over to the side of the road, waiting for Harcourt to announce what it was. It would go on to become one of KCRW's top five requests for eight weeks running, a station record.

Hoop had no idea who Nic Harcourt was, what his radio show was like or even that he was in possession of a copy of her CD, but she could hardly have received a better break. ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' and KCRW as a whole, are renowned for purveying the contemporary music equivalent of art-house films or literary fiction, a genre the rock critic Robert Christgau calls ''semipopular'' music, marked less by style than by a certain base-line intelligence and tastefulness. (As the station's music director, Harcourt also oversees the rest of its music programming.) Harcourt, whose show is broadcast daily from 9 a.m. to noon, has a knack for finding interesting new music ahead of everyone else: he was the first in America to play Norah Jones and Coldplay on the radio; like Jesca Hoop, the platinum-sellers Dido and David Gray were unsigned artists whose demos Harcourt originally spotlighted on his show; and more idiosyncratic unsigned acts like Damien Rice, Sigur Ros and Jem have all also become the object of record-company bidding wars as a result of Harcourt's championing.

Programmers for larger commercial stations across the country now keep a close eye on what Harcourt plays. In Los Angeles, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' is ''appointment radio'' for film and television producers and the music supervisors responsible for finding hip songs for TV commercials, and it's no longer uncommon for quirky, under-the-radar artists favored by Harcourt to be catapulted into mass popularity as a result of their furnishing the key musical-emotional moment in shows like ''The O.C.'' and movies like ''Garden State.'' Some producers have even begun to hire Harcourt himself to select songs for their soundtracks.

Los Angeles boasts a great lineage of charismatic, near-mythical disc jockeys, including B. Mitchell Reed, whose intimate late-night FM stylings inspired Joni Mitchell to write ''You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio),'' and Rodney Bingenheimer, whose long-running show on KROQ served as the launching pad for Blondie, X, Hole and numerous iconic bands of the 70's, 80's and 90's. Harcourt, who just celebrated his seventh anniversary on ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' is more than just the latest incarnation of this figure. At a time in radio when D.J.'s generally possess little personality and no responsibility for choosing the music they play, he has emerged as the country's most important disc jockey and a genuine bellwether.

''He has impeccable taste,'' Chris Martin, Coldplay's lead singer and songwriter, says. ''Every time I talk to someone in L.A., whether they're a 16-year-old or a 40-year-old, if they're talking about some random band or the new Doves record, when I ask how they know about it, it's always KCRW.'' When Sasquatch Books, the publishers of the Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl's best-selling ''Book Lust,'' sought someone as passionate and knowledgeable about records to write ''Music Lust,'' Harcourt was the obvious choice.

On the air, Harcourt is dry, friendly and a little reserved, his distinctive voice a mash-up of his native England, the telltale flattened ''a'' of Australia and assorted American idioms. Announcing what he has just played, he displays an offhand familiarity with rock history and a knowledge of important producers, songwriters and record labels that provides a subtle connective tissue, contextualizing the listening experience beyond just a handful of songs. Such borderline scholarliness is deftly offset by Harcourt's unpretentious enthusiasm and the sense he conveys of sharing his discoveries and passions rather than legislating them. Frequently he will address musicians he's interviewing as ''Dude,'' or utter his favorite exclamation of approval, ''Awesome!'' to a new song by the Chemical Brothers, or a live in-studio performance by Aqualung.

In person, Harcourt, who is 47, has the weathered handsomeness of an elder statesman of rock: wiry and petite, with watery blue eyes set off by a thinning mane of artfully mussed hair and a single earring. Something about him -- maybe the shoes, bulbous neon orange or acid green nylon Yellow Cabs -- also calls to mind Chaplin's Little Tramp, and there is something appealingly Chaplinesque about his manner, oscillating between bold confidence and deep vulnerability. He is often reluctant to talk about himself, noting wryly that ''L.A. is an interesting town because you meet a lot of people who want to tell you how great they are.'' Instead, he'd rather turn the conversation outward to his 2-year-old twins, Sam and Luna; to his beloved soccer team, Aston Villa; and always, to music.

To the extent that there exists a latter-day canon of semipopular music, made up of the intersection of a handful of linguistically dextrous singer-songwriters, alternative and Spanish-language rockers, dissonant Britpop auteurs, elder postpunk statesmen and makers of cinematic-symphonic electronica, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' has had much to do with its formation. When Harcourt took over the show in 1998, its reputation as a tastemaker franchise was well established: his predecessors, Tom Schnabel and Chris Douridas, had each been instrumental in turning ears toward an important cluster of contemporary artists, most famously Beck. When Douridas started spinning a test pressing of ''Loser,'' it became the station's original ''pull your car off the road'' song, and led to Beck's being signed by Geffen Records.

Musically speaking, the word-dense songs of Elvis Costello and Stephin Merritt may have little in common with Astor Piazzolla's classically infused tangos, the Beatlesque synthesis of pop and vernacular Mexican forms achieved by Cafe Tacuba or the regret-laden outpourings artfully arranged over cascading contemporary dance beats by Everything But the Girl, but they coexist inside a taste matrix where people who listen to one of these artists are also predisposed to like the others. If ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' had a Friendster page, its ''Favorite Music'' section would also include Massive Attack, Radiohead, Zero 7, Bjork, Moby, Air, Tom Waits, the Blue Nile, Jeff Buckley, Juana Molina, Rufus Wainwright, the Eels, Aimee Mann, My Bloody Valentine, Caetano Veloso, DJ Shadow, the Trash Can Sinatras and Petra Haden.

Harcourt refers to these and a handful of others as the station's ''core artists.'' Many of them were KCRW favorites before his arrival, but Harcourt has shown a particular brilliance at expanding the core, finding newer and lesser-known music worthy of his listeners' devotion, while simultaneously expanding the station's audience. As Tony Berg, a producer, longtime A.&R. executive and co-founder of the independent label 3 Records, puts it, ''He recognizes careers in their most nascent stages.''

Although KCRW is a listener-supported, not-for-profit, noncommercial station, Harcourt has conscientiously applied commercial principles to its music programming, primarily a ''playlist'' approach in which new discs selected for play on the station are ''pounded'' or played repeatedly in order to foster listener familiarity and identification (although not nearly as repeatedly as on commercial stations -- maybe 5 times a week, as opposed to 80 times a week). Harcourt has also aggressively courted live venues, not only in Los Angeles but also in San Francisco and New York, where thousands of listeners tune into his show via the Internet, to have KCRW present shows by artists they support. In these ways, Harcourt isn't just recognizing careers in the making; he's actually helping to make them.

''What Nic can do,'' says Zach Hochkeppel, the vice president for marketing at Blue Note Records, ''is make people feel like they've discovered something and it's theirs. And that sense of discovery is the difference between buzz and hype -- they feel like they own it, and they become proselytizers on their own.''

''It's all about the music'' is a phrase frequently and snickeringly invoked by jaded music-business insiders -- a kind of secret handshake, the utterance functions as an instant bonding ritual, a succinct negation of the naivete or pretension of platitude-spouting recording artists. The people sharing a laugh know success is not a function of quality but the consequence of any number of calculated gestures, focus groups, forms of payola, image calibration and just plain luck. Once upon a time these people were (and maybe secretly still are) true music fans; their derision comes at the cost of keen disappointment at a formative point in their professional lives, seeing a band they've invested in -- signed to their record label, perhaps, or written a series of rave reviews in support of -- fail to catch fire. And although Harcourt is smart enough, and worldly enough, to know that the words now represent not one but two levels of cliche, he returns to them unironically and un-self-consciously. ''It's all about the music,'' he maintains, and he has turned ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' into a grand experiment designed to see how much he is able to make the music he believes in matter to as many others as possible.

It seems to be working. Harcourt's success at KCRW and his growing reach -- via Webcasting, a weekly syndicated ''Sounds Eclectic'' program, a series of CD's featuring live recordings made in the studio on his show and a planned dedicated Podcast that would make daily ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' shows available for individual download -- have been big factors in what amounts to an alternative-radio renaissance. Internet radio has made geography irrelevant, bringing far-flung shows from the BBC, France's Radio Nova and stations spanning the globe (as well as a handful of scrappy D.I.Y. Internet-only operations like killradio.org and New York's eastvillageradio.com) to the desktop of anyone with a high-speed connection. The satellite services Sirius and XM, which offer a variety of programs both more specialized and more diverse than commercial radio, now boast more than 5.5 million subscribers. Even the FM band itself is showing new signs of life. With support from the billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen and his Experience Music Project, KEXP in Seattle offers a smart mix of contemporary semipopular and independent music; and in January, Minnesota Public Radio unveiled a dedicated all-music station called the Current, programmed along the lines of KCRW and KEXP.

The increasing popularity of such outlets has had an effect on commercial radio as well. Los Angeles is now also home to a raggedy, anarchic start-up called Indie 103 that comes across like a freewheeling college station. On a national level, the fastest-growing commercial radio format is something called Jack. Designed to sound like an iPod in shuffle mode, Jack is a direct reaction to the repetitive monotony of hit radio. Selecting from a rotation of more than a thousand songs at any given time, promiscuously mixing up genres and eras, Jack stations cater to the realization that what listeners want, even from mainstream radio, is something more . . . eclectic.
Harcourt was raised in Birmingham in the 1960's, the only child of a television-journalist father and a mother who worked in electrical wholesaling. He has few happy early memories, save for the times when his combative parents would put on Beatles records and dance around the living room. When they separated, he was 7. Harcourt remembers that when his mother broke the news that his father had moved out, he asked, ''Did he take the Beatles records?''

Harcourt says he began drinking heavily as a teenager, left school as soon as he could and drifted through his youth in an alcoholic haze, working construction and factory jobs and playing part time in a few struggling -- and, he notes, not very good -- rock bands. He followed a girlfriend to Australia, married her and spent the latter half of his 20's there. By then Harcourt was a dedicated postpunk partisan of the Clash and Gang of Four, and he quickly became enamored of INXS, Men at Work, the Hoodoo Gurus and the rest of the blossoming Australian music scene. When his marriage came to an acrimonious end in the fall of 1988, Harcourt washed up in Woodstock. Intending to visit for a couple of months with an old band mate, he wound up joining Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up and stayed for a decade. Talking about it now, he says simply: ''My life changed. In some ways, I'm 16 now.''

In Woodstock he discovered his calling. With no prior radio experience, and now in his early 30's, Harcourt talked his way into doing fill-ins on WDST, the area's local progressive FM station. Before long, he was doing a daily show and programming the station. At WDST, Harcourt earned a reputation for identifying hits far ahead of the curve, and was a crucial early advocate of Alanis Morissette, Moby and Garbage. In 1998, when the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' slot opened up, Harcourt was chosen after a nationwide search.

One day last winter, I went to the KCRW studio in Santa Monica to watch Harcourt do his show. Sometime during the 10 o'clock hour, he played a song by the young English band Doves from a CD that wasn't scheduled for release for three months. While it's routine for Harcourt to have copies of CD's far ahead of their intended releases, no one connected to Doves had anything to do with this leak.

''Let's put it this way,'' Harcourt explained. ''I asked through all the channels I'm supposed to, and no one's sent it to me. Which means they have some exclusive deal. You know, 'Give it to KROQ.' But I have other sources of getting these things -- and, I mean, we were originally playing Doves a year ahead of anyone else. I feel some kind of ownership of it. Why shouldn't we be playing it?''

Harcourt stands at the hub of an interconnected web of opinion and advice that helps guide him through the avalanche of material constantly coming his way: friends in the U.K. who keep him current on English and European releases; producers and musicians he has grown to trust over the years; the producer of ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' and KCRW's assistant music director, Ariana Morgenstern, who was born in Argentina and feeds Harcourt Spanish-language rock discs as well as jazz vocals selected to work in the morning mix; other KCRW D.J.'s with specialized knowledge; and the English music magazine Uncut, which he reads cover to cover.

Harcourt is wary of label executives and band representatives trying to foist things on him. At the same time, however, he works to keep an open mind, going out regularly to hear music and paying dutiful attention to everything that comes in over the transom. The demo CD of Brazilian Girls, a playful polyglot New York-based trip-hop collective that Harcourt started playing last year -- thereby helping them land a major-label deal with Verve -- was given to him by his massage therapist, who saw the band while on vacation. ''You can imagine I get a lot of friends telling me something is great,'' he says. ''And you want to love it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you don't.''

Harcourt receives about 400 unsolicited CD's each week, which he tries out at home over the weekend. One Sunday, I drove up to Topanga Canyon, an overgrown, mountainous area, crisscrossed by dirt roads. There, in the cozy two-bedroom cottage Harcourt shares with his partner of 12 years, Abba Roland, and their young son and daughter, I watched him listen to music. We sat in a small alcove off Harcourt's kitchen, in front of a shelf upon which was perched his PowerBook and a portable CD player, hooked up to a small pair of speakers.

At his feet, three mailing crates brimmed with CD's. Harcourt quickly went through a few dozen discs, putting the ones he liked in the ''add'' pile -- the next day they would be placed in the ''new'' section of the station's library and available to all KCRW's D.J.'s to play on their shows. Harcourt will always give the first couple of tracks of a CD his attention, but if it doesn't grab him, he'll just move on. One disc sent to him was a homemade CD with a handwritten letter from a soldier stationed in Iraq named Adam Sisler, also known as Auburn Bobby.

''Wow!'' Harcourt said. ''This guy's in danger, and he's got an MP3 player out there, and he's demoing songs. I mean, I have respect for everyone who's demoing songs, but this guy's in the middle of a war zone!'' Sisler's music had a raw edge, but it also lacked form, and the recording was extremely lo-fi. Harcourt was disappointed not to find something he could play. ''I might send this guy an e-mail and say, 'Send me the next batch when you record them professionally,''' he said.

Intermittently, Roland, who moved to Los Angeles with Harcourt from Woodstock, would interrupt her chores to offer cheeky commentary. Roland is a New York City native, an intelligent, voluble and strong-willed singer and songwriter who appeared on the Lilith Fair tour with Sarah McLachlan and has recorded and released two CD's of her own material. Roland is one of Harcourt's main conduits to the L.A. music scene. It's clear that her opinions mean a lot to Harcourt, and he says that witnessing her daily struggles to create music and get people to play it on the radio increases his desire to give a fair shake to everyone who approaches him. (Except, perhaps, Roland herself. Constrained by the appearance of conflict, Harcourt says he is reluctant to play her music on the radio or recommend her to industry contacts. ''In a way, she's sleeping with precisely the wrong guy,'' he says ruefully.)

Many people would love to know what exactly Harcourt is listening for, but he is unable to provide a simple answer. Surprisingly for someone who plays so much emotional, personal music, Harcourt rarely pays attention to lyrics. What he listens for, he says, is primarily a sound and a feeling -- part of the reason he's so willing to play music in foreign languages -- rather than literary content. He's confident in what he likes, but he also knows that what he likes isn't always sufficient for inclusion on the station's playlist. Harcourt, for instance, remains a huge fan of Midnight Oil, an 80's-era politically committed Australian band, but he says he has never thought that any of its old songs would feel right (the way that classics by XTC or Crowded House do) on ''Morning Becomes Eclectic.'' And if a new disc isn't clicking with him, that doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being added to the library: Harcourt will often defer in matters of new indie-rock releases to KCRW's music librarian, Eric J. Lawrence, or in jazz to Tom Schnabel, the former ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' host who now has a late-morning weekend show.

Explaining how he introduces new music, Harcourt talks about the listeners' ''comfort zone'' and their need to have things they're already familiar with seeded in the mix. KCRW's audience is largely affluent and professional, and the median age of the station's listeners is 44. As a show designed to ease listeners into the day, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' isn't intended to be bracing or ''in your face.''

If there's a downside to this, however, it's the risk of excessive tastefulness, the possibility that, overflowing with tremulous, yearning, restrained singer-songwriters and billowing clouds of chilled-out gossamer electronica, the station's programming can at times amount to a formulaic rootless cosmopolitan soundtrack, the audio equivalent of a spread in Wallpaper magazine. Given that the traditional East Coast criticism of Los Angeles is that it's entirely too vulgar and commercial, it may seem absurd to accuse an L.A. institution of being too tasteful.

But to his credit, Harcourt is aware of the tendency and, in his own subtle way, has steadily increased the unruliness quotient in the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' mix over the past couple of years, spotlighting brash young bands like Interpol, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, and in recent months playing a lot of Louis XIV, a swaggering glam-influenced garage band from San Diego. When they played a live set on Harcourt's show in January, the walls in the studio shook. Interviewing them, Harcourt told them admiringly, ''These sound like the songs I wish I could've written when I was 18.''

Not too long ago, I joined Harcourt at an organic vegan restaurant in Santa Monica for a lunch meeting with Lionel Conway, a music publisher who manages the catalog of songs written by ZZ Top. Conway was eager for Harcourt to consider finding a way to include the group in the new ''Dukes of Hazzard'' movie, for which he had been hired as music supervisor.

As it happens, Conway is also Jesca Hoop's manager and the person who originally sent Harcourt her CD. When Harcourt inquired after her, Conway explained that she was now ready to make a record and that her suitors had been winnowed to two: an offshoot of Sanctuary, a large independent label whose roster includes Morrissey, De La Soul and the Blue Nile; and 3 Records, a boutique start-up run by a trio of former major-label executives and producers, including Tony Berg.

''She's got some momentum right now,'' Harcourt cautioned. ''And she's at the point where if she doesn't do something soon, that will dissipate. So if she wants to, tell her to give me a buzz. I'm happy to give her my feedback.''

Harcourt favored Berg, and indeed, Hoop is on the verge of closing a deal with him; her record should come out sometime next year. Harcourt has served as an adviser for other artists in similar situations. After playing Jem's demo recordings and causing a furor, Harcourt lent a sympathetic ear as she was pursued by various labels.

Harcourt realizes that he is making decisions that can result in six-figure paydays for the artists he anoints -- the kind of money he will never make as a public-radio D.J. In the mid-90's, when Chris Douridas was the host of ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' he also served as a paid consultant for Geffen Records, bringing to their attention music he discovered in the course of his D.J. work, a relationship that ultimately led to his being hired full time as an executive at DreamWorks Records. At various times, always with the blessing of station management, other KCRW D.J.'s have also worked for record labels.

But although Harcourt has been offered several kinds of scouting consultancies for record companies, he says he has no desire to take such an offer. ''With all due respect to people who do A.&R. for a living, they're a kind of baby sitter, and I already have two babies,'' Harcourt says. ''I just like putting the music out there and letting other people make up their minds whether or not they like it.''

On a Sunday night last January, I met Harcourt outside the Troubadour, a legendary Los Angeles club where KCRW was presenting a sold-out concert by the much-buzzed-about Montreal band Arcade Fire, whose disc Harcourt had kept in his rotation for months. The ticketholder line extended far down Santa Monica Boulevard. A passel of insiders and V.I.P.'s, including Beck and Joel Mark, the executive from Geffen Records responsible for signing Sigur Ros, waved at Harcourt on their way in.

Harcourt, however, was experiencing another Chaplinesque moment -- the doorman couldn't locate his name on the list and wasn't interested in any special pleading. Rather than throw a tantrum, the disc jockey and partial orchestrator of all the surrounding excitement gave up, happy to hang out, savoring the absurdity of it all. By the time the appropriate publicist could be located to get him inside, it was too late for Harcourt to go onstage and introduce the band. Instead, he found a seat, quickly getting caught up in the show's theatrical dynamism and once again becoming what he enjoys being most of all: a fan.

Jaime Wolf wrote for the magazine most recently about the director Wong Kar-wai.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Totoo na talaga 'to...

2005-06-28T06:14:00.000+08:00

So it turns out my blog on blogger.com still exists, after all. I'd decided to abandon the exercise after all my posts mysteriously got wiped out from the main page (but they're still viewable in Edit posts mode). I never really had enough impetus to keep on blogging. I've always been an intensely private person, and I'd always preferred the privacy of physical (as in paper) journals. In fact, I've always had this fantasy of my friends or kin publishing my journals posthumously, when they would turn into a (insert name of esteemed foreign publication here) No. 1 bestseller as a "riveting memoir of my life and times."

But as in most literary ventures I've started (were there even any, or were they all utterly forgettable as to not even deserve to be mentioned; name one and I'll give you a pack of my wickedly delicious breadsticks), diary-writing and blogging both fizzled out miserably. I guess you'd call my first attempt at blogging blogging for blogging's sake. Heck, it can't even be called a real blog: it was just a collection of newspaper articles I'd taken a fancy to. After all, NOTHING ever happens in my life worth writing about. I am also notoriously lazy when it comes to documenting my personal thoughts; I just get too tired or too lazy or too busy to maintain the commitment to pin down my thoughts on a daily basis.

So why am I doing this again? I have a disgustingly ulterior motive: I just located my crush (he of the adorably sweet smile and the even adorably sweeter disposition) on Friendster and discovered he's a blogger-cum-aspiring poet and fictionist. And while his attempts fall sadly short of Coelho, Irving or Neruda, there was something strangely gratifying about the whole discovery: he's not so unattainably profound (and hence, out of my league) after all! Ah, hope shines through them gray low-hanging clouds!! In fact, we're not so different from each other after all (plus, may I cheekily admit, my writing style is also better). So here's the plan: maybe when he reads my blog, he might get to know me better, be amazed at what I have to offer as a person (or at the very least, get blown away by my writing) and (oh most cherished hope of hopes) FALL IN LOVE WITH ME!! Now this is something my friend Steph would laugh at and call 'O.A.'

Corny ba? These are the schemes we crazy girls hatch when Cupid's arrow catches us squarely between the eyes. :) Right, Jan? Buti ka pa, you have that one great love of your life to keep you going; ever reaching and ever striving to finally be together with him. Me, I seem to have fallen into a funk. There is nothing that inspires me (except for my dear Mr Nice Guy, whom I shall call 'A'). Today's turn of events gives me hope though--perhaps he won't remain a pipe dream after all.

He loves seafood. Makapagdala nga ng seafood paella this Saturday. *evil gleam in my eye*

FT.com: Bloggers in a huff at arrival of high society

2005-05-12T00:10:00.000+08:00

Bloggers in a huff at arrival of high society
By Joshua Chaffin in New York
Published: May 10 2005 18:07 Last updated: May 10 2005 18:07

Arianna Huffington's much-ballyhooed web log launched this week with a buzz that seemed more fitting for a fancy magazine than a scrappy internet upstart.

Ms Huffington, a socialite and political pundit, managed to rise above the usual blog din by opening up her card file and securing contributions to the Huffington Post from more than 200 celebrities, including cable mogul Barry Diller, comedian Larry David, Senator John Corzine, writer David Mamet, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and others.

Yet the segment of the media firmament that seemed most eager to sample Ms Huffington's creation was not her fellow celebrities, but her fellow bloggers. For the blog community a diverse, fractious group that tends to resist that term the newest entrant to the field has inspired mixed emotions.

While the project is a validation of their medium by established, mainstream voices, it is also a subversion of the “underground” charm that drew so many to blogs in the first place.

“The blogger is often labelled as a crazy individual, sitting in their bedroom, in their underwear, writing whatever comes to mind,” explained Michael Bassik, a blogger and member of MSHC Partners, which does online political consulting for Democratic candidates.

“What this really symbolises is blogs becoming a more mainstream method of communication,” he adds.

Mrs Huffington has cast her new site as an extension of her penchant for organising “gabfests” which bring her formidable list of social contacts together to swap news, views and stories.

“Picture a nonstop, ever-changing group conversation with input from 100 of the most interesting people from the worlds of politics, entertainment, business, and publishing a place where some of the best minds and most creative thinkers in America can inform, rant, provoke, comment on, and link to whatever strikes them as worth a look,” she wrote to potential contributors.

The first day's postings offered a mixed bag.

There was Mr David's defence of John Bolton, President Bush's prickly nominee as ambassador to the United Nations. “Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it's like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long,” Mr David wrote. “Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.”

The earliest reviews, posted on the internet just after the Huffington Post went live, ranged from grudging praise to Nikki Finke's web column for LA Weekly in which she called the blog the equivalent of “Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one.”

The broader criticism of the Huffington Post, however, is whether it is a blog at all. The site, which is also the brainchild of Ken Lerer, a former executive vice-president of AOL Time Warner, will feature paid advertising.

Given its commercial ambitions, some sceptics suspect the Huffington Post more closely resembles a glossy magazine, with a celebrity stamped on its cover each month than the sort of irreverent conversation that characterised the pioneering blogs.

“It's old media camped out in the internet. It's printed articles printed on screens instead of pulp,” Media Girl wrote on her eponymous blog.

Another question swirling around the Huffington project is whether its roster of celebrities will remain committed to the unglamorous, solitary labour of blogging.

“It's a great list. But are all these people going to blog?” wondered Jessica Coen, the editor of Gawker.com, a blog about New York media and pop-culture that generates 5m page-views per month. For Ms Coen, whose blog has done a good trade in skewering celebrities, the Huffington Post has raised the unsettling possibility that the tables may be turning. “Now the people who were taken down by blogs are starting their own blogs,” she said. Chris Nolan, who blogs about California politics, praised Ms Huffington as a “force of nature”, yet she also questioned whether the site would succeed.

She doubted celebrity contributors would be able to supply the undiluted opinions necessary to stand out amid an ocean of blogs. “The idea that Gwyneth Paltrow is going to have something interesting to say about the state of the world without her handlers is not a likely proposition,” Ms Nolan said. Ultimately, though, she extended a welcoming hand to her newest peer as much as any blogger can.

“If someone else wants to take a risk and give it a try, we have to welcome them.”

Original article: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c3a83e86-c173-11d9-943f-00000e2511c8.html

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

NY Times.com: This Is Your Brain on Motherhood

2005-05-10T01:45:00.000+08:00

May 8, 2005

Op-Ed Contributor
This Is Your Brain on Motherhood
By KATHERINE ELLISON
San Francisco

ANYONE shopping for a Mother's Day card today might reasonably linger in the Sympathy section. We can't seem to stop mourning the state of modern motherhood. "Madness" is our new metaphor. "Desperate Housewives" are our new cultural icons. And a mother's brain, as commonly envisioned, is impaired by a supposed full-scale assault on sanity and smarts.

So strong is this last stereotype that when a satirical Web site posted a "study" saying that parents lose an average of 20 I.Q. points on the birth of their first child, MSNBC broadcast it as if it were true. The danger of this perception is clearest for working mothers, who besides bearing children spend more time with them, or doing things for them, than fathers, according to a recent Department of Labor survey.

In addition, the more visibly "encumbered" we are, the more bias we attract: When volunteer groups were shown images of a woman doing various types of work, but in some cases wearing a pillow to make her look pregnant, most judged the "pregnant" woman less competent. Even in liberal San Francisco, a hearing last month to consider a pregnant woman's bid to be named acting director of the Department of Building Inspection featured four speakers commenting on her condition, with one asking if the city truly meant to hire a "pregnancy brain."

But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn't a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers - and fathers?

This is, in fact, what some leading brain scientists, like Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, now believe. Becoming a parent, they say, can power up the mind with uniquely motivated learning. Having a baby is "a revolution for the brain," Dr. Merzenich says.

The human brain, we now know, creates cells throughout life, cells more likely to survive if they're used. Emotional, challenging and novel experiences provide particularly helpful use of these new neurons, and what adjectives better describe raising a child? Children constantly drag their parents into challenging, novel situations, be it talking a 4-year-old out of a backseat meltdown on the Interstate or figuring out a third-grade homework assignment to make a model of a black hole in space.

Often, we'd rather be doing almost anything else. Aging makes us cling ever more fiercely to our mental ruts. But for most of us, our unique bond with our children yanks us out of them.

And there are other ways that being a dedicated parent strengthens our minds. Research shows that learning and memory skills can be improved by bearing and nurturing offspring. A team of neuroscientists in Virginia found that mother lab rats, just like working mothers, demonstrably excel at time-management and efficiency, racing around mazes to find rewards and get back to the pups in record time. Other research is showing how hormones elevated in parenting can help buffer mothers from anxiety and stress - a timely gift from a sometimes compassionate Mother Nature. Oxytocin, produced by mammals in labor and breast-feeding, has been linked to the ability to learn in lab animals.

Rethinking the mental state of motherhood is reasonable after recent years of evolution of our notion of just what it means to be smart. With our economy newly weighted with people-to-people jobs, and with many professions, including the sciences, becoming more multidisciplinary and collaborative, the people skills we've come to think of as "emotional intelligence" are increasingly prized by many wise employers. An ability to tailor your message to your audience, for instance - a skill that engaged parents practice constantly - can mean the difference between failure and success, at home and at work, as Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, may now realize.

To be sure, sleep deprivation, overwork and too much "Teletubbies" can sap any parent's synapses. And to be sure, our society needs to do much more - starting with more affordable, high-quality child care and paid parental leaves - to catch up with other industrialized nations and support mothers and fathers in using their newly acquired smarts to best advantage. That's why some of the recent "mommy lit" complaints are justified, and probably needed to rouse society to action - if only because nobody will be able to stand our whining for much longer.

Still, it's worth considering that the torrent of negativity about motherhood comes as part of an era in which intimacy of all sorts is on the decline in this country. Geographically close extended families have long been passé. The marriage rate has declined. And a record percentage of women of child-bearing age today are childless, many by choice.

It's common these days to hear people say they don't have time to maintain friendships. Real relationships take a lot of time and work - it's much more convenient to keep in touch by e-mail. But children insist on face time. They fail to thrive unless we anticipate their needs, work our empathy muscles, adjust our schedules and endure their relentless testing. In the process, if we're lucky, we may realize that just this kind of grueling work - with our children, or even with others who could simply use some help - is precisely what makes us grow, acquire wisdom and become more fully human. Perhaps then we can start to re-imagine a mother's brain as less a handicap than a keen asset in the lifelong task of getting smart.

Katherine Ellison is the author of "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter."

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/opinion/08ellison.html?incamp=article_popular

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

FT.com: How to deliver the perfect plaudit

2005-05-10T01:34:00.000+08:00

Sathnam Sanghera: How to deliver the perfect plaudit
By Sathnam Sanghera
Published: April 7 2005 18:45 Last updated: April 7 2005 18:45

An irritating distant relative pops round, just as I'm beginning to tuck into one of my mum's marvellous curries. "I read the beginning of your article in The Times on Friday," he says, peering through the doorway. "It was um . . . interesting."

Now, the phrase "um . . . interesting" is journalism's equivalent of "nice personality" on the dating scene, and to say you "read the beginning" of something implies that it was too tedious to go any further with and, of course, I write for another newspaper - but I grunt my appreciation nevertheless.

My mum's reaction is a little different. As soon as this irritating distant relative leaves, she goes to the larder, finds a dried red chilli, comes back to the living room, circles the dried red chilli around my head five times, takes it to the stove in the kitchen, sets it alight, and, once it has burnt, declares me free of "nazar".

This Indian superstition - the name loosely translates as "evil eye" - has been part of family life for as long as I remember. The slightest compliment delivered to any one of us is enough to send my mum scurrying to the larder to clear the subsequent bad vibes.

But after a lifetime of taking such chilli-burning for granted (other Indians prefer warding off nazar with measures such as hanging fresh green chillies over doorways or wearing anti-evil-eye bracelets), it strikes me that this conception of praise as a destructive force is a bit odd.

At least, the idea that even a well-wisher's eye can be evil seems odd in the context of the west, where positive feedback is generally regarded as . . . well, positive. This is especially the case in business, where we are encouraged to praise our products, our customers, each other, freely and unthinkingly.

I say unthinkingly because while there is plenty of advice available on how to deliver criticism in business - don't overkill the message, don't stumble around it, be constructive, don't let it be a shock, don't be angry, don't be abusive, be empathetic, say all the management specialists - there is hardly any guidance on how to deliver praise.

The only literature I have found examining the role of praise in the workplace is a piece of research conducted by a psychology student at Sonoma State University in California, which looked at the performance of 40 college women, and found that some were actually demotivated by lavish praise. "Phrasing is key," concluded the paper, after finding that plaudits made some people feel anxious and under pressure. "Praise should focus on the task at hand, rather than linking performance to future success."

I am not sure if I agree with this emphasis, but I do agree, with this student and with my mum, that praise is not always praiseworthy. As my irritating distant relative's comment demonstrates, a badly delivered compliment can be as devastating as criticism. Luckily, giving positive feedback is not quite as tricky as giving negative feedback. I would say there are just 10 basic rules to follow:

1. When proffering praise, don't use ambiguous statements like "um . . . interesting", "pretty good" and "not that bad". Faint praise is often worse than an insult. An insult, at least, is not infected with pity.

2. Make sure you know what it is that you are praising, and be prepared to elaborate. I am reminded of an instance when a colleague enthused at length about another colleague's scheduled television appearance. "You were really good," he said. "Really, really, really good!" The television interview had actually been cancelled.

3. Make sure you have the right person. It is shocking how often people get this basic thing wrong. I am regularly praised for work conducted by Asian colleagues. It is nice to be able to pass on a compliment, but a little demoralising to realise that even some of your close colleagues don't know who you are.

4. Don't pay a compliment just because you can't think of anything else to say. Some people seem to think that vague praise ("Hey, I loved the thing you did with the, um . . . thingy the other week") is better than silence. It isn't.

5. Don't proffer praise when something has clearly gone wrong. I recall a particularly devastating "compliment" from a BBC producer, who after an evidently disastrous radio recording, remarked: "That was great! Was it your first time?!" Again, silence would have been better.

6. Don't praise lots of people in the same breath. You can ruin the positive effect of a compliment by extending it to someone your subject regards as second-rate. Occasionally, this can work in your favour - when you extend the praise to someone your subject rates highly - but, in general, such postscripts risk making your subject doubt your judgment.

7. Don't proffer praise just before you ask someone for a favour - even if you mean what you say, your subject will doubt your sincerity.

8. Don't gush. The line between being appreciative and being sycophantic is a fine one.

9. Don't praise too often. You devalue its effect.

10. Don't pay a compliment unless you mean it. But if you must be insincere, then at least sound and act as if you mean it.

On reflection, I suppose these tips could be digested into a simpler maxim: to praise well you should be sparing, specific, detailed, accurate and sincere, which, as it happens, is, more or less, what management commentators say about delivering criticism. And, of course, if you should ever be on the receiving end of praise, be sure to have some dried red chillies and a stove to hand.

sathnam.sanghera@ft.com

Original article: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/dd9c2b6c-a789-11d9-9744-00000e2511c8.html

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

FT.com: The bizarre naming of airports

2005-05-10T01:28:00.000+08:00

This guy is quickly becoming my favorite FT columnist. Ü

Sathnam Sanghera: The bizarre naming of airports
By Sathnam Sanghera
Published: April 21 2005 18:40 Last updated: April 21 2005 18:40

A press release arrives, heralding the launch of an £80m ($153m) airport in the north of England next Thursday as "one of the highest impact events in the travel industry over the next twelve months". Given the worrying ability of aircraft to suffer catastrophic high impacts, the wording is unfortunate. Yet more unfortunate is the name of this, the first new "full service airport in the UK in over 30 years". It is called: Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield.

Now, you may have already noticed that airport names are becoming misleading. In Britain, we have London Stansted and London Luton Airports, both located so far from the capital that it can take longer to get to them than to get to one's foreign destination. We also have Nottingham East Midlands Airport, which is closer to Derby than to Nottingham, and is actually located in the county of Leicestershire, not Nottinghamshire.

It is amazing the airport industry gets away with such deception - there would be an outcry if Cambridge train station renamed itself London Cambridge. But this new airport name manages to be more than just misleading - which it is, given the site, seven miles from Doncaster, is some 22 miles from Sheffield. It manages to be ungrammatical and surreal into the bargain. In English, adjectives generally precede the noun they describe, with exceptions such as when they are used for poetic effect (a dream deferred) or when they are part of a longer construction (the sight of Robin Hood made the crowd rowdy).

Organisations wanting to sound funky have a habit of breaking the convention for effect (Team England), but Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield goes for the bizarre option of putting one adjectival noun before the main noun ("airport" in this case) and two after it. In turn, this makes it fail in the primary function of a business name: to be memorable. I have been thinking about the airport for a couple of days now and every time I need to write down the name, I have to refer to the press release. The operator says the word order was decided according to the way the words "fall naturally off the tongue", but I don't find anything natural about the word order at all. And judging by recent newspaper cuttings, nor does anyone else.

In recent months the airport has been labelled, variously, Robin Hood Doncaster Sheffield Airport, Robin Hood Airport near Doncaster, Robin Hood Doncaster/Sheffield, Robin Hood International Airport, Robin Hood Doncaster-Sheffield International Airport, Doncaster Sheffield, and plain old Robin Hood. Meanwhile television advertisements for Thomsonfly.com, one of the airlines that will be operating flights to Europe from the airport, simply refer to it as Doncaster.

Which brings us to the surreal aspect of the name: Robin Hood. Of course, it is not uncommon to have airports named in honour of local heroes: there is Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport. But this is surely the first instance of an airport being named in the honour of another city's hero. For Robin Hood, as everyone knows, is associated with the city of Nottingham, not Doncaster or Sheffield. On Wednesday morning I asked David Ryall, managing director of the airport, whether his employer, Peel Airports, was, in the spirit of the famous English outlaw, stealing from the rich (in heritage) and giving it to the evidently poor (in heritage)? "Ha! Ha! That's a good line, but it's not the answer to the question." A slightly weary sigh.

"There is good reason for branding airports to bring them to the attention of potential users, locally and overseas. With Liverpool John Lennon Airport, which we also run, we added hugely to the pull of the airport by naming it after the Beatle. With this airport we went through a process of external and internal consultation and, long story short, we picked the name Robin Hood."

But John Lennon was from Liverpool. Robin Hood, very famously, was not from Doncaster. Has Peel Airports not seen Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? Kevin Costner fights the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, not the villainous Sheriff of Doncaster. "Ha! I clearly need to send you a book on Robin Hood." The sounds of scribbling. "He actually hails from this area. The fact is he popped down to Nottingham when forced down there by the Scots. He annoyed the Sheriff and then retraced his steps back here."

Not feeling equipped to enter a debate about the intricacies of the Robin Hood myth and feeling disorientated by a subsequent revelation that another name considered was David Seaman, the former England goalkeeper, I ended the call. I found the conversation mildly depressing. Peel Airports' focus group approach to name selection is typical of a general trend to give things names with maximum popular appeal and minimum relevance. If we continue down this particular runway it cannot be long before someone opens David Beckham International Airport London Manchester, a facility supposedly appealing to everyone, but meaning nothing to anyone, in the middle of who knows where.

It makes one long for the days when airport operators had the guts to use distinctive names with history that had resonance with people living and working nearby. Over time, names like Orly (Paris), and Heathrow (London) have gone from meaning nothing to the world and lots to locals, to meaning lots to locals and lots to the world.

Which is why the operators of this new airport should have saved themselves a great deal of research money and, frankly, a great deal of ridicule, by sticking to the name that the site had when it was a Royal Air Force airbase: Finningley. That sounds like a place I want to travel to and away from. Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield, on the other hand, sounds like a place I only want travel away from, screaming.

sathnam.sanghera@ft.com

Original article: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c574effc-b287-11d9-bcc6-00000e2511c8.html

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

NY Times.com: Reaping What It Sowed

2005-05-06T03:43:00.000+08:00

May 4, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist
Reaping What It Sowed
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In the last few weeks not only has Iraq been destabilized by days with multiple suicide bombers, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also witnessed similar attacks by jihadist fanatics. How do you get so many people to commit suicide on demand, day after day? What's going on?

In part the Arab-Muslim world is reaping something it sowed. Way too many Arab intellectuals and religious and political leaders were ready to extol suicide bombing when it was directed against Israelis. Now they are seeing how this weapon of nihilism - once sanctified and glorified - can be used against their own societies. It was wrong when it was used against Jews, and it is wrong when it is used against Muslims. You can't build a decent society on the graves of suicide bombers and their victims.

But these bombings are also signs of the deeper struggle that the U.S. attempt to erect democracy in Iraq has touched off. My friend Raymond Stock, the biographer and translator of Naguib Mahfouz and a longtime resident of Cairo, argues that we are seeing in Baghdad, Cairo and Riyadh the modern incarnation of several deeply rooted and interlocking wars. These are, he said, the war within Islam between Traditionalists and Rationalists, which dates back to Baghdad in the ninth century; the struggle between ardent Sunnis and Shiites, which dates back to succession battles in early Islam; and the confrontation between Islam and the West, which dates back to the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the Crusades.

In the modern incarnation of each of these struggles, members of the Sunni-Traditionalist-jihadist minority are losing. And the more that becomes evident, the more violent they will become - because their whole vision is in danger of being repudiated by fellow Arabs and Muslims.

"The Iraqi election was a total shock to the militant jihadist forces in the Arab-Muslim world," Mr. Stock noted. "They warned Iraqis that 'you vote - you die,' and instead millions of Iraqis said back to them, 'We vote - we decide.' " And the thing they are deciding on is not to be pro-American, not to be pro-Western, but to try to build their own Arab society in a way that will be open to modernism and interpretations of Islam that encourage innovation, adaptation and progress.

The jihadist forces hate this notion. They see the struggle for democracy in Iraq as anathema to everything they stand for: a literalist interpretation of Islam, unsullied by modernity, adaptation, women's rights or political and religious pluralism.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born jihadist behind much of the Iraq violence, spelled it all out in his declaration last January. Democracy must be opposed, he said, because it is based "on the right to choose your religion," and that is "against the rule of God." He added: "Oh, people of Iraq, where is your honor? Have you accepted oppression of the Crusader harlots?"
Zarqawi and his Saudi and Egyptian allies are trying to defeat America and its allies in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, but Zarqawi & Co. are losing - and they know it.

Having lost the argument with their own community, and unable to offer any program, the Sunni-Traditionalist-jihadists seem to have become totally unhinged, with people becoming suicide bombers at the rate of three and four a day.

The jihadists "know that if democracy comes to this part of the world, the Zarqawis and their ilk are done," Mr. Stock said. "Because the majority of people do not buy their methods or most of their message. They don't want to live like the Taliban. If democracy manages to spread in the Arab world, it will not necessarily be pro-American, but it will definitely be pro-living, not pro-suicide. It will not be a cult of death, but a culture of life." A recent cover of a popular Egyptian magazine, Rose el-Youssef, Mr. Stock noted, shows two well-known female Arab pop singers under the headline: "Stronger than Extremism."

So yes, this is a big, deep struggle in Iraq. Yes, the forces of decency and pluralism are slowly winning. But it is not over - not by a long shot. The U.S. Army and the first freely elected Iraqi government still do not control all the terrain there. Unless we can help the Iraqis create a secure environment in their country, and unless their new government can find a way to integrate the more pragmatic Sunni Baathists, and even dejected jihadists, who want to be part of a better future for Iraq, that nation will not see self-sustaining democracy. The bad guys won't win, but neither will the good guys, and all we will have produced is a bloody stalemate.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html?hp

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

INQ7.net: Man About Town : The Last Ride of Genghis Khan

2005-05-06T01:23:00.000+08:00

The Last Ride of Genghis Khan
Posted 03:48am (Mla time) April 30, 2005
By Chuck Dy
Inquirer News Service

DEAR Man About Town,

A few weeks ago I went to my 10-year High School reunion. It was fun catching up with all my former classmates but I did notice something that really disturbed me. Almost all my old friends had already set their directions in life. Most were married with children, had steady jobs or owned their own businesses, and seemed like they knew exactly how their lives were going to turn out. I, on the other hand, have been shuttling between different jobs, have no inclination towards marriage, and have no idea where I'm going to be in 10 years. I don't feel any jealousy towards their lives, but I am worried about my own. Should I be worried?

IN THE year 1200 AD, a Mongol by the name of Temujin rose as Khan, or king in the Altaic language of Mongolia, over the various families and clans scattered throughout the regions north of the Gobi desert. By defeating the Tatars, an enemy faction to the east, Temujin ascended to the title of Universal Ruler, or Genghis Khan, at the age of 42. During his reign, he was able to compile a resume more impressive than Oprah Winfrey's--uniting the warring clans of Mongolia under a single coalition; educating his once illiterate people; creating records for posterity, protecting the basic rights of women (I'm not kidding); implementing the first known ecological notions by regulating hunting (I'm not kidding); successfully terrorizing China, a nation many times the size of Mongolia; introducing trade and cultural exchange to conquered territories; and, contrary to popular belief, encouraging leniency towards prisoners of war. By the age of 65, Genghis Khan ruled everything from the Caspian Sea to Beijing, an empire four times the size of Alexander of Macedonia (who the Mongols haughtily referred to as Alexander the Pretty Okay for a White Guy).

Now imagine his High School reunions. That must have been a blast. Old friends comparing wives and children, taking notes on who's gotten fat or bald, discussing the current exchange rate of one goat to a sack of yams. Then Temujin walks in and the whole assembly falls silent with whispers. All the guys who used to bully him during gym class scuttle away holding their penises protectively. His former prom date confiding to the girls that he had raped her with the utmost respect. His old Religion professor proudly claiming that Temujin was his favorite student even before he decided to become god himself. And to think the yearbook entry predicted that he would be the person Most Likely to Get Pencils Named After His People! His nametag declares that he is now to be addresses as Universal Ruler (with a special Mandate of Heaven).

Self-indulgence
It will always be an exercise in futility, frustration and self-indulgence when one decides to compare themselves against the achievements or stations of their fellows. Admittedly, it is human nature to measure ourselves against our immediate surroundings, and it seems the most natural gauge to do so against the people around us. Are we more beautiful? Are we smarter? Are we richer? Are we happier? This sort of social paranoia is not limited to humans, as all animals display a tendency to flaunt their tail feathers or mandible size whenever they get that mating urge or to emphasize territorial dominance. But humans have refined the practice of comparison into a rabid discipline. We're getting so good at it that we have long outgrown our basic animal impulse to excel for the purposes of reproduction or survival, and instead have mutated into beings that are simply afraid of failure. The problem is that we are often frightened by the concept of failure without even having clearly defined what success is.

This happens because we allow others to define it for us. There is a terrible show on MTV called "I Want a Famous Face" (not sure if they show this crap in the Philippines), wherein a person undergoes cosmetic surgery in order to closely resemble a celebrity idol of his or her choosing. Long have I been inured to the madness that is American television, but this something truly bizarre, even by Jerry Springer's standards. One episode had twin brothers with terrible acne and teeth like the Berlin Wall after the cold war, and they both wanted to look like Brad Pitt! Kumusta na, Brad? Pogi mo rin, Brad! Sadder still was the case of a young dancer who had surgery to further resemble Carmen Electra. Distressing because she was already quite attractive to begin with and only wanted a makeover at her boyfriend's request. Imagine these people standing before God as He welcomes the faithful to heaven, and the Creator takes a look at their plastic faces, checking His divine notes in confusion, and asking, "Who the hell are you?"
[At this point, I'd like to say that I have nothing against cosmetic surgery. My beef is with the fallacious philosophy that life is better when you look like someone else.]

Priorities
We allow others to define success and failure using the most parochial and base of principles: by what is temporary. Finances, material possession and physical beauty are all great things to have, and if you set out to achieve those goals, then that is good as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being rich or beautiful, or wanting to become so. But if you decide that your happiness is contingent, on a comparative scale, to how everybody else is doing, then maybe you should reassess your priorities.

So you've got classmates who are vice presidents in banks, spouting children like water from a broken spigot, running humanitarian missions in Zimbabwe, writing the new constitution of Iraq, dating a Brad Pitt or Carmen Electra look-alike, or have finished reading James Joyce's "Ulysses." On the other hand, you've got classmates who are in jail, in politics or show biz. It is all relative. (One day, Donald Trump's soul is going to be in the same afterlife poker room with Marcus Aurelius and Napoleon and they are going to laaauuugh at him.) The best thing is to be happy for these people if they are happy, and sad for them if they are sad. But their successes and failures, their directions and particular ambitions, should have nothing to do with your own personal satisfaction. Unless you happen to be their psychiatrist and they're paying you by the hour.

Sense of direction
Set your own standards, even in the most vague of strokes. You don't have to know what you're going to be doing, how much you're going to be making, and where your children will graduate from right away. It helps to have a general sense of direction, but it doesn't need to be specific immediately, or even when you're ten years out of High School. Perhaps it is easier for those who know right away what they want to be and how they want to go about achieving their goals, but someone who has less of a concrete idea need not be any less happy or successful.

Compare yourself to nobody. If you must have a fixed point of reference, then compare your self to your self. Forget all the beauty queens and businessmen; the most difficult person to measure up to is your ideal self, defined not by the portraits of other people, but by a reflection in the mirror. Once on occasion, after I wash and shave, I catch an older me looking back at myself from the bathroom vanity, and I ask myself aloud, "Am I the person I thought I'd turn out to be? Am I better or worse? Or am I still getting there?" (When I'm hung-over from the night before, I sometimes answer aloud as well, but then I scare myself). It really is a session in humility because we are our own toughest critics.

Be objective. Perhaps, if you've been doing this bathroom mirror exercise for sometime and not getting any satisfactory answers, then maybe its time you critiqued your lifestyle. Not because everyone else is moving on, but because its time you did. So you don't know the answers to the big questions, like marriage, or permanent employment, or Bo Bice or Carrie Underwood. But an attempt at narrowing options down often helps provide at least a general sense of direction or destination.

Take your time. Parents and friends will contest this bit of advice, but I stand by it. It is better to be forty and finally doing something you believe in, than twenty-five and frustrated at your haste. As the graduation speech goes, some of the most interesting people you will meet don't know what they want to do in life. Enjoy finding out, I say.

True success
Finally, above all else, try to be a good person. This is the hardest of them all, more challenging to accrue than gold or sexual congress, more difficult to maintain than power or influence, and much more valuable than all of the above combined. It's also the only one that matters in terms of personal happiness. History will record the temporal ambition of men who have spilled blood, built cities and fondled the motherlands, granting them a sort of permanence based on fleeting human perception. But true immortality, true success, is only garnered by those who are good and happy, regardless of recognition or accolade.

The problem with success is that it is regarded as public property. But if you think about it, it should be one of the most private things a person can own. If we stop defining it by everybody else's standards, I think we'll find that it becomes so much more satisfying a process to undergo. Consequently, our achievements will not belong to anybody else, they will be immune to the criticisms and constraints of time or social opinion. And best of all, we will never feel the inclination to explain or excuse our lifestyles to others. So the next time you're in a class reunion, and some classmates feel the need to impress the batch with their bank account or peroxide blonde bimbo, feel comfort in the historical fact that Genghis Khan, ruler of an empire that spanned half the globe, died because he accidentally fell off his high horse.

E-mail author at bohemiansamurai@yahoo.com

Original article: http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=2&story_id=35433&col=123

©2005 www.inq7.net all rights reserved

NY Times.com: All That Glisters Is Gold

2005-05-06T00:53:00.000+08:00

May 4, 2005

All That Glisters Is Gold
By MAUREEN DOWD

I went out once with a guy who didn't care for his mother, partly because he felt she was not attractive enough. My brother Martin, on the other hand, tells our mom how proud he was when she picked him up from grade school because he thought she was the prettiest mother.

And we've seen those studies showing that aesthetics is hard-wired in the brain - that even babies have an innate sense of beauty, choosing to gaze longer at lovelier faces.

So it shouldn't be surprising to learn parents have the same bias. Still, the headline yesterday in Science Times was jolting: "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift." As Nicholas Bakalar wrote: "Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones."

Researchers at the University of Alberta observed that at the supermarket, less adorable tykes were more often allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities - like standing up in the shopping cart or wandering off. Good-looking children, especially boys, got more attention from their parents and were kept closer at hand.

"When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness," the article said. "When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in, compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children." With fathers, it was even worse, "with none of the least attractive children secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were."

Haven't these parents heard of the ugly duckling? Do they read to pretty kids only about pretty ducklings?

Even if you're skeptical about supermarket science, the story conjures up poignant images of Pugsley-looking rugrats toddling off, or flying through the air and crashing into the rotisserie chicken oven because they're not belted in.

Dr. Andrew Harrel, the research team's leader, put the findings in evolutionary terms: pretty children represent a premium genetic legacy, so get top care. "Like lots of animals," he said, "we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value."

As Marilyn Monroe explained in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes": "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

A beauty bias against children seems so startling because you grow up thinking parents are the only ones who will give you unconditional love, not measure it out in coffee spoons based on your genetic luck - which, after all, they're responsible for.

But the world can be harsh. Surface matters more and more, and the world ignores Shakespeare's lesson from "The Merchant of Venice": "Gilded tombs do worms infold."
An analysis published last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that the good-looking get more money and promotions than average-looking schmoes.

Quoting the economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, the study notes that being tall, slender and attractive could be worth a "beauty premium" - an extra 5 percent an hour - while there is a "plainness penalty" of 9 percent in wages (after factoring out other issues).

Researchers report that taller men are more likely to win in business and - except for the hapless Al Gore and John Kerry - get elected president. Correlating 16-year-olds' height with their later salaries shows beanstalks grow up to earn about $789 more a year for each extra inch of height.

In his best seller "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell did a survey of half the Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s, and found that (Jack Welch notwithstanding - or notwithsitting) the average C.E.O., at 6 feet, is about 3 inches taller than the average American man.

As Randy Newman sang, "Short people got no reason to live."

Research also shows that obese women get 17 percent lower wages than women of average weight and that dishy professors get better evaluations from their students.

There can be too much of a good thing. As Dan Ondrack, a professor at the University of Toronto, told The Toronto Star, there's a "Boopsey" effect - if women are too gorgeous, people assume they are airheads.

No one seems sure whether bosses discriminate against people because they're less attractive, or whether more attractive people develop more self-esteem and social finesse.

But one thing's for sure: it's hard to develop self-esteem when you're hurtling out of the supermarket cart toward the rotisserie oven.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/opinion/04dowd.html?incamp=article_popular_2

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

NY Times.com: Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift

2005-05-06T00:45:00.000+08:00

May 3, 2005

Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Parents would certainly deny it, but Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.

Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.

The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents' attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child's physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.

The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.

Homely children were also more often out of sight of their parents, and they were more often allowed to wander more than 10 feet away.

Age - of parent and child - also played a role. Younger adults were more likely to buckle their children into the seat, and younger children were more often buckled in. Older adults, in contrast, were inclined to let children wander out of sight and more likely to allow them to engage in physically dangerous activities.

Although the researchers were unsure why, good-looking boys were usually kept in closer proximity to the adults taking care of them than were pretty girls. The researchers speculated that girls might be considered more competent and better able to act independently than boys of the same age. The researchers made more than 400 observations of child-parent interactions in 14 supermarkets.

Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, executive director of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and the leader of the research team, sees an evolutionary reason for the findings: pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care.

Not all experts agree. Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, said he was skeptical.

"The question," he said, "is whether ugly people have fewer offspring than handsome people. I doubt it very much. If the number of offspring are the same for these two categories, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids."

Dr. Robert Sternberg, professor of psychology and education at Yale, said he saw problems in Dr. Harrell's method and conclusions, for example, not considering socioeconomic status.

"Wealthier parents can feed, clothe and take care of their children better due to greater resources," Dr. Sternberg said, possibly making them more attractive. "The link to evolutionary theory is speculative."

But Dr. Harrell said the importance of physical attractiveness "cuts across social class, income and education."

"Like lots of animals, we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value," he said. "Maybe we can't always articulate that, but in fact we do it. There are a lot of things that make a person more valuable, and physical attractiveness may be one of them."

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/health/03ugly.html?incamp=article_popular

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

NY Times.com: The Woodpecker in All of Us

2005-05-04T04:49:00.001+08:00

May 3, 2005

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Woodpecker in All of Us

By JONATHAN ROSEN

I have a hard time imagining many people actually calling the ivory-billed woodpecker "the Lord God bird" - the name doesn't even make it onto the list of more than 20 common names recorded by the bird's intrepid chronicler, James T. Tanner, in 1942. But it makes a terrific headline for a bird reported last week to have been rediscovered after 61 years of official extinction (better than, say, "King woodchuck," one of its other nicknames). It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is also present in our effort to get it back.

"Second chances to save wildlife once thought to be extinct are rare," said Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. Of course, chances to save birds not yet believed extinct are common, if sadly less appealing. But who doesn't love the idea of a second act, especially in America, where we are far more fixated on resurrection and new beginnings than on death and dying?

The searchers have given us back a magnificent creature. Some 20 inches long, boldly patterned with black and white, the bird is so beautiful that Audubon likened it to a Van Dyck painting. I may never see it - though I certainly hope to - but it has new life for me and will live for other people who may never have even heard of the bird. They will want to protect its habitat and in doing so will, without even knowing it, protect the habitat of many other animals as well. All this is a great gift. Likening the bird, as Audubon did, to a work of art while it still haunted the forests of the South is charming; imagining that the bird is nothing but a work of art is overwhelmingly depressing. As Goethe said, art is long and life is short.

The discovery certainly brings with it a measure of hope - for the bird, of course, but also for us. Though it is unclear if a breeding pair exists, we have suddenly been acquitted of murder, even if we still face a lesser charge of reckless endangerment for having logged the old-growth trees right out from under the bird. Before last week, the last official sighting of an ivory bill came in 1944 in an area near the Tensas River in Louisiana known as the Singer Tract because it was owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Despite protests from conservationists warning of the bird's extinction, the Singer Company leased the land to a logging company in 1938. At times using German P.O.W.'s for labor, the company went on to raze the forest.

All birds live between worlds, but the ivory-billed woodpecker is like Persephone in Greek mythology, the goddess who spent half her time in the underworld and half on earth. This is not even the first time the bird has come back from the grave. Never abundant, the ivory bill was considered gone for good as far back as the 1920's, when a nesting pair was found in Florida in 1924. That pair was shot and stuffed by hunters. In 1932 an ivory bill was shot in the Singer Tract, which led to the discovery of a tiny population that survived until 1944. The bird's disappearances gave it a ghostly life that it now carries with it back into the world.

To a bird watcher, every bird has a kind of double existence. It is the bird you struggle to see and identify and gather into the scientific world of Linnaean nomenclature; and it is the wild, mysterious creature that lives beyond our ability to ever name or truly know it. The trick with birding is to see both things at once - the bird in the guidebook and the bird that lives beyond books. To see the Van Dyck painting as a bird that is also, as its lowly Latin name Campephilus principalis tells us, "principally, an eater of grubs."

The ivory bill has a third identity as well, one that grows out of our need for the natural world to play a symbolic role in our lives. Tanner, in his study, observed that the most common explanation given for the bird's disappearance was that it "could not stand the presence of mankind or association with advancing civilization." In other words it was a lot like us as we sometimes idealized ourselves. Huckleberry Finn lights out for new territory because the Widow Douglas wants to adopt and "sivilize" him. The paradox is that the thing that seemed to link us to the wild world, our ferocious independence and unrestrained freedom, was the very impulse that endangered the wild places nourishing our national soul.

The great 18th-century ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, tells a story about shooting, but not killing, an ivory bill in order to paint it. Wilson locked it in his hotel room and when he returned an hour later the bird had all but hammered its way to freedom. Wilson was so impressed with the bird, which also attacked him, that he was "tempted to restore him to his native woods." He resisted temptation, however, and the bird died after three days of refusing food.

This defiant, almost suicidal integrity has long been part of the bird's aura, but it has been accompanied by an almost opposite quality - a claim the bird makes on us, a refusal to disappear from our lives, almost a kind of haunting. One of the most stirring photographs in Tanner's landmark 1942 study is a picture of an ivory-billed nestling perched on a researcher's head.

The ivory bill is a perfect emblem of our own paradoxical relationship to the American wilderness, of what is lost and what can be recovered, and of our own divided impulses. While carrying the ivory bill to his hotel room, Wilson noted the wounded creature's cries, "exactly resembling the violent crying of a young child." And with the bird hidden beneath his coat, Wilson asked the innkeeper for a room "for myself and my baby." His joke has painful meaning. Wilson shot a bird he longed to liberate and pretended a wild animal he was in the process of killing was his own child.

The urge to kill and the urge to conserve do live side by side; they are our heritage and the bird somehow carries our double burden on its back. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that David Luneau, whose videotape of the bird clinched the spectacular rediscovery, attributed the ivory bill's survival to "the lands that hunters and fishermen have conserved." It's worth recalling, too, that it was a young zoology major, David Kulivan, who touched off a frenzy among birders back in 1999 when he said he had seen a pair of ivory bills in a Louisiana swamp while he was out hunting for turkey.

Among its gifts to us, the ivory bill can help us see ourselves as we really are, torn between our own desire to be free - to shoot and develop and cut down and expand - and the desire to live among free things that can survive only if we are less free. With the double vision of birders, we still can recognize ourselves as the wild children of American fantasy, but also as the far less romantic, but equally biblical, stewards of the earth. The challenge now is to give the ivory-billed woodpecker a home - not merely in legend but on actual, American ground, where it can be both the metaphorical Lord God bird and also the literal eater of grubs. If we can pull this off, we will not merely be saving this bird, we will be saving ourselves.

Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of Nextbook, is the author, most recently, of the novel "Joy Comes in the Morning."

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/opinion/03rosen.html

NY Times.com: Woodpecker Thought to Be Extinct Is Sighted in Arkansas

2005-05-04T04:49:00.000+08:00

April 28, 2005

Woodpecker Thought to Be Extinct Is Sighted in Arkansas
By JAMES GORMAN

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., April 28 - The ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird that ornithologists had long given up for extinct, has been sighted in the watery tupelo swampland of a wildlife refuge in Arkansas, scientists announced today.

The birders, ornithologists, government agencies and conservation organizations involved had kept the discovery secret for more than a year, while efforts to protect the bird and its territory went into high gear. Their announcement today provoked rejoicing and excitement among birdwatchers, for whom the ivory bill has long been a holy grail: a creature that has been called the Lord God bird, apparently because when people saw it they would be so impressed they would utter an involuntary "Lord God!"

"This great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe," as John James Audubon described the ivory bill - with its 30-inch wingspan, stunning black and white coloration with red on the male's cockade and a long, powerful bill - was once found in hardwood swamps and bottom land through the Southeast. As the forests were logged the numbers of birds decreased, until the ivory bill, the largest American woodpecker, faded from view. The last documented sighting was in Louisiana in 1944.

Though it appeared lost, the ivory bill haunted birders and ornithologists and others, and over the years there were dozens of reports of sightings. But each effort was unmasked as a hoax or wishful thinking - until Feb. 11, 2004.

On that date Gene M. Sparling III, an amateur birdwatcher from Hot Springs, Ark., sighted a large woodpecker with a red crest in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, about 60 miles northeast of Little Rock. Tim W. Gallagher at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, author of a new book about the ivory bill, "The Grail Bird," saw Mr. Sparling's report on a Web site, and within two weeks he and Bobby R. Harrison of Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., were in a canoe in the refuge, with Mr. Sparling guiding them.

Mr. Gallagher said he expected to camp out for a week but after one night out, on Feb. 27 he and Mr. Harrison saw an ivory bill fly in front of their canoe.

When they wrote down their notes independently and compared them, Mr. Gallagher said Mr. Harrison was struck by the reality of the discovery and began sobbing, repeating, "I saw an ivory bill."

Mr. Gallagher felt the same. "I couldn't speak," he said.

Once Mr. Gallagher convinced John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab, work began in earnest to confirm the sighting and begin to join with conservation organizations to protect the bird's habitat.

Over the next year, there were only seven more convincing sightings, Dr. Fitzpatrick and 15 colleagues report in an article published in the online version of the journal Science.
Fortunately, Dr. Fitzpatrick said in an interview, the bird is already in a national wildlife refuge, and is already being protected. The ivory bill itself, as a species, is also doing a good job of "protecting itself," he said, adding, "It is really scarce and really wary."

The ivory bill was brought low in the first place by the loss of forest land, by the conflict between its own appetites and the appetites of humanity. It feeds by hammering the bark off large, recently dead trees and eating the exposed grubs. It does not drill or even dig very deep. It skims the cream of a larval crop bred in decaying trees and leaves the deeper work for lesser birds.

Because of this specialized approach to feeding, it needs many dead trees to feed on. Each breeding pair had a territory of four or five square miles. As the forests they needed disappeared, so did the birds.

In his book "The Future of Life," a discussion of how to reduce the extinctions caused by human beings, the biologist E. O. Wilson notes that the ivory bill was "the signature bird" of the wild woods of the Southern coastal plain. He imagines hearing their bills banging against trees in the distance and moving gradually closer. He writes, "They came to the observer like spirits out of an unfathomed wilderness core."

Now the effort to protect the bird will continue, as will the search for other individuals. So far, the scientists are certain of seeing only one male. If it does not have company, the discovery will be bittersweet.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/28/science/27cnd-bird.html?hp&ex=1114747200&en=17af7830d93c483c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NY Times.com: Conservatives ♥ 'South Park'

2005-05-04T04:39:00.000+08:00

May 1, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Conservatives ♥ 'South Park'
By FRANK RICH

CONSERVATIVES can't stop whining about Hollywood, but the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too. It's not easy. In the showbiz wrangling sweepstakes of 2004, liberals had Leonardo DiCaprio, the Dixie Chicks and the Boss. The right had Bo Derek, Pat Boone and Jessica Simpson, who, upon meeting the secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, congratulated her for doing "a nice job decorating the White House." Ms. Simpson may be the last performer in America who can make Whoopi Goldberg seem like the soul of wit.

What to do? Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger's poll numbers have sunk, the right's latest effort to grab a piece of the showbiz action is a new and fast-selling book published by Regnery, home to the Swift Boat Veterans, and promoted in lock step by the right-wing media elite of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and The New York Post. "South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias," by Brian C. Anderson of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, gives a wet kiss to one of the funniest and most foul-mouthed series on television. The book has even been endorsed by the grim theologian Michael Novak, who presumably forgot to TiVo the "South Park" episode that holds the record for the largest number of bleeped-out repetitions (162) of a single four-letter expletive in a single television half-hour. Then again, The Weekly Standard has informed us that William Bennett, egged on by his children, has given the show a tentative thumbs up.

Cynics might say that conservatives, flummoxed by the popularity of Jon Stewart, are eager to endorse any bigger hit on Comedy Central: The animated adventures of four obstreperous fourth graders in the mythical town of South Park, Colo., outdraws "The Daily Show" by a million or so viewers. But Mr. Anderson has another case to make. He quotes "South Park" profanity without apology and cheers the "scathing genius" with which it mocks "hate-crime laws and sexual harassment policies, liberal celebrities, abortion-rights extremists."

In one episode he praises, "Butt Out," a caricatured Rob Reiner journeys from Hollywood to South Park to mount a fascistic antismoking campaign that "perfectly captures the Olympian arrogance and illiberalism of liberal elites." Mr. Anderson also applauds last fall's "South Park" adjunct, "Team America: World Police," the feature film in which the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, portray Michael Moore as a suicide bomber and ridicule the antiwar activism of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo by presenting them as dim-witted, terrorist-appeasing puppets (literally so, with strings) who are ultimately blown to bits at a "world peace conference" convened by Kim Jong Il. (The film is out on DVD, with an expanded marionette sex scene featuring coprophilia, on May 17.)

So far, so right. Among their other anarchic comic skills, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone have a perfect pitch for lampooning what many Americans find most irritating about liberals, especially Hollywood liberals: a self-righteous propensity for knowing better than anyone else and for meddling in everyone's business, whether by enforcing P.C. speech codes or plotting to curb S.U.V.'s and guns.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the publication of "South Park Conservatives": Emboldened by the supposed "moral values" landslide on Election Day, the faith-based right became the new left. Just as Mr. Anderson's book reached stores in early April, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, true to their butt-out libertarianism, aimed their fire at self-righteous, big-government conservatives who have become every bit as high-handed and meddlesome as any Prius-pushing movie star. Such is this role reversal that the same TV show celebrated by Mr. Anderson and his cohort as the leading edge of a potential conservative victory in the culture wars now looks like a harbinger of an anti-conservative backlash instead.

In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a "South Park" ritual, lands in a hospital in a "persistent vegetative state" and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that "God intended Kenny to die" rather than be "kept alive artificially," they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to "do what we always do - use the Republicans." Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites ("Removing the feeding tube is murder") scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don't prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: "If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don't ever show me in that condition on national television."

This remarkably prescient scenario, first broadcast on the eve of Terri Schiavo's death, anticipated just how far the zeitgeist would swing in the month after the right's overreach in her case. A USA Today poll a week later found that Americans by 55 to 40 percent believe that "Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are 'trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans' on moral values." In other words, what Hillary Clinton's overreaching big-government health care plan did to the Democrats a decade ago is the whammy the Schiavo case has inflicted on the G.O.P. today. And like the Democrats back then, the Republican elites have been so besotted with their election victory and so out of touch with the mainstream they didn't see their comeuppance coming. At the height of the feeding-tube frenzy, Peggy Noonan told her Wall Street Journal troops that federal intervention in the Schiavo family brawl was a political slam dunk: "Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive." (Italics hers.)

Oops. But what's given the Schiavo case resonance beyond the Schiavo story itself is that it crystallized the bigger picture of Olympian arrogance and illiberalism on the right. The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family's bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can't even sing.

The same arrogance that sent Republicans into Terri Schiavo's hospice room has also led them to try to police the culture of sex more rabidly than the left did the culture of sexism. No wonder another recent poll, from the Pew Research Center, finds that for all the real American displeasure with coarse entertainment, a plurality of 48 percent believes that "the government's imposing undue restrictions" on pop culture is "a greater danger" to the country than the entertainment industry itself. Who could have imagined that the public would fear Focus on the Family's James Dobson more than 50 Cent?

But in this crusade, too, few on the right seem to recognize that they're overplaying their hand; they keep upping the ante. One powerful senator, Ted Stevens of Alaska, has proposed that cable and satellite be policed by the federal government along with broadcast television - a death knell for even the Sirius incarnation of Howard Stern, not to mention much of Comedy Central. A powerful House committee chairman, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, topped that by calling for offenders to be pursued through a "criminal process." Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows "family-friendly" companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD's of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films' own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even "Schindler's List" isn't immune from the right's rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD's, once explained to The New York Times: "Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles." And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.

On the first page of "South Park Conservatives," its author declares that "CBS's cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries 'The Reagans' marked a watershed in America's culture wars." It did, in the sense that the right's successful effort to stifle what it regarded as an un-P.C. (i.e., somewhat critical) treatment of Ronald Reagan sped the censorious jihad that's now threatening everything from "The Sopranos" on HBO to lesbian moms on PBS. Of course "South Park" is also on this hit list: the Parents Television Council, the take-no-prisoners e-mail mill leading the anti-indecency charge, has condemned the show on its Web site as a "curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit." Should such theocratic conservatives prevail, "South Park" conservatives will be hipper than they ever could have imagined - terminally hip, you might say.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/01rich.html?incamp=article_popular_4

NY Times.com: From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'

2005-05-04T02:57:00.000+08:00

May 2, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'
By BOB HERBERT

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "

"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.

Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.

He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.

Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "

He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."

In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.

Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?incamp=article_popular_3

NY Times.com: It's a Flat World, After All (Part II)

2005-05-04T00:59:00.000+08:00

April 3, 2005

It's a Flat World, After All (Part II)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

HOW did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?

It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.

No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.

The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.

Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.

So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.

Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''

AS if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!

It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.
If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''

The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''

RAO is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''

That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''

If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken down and many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''

No, Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and engineering base.

''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.

These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''

Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' to be published this week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times, and his television documentary ''Does Europe Hate Us?'' will be shown on the Discovery Channel on April 7 at 8 p.m.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?ex=1115179200&en=2880ac94e67e482c&ei=5070

NY Times.com: It's a Flat World, After All (Part I)

2005-05-04T00:51:00.000+08:00

April 3, 2005
It's a Flat World, After All
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

IN 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''

''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!

This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?ex=1115179200&en=2880ac94e67e482c&ei=5070

NY Times.com: The Greediest Generation

2005-05-04T00:43:00.000+08:00

Isn't this sad?

May 1, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Greediest Generation
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

AS a baby boomer myself, I can be blunt: We boomers won't be remembered as the "Greatest Generation." Rather, we'll be scorned as the "Greediest Generation."

Our influence has been huge. When boomer blood raged with hormones, we staged the sexual revolution and popularized the Pill. Now, with those hormones fading, we've popularized Viagra.

As we've aged, age discrimination has become a basis for lawsuits, and the most litigated right has become the right to die. The hot issue of the moment is Social Security, and the newest entitlement program is a prescription drug benefit for the elderly.

Our slogan has gone from "free love" to "free blood pressure medicine."

But I fear that we'll be remembered mostly for grabbing resources for ourselves, in such a way that the big losers will be America's children.

Traditionally in America, the people most likely to be poor were the elderly. As recently as 1966, for example, 29 percent of Americans over 65 were below the poverty line, compared with only 18 percent of American children.

But that same year, Medicare took effect to provide medical care for the elderly, and Social Security adjustments steadily reduced poverty among them. We were suitably embarrassed that old people were eating cat food or scavenging garbage cans for food, so we reallocated resources to the elderly.

As of 2003, the share of elderly below the poverty line had fallen by two-thirds to 10 percent - representing a huge national success. Retirement in America is no longer feared as a time of destitution, but anticipated as a time of comfort and leisure.

On the other hand, the proportion of children below the poverty line is still 18 percent, the same as it was in 1966. And while almost all the elderly now have health insurance under Medicare, about 29 percent of children had no health insurance at all at some point in the last 12 months.

One measure of how children have tumbled as a priority in America is that in 1960 we ranked 12th in infant mortality among nations in the world, while now 40 nations have infant mortality rates better than ours or equal to it. We've also lost ground in child vaccinations: the United States now ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

With boomers about to retire, I'm afraid that national priorities will be focused even more powerfully on the elderly rather than the young - because it's the elderly who wield political clout.

"The elderly are retired, and it's easier to get them to go to rallies or write their congresspeople," notes Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "Children can't vote, don't give money and have no power, and neither do their parents."

We boomers are also preying on children in a more insidious way: We're running up their debts, both by creating new entitlement programs and by running budget deficits today. Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist and fiscal expert who with Scott Burns wrote the excellent and scary book "The Coming Generational Storm," calls this "fiscal child abuse."

The book says that the Treasury Department commissioned a study by two economists of the United States' long-term liabilities, for inclusion in the 2004 federal budget. The study found that the government faces a present value "fiscal gap" - the excess of expected payments over expected revenues - of $51 trillion. That's 11 times our official national debt and also greater than our total net worth, meaning that in some sense we're bankrupt.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration took a look at the study, blanched, and declined to publish it.

In coming years, we'll hear appeals for better nursing homes, for more Alzheimer's research and for more wheelchair-accessible office buildings, and those are good causes. But remember that American children are almost twice as likely as the elderly to live in poverty, and that you get much more bang for the buck vaccinating a child than paying for open-heart surgery.

The solution is not to force the elderly to get by on cat food again. But we boomers need to resist the narcissistic impulse to ladle out more resources for ourselves. Our top domestic priorities should be to ensure that all children get health care and to get our fiscal house in order.

Otherwise, we boomers may earn a place in history as the worst generation.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?incamp=article_popular_5

NY Times. com: Sunday Book Review: 'The World Is Flat': The Wealth of Yet More Nations

2005-05-03T01:30:00.000+08:00

May 1, 2005

'The World Is Flat': The Wealth of Yet More Nations
By FAREED ZAKARIA
THE WORLD IS FLAT A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
By Thomas L. Friedman.488 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.50.

OVER the past few years, the United States has been obsessed with the Middle East. The administration, the news media and the American people have all been focused almost exclusively on the region, and it has seemed that dealing with its problems would define the early decades of the 21st century. ''The war on terror is a struggle that will last for generations,'' Donald Rumsfeld is reported to have said to his associates after 9/11.

But could it be that we're focused on the wrong problem? The challenge of Islamic terrorism is real enough, but could it prove to be less durable than it once appeared? There are some signs to suggest this. The combined power of most governments of the world is proving to be a match for any terror group. In addition, several of the governments in the Middle East are inching toward modernizing and opening up their societies. This will be a long process but it is already draining some of the rage that undergirded Islamic extremism.

This doesn't mean that the Middle East will disappear off the map. Far from it. Terrorism remains a threat, and we will all continue to be fascinated by upheavals in Lebanon, events in Iran and reforms in Egypt. But ultimately these trends are unlikely to shape the world's future. The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade and democratic politics. The world's future -- the big picture -- is more likely to be shaped by the winners of this era. And if the United States thought it was difficult to deal with the losers, the winners present an even thornier set of challenges. This is the implication of the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman's excellent new book, ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.''

The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world's economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ''barriers to entry'' are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ''Now,'' Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''

The book is done in Friedman's trademark style. You travel with him, meet his wife and kids, learn about his friends and sit in on his interviews. Some find this irritating. I think it works in making complicated ideas accessible. Another Indian entrepreneur, Jerry Rao, explained to Friedman why his accounting firm in Bangalore was able to prepare tax returns for Americans. (In 2005, an estimated 400,000 American I.R.S. returns were prepared in India.) ''Any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around. Some people will say, 'Yes, but you can't serve me a steak.' True, but I can take the reservation for your table sitting anywhere in the world,'' Rao says. He ended the interview by describing his next plan, which is to link up with an Israeli company that can transmit CAT scans via the Internet so that Americans can get a second opinion from an Indian or Israeli doctor, quickly and cheaply.

What created the flat world? Friedman stresses technological forces. Paradoxically, the dot-com bubble played a crucial role. Telecommunications companies like Global Crossing had hundreds of millions of dollars of cash -- given to them by gullible investors -- and they used it to pursue incredibly ambitious plans to ''wire the world,'' laying fiber-optic cable across the ocean floors, connecting Bangalore, Bangkok and Beijing to the advanced industrial countries. This excess supply of connectivity meant that the costs of phone calls, Internet connections and data transmission declined dramatically -- so dramatically that many of the companies that laid these cables went bankrupt. But the deed was done, the world was wired. Today it costs about as much to connect to Guangdong as it does New Jersey.

The next blow in this one-two punch was the dot-com bust. The stock market crash made companies everywhere cut spending. That meant they needed to look for ways to do what they were doing for less money. The solution: outsourcing. General Electric had led the way a decade earlier and by the late 1990's many large American companies were recognizing that Indian engineers could handle most technical jobs they needed done, at a tenth the cost. The preparations for Y2K, the millennium bug, gave a huge impetus to this shift since most Western companies needed armies of cheap software workers to recode their computers. Welcome to Bangalore.

A good bit of the book is taken up with a discussion of these technological forces and the way in which business has reacted and adapted to them. Friedman explains the importance of the development of ''work flow platforms,'' software that made it possible for all kinds of computer applications to connect and work together, which is what allowed seamless cooperation by people working anywhere. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that has made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' Microsoft's chief technology officer, Craig J. Mundie, told Friedman.

Friedman has a flair for business reporting and finds amusing stories about Wal-Mart, UPS, Dell and JetBlue, among others, that relate to his basic theme. Did you know that when you order a burger at the drive-through McDonald's on Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., the person taking your order is at a call center 900 miles away in Colorado Springs? (He or she then zaps it back to that McDonald's and the order is ready a few minutes later as you drive around to the pickup window.) Or that when you call JetBlue for a reservation, you're talking to a housewife in Utah, who does the job part time? Or that when you ship your Toshiba laptop for repairs via UPS, it's actually UPS's guys in the ''funny brown shorts'' who do the fixing?

China and India loom large in Friedman's story because they are the two big countries benefiting most from the flat world. To take just one example, Wal-Mart alone last year imported $18 billion worth of goods from its 5,000 Chinese suppliers. (Friedman doesn't do the math, but this would mean that of Wal-Mart's 6,000 suppliers, 80 percent are in one country -- China.) The Indian case is less staggering and still mostly in services, though the trend is dramatically upward. But Friedman understands that China and India represent not just threats to the developed world, but also great opportunities. After all, the changes he is describing have the net effect of adding hundreds of millions of people -- consumers -- to the world economy. That is an unparalleled opportunity for every company and individual in the world.

Friedman quotes a Morgan Stanley study estimating that since the mid-1990's cheap imports from China have saved American consumers over $600 billion and probably saved American companies even more than that since they use Chinese-sourced parts in their production. And this is not all about cheap labor. Between 1995 and 2002, China's private sector has increased productivity at 17 percent annually -- a truly breathtaking pace.

Friedman describes his honest reaction to this new world while he's at one of India's great outsourcing companies, Infosys. He was standing, he says, ''at the gate observing this river of educated young people flowing in and out. . . . They all looked as if they had scored 1600 on their SAT's. . . . My mind just kept telling me, 'Ricardo is right, Ricardo is right.' . . . These Indian techies were doing what was their comparative advantage and then turning around and using their income to buy all the products from America that are our comparative advantage. . . . Both our countries would benefit. . . . But my eye kept . . . telling me something else: 'Oh, my God, there are just so many of them, and they all look so serious, so eager for work. And they just keep coming, wave after wave. How in the world can it possibly be good for my daughters and millions of other young Americans that these Indians can do the same jobs as they can for a fraction of the wages?' ''

He ends up, wisely, understanding that there's no way to stop the wave. You cannot switch off these forces except at great cost to your own economic well-being. Over the last century, those countries that tried to preserve their systems, jobs, culture or traditions by keeping the rest of the world out all stagnated. Those that opened themselves up to the world prospered. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything to prepare for this new competition and new world. Friedman spends a good chunk of the book outlining ways that America and Americans can place themselves in a position to do better.

People in advanced countries have to find ways to move up the value chain, to have special skills that create superior products for which they can charge extra. The UPS story is a classic example of this. Delivering goods doesn't have high margins, but repairing computers (and in effect managing a supply chain) does. In one of Friedman's classic anecdote-as-explanation shticks, he recounts that one of his best friends is an illustrator. The friend saw his business beginning to dry up as computers made routine illustrations easy to do, and he moved on to something new. He became an illustration consultant, helping clients conceive of what they want rather than simply executing a drawing. Friedman explains this in Friedman metaphors: the friend's work began as a chocolate sauce, was turned into a vanilla commodity, through upgraded skills became a special chocolate sauce again, and then had a cherry put on top. All clear?

Of course it won't be as easy as that, as Friedman knows. He points to the dramatic erosion of America's science and technology base, which has been masked in recent decades by another aspect of globalization. America now imports foreigners to do the scientific work that its citizens no longer want to do or even know how to do. Nearly one in five scientists and engineers in the United States is an immigrant, and 51 percent of doctorates in engineering go to foreigners. America's soaring health care costs are increasingly a burden in a global race, particularly since American industry is especially disadvantaged on this issue. An American carmaker pays about $6,000 per worker for health care. If it moves its factory up to Canada, where the government runs and pays for medical coverage, the company pays only $800. Most of Friedman's solutions to these kinds of problems are intelligent, neoliberal ways of using government in a market-friendly way to further the country's ability to compete in a flat world.

There are difficulties with the book. Once Friedman gets through explicating his main point, he throws in too many extras -- perhaps trying to make that chocolate sundae -- making the book seem slightly padded. The process of flattening that he is describing is in its infancy. India is still a poor third-world country, but if you read this book you would assume it is on the verge of becoming a global superstar. (Though as an Indian-American, I read Friedman and whisper the old Jewish saying, ''From your lips to God's ears.'') And while this book is not as powerful as Friedman's earlier ones -- it is, as the publisher notes, an ''update'' of ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree'' -- its fundamental insight is true and deeply important.

In explaining this insight and this new world, Friedman can sometimes sound like a technological determinist. And while he does acknowledge political factors, they get little space in the book, which gives it a lopsided feel. I would argue that one of the primary forces driving the flat world is actually the shifting attitudes and policies of governments around the world. From Brazil to South Africa to India, governments are becoming more market-friendly, accepting that the best way to cure poverty is to aim for high-growth policies. This change, more than any other, has unleashed the energy of the private sector. After all, India had hundreds of thousands of trained engineers in the 1970's, but they didn't produce growth. In the United States and Europe, deregulation policies spurred the competition that led to radical innovation. There is a chicken-and-egg problem, to be sure. Did government policies create the technological boom or vice versa? At least one can say that each furthered the other.

The largest political factor is, of course, the structure of global politics. The flat economic world has been created by an extremely unflat political world. The United States dominates the globe like no country since ancient Rome. It has been at the forefront, pushing for open markets, open trade and open politics. But the consequence of these policies will be to create a more nearly equal world, economically and politically. If China grows economically, at some point it will also gain political ambitions. If Brazil continues to surge, it will want to have a larger voice on the international stage. If India gains economic muscle, history suggests that it will also want the security of a stronger military. Friedman tells us that the economic relations between states will be a powerful deterrent to war, which is true if nations act sensibly. But as we have seen over the last three years, pride, honor and rage play a large part in global politics.

The ultimate challenge for America -- and for Americans -- is whether we are prepared for this flat world, economic and political. While hierarchies are being eroded and playing fields leveled as other countries and people rise in importance and ambition, are we conducting ourselves in a way that will succeed in this new atmosphere? Or will it turn out that, having globalized the world, the United States had forgotten to globalize itself?

Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and author of ''The Future of Freedom,'' is the host of a new current affairs program on public television, Foreign Exchange.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/books/review/01ZAKARIA.html?incamp=article_popular_3

FT.com: It's hard being nice

2005-05-03T01:22:00.000+08:00

It's hard being nice
By Lucy Kellaway
Published: March 20 2005 19:12 Last updated: March 20 2005 19:12

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit, giving a kung fu kick to any diabolical mastermind who merits it.

I did not write those words, and I hope you didn't think for one moment that I had. They were the introduction to a column written by Maureen Dowd of The New York Times last Monday in which she said how hard life was as the only female op-ed columnist on her paper. Before I get to the issue of female columnists, their scarcity, the harshness of their life and whether we should give a damn one way or another, I would like to get back to that intro.

I've never met Maureen D, but I bet she does not think about Peel, catsuits or kung fu. When I am about to write a tough column, I normally feel calm and relatively cheery. In my experience, tough columns are pleasingly untough to pen. Example: imagine a large bank gave all members of staff a booklet of 123 golden behaviours for them to follow every day. My response would be 1,000 scathing words that would more or less write themselves. Writing nice columns is harder. And writing subtle and nuanced ones is hardest of all.

Back to the women columnists. There are hardly any serious ones in the US. This is because, says Dowd, women have difficulty being nasty. Women also are not comfortable pontificating. And if they do write something horrid, all hell breaks loose, as men don't like taking criticism from women, which in her view is to do with a castration complex. And by way of conclusion, she says there must be lots of brilliant women columnists who are hiding somewhere. "We just need to find and nurture them." I am not sure who "we" is, but still.

On the first point about the paucity of serious female columnists: this is not so in the UK. There are millions of them. Not just ones that write fluffy waffly stuff, but serious ones too. Polly Toynbee, Melanie Phillips, Julie Burchill, Ann Leslie, Deborah Orr and Jackie Ashley are in my first division. There are coachloads more in divisions two and three. The most powerful woman in British business might be American (she is also my boss, Marjorie Scardino, so I have to be careful), but it is nice to know that this is one area in which we lead the US.

There is no problem with toughness, or with getting our views across either. Indeed some women columnists are so opinionated as to end up sounding slightly unhinged - though being unhinged can be an advantage in this line of business.

On to the next point: "Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman," says Dowd. "It taps into the myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers."

In true life, guys don't appreciate being lectured by anyone. Period (as I would say if I were a tough American female columnist). Over the years, I have interviewed many leading businessmen, and many of the pieces were not all that flattering. Most didn't like the result, and some complained. However, if I reminded them of their wives or mothers, they never let on. I suspect that my being a woman was relevant, both because they were lulled into confidential mode, and because my sex makes me finely attuned to the vanity of a man.

Dowd complains that there is a set of adjectives used only to describe women's work. This is true. People often say to me: "So who will you be sticking your stilettos into this week?" What bothers me about this is not the stilettos (in fact, given my flat, unsexy choice of footwear, I'm charmed to be associated with something as alluring as a stiletto). It is the unspoken assumption that I am unpleasant in a knee-jerk way, turning out gratuitously beastly columns and interviews without thinking. If this is true I should be fired, or sent away for retraining.

In response to Dowd's column, Anne Applebaum (the only female op-ed writer on The Washington Post) writes that she doesn't want to think of herself as a woman writer, a statistic or a token. She is a columnist, plain and simple.

By contrast, I don't mind at all if people think of me as a woman. I am one, after all. I don't mind if I'm a token either. All the way through my life, being a woman has been massively to my advantage. It has helped me get jobs and be chosen for things, and I'm grateful for that.

Deborah Tannen in the Los Angeles Times questions the assumption that serious columns have to be tough. She thinks that adversarial journalism is men's journalism, and wouldn't it be nice if women did their own thing and wrote things that were more balanced. I agree this might be nice, but I disagree that we are aping men. If many of our columns are nasty, it is because - as I said before - nasty columns are easier to write, and people seem to like them (up to a point).

That is not to say that men and women write their columns in the same way. I daresay that last week's news that the second X chromosome in women is not switched off may one day be able to explain the differences in male and female columnists. For now I'd say that many women are better at making a connection with the reader. The best ones do this by writing about themselves and their thoughts as they are, not by striking poses for effect. Pretending that you imagine wearing leather catsuits when you do no such thing jars horribly and devalues what follows.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Original article: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84d4e46e-9966-11d9-ae69-00000e2511c8.html

© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

FT.com: A quite British escort agency

2005-05-03T01:18:00.000+08:00

A quite British escort agency

By Sathnam Sanghera

Published: April 28 2005 18:28 Last updated: April 28 2005 18:28

Last week I did something that would have normally got me fired: I logged on to a website offering male and female escorts, paid £300 ($572) to secure the company of an attractive young woman for an evening, and claimed the money back on expenses.

The reason I am still here, and not flipping burgers at Alibaba Fried Chicken on the Stockwell Road in London, is that this was no conventional escort service, offering nookie under the cover of companionship. This was friendsintown.co.uk, an escort agency offering business travellers companionship without the prospect of any nookie at all.

The whole thing began when I noticed an advert for the curious new service in the back of a business magazine. Having obtained permission from an initially sceptical editor to test-drive it, I then completed the necessary "client registration form", explaining what qualities I was looking for in my "friend". A telephone call came through soon afterwards saying they had just the person for me - Helen, who, as requested, had a background in business. All I had to do now was say what I wanted her to wear for our meeting.

Not having dressed a date before, the question threw me - I um'd and ah'd and stuttered until the voice on the end of the line got tired and decided that smart casual was probably the best option. It was not the most confident start. And I didn't feel any more confident when the time came to meet Helen for drinks in Covent Garden.

She arrived at the hotel in the company of Robert Davenport, the brains behind the agency. After saying hello, he asked to see some identification, for security reasons. I hadn't told friendsintown I was a journalist, but I hadn't lied either. Luckily, Robert asked for no elaboration after checking my passport, and left us alone to chat.

The surrealness of the situation made me babble manically: within just 10 minutes I had forced Helen, a twentysomething City worker, through half a dozen conversational topics. From the beginning, it was impossible to tell from her _expression if (a) she disliked me intensely or (b) she liked me quite a bit or (c) she didn't care either way.

It transpired that this was her first engagement with friendsintown, that she was doing it because she was convinced there would be no sleaze and because it seemed like an easy way of clearing her student debts. Eventually, I asked her where she lived and she named the same rough district of south London I live in. The guilt I was already feeling about not being completely frank intensified. Misleading a neighbour felt like a particularly bad thing to do. I went to the loo to think.

When I came back, I blurted out the truth, prepared for the worst. But Helen laughed and said she suspected I was a journalist - it was obvious from my age (too young), my nationality (most clients are foreigners), my vagueness about my occupation ("publishing"), my demeanour (awkward), and the way I showed more interest in Rob than in her.

With the secret off my chest, the evening suddenly became bearable: we had a few more drinks, a nice chat and at the end of the night shared a cab home to our rough district of south London. For the record: no extras were requested or proffered. The morning after, I called Robert.
He was happy to explain how he had come up with the idea for the agency. As a freelance IT consultant, he travelled a lot for work and often found himself going alone to interesting places. That was OK up to a point, but he hated exploring the local sights without company. What the world needed, he concluded, was an escort service offering high-class company, without the sleaze.

Having had time to reflect upon my evening, it strikes me that Rob's concept has a few flaws.
1. It is impossible to enjoy an evening with someone who is being paid to spend time with you. Even if you get on like a house on fire, there is always that depressing thought at the back of your mind that they are only laughing at your jokes because they are being paid to do so.

2. The £300 charge is too much for an evening of a stranger's company. Helen turned out to be charming or, at least, was paid enough to be charming to me, but even then the price was too steep. This seems to be reflected in the take-up: the service was set up in January and so far has only had a "handful of bookings from European and US business people as well as a couple of Londoners".

3. The whole process of booking a "friend" is too protracted. If I had to fill out a form, send an e-mail, receive a telephone call, give my credit card details and produce my passport every time I wanted to see a real friend or relative, I don't think I'd ever meet them. A night in front of the telly would always seem preferable.

4. Even though friendsintown insists it is not in the business of sleaze, various aspects of dealing with them - the question about what I wanted Helen to wear, the passport check outside the hotel, the receipt dishonestly citing "consultancy services", the very words "escort agency" - felt very sleazy indeed. Even though I was doing nothing naughty, it felt like I was.

Indeed, I wouldn't recommend such a service to any bored and lonely business traveller. Instead, in the case of London, my advice would be to use the £300 to book a nice room in a nice hotel, buy a good book, make a visit to Alibaba Fried Chicken on the Stockwell Road and, in cases of extreme unhappiness, reserve an earlier flight home.

sathnam.sanghera@ft.com

NY Times. com: Episode VII: Revenge of the Writers

2005-05-03T01:13:00.000+08:00

May 1, 2005

Episode VII: Revenge of the Writers
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

MILLIONS of "Star Wars" fans are awaiting the release of "Revenge of the Sith" later this month, the sixth and final film in George Lucas's epic series. In it, the young hero Anakin Skywalker is seduced by the dark side and becomes Darth Vader.

Science fiction writers, however, are awaiting the release for a different reason. To them, "Star Wars" is nothing more than a space opera, and if the big guy in the black cloak is finally singing, that means the show is over. The saga continues no longer.

"That's the past of science fiction you're talking about," said Richard K. Morgan, the British cyberpunk-noir writer whose most recent novel is "Market Forces."

Mr. Morgan is one of a newer breed of science fiction writers who have moved far beyond the whiz-bang technological vision of Mr. Lucas's blockbusters.

"It's just such a huge shame," he said. "Anyone who is a practitioner of science fiction is constantly dogged by the ghettoization of the genre. And a lot of that comes from the very simplistic, 2-D Lucasesque view of what science fiction has to offer."

If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.
Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.

That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. "We're starting to look inward, rather than outward," Mr. Morgan said. "There are exciting and scary things going to be happening in our bodies."

One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. Mr. Lucas has said that his story, especially the journeys of his central characters from innocence through trials by fire to wisdom and acceptance, were rooted in Joseph Campbell's comparative studies of world mythologies, and especially in his popular book, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces."

What Mr. Lucas may have seen as eternal, however, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique.

"It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."

"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."

Science fiction, on the other hand, "is a set of metaphors," Ms. Le Guin said. "It's useful for thinking about certain things in our lives - if society was different in some way, what would it be like?"

The narrative is not the only thing that feels dated (or archetypal, if you're a fan) in "Star Wars." The science, too, often feels stock.

Larry Niven, the author of the "Ringworld" series and other works, noted that the faster-than-light travel in the films is very familiar. And that's not surprising. "Most writers, if they need to get somebody between two points faster than light, they invent their own hyperdrive," said Mr. Niven, who counts himself among the inventors. As a filmmaker, though, Mr. Lucas had an advantage. "They did special effects and made you believe it," Mr. Niven said.

Those effects were a double-edged light saber, however. The first "Star Wars" film helped usher in an era of highly technical filmmaking where character development sometimes took a back seat.

"We're still stuck with this legacy of - 'Oh yeah, sci-fi, that's when you have a big budget and lots of special effects,' " Mr. Morgan said.

Ray Bradbury said that the end of "Star Wars" was long overdue. Mr. Lucas should have quit while he was ahead, Mr. Bradbury said - perhaps 28 years ago, when the first movie came out to critical acclaim.

"The problem was he made a sequel," Mr. Bradbury said. "People have tried to get me to do a sequel to 'The Martian Chronicles,' but I've never done it. Sequels are a bad idea."

Mr. Lucas, of course, made sequels - and prequels - in spades. As if hyperdrive rendered historical continuity irrelevant, the first "Star Wars" film was actually Episode IV, and the last is Episode III. In the eyes of nonfans, of course, it doesn't really matter where one lands in the saga; after the second film ("The Empire Strikes Back") the whole thing went downhill.

"I fell asleep during the third one, when they brought out the Care Bears," said Mary Doria Russell, author of "The Sparrow" and "Children of God." The third movie, "Return of the Jedi," was the one that had those dancing, furry little creatures called Ewoks.

That kind of cute, sunny woodsiness seems particularly out of place in current science fiction. For as sci-fi has turned inward, it has also turned darker. "It's a rather quieter and more disturbing kind of science fiction," Mr. Morgan said.

"Star Wars" can hardly be called quiet or disturbing. But there is a film, made around the same time as "The Empire Strikes Back," that does fit that description: "Blade Runner." Many people, including Mr. Morgan, consider the film, directed by Ridley Scott, to be one of the best sci-fi movies ever made, because it was as much about what's inside as what's outside. It, not "Star Wars," was truly ahead of its time.

"You've got the gun battles and all that stuff," Mr. Morgan said, "but the movie is very much about internal factors, like robots yearning to be humans."

"And even now, 20 years later, it still looks like the future," he added. "That's a neat trick."

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/weekinreview/01fount.html?8hpib

NY Times. com: Let the Fur Fly

2005-05-03T01:07:00.000+08:00

May 1, 2005

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Let the Fur Fly
By DAPHNE MERKIN

Where have all the Lassies gone? Who can forget that noble collie who had her own show on Sunday-night TV and was a kid's best friend, there for the hugging when you needed her to be? She was an honorary member of the show's perfect nuclear family -- the whey-faced Timmy, played by Jon Provost; his earnest mother, played by June Lockhart; and his levelheaded father, played by Hugh Reilly. But it was also abundantly clear that no one was thinking of inviting Lassie in for a snack of milk and Lick 'n Crunch treats (Oreo-style cookies from Three Dog Bakery, made with carob instead of chocolate, which is bad for dogs) or of decking her out in a Swarovski-crystal heart-shaped dog tag, or of painting her nails with Opi's Pawlish. You can be just as sure that Timmy wasn't saving up his allowance to buy Lassie a $14 squeaky toy Chewy Vuitton or Jimmy Chew and that his mother wasn't stretching the household budget to cover Le Chien et Le Chat cedar-scented laundry detergent.

No, Lassie belonged to an honorable but almost-extinct breed of household pet, one that knew its place in the family of man. She would never have been caught dead sleeping in a customized $400 white-crackle painted dog bed with toile linens -- would never have been caught dead sleeping anywhere but outside the farmhouse screen door, keeping an ear cocked for strange sounds.

At the risk of drawing ire, I would like to suggest that there is something profoundly awry about the way our culture treats pets. To wit: We spend more money annually on pet-related supplies and services (an estimated $35 billion last year) than we do on toys for children. To wit: The New York Dog Magazine, which features un-tongue-in-cheek articles on whether or not to buy health insurance for Fido (5 percent of pet owners have insurance) and how to keep your canine in a custody battle (''Start a diary showing that you are the primary caretaker,'' advises Raoul Felder, divorce lawyer to the stars. ''Note how many times you walk the dog''), is but the latest entry in a crowded field that includes Dog Fancy, Modern Dog and The Bark. To wit: If you're looking for a place to board your dog while you're on vacation, you could do worse than Canine Cove in Sausalito, Calif., a cageless facility offering a quiet area to watch TV as well as an outside lounge area.

How has it come to pass that outfitting a dog with a $1,380 Hermes crocodile-and-calfskin leash-and-collar set doesn't seem too absurd -- too shameful? How is it that our sense of humanity has been transferred to members of the animal kingdom -- the domesticated and overbred as well as the wild and exotic -- so that we lavish affection, money and moral outrage on them while we gripe about the homeless instead of empathizing with their plight and ignore our elderly altogether?

Credit for this weird and somewhat depraved cultural phenomenon must go equally to the Animal Liberation movement, which has managed to seize the moral high ground in spite of sentiments that are neither entirely heartwarming nor logically consistent (Clive D. L.Wynne's ''Do Animals Think?'' offers a witty rejoinder to many of the movement's more pious arguments) and to a prevailing Marie Antoinette spirit of consumerism. Together these two forces have produced a climate that has allowed the anthropomorphic fallacy -- in which we confuse our very human desires with an animal's best interests, sometimes to the detriment of the animal -- to run riot. A recent instance of this involved the more than seven years of international effort and $20 million spent on trying to return Keiko, the sociable killer whale and star of the movie ''Free Willy,'' to the Icelandic wilds. Keiko, who never seemed to feel the call to freedom quite as keenly on his own behalf as his human protectors did, ended up dying two years ago, ''seeking human consolation,'' as one writer put it. (omg, he died!)

So while PETA activists seem to be more focused on saving lab rats than on preserving advances in medicine that might save their parents or grandparents, people are prepared to endanger their neighbors' -- and sometimes their own -- lives by adopting tigers or chimpanzees as backyard curiosities. And while pet fetishism has a well-documented history, nowadays dogs and cats are embraced with more brazenness than ever, as status possessions, or substitute children, or displaced love objects ripe for narcissistic projection (and sometimes all three at once).

Lest you're still in any doubt as to where I'm coming from, let me identify myself as an unreconstructed speciesist. I am, that is, one of those unenlightened types roundly criticized by the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer for conceiving of humans somewhat differently from, say, boa constrictors. This is not to say that I don't take it on faith that animals can suffer -- ''The question,'' according to Singer's guru, the 19th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, ''is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?'' -- only that I can't bring myself to regard the psychic or physical travails of my niece's beloved dog, Lily, with the same empathic investment I regard those of my niece.

You might say that I come by these attitudes naturally, descending as I do from a long line of pet-avoidant people. In my Orthodox Jewish family, animals of all sorts were associated with a Tennysonian principle of aggression -- ''nature, red in tooth and claw'' -- rather than with cuddliness or companionliness. Both my parents were escapees from Nazi Germany, where the Führer was known to adore his German shepherd, Blondi (the opening of ''Downfall,'' the harrowing movie about Hitler's last days in his bunker, refers to his twin obsessions with vegetarian food and his hound). While Jewish law takes a fairly benign view of household pets and prohibits unnecessary cruelty to animals, European-born Jews have historically enjoyed somewhat leery relations with dogs and cats.

In my own family, gerbils were the main concession to my and my five siblings' wishes for a pet, along with some negligible goldfish and a loveless chameleon or two. The gerbils died fairly regularly by way of negligence rather than of intentional malice, and one particularly ghoulish instance, in which a batch of gerbil newborns were devoured by their mother, has remained etched on my mind. My youngest brother was the most insistent in his wish for an animal playmate, and eventually cajoled my mother into letting him have a snake. The snake required a diet of live mice, which only added to my brother's happiness, but the whole project was short-lived since it turned out that my mother's cherished housekeeper wouldn't step foot in our apartment as long as a snake was on the premises.

All the same, it's easy to see the allure of furry, tail-wagging little creatures, and I'm not averse to the proposition of joining the swelling ranks of urban dog owners someday. (As for cats, I might as well admit I'm a confirmed ailurophobe.) My 15-year-old daughter and I, in our elaborate conversations about our dream dog, lean toward saucy breeds, like cocker spaniels or West Highland terriers. (Then, too, it has hardly been lost on me that dog-walking is the divorced woman's answer to single bars.) Nor am I minimizing the importance of the animal-human bond, although I've never been persuaded that there's much correlation between being kind to animals and being kind to people. I'm more inclined to believe in the negative side of equation -- the link between kids who enjoy tearing the wings off butterflies and adults who become serial killers.

Indeed, one of the supreme dog lovers of all time, the gifted British writer and editor J. R. Ackerley, was undoubtedly also one of the most intensely misanthropic people ever to have lived. Ackerley's memoir, ''My Dog Tulip,'' is a compelling and somewhat queasy-making testament to the power of displacement, as evidenced by the author's absorption in the excretory and mating habits of his beloved Alsatian, which he conveys in prose that is nothing short of rhapsodic. Ackerley's passion for animals was exceeded only by his contempt for people, which makes you wonder whether it is possible to be equally ardent about both mice and men, or whether it is truly a matter of declaring one's exclusive allegiance, as Ackerley seems to have thought: ''Everyone in the long run must decide which side he is on.'' He went so far as to observe: ''I myself am out to save the animals . . . if necessary at the expense of mankind.''

Which brings us back to the heart of the matter: how did creatures once relegated to the basement and the back porch, expected to earn their keep as retrievers and ratters, ascend to their current prima-donna status? Why is moneyed America throwing its discretionary income in the dog bowl, gussying up its dogs and cats and stuffing their yaps with delicacies as they perch on upholstered pillows as if they were temperamental Egyptian deities? Perhaps these pampered beings offer us spiritual cleansing, a way of absolving ourselves from the guilt of living high while others starve by sharing our good fortune with mammals less powerful than ourselves. Then again, who -- no matter how rich or celebrated -- isn't in the market for unconditional love, even if it comes by way of a pooch or kitty that can't tell a joke or remind you to take your keys?

Still, even if our ''relentlessly anthropomorphic psyches,'' as Stephen Budiansky describes it in his charming book, ''The Truth About Dogs,'' are to blame for the warm place that dogs (whom Budiansky characterizes, only half-jokingly, as ''con artists, parasites'' and ''biological freeloaders'') hold in our collective hearts, I know I can't be the only one to find myself increasingly nostalgic for the days when a pet was a pet and not a handbag-size celebrity pooch named Tinkerbell or Bit Bit. These, of course, are the precious little bowwows that appear at fashion shows and shopping sprees on the arms of their respective owners, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, in a parody of mothering that is reminiscent of girls pushing doll strollers. (Courtesy of my daughter's copy of In Touch Weekly, I have learned that Tinkerbell now faces stiff competition in the form of another teacup Chihuahua, named Bambi, which led one animal behaviorist to observe, ''The older dog has probably been lavished with affection, which may lead to heightened anxiety if Paris is now paying attention to another pet.'' God only knows what trauma has been induced in Bit Bit by the news of Britney's pregnancy.)
Not long ago, my neighbors across the hall asked if I'd house and feed their lone Japanese beta fish, Candy, for a week while they went away for a spot of sun with their three young children. I readily agreed: I like my neighbors and was reassured by their calm assertion that if the fish happened to die on my watch, I could always replace it for $3.79 at a nearby Petco. This was an attitude to pets that I could recognize, even identify with, one that predated our present culture of relentless commodification, in which everything -- from your child's school to your dog's exclusive kennel -- is meant to testify to the enviable pedigree of your lifestyle rather than to the messy reality of a life. The fish, I'm happy to report, survived his foster domicile. I kept the rather majestic tank in my kitchen and sometimes of an afternoon I would wander in and watch Candy swim in and out of the plastic igloo-looking dwelling that was its only diversion other than some flakes of fish food. What, I wondered, did Candy think about all day? Did he recognize that he was away from home? And then, coming rather quickly on the heels of that thought, I realized that my own interest in piscine consciousness was limited in the extreme, unregenerate speciesist that I am. Besides, I tend to agree with Wittgenstein, who was of the opinion that if lions could talk, we wouldn't understand their conversation. The final word on the subject of the larger meaning of pets, however, should really go to Groucho Marx, who was never beyond taking things to their preposterous conclusion: ''Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.'' Go on, give the man an old-fashioned, store-bought bone.

Daphne Merkin, a novelist and critic, is a frequent contributor to the magazine.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01WWLN.html?8hpib

FT.com: Today's purchase of satisfaction

2005-04-20T03:33:00.000+08:00

Richard Tomkins: Today's purchase of satisfaction
By Richard Tomkins
Published: April 18 2005 18:24 Last updated: April 18 2005 18:24

How much should you expect to pay for a pair of luxury chopsticks? Well, Crate & Barrel does a nice pair in organic bamboo with enamelled striped bands for $5.95. At www.echopsticks.org (where else?) I spied some very attractive Japanese ones in hand-polished, lacquered wood at a special price of $14.99. Then again, as a reader has brought to my attention, there are the ones that Hermès offers, in somewhat plain-looking silver and wood, for $490.

Admittedly, if you opt for the Hermès sticks, you get an extra pair and a couple of porcelain dishes thrown in. Even so, at that price, I would think twice before chucking them into the dishwasher, and three or four times before using them to prise stuck-on lumps of smouldering crumpet out of the toaster.

Hermès is not a name you normally associate with chopsticks, but you do tend to associate it with luxury. So I doubt the company was all that chuffed to read the story that appeared in the Financial Times over the Easter weekend in which Fred Wilson, boss of Saks Fifth Avenue, defined luxury as being for ladies who lunch; as staid, rigid, snobbish, establishment and dull.

I, on the other hand, was delighted. At last, here was someone articulating what I had always thought about luxury - and not some envy-ridden peasant, hair-shirted ascetic or unreconstructed hippy but the chief executive of a la-di-da department store chain with 57 shops across the US and annual sales of $2.7bn.

As an envy-ridden peasant, hair-shirted ascetic and unreconstructed hippy myself, I have never understood how the idea of luxury has survived - at least, not the sort of luxury Mr Wilson describes, redolent of Roll-Royces, fur coats, poodles, gold bath taps, shag-pile carpets, chandeliers and champagne.

That notion of luxury derived from the idea of apeing the lifestyle of the aristocracy. Or rather, the imagined lifestyle; in reality, as a shocked nation learnt in 2003 when a tabloid newspaper reporter infiltrated Buckingham Palace, the private quarters of Britain's royal family are furnished in the manner of a faded sea-front hotel and the boxes on the breakfast table in which the Queen's cereals are kept are pure Tupperware.

Anyway, in the 1960s, all those old bourgeois values to do with money, materialism, class and snobbery were rejected by the counter-culture revolution. As David Brooks documented in Bobos in Paradise, words regarded as compliments by the old guard - decorous, opulent, luxurious, elegant, splendid - were disdained by the new generation in favour of words reflecting an almost opposite spirit: authentic, natural, warm, rustic and simple.

Disappointingly, however, the counter-culture revolution failed to abolish money, so new forms of luxury had to be found to reflect the changed times. Since the ostentatious display of wealth was seen as vulgar under the new rules, heavy spending on products or services had to be justified by higher levels of authenticity or functionality.

A good analogy was provided by Mr Wilson. Years ago, Cadillac and BMW were both considered luxury car brands in the US. Then, in the 1970s, BMW went down the high-performance road and produced the 3, 5 and 7 Series; still luxurious but now "the ultimate driving machine", while the Cadillac remained merely flashy. There are no prizes for guessing which came out ahead - an example Mr Wilson now wants to emulate, turning Saks Fifth Avenue from just a box full of luxury brands into a "high-performance" store providing much better service.

A lot is said these days about the democratisation of luxury, which seems to mean only that a lot more people are buying up-market products and services. But to me, there is something much more striking about the phenomenon. The old idea of using luxury to ape our betters has faded; now, it is much more to do with finding satisfaction for ourselves in something that looks, tastes or does its job better than standard products or services in its category.

Yet the old idea has not so much disappeared as morphed. It figures still in so-called aspirational brands with big logos and ostentatious styling - those featuring in the "bling" culture of hip-hop music and the shopping expeditions of celebrities.

I conclude that the whole concept of luxury is fragmenting into at least three, probably overlapping, forms. One manifestation is new luxury: the high-performance variety that delivers something the consumer finds more than usually enjoyable or fulfilling. It can mean almost anything from a special cup of coffee to a cruise in Antarctica. As living standards rise and people seek more emotional satisfaction from the things they buy, this has become an extremely promising category.

Another is old-style, aspirational luxury. In its favour, we can say that people will always aspire to be something. But now people emulate celebrities instead of royalty, this has become a much more fashion-driven, fleeting business than it once was. And with its low aspirations to taste, one hesitates to wish it well.

And then, there is timeless luxury, the sort represented by Hermès, which does not even regard itself as a luxury goods company but as one producing beautifully crafted, ultra high quality products that just happen to cost a great deal of money.

Perhaps, in a way, this is just an extreme example of new luxury. Simple, understated and functional, the Hermès chopsticks do not shout their presence - but to those who can afford them, they are no doubt as pleasing a pair of chopsticks as money can buy. And who can put a price on that?

richard.tomkins@ft.com
Original article: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5e1dd8a2-b02d-11d9-ab98-00000e2511c8.html
© Copyright Ltd 2005. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping

2005-04-13T05:15:00.000+08:00

Fascinating.

December 12, 2004
Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping
By STEPHEN MIHM

When it comes to computer security, do you have faith in firewalls? Think passwords will protect you? Not so fast: it is now possible to eavesdrop on a typist's keystrokes and, by exploiting minute variations in the sounds made by different keys, distinguish and decipher what is being typed.

Credit for this discovery goes to Dmitri Asonov, a computer-security researcher for I.B.M. at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., who (with Rakesh Agrawal) published his results this year. The principle is a simple one. Keyboards are a bit like drums: the keys rest atop a plastic plate; different areas of the plate yield different sounds when struck. The human ear can't tell the difference, but if the sounds are recorded and processed by a highly sophisticated computer program, the computer can, with a little bit of practice, learn to translate the sounds of keystrokes into the appropriate letters and symbols.

This means that firewalls and passwords will amount to nothing if someone manages to bug a room and record the cacophony of keystrokes. Asonov managed to pull off this feat with readily available recording equipment at a short distance. Even as far away as 50 feet, and with significant background noise, he was able to replicate his success using a parabolic microphone. He also anticipated an obvious practical objection: how does a would-be eavesdropper get into a building and spend enough time to ''train'' a computer program to recognize the keystrokes of a particular keyboard? Not a problem: it seems that keyboards of the same make and model sound sufficiently alike -- regardless of who is typing -- that a computer trained on one keyboard can be unleashed on another.

Having divulged this vulnerability, Asonov says he felt dutybound to come up with a countermeasure. Keyboards, he proposes, could be engineered in such a way that the sounds of different keys would be indistinguishable from one another. But even if engineers manage that, other loopholes will undoubtedly emerge. Asonov says that he has heard rumors of research into the possibility of using computers to translate the humming of ink-jet printers into the actual text being printed.

Thankfully, such approaches remain relatively exotic and beyond the reach of the average eavesdropper. ''Everyone still tries to break firewalls,'' Asonov complains. ''People don't think outside the box.''

'Extreme Textiles' Come of Age

2005-04-13T00:05:00.000+08:00

April 12, 2005
'Extreme Textiles' Come of Age
By KENNETH CHANG

A knitted bag holds a weakened heart, helping it pump blood. Electricity flows through the threads of a battery-powered fleece jacket, keeping the wearer warm. Carbon fibers are braided into structures that look like mushrooms, but are actually prototypes of automotive engine valves. Other fibers are shaped into bicycle frames and sculling oars.

Textiles are no longer just the stuff of clothing, carpets and furniture covering. Made of high-tech threads, they can also be found in lifesaving medical devices and the bodies of racing cars. One architect is proposing building a skyscraper out of carbon fibers.

"I think there's more areas that are using textiles than there were before," said Matilda McQuaid, head of the textiles department at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where 150 items showing the advances of materials science are on display in a show called "Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance."

In fact, textiles have long been used for more than clothes and rugs, said Dr. Peter Schwartz, head of the textile engineering department at Auburn University. "The Romans used jute fabrics for road stabilization," he said.

Many textiles are never seen, like those that are embedded in the rubber of automobile tires. "Not many people are quite aware of it," said Larry Q. Williams, business director of Invista, a company that makes a polyester fabric used in tires. "It's the polyester that's forming the shape of the tire and holding it together."

Otherwise, a tire "would immediately blow apart," Mr. Williams said. "Textile reinforcement of tires has existed as long as pneumatic tires have been built." Cotton textiles were used initially, followed by rayon and then nylon. But nylon had the problem of "flatspotting": when a car was parked for a while, the section pressed against the ground would harden and roll bumpily until the tire warmed up.

In the 1970's, polyester replaced nylon, and continual improvements in the textiles explain in part why tires now often last 80,000 miles instead of 10,000 to 15,000 miles.

Threads made of a wide variety of new materials, including metals, carbon fibers and high-strength materials like Kevlar, have further widened the use of textiles. Chemical coatings stiffen them or add additional properties like fire resistance.

"The uses are increasing in the high performance sector," Dr. Schwartz said. "People are looking at new polymers for fibers." For example, fibers that are more efficient at absorbing energy could lead to safer safety belts. Stronger fibers could be braided into ropes that could replace steel cables.

Squid Labs of Emeryville, Calif., has added microscopic strands of stainless steel to rope, making the rope electrically conductive. Pulling the rope changes the electrical resistance. For the Cooper-Hewitt show, Squid Labs built a jungle-gym-size gizmo that plays musical notes when visitors pull on the ropes. More practically, such rope could set off an alarm when it is fraying.

Woven electronics are not a new idea - the exhibit includes a prototype from 1960 - but the concept of "smart" clothing, carpeting or wall covering is nearing practicality. Infineon Technologies AG, a German chipmaker, has made a snowboarding jacket that plays MP3's and a carpet that can report the footsteps of an intruder or the heat of a fire.

ILC Dover Inc. of Frederica, Del., has developed technology for NASA that allows the outside of a spacesuit to act like a mouse pad for controlling computer functions. The electrical signals flow along metal-containing polymers in the suit's fabric, not metal wires. The circuitry is thus less likely to wear out or break.

"There is a lot of engineering that goes in the textiles," said Ms. McQuaid of Cooper-Hewitt.

Even so, today's textiles still show ancient patterns. "The weaving and knitting, the structures are identical to what were made way back when," Dr. Schwartz said.

The museum show largely overlooks one area of textile innovation, the so-called nonwovens, whose fibers are bound together in a random pattern. They can be found in bandages and diapers, among other items.

"But they're really boring to look at," said Susan Brown, an assistant curator of the show. "They might be really cool. They might be really interesting. They might do something great, but they come in the mail, and you're like, I can't put that in a museum."

Ms. Brown added, "We excluded a lot of really ugly things."

My Keane CDs are here!

2005-04-12T11:44:00.000+08:00

As of April 8, I'm now the proud and overjoyed owner of four of Keane's singles: Somewhere Only We Know, Everything's Changing, This is the Last Time, and Bedshaped. They arrived in their gleaming little jewel cases courtesy of the great folks at Amazon.co.uk, and I had to suppress the urge to make a mad dance of joy while claiming the parcel at the post office. I love this band for their extremely emotional, heartfelt songs, and for their completely unassuming attitude toward fame. To know more about them, point your browsers to:

www.keanemusic.com
www.keaneshaped.co.uk
www.keane.at/links/links.html

I'm blogging! I'm blogging!

2005-04-08T14:33:00.000+08:00

Why have I joined the blogging bandwagon?

I never thought of myself as a blogger. I've always been an intensely private person. One of my friends proclaimed that her private thoughts would die with her, and while I'm a bit more amenable to sharing my thoughts with somebody else, I would prefer to do it through an old-fashioned journal. I have fantasies of my family or friends discovering my yellowed, crumbling and moth-eaten journals after my passing, and publishing them posthumously as a chronicle of my life and times.

There's also the excuse of not owning a digital camera, and hence not being able to take decent digital photos that can be uploaded to the site. Or of having a life not worth blogging about. Only politicians, celebrities, reporters, high-flying execs, jetsetters and their ilk have the right to write blogs. People who have interesting lives, in other words. Well, nothing interesting ever happens to me, so what would I write about? If I ever put up my own blog, I wanted it to be profound and meaningful (but not pretentious), not the type where I recounted my recent sale purchases.

So what prompted this change of heart? Well, recently I started forwarding these articles to friends. They were articles about stuff I found interesting, like scientific proof that women's genetic makeup was more complex than men's. Or of Kashmir militants pledging to disrupt the peace process. The last straw was this article from the New York Times:

April 7, 2005
Nominee Is Grilled Over Program on Pesticides
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, April 6 - Stephen L. Johnson, President Bush's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, encountered unexpected turbulence at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday as Senator Barbara Boxer of California threatened to hold up his nomination over a small but controversial pesticide program in Florida.

Appearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Johnson, a 24-year veteran of the agency who has been acting administrator since his predecessor, Michael O. Leavitt, became secretary of health and human services, was greeted warmly by Republicans and faced predictably pointed questions from Democrats over recent agency initiatives, including emission control rules put into place last month.

Ms. Boxer's objections were based on a little-known research program near Jacksonville, Fla., sponsored by the agency and the American Chemistry Council, that offered money to low-income families willing to allow the agency to measure the effects of pesticides on their children under one year of age. The project, called Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, or Cheers, was suspended last year after negative public reaction that prompted the agency to call in outside experts to assess its feasibility. (emphasis mine)

The program was limited to families in Duval County that routinely used pesticides inside their homes. It offered parents $970 over two years if they made sure their young children went about their usual activities as the use of pesticides continued. Researchers would then visit the home every three to six months to collect data. (emphasis mine)

In a letter that reached Ms. Boxer several hours after she raised her concerns, Mr. Johnson said, "No additional work will be conducted on this study subject to the outcome of external scientific and ethical review."

But that was well short of her demands. Calling the program "appalling, unethical and immoral," Ms. Boxer implored Mr. Johnson "to pull the plug on this program tomorrow." In an interview later, she said she would do whatever she could to hold up Mr. Johnson's confirmation so long as the program had any chance of being revived.

"Until it's canceled, I will do anything I can to stop this nomination," she said. "This program is the worst kind of thing; it's environmental injustice where children are the victims."

Mr. Johnson, 54, is the first career employee at the agency with a formal scientific background to be nominated to lead it. Trained as a biologist and pathologist, he led the agency's pesticide and toxic substances office before rising to several senior positions under Mr. Leavitt and his predecessor, Christie Whitman.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Johnson assured committee members that under his leadership, decisions would be made on "the best available scientific information" and that they would be made through a process "as open and transparent" as possible.
But fielding questions from other Democrats and Senator James M. Jeffords, Independent of Vermont, who warned Mr. Johnson against becoming "a rubber stamp for White House policies," Mr. Johnson made it clear that he would strongly support preferences of the administration.

That became especially evident in an exchange with Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, who pressed Mr. Johnson to explain why the agency provided the committee with detailed analyses of the administration's pollution-reduction bill, known as Clear Skies, but not two competing bills. The measure has stalled in the last two sessions of Congress.

Mr. Johnson said the agency had more pressing matters to address, but he vowed to do whatever he could to help the committee pass effective antipollution legislation so long as it was built on Clear Skies.

"I appreciate the work the committee has already done on this issue," he said, "and I look forward to working with you to advance this important legislative initiative."

Responding to friendly questions from Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, Mr. Johnson returned to the theme of sound science as the overarching imperative for all agency decisions. But Mr. Jeffords threw the concept back to him, asking Mr. Johnson why the agency chose a cap-and-trade program for its recently announced mercury rules for power plant emissions, rather than a program that demanded the use of best available technologies.

Mr. Johnson's answer reflected his willingness to balance economic considerations with new environmental regulations. He said that new guidelines for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions were also helping to reduce mercury emissions and that forcing plant operators to do more would prove too expensive.

"It's a much more cost-effective approach," he said of the cap-and-trade program.

As he left the hearing room, Mr. Johnson smiled when asked about Ms. Boxer's concerns and said, "Today was a pleasure being before the senators, and I'm looking forward to swift confirmation so I can run the E.P.A. on a full-time basis."
-----------
I wanted to say to my friends that I felt appalled. That the world was coming to an ignominious end. This guy paid parents to have their children exposed to pesticides for two years, all in the name of science, and now he's been nominated to run the US Environmental Protection Agency. Then I thought, why subject my friends to the vexation of reading my peevish and dispiriting comments. Sure, I frequently send amusing, fascinating and uplifting pieces to them, but with all the abominable things happening in this world, it's becoming more and more likely that 'bad forwards' will outnumber the good ones. Well, who wants to open their inbox at 9 am and read my churlish comments on the latest deplorable event of the day?

And so, CertiFiabLe! was born.

NY Times. com: It's a Flat World, After All

2005-04-04T12:39:00.000+08:00

Galing nitong article about globalization!

April 3, 2005

It's a Flat World, After All
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''

''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!

This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?

It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.

No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.

The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.

Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.

So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.

Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''

As if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!

It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.

If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''

The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''

Rao is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''

That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''

If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken down and many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''

No, Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and engineering base.

''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.

These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''

Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' to be published this week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times, and his television documentary ''Does Europe Hate Us?'' will be shown on the Discovery Channel on April 7 at 8 p.m.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?ex=1115092800&en=da143c3a3f6f38a8&ei=5070

2005-04-04T00:58:00.000+08:00

Galing nitong article about globalization!

April 3, 2005

It's a Flat World, After All
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''

''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!

This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

HOW did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?

It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.

No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.

The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.

Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.

So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.

Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''

AS if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!

It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.

If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''

The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''
ao is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''

That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''

If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken down and many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''

No, Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and engineering base.

''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.

These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''

I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''

Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' to be published this week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times, and his television documentary ''Does Europe Hate Us?'' will be shown on the Discovery Channel on April 7 at 8 p.m.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?ex=1115092800&en=da143c3a3f6f38a8&ei=5070