SPAN: July/August 1999

SPAN

Privatization: A Dirty Word?

By Pramit Pal Chaudhuri

It Isn't Always Easy An Interview with James Boyd

Publisher Francis B. Ward

Bar Codes: Reading Between the Lines

Editor-in-Chief Kiki S. Munshi

By Ed Leibowitz

Editor Lea Terhune

Where the Boys Aren't

By Brendan I. Koerner

Associate Editor Arun Bhanat Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. Muthukwnar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services Documentation Services, American Center Library

usrs

Visas for the College-Bound

By A. Venkata Narayana

H1-B Visas

MIT Project India Connect

By Lea Terhune

E-Mail Nation

By Sara Sklaroff

The Life of the Mind Goes Digital

By Jay Tolson

Office Politics in the Electronic Age

By Dana Hawkins Front cover: Sundara and Paravai, Tamil Nadu, 16th century, bronze. The work is part of PUja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion, an exhibition of Indian temple art currently on view at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. See story on page 26. Photograph courtesy Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Institution.

When Granny Goes Online

By David 1. Marcus

Indian Art at the Smithsonian

By Lee Adair Lawrence

A New Art Museum for a Classic City

By Soumya Sitaraman

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Project Lead-Free: Fighting an Unseen Enemy

Erratum: The credit for the photograph on page 42-43 in the March/April 1999 issue of SPAN should have read courtesy Brown Brothers. The error is regretted.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed al Ajanta Offset & Packaging Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110 052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

By Dinesh C. Sharma

Taking Charge

By John Wareham

Rhythm of a Life

By Arun Bhanot

Programs

to the People

By Charles C. Mann

Casting a High-Tech Net for Space Trash

By James R. Chiles

A LETTER

T

FROM

his is the time of year when college-age students prepare to begin a new life in higher education and parents worry about launching their children into the wide world, sometimes far away from their nurturing family. Many young men and women from South Asia choose to pursue an advanced degree at colleges and universities in the United States. After the anxiety of obtaining the marks, passing the requisite exams and arranging financing, there is one last hurdle: the visa queue.

Knowing the hows and wherefores of getting a U.S. visa can make it all easier, so SPAN offers a quick guide to the procedure with tips from Consul General Wayne S. Leininger on the best way to qualify for both student and H 1-B visas, as told to A. Venkata Narayana.

Two more articles explore what is going on in U.S. institutions of higher learning. "Where the Boys Aren't" by Brenden 1. Koerner looks at the changing gender balance in U.S. colleges, where more women than men are pursuing degrees. "MIT Project India Connect" focuses on a new program which brings student interns from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to schools and businesses in India-sharing knowledge and learning how to function in the globalized workplace of the future. Having been professionally involved in Indo-American educational exchange for some years, I am now getting personally involved. My son just got his Indian visa and university acceptance for a year's study in Varanasi.

Students and grannies alike are taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet. ••E-Mail Nation" tells how Americans are going online like never before: from scholars, to office workers to the elderly. Once online, there is no turning back, with the wealth of information and debate available.

Quite a bit of cyber-debate is about the controversial domination of Microsoft computer operating systems versus those, like Linux, that many computer professionals prefer. "Programs to the People" by Charles C. Mann tracks an insurgent band of programmers who are motivated not by profit but the

THE PUBLISHER ideal of free software developed communally on the Net. The GNOME project is "a volunteer effort to develop a computer desktop-a mouse-and-windows interface -that will outdo the various incarnations of Windows that form the foundation of the Microsoft empire."

Away from the think tanks, SPAN takes you to a special exhibition on at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., this summer. Devi is just one in a series of fascinating exhibitions on Indian art and culture that have been mounted by the Freer and Saclder galleries over the past few years. Lee Adair Lawrence gives the background to accompany the pictures. And Soumya Sitaraman writes about a new museum of modern art just opened in San Francisco.

The theme of Indian culture continues in Arun Bhanot's "Rhythm of a Life," in which he interviews Harriotte Huriee, a blind American singer whose talents are devoted to Indian classical music.

A pressing problem around the world is finding the best ways and means to divest power from government-run or regulated business concerns into the hands of more efficient private service providers. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri examines how it has been done, the advantages and disadvantages, in "Privatization: A Dirty Word?"

Garbage is a man-created predicament that we are only too aware of on terra firma. Now it has extended into the Final Frontier. In "Casting a HighTech Net for Space Trash" James R. Chiles looks at how scientists are trying to deal with junk floating around the Earth. Closer to home, in "Project Lead-Free: Fighting an Unseen Enemy," Dinesh C. Sharma profiles a nongovernment environmental organization funded by Indian American Dr. George Abraham with the purpose of taclding lead poisoning, particularly in poor communities which are often the most severely affected.

We hope you enjoy the issue.

I

began t with a grocer's daughter's determination to undo the handiwork of a retired railway worker. It involved a trillion dollars in sales.

It has been used to rebuild economies, transform societies. Yet after 15 years and having spread to five continents, privatization has still to run its course. This wholesale transfer of government property to private hands, whether by grant or by sale or temporary subcontract, is proving to be a defining moment between this century and the next.

Though the term "privatization" was coined by the American management guru Peter Drucker in the 1960s, it was Margaret Thatcher who made it a buzzword for policymakers and popular opinion alike. It was during her tenure as British prime minister that she put government-owned British Telecom on the block in 1984. It sold for $ 4.9 billion, dwarfing all previous public-to-private sales. Its sheer size, the audacity of selling a telephone company-an economic sector then thought to be a "natural" for government ownership-made this deal the economic equivalent of storming the Bastille. Dozens of countries followed suit. By 1990 worldwide proceeds of privatization touched $30 billion. In 1997 they topped $150 billion.

In a way, Thatcher was only undoing the damage done by one of her own countrymen. In 1944 a British worker, Will Cannon, wandered into a meeting of his local trade union in the town of Reading.

Cannon proposed a motion calling for Britain's industries to be "nationalized."

The motion passed. By December the same year this newfangled concept was part of the Labour Party's manifesto. The success of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Franklin Delano Roosevelt's giant public sector answer to the poverty of the American south, encouraged the belief that whatever a private company could do, a posse of bureaucrats could do better.

The just-born World Bank made replicating the TVA across the planet one pillar of its economic platform.

By the time Thatcher reigned in 10 Downing Street it was generally accepted that state ownership was more blight than

blessing. The losses public sector companies ran up directly fed into the hyperinflation that crippled Latin America in the 1980s. The burden such companies placed on government exchequers flattened the growth curves of even Western economies. Countries that emerged from the gloom of communism had deep emotional reasons to rollback the state, an institution they associated with oppression. For the man on the street, government ownership was synonymous with abysmal service and minimal choice.

After British Telecom was privatized, the number of consumer complaints rose dramatically. The reason was telling: under state ownership consumers had given up complaining because of the lack of response.

T

here are two broad arguments in favor of transferring economic assets from government to private hands. The first rationale for privatization is a simple matter of efficiency. During the past decade government after government has gone public about what was one of the world's worstkept secrets. Namely, that state-owned companies are not only bad at making profits, they are millstones around the national economy as a whole.

Throughout the world, the public sector was marked by poor returns, an addiction to asking the government for undeserved bailouts, and a tendency to fall behind private competitors in technology and marketing skills. In their book Commanding Heights, chronicling the recent eclipse of the state and rise of the market, authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw declare the inability of public sector firms to balance their books as the "number one" reason for their discredit. Far from living up to the claim of being national champions, these companies became local embarrassments.

This universal inefficiency was almost baffling. As the former French President, Valery Giscard d 'Estaing, once said, "There is a mystery about state-owned companies. They are managed by good people-the best names of the elite. And yet they are unable to operate efficiently."

At times, what governments found themselves managing bordered on the absurd.

Argentina, at one point, owned a circus while Ghana ran a casino.

Attempts by governments to help their wards only made things worse. Protection from competition, subsidies and rigged markets only made the public sector flabbier and more inert. Worse, there was a tendency for politicians to ask for favors in return. This included hiring too many workers or inducting the wrong sort of employees. State-owned companies would be made to artificially depress prices of products to appease voters.

Vijay Kelkar, finance secretary, put his finger on the problem: "State ownership creates permanent confusion for enterprises when it comes to their basic purpose."

Few are as enthusiastic about selling off these liabilities as treasury officials and finance ministers. Privatization was a triple benefit for them. It meant paying less subsidies, provided a revenue windfall through the actual sale and a greater likelihood of future tax earnings from the new private owners.

Freed of this burden, a government could divert more resources to social welfare. For many Third World countries the public sector is a major drain on funds. In Tanzania, until recently, subsidies for the public sector equaled over 70 percent of government spending on education and ISO percent of its spending on health. In countries ranging from Turkey to Peru to Senegal, a third of the government's fiscal deficit is due to such handouts.

The public sector also cut into overall economic growth. It jostled, often helped by unfair advantages provided by the government, with the private sector for capital and markets. A state enterprise was more spendthrift with its capital than its private counterparts and provided worse quality products and service. In Bangladesh, for example, the public sector absorbs 20 percent of domestic credit but generates only 3 percent of gross domestic product. A government-owned eriterprise, almost by definition, gives less bang for its buck.

It Isn't Always Easy James Boyd is a Fellow in the Energy and Natural Resources division of Resources for the Future, and is a consultant in regulatory program and mechanism design. He is particularly interested in the effect of regulation on technological innovation and how corporations can increase profitability through environmental investments. He has also analyzed the impact of liability on privatization in formerly centrally planned economies. He observed one country S transition first hand while working in the former Soviet Union.

"Viewing it from the standpoint of those who oppose it, it's always important to think about why they're opposing it. Of course, there are the entrenched interests, the people who benefit from it, but then it comes down to a kind of fear.

Russia is an example where privatization has been in some sense hijacked by a very select minority, those with power.

The benefits of some of the sale of the state assets have gone to a very small minority of people. And that tends to undermine the general public's confidence in why a concern is being privatized.

The larger issue, that it's going to lead to more competition, more efficient production, tends to get lost in the idea that the reason an industry is privatized is so a few people can try to make some money. That speaks to the need to have a very transparent and almost a collective participation in the privatization itself, that the benefits should be shared. Now that can be very difficult to pull off.

"In the United States, it was not privatization per se, but deregulation that provoked the same kind of arguments used against privatization-for instance, in the airline industry, which used to be highly regulated by the government. If you open that industry to competition, it was said, people would lose jobs, people would be worse off. Opponents to telecommunications deregulation had a similar argument. What you see now in the U.S., 20 years later-telecommunications being an amazing example-is that when you freed that market up, you created an entire new industry. Orders of magnitude more wealth is being generated injobs. So in the short run, invariably certain individuals will experience pain, but it's an investment that always pays off if what you achieve is a more open market and a more competitive situation-where market forces lead to a whole host of other benefits that only occur in the long run, but are very meaningful and lasting benefits.

"Pick any country, any industry. The question is, can they come up with an example where privatization has led to a worse situation? It is very hard to think of one. Privatization almost always leads to more jobs, greater efficiency, a more dynamic market, lower prices for the consumer, higher quality, better service.

"There are certain ways in which you want the government to provide safeguards, for instance, in air traffic safety. It's unfair to judge privatization if what replaces privatization is a highly regulated, constrained market. The great successes come when you fundamentally free up these kinds of markets, and have the government step back and not be involved. If all you are doing is changing ownership from the state to a small minority that is friendly with people in the government, then nothing really has changed. The important thing is having competition and the force of the market bring improvements.

That's the real test."

-L.T.

hey were strangers to the city of San Francisco. In their sober suits and muted ties, they could easily have been mistaken for a group of bewildered conventioneers as they made their way up a labyrinth of steep, unfamiliar streets, then down again toward the Bank of America Tower. The technical consultant from H.J. Heinz was among their number, as was the assistant controller of Del Monte and the electronic data processing manager from Procter & Gamble. The work they began that morning of January 4, 1973, would eventually impress itself upon every soft-drink bottle, every tube of toothpaste, every new novel, every magazine and newspaper, and every pop disk from Bing Crosby to the Beastie Boys. These men did not know San Francisco, but no American city, prosperous suburb or impoverished hamlet would escape the fruit of their labors.

The eight members of the Symbol Selection Committee had arrived to give birth to the Universal Product Code or UPC, now more familiarly known as the bar code. They would hear presentations from RCA, IBM, Pitney-Bowes and four other companies with competing prototypes for a laser-scannable icon meant to automate the checkout counter. By sheer coincidence, a religious cult had reaped some sizable press by predicting that on that very morning all life on earth would cease. "If the world ended," the committee's corporate counsel Stephen Brown later joked, "our last views would have been of one of the world's most beautiful sites-San Francisco Bay." RCA, with its smart scannable bul1'seye, seemed to be an early favorite, while obscure contenders like Charecogn and Resources for Lawyers were not strongly in the running. IBM's symbol-a cluster of black stripes of variable thickness on a white rectangular field with 10 identifier digits emblazoned along its button-was not yet a fully known quantity.

It was a harsh inflationary climate that had led usually uncooperative supermarket executives and a few food manufacturers to join forces in the early 1970s. Their Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code was to establish a standard product identifier for al1 packaged foodstuffs, regardless of where they were sold or manufactured. They were also given the task of coming up with an automated checkout stand to process this universal ID. The Symbol Selection Committee was spun off to choose the icon.

Near despair drove the bar code's creation. Supermarket net margins, which rarely crept over I percent in more profitable times, had sagged to 0.6 percent by 1970. While the industry had limited control over soaring prices for groceries and rising rates for shipping, commercial space, air-conditioning and other services, one enormous expense was mal1eable. They could halt the slide by "improving productivity," or reducing personnel.

In the early 1970s, supermarket employees formed a wel1paid, unionized workforce. Lawrence Russell, a consultant to the Symbol Selection Committee, recalls the checkout clerk and bagger eating up a full quarter of a supermarket's gross margin. By automating the checkout line, the clerks might use the time saved to bag the groceries themselves. Price labeling might be eliminated to further cut down payroll and boost profits. Human error

rum

in ringing up prices, which was usually in favor ofthe customer, could also be minimized. "That looked pretty juicy," says Russell, now president of the Information Services Group at Unisys, "a potential tripling of profitability."

For Alan Haberman, the selection committee chairman, the supermarket industry's predicament was more deeply felt. "While the rest of the world was sending people to the moon and playing around with computers, nobody in the technological world wanted to work in the supermarket business, because it was such a low-profit industry. The business was literal1y in the backwash of technology." His portrait of the checkout stand on the eve of automation is just as dismal, suffering from more than high labor costs. "As an industry, we were so damned conscious of the fact that the checkout experience was the least pleasant experience in a store. It was the thing that people hated! They hated having to wait in line! They hated having to watch the checker's action. It was an unhappy place."

How strange that the checkout line-this unhappy place, this technological backwater-should have pioneered a symbol that has transformed not just the supermarket but mass retail worldwide. During the 25 years since its adoption, the bar code has blossomed by the thousands in every American household. It has found its way into refrigerators and kitchen cabinets, bookshelves and broom closets, bathrooms and bureaus. On just about any consumer good imaginable, the ubiquitous icon comes compulsory, as part of the purchase price.

Through its formidable database, the UPC has allowed such retail giants as K Mart and Staples, Wal-Mart and Office Depot to track customer buying habits worldwide and to adjust bil1ions in inventory accordingly. Its use has expanded through the distribution and production chain to encompass wholesale shipments and raw materials. And it has spun off a multitude of other codes and a computerized identification movement in which human blood, overnight packages, dry cleaning, university students, antidepressants and endangered animals are identified by a laser-driven scanner.

"This little footprint," Haberman marvels, "has built a gigantic structure of improvements-of size and speed, of service, of less waste, of increased efficiency. This lousy little footprint is like the tip of an inverted pyramid, and everything spreads out from it. It's a very dramatic story."

n

ormanJoseph Woodland was determined to invent something of consequence for postwar America. A mechanical engineering instructor at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology in the late 1940s, Woodland had already formulated a method to improve elevator Muzak by recording 15 simultaneous tracks onto 35mm film-a major innovation over reel-to-reel tapes and record albums. But Woodland's father convinced him to drop the venture, warning him that he'd heard that Muzak was controlled by the Mob. A fel10w instructor and friend of Woodland's, Bernard "Bob" Silver, overheard a supermarket executive trying to sell the Drexel dean on a research project to automate the checkout

In the beginning, the bull's-eye target vied with IBM's rectangular symbol that could be read omnidirectionally by a scanner. IBM's "truncated piano keyboard" finally won out. counter. The dean declined, but Silver and Woodland began pursuing the concept themselves. Their first solution was to fashion a grocery icon out of different colors of fluorescent ink that could be identified through a tunnel of black light.

After making a quick killing in the stock market, Woodland left Drexel and spent the winter of 1948 musing over retail automation at his grandparents' apartment in Miami Beach. He had already rejected a multicolored fluorescent code in favor of a scannable bicolor icon, but the only code he was familiar with was Morse, which he had learned in the Boy Scouts. One calm January morning as he sat ensconced in the beach chair, the surf drumming in his ears, he was hit by a solution as hard as Newton's apple. "What I'm going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale," Woodland, now 77 and retired in Raleigh, North Carolina, warns. "1 remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when 1poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason-l didn't know-I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said, 'Golly! Now I have four lines and they could be wide lines and narrow lines, instead of dots and dashes. Now I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing.' Then only seconds later, I took my four fingers-they were still in the sand-and I swept them around into a full circle."

The inventor realized that any supermarket icon might pass through the scanning mechanism right-side-up, upside down or sideways, yet would still have to be recognized as the same image. Otherwise, the checkout clerk would waste too much time precisely orienting each can of soup or box of cornflakes.

Looking at the concentric circles in the sand, Woodland knew he had found a true omnidirectional symbol. He created a scanning device for his icon and persuaded Silver to design an electronic decoder for the system. In 1952 they were issued a joint patent. Woodland took ajob at IBM, hoping that he could interest the company in developing his invention. In 1959 he finally succeeded, and while carpooling with other IBM engineers, would talk checkout-stand automation. One of his colleagues made an unusual suggestion. "I don't know if he was joking or not; he was the kind of guy who might have been serious about it," Woodland recalls. "But he said that if you march a regiment under a scanner, with bull's-eyes on their helmets, you could find out who was AWOL." Woodland went on to complete a working checkout-stand prototype, but feasibility studies led him to recommend that the project be shelved. Before the advent of cheap low-power lasers, his automated method proved far more expensive than ringing up and bagging. Woodland resolved, however, to stay at his job.

When IBM offered to buy their patent a short time later, Woodland and Silver rejected the offer because they felt it was too low. A few weeks later, an attorney representing the Philco

Corporation called Woodland and bought the bull'seye patent for what they were asking-a price Woodland guards to thjs day.

It takes two to tango, the cheerful brochure explained, "and it takes two to make food shopping better. ..YOU ... and your SUPERMARKET! With the cooperation of RCA Corporation, whose electronic wizards created the new scanner checkout now being tested at the KROGER KENWOOD PLAZA STORE, Kroger is taking the first step toward bringing your fondest foodshopping dreams into reality!"

In July 1972, Kroger's Kenwood, Ohio, store was relaunched as the country's first fully automated supermarket. Its foodstuffs were slapped with adhesive labels bearing the Woodland/Silver bull's-eye obtained by RCA from Philco. Engineer Francis Beck led the RCA team of "electronic wizards" who built the automated checkout stands. Beck himself coauthored the patent design for a checkout stand with a stationary laser that allowed clerks to drag groceries past the beam and drop them directly into the bag. He spent hours at the Kroger store gazing at the shoppers. As he remembers it, customer response was reassuringly muted as food destined for their tables was dragged past the flashing red laser. "As happens a lot, people seem to take these things in stride," Beck says. "If someone would have fired a can of peas at my head, I would have remembered it."

In the winter of 1973, one of Beck's prototypical checkout stands was donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The ceremony celebrating the bequest was jovial and somewhat informal, with the historic stand serving as an impromptu bar. In honor of the bar code's 25th anniversary, the Smithsonian is planning to hold a special seminar on the UPC sometime next fall.

When the Symbol Selection Committee met in San Francisco in early 1973, RCA alone could claim five months of successful in-store scanning. Having dropped supermarket automation and having missed out on the bull's-eye patent, IBM dispatched an ombudsman to fight for its hastily developed rectangular bar code. Harboring some singular qualifications, the ombudsman held a preliminary meeting with committee chairman Alan Haberman, who told him straightaway that RCA had said that someone from IBM would try to make the bar code a more complicated issue than it was in order to make IBM's design more attractive. "I too thought that it wasn't that complex when I invented it in 1948," explained IBM's ombudsman, Joe Woodland, whipping out his patent for Haberman's inspection.

Thus Woodland set about defeating his own bull's-eye design in favor of the rectangular symbol invented by hjs colleague, IBM senior engineer George Laurer. By 1971, RCA had seemed so far ahead in the symbology game that Laurer's boss had ordered him to simply develop technology to support the bull's-

"This little footprint has built a gigantic structure of improvements. It is like the tip of an inverted pyramid, and everything spreads out from it." eye. But when his supervisor went out of town for a few weeks, Laurer recalls, "I played a game of 'bet my job.' " He had examined the bull's-eye and determined that "there was no way in the world that that was going to do it." Unlike the bull's-eye, his rectangular symbol could be lopped down to half its height and still be read omnidirectionally by the scanner. It was also less subject to distortion when spat out on the crude printers that were then the industry standard. Thus, on his own initiative, Laurer designed an iconography for the mass retail age.

Hemmed in by legal entanglements, IBM couldn't demonstrate an up-and-running system to the Symbol Selection Committee, but it could dredge up doubts about the RCA bull'seye. It was said to take up too much "real estate," or valuable product promotional space on the label; it was unable to be reduced sufficiently to fit on candy bars or packs of chewing gum; it was too distortion-prone.

Since the winning supermarket symbol would remain in the public domain, the property of no single company, all the competitors were encouraged to build equipment for whichever one was chosen. But, according to attorney Stephen Brown, RCA had floated an ultimatum. "They essentially were presenting us with, 'You play with our marbles or we're going to go home.'" Then, a fresh-faced young presenter from IBM picked up where Woodland left off. Bereft of a demonstrable checkout stand, he wowed the committee with theatrics. "He was a big man," Brown remembers. "Sort of a glorified country boy."

In an era before PCs, the committee had fretted over how to cram thousands of grocery item numbers and the necessary processing power into a computer. No problem, said the country boy. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a chip about the size of a half-dollar and announced, "We've got it down so that the computing capacity required for this can be placed on one chip." Brown recalls, "The fella who was sitting next to me said, 'My God. They've got a whole system developed and they've never shown it to anybody.' " Of course, Brown can't say for sure what was on that chip. "It may have contained nothing," he says, "but we were convinced they had a system.

That was extraordinarily impressive."

The decision was unanimous. IBM's rectangular symbol was embraced with only a few modifications, and on April 3, 1973, the Ad Hoc Committee unveiled the Universal Product Code to the world. A little more than a year later, on June 26, 1974, a jumbo pack of Wrigley's Spearmint gum bearing the UPC code was dragged past a newly installed laser at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, earning its 15 minutes of fame as the first consumer item with the IBM icon ever to be scanned.

Twelve digits run across the bar code's bottom, topped by 29 light and 30 dark lines that render those digits into a laserscannable computer language. The first digit defines broad categories: produce, health-related items, standard packaged

foodstuffs. A nonprofit corporation called the Uniform Code Council (UCC) assigns a five-digit sequence to a given manufacturer, such as the number "30000" for the Quaker Oats Company, while the manufacturer doles out subsequent five-digit units of UPC to identify different products and sizes. Thus the scanner will read "30000 06110" as a pound of Quaker's Cap'n Crunch cereal, or "30000 0 I 020" as an 18-ounce container of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats. The final UPC digit ensures that each one of the passing items has in fact been correctly scanned.

Although the symbol would eventually become invisible in its omnipresence, one can certainly understand how shoppers during those first few months perceived that strange apparition on their cans of com and cartons of milk-decipherable to a laser but not the human eye; a truncated piano keyboard viewed through a virtual haze ofhallucinogens.

I~I

itting for her makeup, Carol Tucker Foreman, then president of the Consumer Federation of America, was a bit startled as Phil Donahue wagged a giant jar of peanut butter beneath her nose. "What's this?"

Donahue asked, drawing her attention to the black-and-white icon. "Oh, that's the Universal Product Code," Foreman answered. The supermarkets, she explained, are going to take the prices off the groceries, put them only on the shelves, and use these automatic scanning symbols instead of stickers to ring up the bill.

For this, Foreman's TV debut in the spring of 1974, she had intended to make the case for a federal consumer protection agency. Armed with his peanut butter, the talk-show host decided instead to launch an anti-bar-code crusade, railing against the bizarre symbol that would in time consign colorful little price tags and their sticker guns to oblivion. "Phil Donahue was really good at what he did," Foreman recalls. "I didn't realize it at the time but he very quickly thought, 'A crusade is a heck of a lot more fun than another government agency. ' " Before a live television audience, Donahue and Foreman reprised their preshow discussion and were met with horrified gasps. Could the supermarket price sticker, the only means a consumer had to measure food prices in the inflationary maelstrom of the Nixon-Ford era, be eliminated entirely? "The women were clearly agitated by this," Foreman says. "And Donahue whipped them up a little to get them even more agitated." Close-ups of the offending jar of peanut butter followed, and Donahue's call-in phones lit up like mad. Finally, Donahue asked Foreman what she was going to do about it. "Well," she replied, "your viewers should send money to the Consumer Federation, and we'll use their money to fight it."

The bar code's creators had never preoccupied themselves much with customer satisfaction. "The committee focused on im(Continued on page 47)

Women are a growing majority on campus. So what are the men doing?

And who is losing out?

eels to Heaven, an a cappella group at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, needed to add a few baritones and basses as the 1996-97 school year opened. But deep voices are in short supply on a campus that is over 60 percent female. In its quest for low-end sounds, the group conducted a public relations blitz, plastering every dorm with signs declaring "Real Men Sing Loud!"

The campaign worked, and it doubtless will be tried again in the future: With females accounting for 61 percent of the university's pool of applicants, the gender gap at Chapel Hill is unlikely to close soon. "There is an obvious lack of guys on campus," sighs Catherine Brandt, a junior and former member of Heels to Heaven.

"I don't know what to say about it other than they're not there."

They're not there at Seattle Pacific University, either, where the student body is 65 percent female. An annual freshman icebreaker called "Dickeralla," in which women and men pair off for trips to a local burger joint named Dick's, has become a farce: "A lot of the guys have two dates," says Sarah Johnson, a senior.

Nor are they at Concordia College in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is 61 percent female. "IfI'm about five minutes late for a

H

class, when I walk in and look up, at least three quarters of the seats in my class are filled with girls," says junior Chad Nelson.

In short, they're not there across the country. This year, women are expected to earn just over 57 percent of all bachelor's degrees, compared with 43 percent in 1970 and under 24 percent in 1950. The U.S. Department of Education now projects that by 2008 women will outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate programs by 9.2 million to 6.9 million. The trend is moving quickly; ifit continues at this pace, "the graduation line in the year 2068 will be all females," says Tom Mortenson, a higher-education policy analyst.

Armed with better grades, better resumes and a clearer sense of future goals, many females reach the senior year of high school primed for the college admissions game. Males, meanwhile, are tempted by fast cash in a boom-time economy, preferring $30,000 starting salaries in such fields as air-conditioner maintenance and Web design to four years of Beowulfand student loans.

The growing split in post-secondary paths might do more to foster gender equality than any constitutional amendment or court decision. With an edge in education, women could close the salary gap and increasingly move into positions of

power-as heads of corporations, presidents of universities and political leaders.

But that's assuming higher education remains the key to upward mobility-a big "if," warn some, who foresee a time not too distant when degrees are not so prized, and skipping college might be a wiser career choice.

Past parity. Since women stepped into the majority on campuses in 1979, the college gender gap has widened at virtually every type of school: large and small, public and private, two-year and four-year.

From the 23,617-student, state-run University of New Mexico (57 percent female) to 2,032-student, Catholic-affiliated Edgewood College in Wisconsin (73 percent female) to the mammoth University of California system (seven of the eight campuses have female majorities), women are flooding colleges and universities.

And where are the boys?

Logan Sieg, a 17-year-old senior at Gettysburg Area High School in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, picked up his diploma this June. Come September, though, he won't be on a college campus.

"I have enough money in the bank, and college would be a snap," he says. "But I have a car to pay for." Instead of pursuing a bachelor's degree, he plans on learning air-

Above: Similar scenes to this one at Catholic University are enacted all over America on graduation day, but increasingly, more women than men are adorned by mortarboards.

Left: A class at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts.

conditioner and heating system repair at a local technical institute; a friend's brother, a graduate of the trade school, made $10 an hour his first year out, plus generous overtime. While Sieg sees the value of high school math-"you need to know the volume of rooms, the circulation"-he says that other intellectual pursuits have little bearing on his career plans. "In academic English, all the teacher talks about is college prep, college prep," he moans. "I raise my hand: 'I'm not going to college, I'm going to technical school.' " With unemployment at its lowest point in a generation, it's not surprising that some kids pass up four more years of classes. "It's easier to go out and get a job now than to do the hard work and stay in college," says Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard University.

"For lots of people it's 'buy now, think later' "-a mind-set that can have severe consequences.

Male college graduates earn, on average, over $23,000 a year more than men who have only high school diplomas, and that income disparity is growing. Nevertheless, boys are leading the charge into the workplace-they account for 57 percent ofthose ages 16 to 24 in the labor force who hold only a highschool diploma.

Where the boys are. "I know a lot of guys from my hometown who quit college to run their own store, or to have a Schwan's [food delivery] route, or to do some of these jobs where, for their age, they're getting paid really well," says Shawn Vogt, a junior at Hamline University's College of Liberal Arts in St. Paul. "That may not be the case once we all graduate from college ...but at this point, they have high-paying jobs. And I don't know of any women in those positions."

A real growth industry for young men subscribing to the "less learning, more earning" credo is computers, where pay is high and the future bright. "If making money is your first goal, and if you are competent in high-paying skills, there's no reason to finish your degree," says Stephen Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "We shouldn't be surprised by that.

It's demonstrated to us on a regular basis by people who sign up with the NBA [National Basketball Association] or [by] baseball players." His son, a 1997 graduate of Columbia University, had a roommate who dropped out during his sophomore year to take a computer-related job. "By the time my son got his BA, his former roommate was making $100,000 a year," says Trachtenberg.

Michael Rahimpour, 23, knows all about the fast money to be made in computers. The San Diego native has been designing Web sites since 1993. After bouncing around a few junior colleges, he dropped out after realizing that "the best education is given by corporations these days." He adds that "pretty much everyone I know is taking the route of not finishing college-it's just too attractive." It certainly is in Rahimpour's case: He pulls down $76,500 a year in base salary as the webmaster for PalmPilot-maker 3Com. Computer companies are so desperate to snag fresh talent that many are actively recruiting high school seniors. Cisco Systems, for example, runs two-year classes in high schools that certify graduates to become network administrators.

And Intel travels far and wide to snatch up workers for its chip-making plants; in Oregon, Portland-based recruiters often journey 346 kilometers southwest to Marshfield High School in Coos Bay to entice students to put off college in favor of a high-tech factory. Most of the workers Intel walks away with are boys; Walt Biddle, executive director of the Career Training Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports U.S. trade schools, estimates that two-thirds of the people entering the information-technology industry are male.

Girls, meanwhile, are busy making themselves into strong candidates for admission to college. "They mature sooner, so they get more serious about their

schoolwork," says Delsie Phillips, director of admissions at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, echoing a nearunanimous sentiment among college officials. "It really shows up when you start reading applications. Girls have followed through and done all the things they are supposed to do, while boys are still trying to find themselves." Though girls do slightly worse than boys on standardized tests-in 1998, their mean score on the SAT was 7 points lower on the verbal section and 35 points lower on math-ad-

missions officials say grades, class rank and activities are given far more weight.

Slightly outnumbered in the overall population of 15- to 19-year-olds, girls graduate from high school at a higher rate than boys; in 1996, 51.2 percent of high school graduates were female. Girls accounted for 53.5 percent of SAT takers that year, and 69.7 percent of female graduates enrolled in college within a year of graduating, compared with only 60.1 percent of boys.

Clearly, part of the trend in college enrollment stems from advances in society that have given women more choices: They are no longer expected to take the homemaker route or to matriculate solely for the purpose of earning their "MRS degree": that is, a husband. "When I was a high school counselor 20 years ago, 1 had many parents say, '1 want my daughter to take home economics because she's just going to get married,' " says Nancy Perry, executive director of the American School Counselor Association. "Women believe they can achieve now, and they go for it."

This also brings a large number of older women to campus, especially to state universities that cater to "nontraditional" students. "A lot [of women] put off finishing college to follow a husband or because of families," says Michael O'Connor, director of enrollment services at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, which is 56 percent female. "Now they're re-entering the work force, and they need to be retrained."

A small pool. A particularly large gender gap among African-Americans, who make up about 11 percent of America's undergraduate population, also contributes to the skew. Nearly 63 percent of African-American undergraduates are women, and of America's 117 historically black colleges and universities, only oneall-male Morehouse College in Atlantahas a majority of men. High dropout and incarceration rates are to blame for the discrepancy: In 1994, there were more African-American males in jailor prison than enrolled in college. "You've got fewer and fewer black males who are eligible for college," says Anthony Jones, director of admissions at Fisk University in Nashville, which is 71 percent female. "Then you have to find ones who meet Fisk's criteria, and it's a bit selective. We end up having to recruit from a very small pool."

But girls in general seem steps ahead long before college appears on the radar.

As early as fourth grade, according to a Department of Education survey, they spend more time on homework than boys do, and they are less likely to zone out in front of the television for hours on end.

More girls become high school newspaper editors, honor society members and community service volunteers.

Male peer pressure, which often includes a strong anti-intellectual component, may also contribute to the trend. "I raised a boy, and I'm aware of the degree to which acting enthusiastic in your studies is not something that boys are encouraged to do," says Margaret Miller, president of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). "Being good in school is associated with femininity."

Some believe that educators on the ele-

mentary and secondary levels are not helping matters by fostering a bias toward girls. They argue that the tendency of boys to be rambunctious, to ignore directions, and to produce sloppy assignments draws the ire of teachers who prefer more well-behaved, manageable girls. Perry of the counselors' association agrees that young girls may do better in part because "they are more willing to comply with their teachers than boys; their papers are neater."

It is a theory that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which for years has depicted classrooms as chilly places for girls. Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of AlaskaFairbanks, attacked that viewpoint in a controversial paper last year, in which she concluded: "Males are ...more apt than females to believe that the school climate is hostile to them, that teachers do not expect as much from them and give them less encouragement to do their best."

"It really begins early," says Mortenson. "The boys tend to be less focused." It is a "learning style" that can give teachers-70 percent of whom are female-fits.

A disproportionate number of boys end up in special education-they account for over three quarters of the enrollment in programs for those with behavioral or developmental disorders. Boys also fail to finish high school at a far higher rate; between October 1995 and October 1996, they accounted for 58 percent of America's dropouts.

The new dating game. With boys a rarer on-campus sight, college social life has taken a new turn. Ajoke that makes the rounds at Seattle Pacific goes, "What's the difference between an SPU woman and a trash can? A trash can gets taken out once a week." At UNC-Chapel Hill, one recent alumna says, "The women develop eating disorders, and the men develop huge egos."

Sorority sisters at UNC often outnumber fraternity brothers by 3 to 1 at Greek system parties. "The guys here notice that they're outnumbered, and they take advantage of it," says Meredith Gayle, a junior.

"They date more girls, sometimes several at a time. They can get away with it." The

men, by contrast rarely complain about their minority status. "The ratio was a determinant in my coming here," says Matthew Caroll, another junior. "You can always go on a date if you want to. It's just a matter of having the time and a car."

This is not to say that a school dominated by women is necessarily an unpleasant place to be. Lauren Bums, a junior at UNC, says, "I wouldn't change the fact that there are so many females. We really feel a bond. It makes more women speak up; we're not afraid."

On the whole, though, administrators are concerned that students are missing out on a well-rounded experience.

"College is for a lot more than going to class," says Phillips of Haverford, a men's college until 1980 that is now 52 percent female. "There's all kind of interactions that take place, intellectual and social in nature, and male and female points of view are important, just like viewpoints from different nationalities and different ethnic groups."

In an effort to bolster male enrollment, some colleges are putting greater emphasis on sports, an area in which men are thought to have a disproportionate interest. "We did win the Sun Bowl and win in our conference," says Sandra Ware, dean of admissions at Texas Christian University (59 percent female) in Fort Worth, lauding the school's champion football team. "So we're hoping that [males] were watching and paying attention to that."

The University of Dallas (56 percent female) went so far as to form a varsity baseball squad, which added 28 muchsought-after men to the school in 1997.

And as part of a five-year plan to attract more males, Fisk is contemplating a move from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division III up to the more competitive Division II. Other schools have fiddled with their recruitment materials, redesigning catalogs and revamping direct-mail campaigns. Edgewood is considering packaging their view books in different envelopes, depending on the sex of the recipient. "We're taking a cue from Bon Appetit magazine, which tried to increase their male readership with different color

Crew team practices at Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts.

Musicians in concert at Catholic University.

schemes and graphics," says Scott Flanagan, Edgewood's dean of admissions and financial aid. In 1997, Whitman College (55 percent female) in Walla Walla, Washington, sent a second mailing of recruitment materials to 5,900 menbut not to women. The move gained the school 40 more male applicants.

Male preference? Schools say they stop short of offering "affirmative action for men," but some confide that giving male applicants a slight break is becoming a standard, albeit unspoken, practice. "Colleges and universities are dipping down deeper into their male pool than their female pool," says AAHE president Miller. "It's definitely out there," agrees Joan Mudge, director of college counseling at the all-girls Garrison Forest School in Owings Mills, Maryland.

"They don't come right out and say they're discriminating against our girls, but they are." When calling schools to inquire why highly qualified female applicants were rejected, Mudge says admissions directors will "hedge and hedge before saying, 'Our female applicant pool was just incredible this year.' " Such griping must seem ironic to many women who remember when higher education, especially at four-year schools, was a privilege reserved mostly for their brothers. Indeed, the gender flip-flop could be viewed as an amazing success story. But some observers who study the gender patterns of the work force warn that the picture is not as rosy as it might appear. Among the population of full-time workers, women with bachelor's degrees still make only $4,708 more on average than men holding nothing more than a high school diploma; that's close to $20,000 less than the college-degree premium enjoyed by men. And there are concerns that most areas of study preferred by women-English over engineering, psychology over computer science-are reinforcing their secondary position in the economy. "Every sort of job that's associated with females is also associated with declining status," says Barbara Miller, an anthropologist and former director of women's studies at George Washington.

"They're less economically promising in terms oflifetime earnings."

"We still find that women are more likely to be concentrated in female fields, which have lower pay, fewer opportunities for advancement and less prestige," says Judith Sturnick, director of the American Council on Education's Office of Women in Higher Education. In part this stems from choices that are almost as much about lifestyle as they are about ambition: "A typical high school male student may feel he has to go directly into an engineering or business track right away," says Edgewood's Flanagan. (Indeed, schools with strong engineering programs-like large state schools-have not experienced this trend as dramatically.) "Female students have a much more enlightened view that, to succeed later in life, they need an education with more breadth to it."

But Sturnick cites the current rise of corporate-sponsored schools-such as the Cisco computer-networking programwhich train mostly men for high-paying, often technology-related jobs, as women slog along at traditional colleges. "Will we set up a separate track for education which will primarily benefit men, which will allow them to enter the job market with higher pay at a higher salary," Sturnick asks, "while women continue on the baccalaureate track, end up debt-laden, and then wind up three or four years behind in a profession?" She says higher education could become devalued because of its increasing feminization-the same phenomenon that has occurred with elementary school teachers-and that earning a bachelor's degree will someday be considered a foolhardy economic decision. "When there begins to be a predominance of female members in any area, the value of that area goes down," she says. "Is it possible we are devaluing higher education? There's a potential for that as more and more women dominate in degree achievement."

The still-small number of women majoring in math and the sciences also has some education watchers troubled.

Though many traditionally "male" majors-like business-have moved toward parity or are now female dominated, women are still vastly outnumbered on

campuses with strong engineering and physical-sciences programs. The student body at the California Institute of Technology, for example, is still 73 percent male. "What we're seeing now is that there is a tremendous gap in computer science," says Sandy Bernard, president of the American Association of University Women. "That one will be really significant." She worries that women's lack of those types of degrees will sentence them to also-ran status in the high-tech workplace, where the big money will be.

Social distortion. Tom Mortenson foresees another problem, one with major implications for the American way of courtship, marriage and family life. "If the educational attainment differences continue to grow at the rate they are, a shrinking number of college-educated women are going to find college-educated men to marry," he cautions. It's a trend that is already familiar to African-American women, many of whom bemoan the fact that there are relatively few collegeeducated black men to choose from.

Occasional griping about dim romantic prospects aside, most female students realize how far they've come. "You know, 20 years ago it was not this way at all," says Jen Balk, a Hamline sophomore. "It was all the men going to school and getting the good jobs, and there was such a barrier. Now that we have the opportunity, everybody's taking it." And what of the men who are increasingly not part of that "everybody"? If college degrees remain an entree to wealth and status in the 21 st century, males may have to get used to the same second-class status that American women so long endured, as highly educated females become the majority among America's intellectual, economic and even power elite. "1 hope the men can accommodate what's going to happen," says Mortenson, "when the woman becomes the main breadwinner in the family." It could prove enough of a shock to send the guys scurrying off to hit the books-and fill out some college applications.

0 About the Author: Brendan 1. Koerner is senior editor 01 U.S. News & World Report.

The United States is a favorite choice of Indian students who want to study abroad, judging by the growing number of visa seekers.

Here are some useful tips on what visa you need and how to get it.

A

s the new academic session begins in August in America, a large number of Indian students are busy getting their names registered in U.S. educational institutions. Most of them are looking forward to getting admission and receiving the Form 1-20: the form that indicates the student's intent and eligibility to pursue a full course of study at that particular institution.

In recent years Indian students have shown greater inclination to pursue higher education not only in the traditional academic courses such as the sciences, medicine and business administration, but also in the emerging fields like international relations, cultural and language studies, trade, peace and conflict resolution, international and comparative law, and environmental studies.

The number of Indian students with a professional first class degree is significantly high and all of these cannot be absorbed

locally. The United States in recent years has been the first country of choice for the Indian student who prefers higher international education and better career development. The value of education, especially professional education, among the Indian middle and upper classes is also a major factor in deciding on studying abroad. Indians equate international education in terms of broader perspective and exposure. In the emerging new era of globalization, studying in a foreign country ensures excellent career opportunities and handsome salary. "The United States has been an obvious destination for Indian students who want to pursue studies in professional or technical fields," says Sarina Paranjape of the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) in New Delhi.

The exodus of Indian students to the U.S. has steadily been growing every academic year. In 1997 more than 11,200 Indian students were issued visas to pursue further studies in the United States. During 1997-98, a total of about 33,800 students from India were attending the various educational institutions doing from one-year to four-year courses. During the 1960s, the corresponding figure was about 6,000 students, 10,500 students during 1970s and 12,900 during the 1980s.

American educational institutions arrange educational fairs at Indian universities attempting to spread the good word and explain the opportunities. Certainly, American institutions value the high caliber Indian students. They are considered among the most accomplished students in the U.S., making many significant contributions to the overall excellence of their own education.

Students are confused by the abundance of colleges and universities where they might try for admission and often ask the question: "How do I select the best institution?" Unfortunately there are no simple answers.

The first step is to define your own academic and career goals and personal preferences about the campus environment. The second step is to check whether or not institutions are recognized.

Each year the American Council on Education publishes a list of all accredited institutions. In the United States, accreditation represents a unique process of voluntary nongovernmental review of educational institutions and professional preparation programs.

Although the number of student visa applicants grows every year, the American Embassy does not have any fixed quota of visas to be given to students. "Visas are issued based on merit. If a student hands over the proper documents concerning personal property, how education is funded and can put up a reasonable explanation of why he or she is going to the American educational institution-and why he or she will return to India-the officer won't have any hesitation issuing a visa," explains Wayne S. Leininger, consul general at the American Embassy in New Delhi. "Well, it is very difficult to mind-read about the intention of a student over a period of four to six years. So it really comes down to the question of trust and the character of the student.

And he or she must marshal arguments and explanations in the best way possible. The U.S. visa law presumes that everybody applies for a visa with an intention to immigrate. The law places the burden on the applicant to prove otherwise. The consular

officer, nevertheless, gives each applicant every opportunity to overcome the presumption of the law."

Getting admission to an American educational institution is not an easy road. Students prepare themselves for at least one year to reach their desired American university or college. To begin with, they must have completed the course of study required for enrollment at the level of study contemplated. Students are required to pass at least one academic external examination such as TOEFL, SAT, GRE, GMAT, etc., depending on the course elected. This helps in establishing their seriousness as students.

In addition, a student must show that he or she has sufficient knowledge of the English language for the intended course of study during the visa consular interview.

The American Embassy in New Delhi and its three consular offices in Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai issue visas. There are three categories of visas issued to students. The common visa and the one most students apply for is the F-1 visa. The F -1 visa is a nonimmigrant visa issued to students pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies with some financial support from the educational institution, but largely on their own.

The next most popular category is the 1-1 visa which is often issued to graduate students, medical residents, certain scholars and professionals going to the United States to participate in a program of study or research. Students who apply for visas under this category receive some stipend from the institutions they are attending.

The third category is the M-I visa, which is issued to students who take up studies in a practical area-vocational training, not necessarily academic study. For example, people who undergo training as pilots are issued the M-I visa.

After determining the institution of choice, the student must acquire the Form 1-20 from the educational institution to apply for an F-l nonimmigrant student visa. The 1-20 also indicates the tuition charges, what the costs of living are likely to be and the financial assistance or fellowship the institution will offer to the student. If the student decides to attend a different institution which has also issued a Form 1-20, at the last minute, the student must contact the consular officer before departure to see whether the nomination on the visa can be changed. For initial entry into the United States, the institution endorsed on the visa and the institution the student plans to attend must be the same.

The consular officer at the time of interview will examine documents and review the student's educational plans. Although the visa issuing process is not time-consuming, it is a good idea to apply early (though not earlier than 90 days before the date the student will be required to report to the school). Any questions that might arise about the student's qualification to receive a visa can be dealt with without delaying one's departure.

The applicant must satisfy the visa officer that his or her intent in going to the United States is to remain there temporarily, to pursue a full course of study at the institution specified on Form 1-20; secondly, that he or she will not accept employment or engage in business in the United States without authorization of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS);

HI路B Visas Last May the H1-B visa program was in the news when the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service noticed large-scale abuse of the program in India, Russia and China.

According to reports, more than 20 percent of visa petitions identified as suspect by adjudicating INS offices and forwarded for investigation by the Chennai Consulate-which in 1998 issued the highest number ofHl-B visas of any other U.S. consulate overseas, totaling more than 20,000 visas-were fraudulent. Most of these applications were accompanied by fraudulent documents purportedly from Indian colleges and universities, and fake certificates issued by fly-by-night operators of "technical institutions" attesting to the specialized professional training of the prospective visa seekers.

The H1-B visa is issued to persons going to the United States as nonimrnigrants for temporary employment in specialized occupations. They include nurses, computer specialists, fashion models, and other qualified temporary workers of a type unavailable in the United States. The spouse and children of an employee who is issued an H1-B visa may also apply for temporary stay in the United States under this category. Persons going to the United States for training fall under a separate subdivision of the H category.

Considering the popularity of this visa category, it is essential for genuine visa seekers to know what qualifications enable them to become eligible for the HI-B visa and what documents they are required to furnish.

The occupations that are defined by law and regulation require at least a bachelor's degree, or barring that, the substitution of two full years of job experience for every missing year of educa-

tion. So if an applicant has eight years practical training, he does not need a bachelor's degree.

It would be pertinent to note that only a limited number of HI-B visas are issued worldwide every year. The earlier limit of

some by virtue of having adjusted status to a permanent immigrant category. As a result of the massive exodus of professionals to the United States, Leininger says, "the Indian software industry has begun to report to us their difficulty in

65,000 H1-B visas per year has been raised to 115,000 this year after U.S. information technology companies lobbied with Congress and President Bill Clinton to allow them to hire more outside talent. "For next year the limit shall also be fixed at 115,000, but then decline to 107,500, and finally it will revert to 65,000 the following year. That is the way the current legislation is written," says Consul General Wayne S. Leininger.

Last year, 42 percent ofH1-Bs issued all over the world were to Indians. Out of this, some 80 percent were issued to computer professionals-software engineers, database managers, hardware experts-who were educated and trained in India. The program has been on for eight years during which time about 120,000 professionals have traveled to the U.S. Many of them are still there,

finding qualified people to do jobs here."

The H1-B visas are issued initially for three years after the sponsoring company's petition is processed. However it can be renewed for three more years by the same sponsor or by any other sponsor in case of job change. After six years the H1-B status expires and the employee must return to his or her native country for at least one year. The consulate reviews the cases for renewal and ensures that the applicant has the required qualifications, that the job is of a specialized technical nature and that the sponsoring firm itself is a viable organization doing business in the United States. "All along the road, beware of fraudulent companies in the United States who are doing nothing but running visa factories," cautions Consul General Leininger.

-A.V.N.

thirdly, that adequate finances are available for the entire period of study.

The F-l visa applicant must be prepared to submit to the consular officer that he or she has financial assets that can cover tuition charges, living expenses, books and travel, either from grants from the institution or from personal sources without the need to work in the United States. The immigration regulations restrict students from the possibility of working outside the university to support themselves. Even if one can find a job, the wages one earns do not cover all expenses. "Of course students can get on-campus or part-time employment normaIly after completing the first year of academic study," says Leininger.

"Students can't come and work to offset their basic cost ofliving.

But once they are on campus, the college foreign student adviser, who has now been empowered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to aIlow on-campus employment, can sanction part-time employment and summer employment on campus when the coIlege is not in session. Off-campus employment is usually not aIlowed except when it is related to practical training, or an internship from an American corporation in case of business administration students," says Leininger.

The "published" cost of study varies widely among institutions and the cost of living varies from one place to another.

According to estimates, the cost for one academic year of graduate study ranges from $8,500 to $30,000. Apart from the "published" costs students must be prepared to cover "hidden" costs-which include personal expenses, costs when residence haIls are closed, required health insurance and medical expenses, changes in the value of currency, etc.

Students are required to furnish the supporting documents which indicate the student's ties with home country after the conclusion of study in the United States. "This is not a subjective documentation. Some families own properties, some own businesses, some are in the medical profession. That shows clearly that people are rooted in their home country and their intention is to come back and continue the family tradition," explains Leininger.

What are the documents required in support of financial assets? "Both immovable properties and liquid assets are taken into account. Since the student needs funding, the available liquid assets, bank balance for past year and income tax returns for three to four years are scrutinized by the consular officer," Matthew D. Murray, vice consul, told a group of students at a USEFI counseling program in New Delhi. Of course sponsorship by close relatives and friends is considered. "However the applicant himself must establish the real degree of relationship between these two people or families." The sponsor must fiIl in Form 1-134 which is a formal affidavit of support. The document is basicaIly a statement of intent and is not legaIly binding upon the person who swears the affidavit; for this reason the degree of real relationship sometimes becomes an issue.

When asked about people's perception that some consulates are being harsh in issuing visas compared to others, Leininger refuted the statement squarely. Refusal rates may vary by jurisdiction because of education levels and socioeconomic factors, not

because the consular sections employ different standards. "For example, Chennai is located in an area where much of the general population is weIl educated and financiaIly well off. In Delhi, another prosperous area, the acceptance rate is 90 percent. So it varies by micro populations and socioeconomic status. Within India, since the states vary so much in relation to prosperity and education, so do the visa acceptance rates vary post by post," Leininger says.

Leininger has some solid suggestions for visa applicants.

"Don't get misguided by touts who seIl bad documents by saying that your case looks better. After we notice the fraudulent documents we conclude that the case is quite false. People should apply on the basis offacts. If they can't qualify on the basis offacts,

they can always come back tomorrow and provide additional evidence. But if a student provides us fraudulent documents, he or she can be made ineligible for the U.S. visa forever."

What should one do when a visa is denied on first appearance?

"Listen carefuIly what the consular officer teIls you is the reason for the refusal. Maybe you did not submit enough evidence to prove your financial state or you have not adequately explained that you have no intention of seeking unauthorized employment in the United States. The visa officer gives you a brief summary in writing about the reasons for refusal," says Leininger.

However, if the applicant has compeIling evidence of his or her ties, resources and eligibility not presented in the interview, he or she can apply again.

Students can be issued visas for a maximum of five years, depending on how long the school has indicated on Form 1-20. The basic application fee is Rs. 1,980 and a student must deposit additional $100 for long-term study.

Students who foIlow a clean and simple route may find their way to an American educational institution. Honest, clear representations are the quickest way to a visa and to pursue an academic career in the United States.

0

, I

Project India Connect, It all began with six students in the summer of 1998. They came to Pune from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyfamiliarly MIT -to connect Kalmadi Shamarao School to the Internet, teach students how to navigate the World Wide Web, teach them HTML and Java, develop school Web pages, and, as interns in a very special program, develop their own skills of interacting with the diverse, transnational world of the future.

This pilot "Project India Connect" was such a success that it has expanded in 1999 to include more students at more sites, among which are four of India's top business houses. This year 16 MIT students will be deployed to continue the program at the Pune school, initiate one at Bangalore's Bishop Cotton Boys School. Others will intern at Infosys in Bangalore, ICICI and Godrej in Mumbai, and TISCO in Jamshedpur. The interns will also teach at church and municipal schools in

When South Asian specialists at MIT saw an Indo-American information gap, they did something about it. Now the newly-minted MIT-India Project has Indian Big Business getting into the act.

Jamshedpur. The purpose of the program, MIT-India Project Director Kenneth Keniston says, is "to prepare MIT scientists and engineers more adequately for a globalized world in which India will invariably playa major role."

Interns undertake extracurricular study of Indian history, culture and literature in preparation for their six-week stint. The current group completed a seminar taught

by Professor Keniston called "Introduction to India," which surveyed the history of India, particularly the British Raj, the

Independence Movement and events since Independence. It discussed the history of science and technology in India, social and cultural mores, the role of women, science, and other topics. Students also had the opportunity to interact with India experts from the MIT faculty.

MIT student Matt Norwood, a participant in last year's program, said, "Visiting India for the first time was a profoundly affecting experience. I really haven't been able to think about my life the same way since ...!can't conceive of not going back to India. In fact, returning to the States was a bit of a rude awakening, as I was confronted with people who didn't know anything about India or what it had to offer ....1 came back with the feeling that I would never see anything again from only an American point of view-too much of India has stuck with me."

Academics and others interested in South Asia find India poorly understood in

MIT interns and young students at Kalmadi Shamarao School, Pune. Both sides benefit.

America generally. MIT, which has educated many students from India and has old ties to Indian institutions of higher learning, wants to close that knowledge gap.

Professor Keniston says it has to do with building bridges between the world's two largest democracies: "MIT has more than 1,000 alumni who came from India to learn in the United States. We want to reverse the flow, sending our students to India to learn at first hand Indian business practices, Indian culture, Indian technologies and Indian problems. Among these students will be the men and women who have the technical knowledge and the cultural understanding needed to expand collaboration between our two countries."

MIT is developing programs in Cambridge, too, to broaden the worldview of its students: the new South Asia Forum has sponsored a series of lectures on topics related to science, technology and development in the subcontinent. The program is

monitored and mentored by a 20-person faculty Council on MIT-India. An MITIndia Web page is being set up. And funds are being solicited by committees of Friends of MIT-India around the U.S. and India.

Funding for the program comes from participating Indian firms, from Indian alumni and friends, and from foundation grants. It will be money well-invested, as students from both countries collaborate on research and study projects, with topics such as the economic and cultural impact of the new information technologies. The program will also create new opportunities for Indians to join MIT research laboratories and teaching centers as collaborators. Intemships may range from one month to one year. Research and education partnerships with Indian institutions of science and technology are also being defined.

Bombay businessman and MIT grad Kavas Petigara belongs to the MIT Club of India. Its MIT alumni members have done a

lot of spadework for MIT-India. They found "tremendous enthusiasm here among Indian companies to support a project like this," he says. This extends even to fundraising. "We have not done much fundraising, but expect we should be able to raise a good amount of money from this side to support the program from India." He feels support should come from both MIT and India. Petigara says the response on both sides has been more than encouraging.

Once the interns from last year's pilot project returned to MIT, he says, "After six months we asked for applications for this year's project, and we got 40 applications, but we could only really support 12."

Twelve interns were placed with companies that offered to help sponsor them. "We even had a company like ICICI who heard of the program and wanted an intern. We said we don't have the funds to send any more. So they said we want interns so badly that we'll pay for them altogether. So that's the kind of enthusiasm we are generating. It's extremely heartening. The whole idea behind the project is have it be a two-way street."

Both Indians and Americans need to really understand countries of the world that will be future workplaces or partners. "After all, everybody's going to be working in a global environment in the new millennium. We feel, and many people at MIT now feel, that India is going to be a very important part of that global environment." He adds, "I have no doubts whatsoever that it is going to develop into a major program at MIT." Professor Keniston is very specific in his reasons for thinking it is high time India gets a higher profile in America: "India is the world's fifth largest economy and the world's largest democracy. It has an ancient civilization, vast potentials and enormous problems. It's economy is opening, and it has withstood the shocks that have recently shaken Southeast Asia. It is an increasingly important center of knowledge creation in science and technology. MIT has long and deep ties with India. The time is right to build on them to create an intellectually vital program of internships, exchanges and new partnerships."

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By SARA SKLAROFF

Do

you remember your first time?

You logged on, and there it was, a small miracle of bits and pixels: You've got mail.

Your heart leapt-or sank-at the modernity of it: the strange syntax of .edu and .com, the

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signs and routing

paths, the feeling that your computer was actually talking to you. You clicked (or typed, depending on how early you got into the game), brought up your first e-mail ever, and suddenly it seemed as if life was going to be different. You were connected.

Life is different: Where once Americans depended on the vagaries of the post office to communicate in personalized, written messages, now we send 2.2 billion e-mail messages a day, compared with just 293 million pieces of first-class mail. And while frequent communication across borders of state and country once cost serious money (in big phone bill payments), you can now trade digital one-liners with pals in, say, Kuala Lumpur for the price of a local phone call. Space and time are collapsed in a Star Trek second.

With at least a third of America now sending messages over the Internet, e-mail has become second nature to tech-savvy Net-setters and groovy grandmas alike. It is de rigueur for college kids, and an important tool for children and teenagers, who use it to test the limits of social behavior and good taste. In many workplaces, it is by now essential-which becomes evident whenever the system goes down.

As more and more of us go online, we become accustomed to e-mail.smix

of intimacy and anonymity, and

most of all its delirious speed. (Can anyone remember, in the time before e-mail and FedEx and fax, what it was like to wait for a letter to arrive in the afternoon post?) Gone are intonation, affect, facial expression; e-mail offers only bare words, without even the nuances of handwriting. The best e-mailers use that unidimensionality to great advantage, working against the medium's limitations to produce humor, or wistfulness, or even gravity. And yet these messages, were they to be reproduced here, would no doubt fall flat; the immediacy of the e-mail moment rarely survives printout.

Once we go online, we find-after several rapid exchanges-that an old college pal can't spell, or that a curmudgeonly uncle crafts brilliant turns of phrase. Acquaintances who seem lackluster in person may be master e-mailers. Perhaps this is why we make such different kinds of friendships on e-mail, quickly becoming intimate with people we hardly know, and keeping in touch with those we might otherwise let slip away.

But cybermissives can't compete with the satisfaction of an old-fashioned letter. You can't rub a finger along the embossing of an e-mail or examine its script for deeper meaning. Tactile, fragile and wonderfully individual, letters are still safe in the age of e-mail.

0

THE liFE OF THE MIND GOES DIGITAL ll shuffle there; all cough in ink," w.E. Yeats once observed of scholars at their trade. Today, the poet might say, they cough in e-mail. More and more of those engaged in the life of the mind, artists as well as intellectuals, find e-mail almost unavoidable both as a means of communication and, increasingly, as a subject of study.

But because they are contentious souls, few of them agree about what the e-mailexamined life means, or even whether it's a good thing. Take the simple fact that 70 to 80 percent of American university faculty now use electronic messages to communicate with students and colleagues. To many, that's only a boon, encouraging greater intellectual exchange and pedagogical innovations (such as student-constructed Web sites instead of papers). To others, even to some of its partisans, email can be a disembodied horror, threatening not just privacy and intellectual community but literacy itself.

Few scholars have taken a longer view of the mixed blessings of electronic scholarship than classics professor James J. O'Donnell of the University of Pennsylvania. His generally optimistic perspective, set forth in his 1998 book Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, is echoed in his work as the university's vice provost for information systems and

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computing. That might sound as though a bookbound humanist has usurped the technogeek's chair, but O'Donnell says his classical training provides valuable insight into controversies surrounding new forms of communication. "After all, Plato distrusted the written word," he says.

"You have to accept that technological advances present risks and opportunities and try to make the most of the latter." An early convert to the computer, O'Donnell helped launch one of the first online humanities journals in 1990. Four years later he added an electronic listserv to his course on St. Augustine, enabling students as far away as Hong Kong to audit.

Now he comes up with new ways to use computers to enhance academic and community life.

But isn't something lost when, as many students report, even roommates communicate via e-mail? Possibly, says Gillian Weiss, a graduate history student at Stanford. She counts it a loss that "the library and the department office are now less social spaces." Yet that doesn't outweigh the benefits of access to history-oriented listservs, or to professors she wouldn't approach "if 1had to do it in person."

"What the Internet is doing is providing something like the coffeehouses of Vienna," says poet and University of Texas professor of humanities, Frederick Turner. He uses the computer to chat regu-

larly with about 30 scholars around the world who share his eclectic interests. But the electronic salon has its drawbacks.

"The sheer volume is overwhelming," he says. "And you can't leave the coffeehouse and go home to private reflection."

That raises the question of what all those words buzzing back and forth are really doing to the life of the mind. "I don't want to sound like a Luddite," says critic and biographer James Atlas, "but it's a fact that e-mail is going to change the way the writing life is recorded." Atlas believes that in the future writers may become more careful about keeping their letter-displacing e-correspondence. Moreover, he has grave doubts about the quality of reflection that goes into e-mail: "When you sit down to write a letter, you are making a more serious commitment."

All is not gloom and doom on this point, however. Reynolds Price, the novelist and Duke University professor of English, differs with those who claim that e-mail's immediacy is destroying the art of prose. "It's not as though it fell from some great recent height," says Price, who applauds the fact that young people are writing more these days, "even if many don't seem to realize it."

Questions about the literary worth of email may quickly be eclipsed by ones about how to store it. Consider just one object of historical concern: the U.S. government, which sends and receives millions of messages a day. Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, helped to prevent every White House since Ronald Reagan's from destroying its e-mail. Thanks to Blanton and other activists, the National Archives recently issued guidelines for e-mail preservation to all federal agencies. Of course, with the gigaheaps of data quickly mounting, scholars may find that too much documentation can be as maddening as too little.

0 About the Author: Jay Tolson is a senior writer with U.S. News and World Report.

OFFICE POLITICS IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE Old

bald-headed goat." "Idiot." "Useless control freak pseudo figurehead numbskull." Beth Gunn and Alec Myers never figured that these e-mailed references to their boss--casually exchanged to relieve boredom-would become part of a two-year court battle.

Their story begins five years ago, when Gunn and Myers were recent college grads working at Opta Food Ingredients, a food science company in Bedford, Massachusetts. Both were praised for their sardonic wit, and for a while they were the toast of the office. Their boss even asked them to write jokes for a company roast. But one of Gunn and Myers's pranks went awry. An office snitch slipped the CEO their reply to a mock ransom note in which the pair joshingly threatened a fellow employee who was in on the joke. Their boss was not amused and mounted an investigation. I was sitting in the CEO's office trying to figure out what kind of investigation there would be," says Gunn. "Then I thought, 'Uh-oh. He's going to read my e-mails; then he's going to fire me.' "

Uh-oh was right. When officials analyzed the company's computer network, they uncovered e-mail messages rife with dark humor, including jokes about building bombs and planting drugs on a coworker. Perhaps most disastrously, the exchanges contained the insulting references to the boss. The CEO fired them for deliberate misconduct. "We assumed since we had passwords, no one would look at our e-mails," says Gunn. "Besides, who doesn't make fun of the boss?"

Nowhere to hide. Gunn and Myers found out the hard way that e-mail isn't as private as it seems. That's a lesson more American workers are learning as e-mailing skyrockets.

According to International Data Corporation (lDC), 90 million U.S. workers send 1.1 billion business e-mail messages per day.

By the year 2000, IDC projects that 130 million workers will flood recipients with 2.8 billion such messages daily.

Most experts agree that e-mail has changed the workplace for the better. It allows some employees to work from home, conduct business after hours and while traveling, and transmit information more efficiently, without the unnecessary chitchat of a phone conversation. The downside of e-mailing (aside from potential lawsuits) includes less face-to-face interaction in the workplace-as well as the glut of junk e-mail and unneeded, unregulated intraoffice e-mail traffic.

But perhaps the biggest change e-mail has wrought is in its snowballing use as legal evidence-whether in cases brought against workers or companies. The law regarding e-mail is still developing, but so far the courts have held that employers may snoop through workers' electronic missives at will. It's becoming a popular practice. The number of employers at major U.S. firms who say they monitor e-mail has nearly doubled over the past two years to 27 percent in 1999, according to preliminary results of a study by the American Management Association.

Employees who have deleted their e-mail are surprised to learn it is not really gone. Phantom messages reside in a computer's delete folder until it's excised as well. And even then, computer specialists known as forensic analysts can often excavate ancient e-mail from a computer's hard drive .••E-mail records employees' thoughts, words and deeds throughout the business day," says Joan Feldman, the president of Computer Forensics, a Seattle-based firm that helps lawyers sift through computerized data for lawsuits. "So it's easy to find yourself in an Orwellian world pretty quickly." Feldman's company and others in the fast-growing field say they've particularly noticed an increase in business over the past six months--ever since some of Microsoft's internal e-mail came back to haunt it in the recent antitrust case. "Everyone has got to be aware that whatever they put in their e-mail could be retrieved and used against them, now or in 10 years," says Craig Cornish, a privacy-law attorney.

It should be noted, however, that the Gunn and Myers horror story ends like a fairy tale: After the pair were fired, they represented themselves in unemployment court and won back their unemployment benefits in 1996. What's more, the long hours spent preparing for court together sparked a love of the law-and for each other. The couple now live in New York, where both are enrolled in a law school. ••E-mail changed every single part of my life," says Gunn--even the way she uses the technology.

After composing an e-mail message these days, Gunn sits on it for up to a half-hour-then hits the send key.

0 About the Author: Dana Hawkins News and World Report.

is an associate

editor of

u.s.

WHEN GRANNY GOES ONLINE or most of the 20th century, Betty Flanagan was a technophobe.

She drove cars with stick shifts, eschewed automatic coffee makers and refused to buy an electric garage door opener. So she was skeptical when, on her 80th birthday, her son arrived with a desktop computer. But now-after lessons from her granddaughters-Flanagan spends every evening in her kitchen in White Plains, New York, zapping messages to old friends and young relatives. Flanagan quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to explain her hobby: "It is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

These days, some of the most dedicated e-mailers are old enough to remember when modern communications meant Philco radios with vacuum tubes.

America's senior citizens are cramming introductory computer classes in libraries,

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community centers and cruise ships. The percentage of Americans over age 55 who are online more than doubled last year, to 9 percent, according to the ZiffDavis/Roper Starch Quarterly Update, and the number of e-mails to Elderhostel, the travel group for seniors, has doubled in just four months, to 1,500 in February.

E-mail could turn out to be more than a way to pass the time for seniors. A threeyear study now underway in Sweden, Portugal, Great Britain and Ireland indicates that seniors get a psychological boost from being connected. (Project participants get an added benefit from having nurses answer health questions online.) In the suburbs of Philadelphia, Howard Adelman, a family therapist, urges his older patients to learn e-mail to combat loneliness and depression. "Seniors are often depressed, and with depression comes withdrawal," he says. "E-mail brings them back to the world."

Not that it's easy to make the transition

from pen-and-ink missives to screen-toscreen communication.

Roger Nelson, who has taught computer novices in the retirements studies program of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says senior citizens are often daunted by the concepts of "double clicking," "dragging icons" and "pulling down a window." Part of the difficulty is physical; arthritis can impede the use of a mouse.

Once they learn the basics, though, they are as eloquent-or as crass-as the young online. "We have this image of cute little dainty old people, but they're nothing like that-they're rough and tumble, they're loud, and some are obnoxious," says Laura Fay, assistant director of development for SeniorNet, a nonprofit group that offers computer instruction in 35 states. E-mail, she says, "gives a more complete view of senior citizens."

0 About the Author: David L. Marcus is a senior writer with U.S. News and World Report.

ndian Art at the mithsonian

By LEE ADAm LAWRENCE

A fast-growing center of Indian art appreciation nestles in the embrace of the vast Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The 1990s have seen the Smithsonian's Sackler and Freer galleries adjust their East Asian focus to include South Asian art in a big way.

It is a blue-skied Saturday in May, and six-year-old Rielly Wall plans to spend the afternoon playing baseball. But, first, he has a goddess to make. Sitting at a table in the ImaginAsia program of the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Rielly and his grandmother are fashioning the silhouette of a kneeling human figure out of a thick blue length of wire. "She'll look really beautiful," says Rielly. "She'll have jewels everywhere, even on her feet.

And," he adds, "I want to make her 10 arms." At a nearby table, five-year-old Matthew Shonman is equally busy. His wire goddess has five heads, six arms and, as he points out, "a flower as a mouth. And you know what this is?" he asks his father, pointing to a tiny bit of wire that pokes up through the Styrofoam base. When his father shakes his head, Matthew exclaims: "It's a person!" And, by comparison, his goddess swells to cosmic proportions.

They may be made of simple wire, but Matthew and Rielly's goddesses capture key aspects of the stunning metal and stone statues of goddesses on display down the hall. In the process, they illustrate the depth of the Smithsonian's commitment to bringing the art and culture of India to life for Americans of all ages.

Funded by the U.S. Government, the Smithsonian includes museums dedicated to just about every branch of learning and art imaginable. Among them are two museums devoted to Asian art-the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler

Gallery-which explore various aspects of Asia through film and lecture series, demonstrations of traditional arts and dance, ImaginAsia activities for schoolchildren, ExplorAsia for two- to sevenyear-olds, and the cornerstone of it all, ambitious shows like Devi: The Great Goddess on view at the Sackler through September 6.

Until the early 1990s, the two museums concentrated primarily on Chinese and Japanese art, reflecting the interests of their founders and the art market at the time they were collected. But if there was once a scarcity of Indian art in the nation's capital, the Sackler and Freer have more than made up for it. This summer alone, three shows center on India, in addition to displays in each museum showcasing Indian selections from their respective permanent collections.

The reason there are two museums devoted to Asian art is simple: Charles Lang Freer, who donated both his collection and the elegant, Italian-inspired building in which it is housed, stipulated that no part of its collection could ever be loaned and no loaned objects ever be shown within its walls. This posed no problem in 1923, when the Freer-the Smithsonian's first fine arts museum--{)pened its doors to the public. But in this age of traveling shows, the restriction proved crippling. Or rather would have, had collector Arthur M. Sackler not stepped forward in the 1980s and donated a second museum.

As a result, the Smithsonian now has two venues in which to exhibit Asian

Shiva and Parvati as Ardhanari, Kalighat, West Bengal, ca. 1880; watercolor on paper.

Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi as the Goddess Parvati, ca. 950-1000; bronze.

Left: The God Shiva with his consort Parvati and their son Ganesha, with Nandi bull: an example of typical Hindu religious poster art, also part of the Puja exhibit.

Above: A woman performs puja at her residence in Maryland, part of Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion.

Right: An infant has ajirst look at an aspect of the Goddess.

Left: Mohra of Devi, Himachal Pradesh, 8th or 9th century; brass.

A Palace on Fire. From a Bhagavata Purana series by the workshop of Nainsukh and Fattu, perhaps Basohli, ca. 1770-80; opaque watercolor on paper.

art and has developed complementary approaches. The Freer has no choice but to concentrate on strengthening its collection, which it has done by assiduously purchasing significant works such as a red sandstone Buddha from the Gupta period, a Mughal miniature depicting Emperor Aurangzeb from the famous St. Petersburg Album, and a Chola bronze statue of Shiva. As associate director at the Sackler and Freer, Vidya Dehejia, puts it, "whenever we find anything with really good quality and with a full provenance, we snap it up."

While the Freer takes what Dehejia calls "a masterpiece approach," the Sackler con-

Contempormy art is also represented.

At the Hub of Things, 1987,

by Anish Kapo01; rests in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian; fiberglass and powdered pigment.

Female Bhuta, coastal south Kanara, Kamataka, 19th century; wood.

centrates on hosting and developing shows that place works in context so that the public comes away with an understanding of India's present-day culture as well as an appreciation of its artistic heritage. A particularly popular show is Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion, which runs through next spring. The moment visitors set foot inside this exhibit they know this is not going to be the usual museum experience.

To their right, brass temple bells hang from the ceiling with an invitation to ring them "to awaken your senses." Straight ahead sits a statue of Nandi, his hump and muzzle worn to a shine. Again, visitors are "invited to touch Nandi for good luck."

Fittingly, Nandi faces a Shivalinga, while to the left stand statues of Paravai and Sundara, dressed as they would be in a South Indian temple and honored with an offering of fresh flowers.

Throughout the show, there are more reminders that the objects so often displayed as art also have another life. They are not only beautiful statues but objects of devotion or implements for ritual offerings, as is made plain in the re-creations of a household shrine and a village and a wayside shrine. As another reminder of their function, the sounds of chanting, prayers and bells fills the air, compliments of two videos. One shows various pujas, while the other presents a more formal explanation of the Hindu concept of multipie gods and the importance of the puja.

"This is a chance to see things I've read about," says Marilyn Hilton, a social worker from Augusta, Georgia, who makes it a point to read about other cultures because "this helps me relate to patients I interact with." For Hilton, the Puja show was a wonderfully concrete complement to her readings. But it is not just Americans who find such shows useful. Born and raised in Mumbai, Jayshree Sarma has lived in the Washington area for the past 12 years and considers the Sackler a valuable ally in imparting her heritage to her children.

"Most of the things I learned in India from my mother, I took for granted," says Sarma. "But kids growing up here ask 'why this,' 'why that.' So the Puja show really helped me explain."

Even shows that parade the breadth,

A Prince Prays in the Shaligrama Shrine, Nainsukh of GuIer Court of Jasrota, ca. 1740-45; opaque watercolor on paper.

Crowned Buddha, Pala-Sena period, Bihar, 11th century; stone.

Krishna on the Shore of the Yamuna River, by a master painter of the first generation after Nainsukh, probably Basohli, ca. 1770-80; opaque watercolor on paper.

Top: The museum also offers musical concerts. Here sarod maestro Amjad AU Khan performs with his son AU Bangash (sarod. right) at the Meyer Auditorium of the Freer Gallery of Art. Above: Participants at a session on Indian art and culture at the Smithsonian.

quality and variety of Indian art aim to give visitors broader insights into India.

Devi: The Great Goddess, for example, offers a stunning spectacle of goddesses set against dark walls and bathed in a soft, twilight glow. Little wonder that Rielly and Matthew and other ImaginAsia participants were so enthralled with the images that they rushed back to create their own. At the same time, the theme itself speaks volumes about Hinduism and the centrality of Devi as Lakshrni, Parvati, Durga, Kali, Saraswati-just to list a few of the multitude of faces she wears.

The third show running this summer illustrates another focus of the museums: Indian painting. This is hardly surprising given that the museums' director, Milo C. Beach, is an authority on the subject.

Beach's knowledge of Indian paintings has translated into a steady flow of shows, ranging from exhibitions devoted to a single Mughal manuscript to such shows as Nainsukh: Painter from the Punjab Hills, on view at the Sackler through July 18. If the choice of paintings on display often attracts scholarly interest, it also draws museumgoers to the Indian shows. At the Freer, Lizzie Wise stands before a scene from the "Hash Bihist," painted in 1450. The high-school student from McLean, Virginia, could not resist the bold red background and the stylized "cute" figures.

Similarly, it is the color of the Nainsukh paintings that most attract Saranna BielCohen, a student visiting from Chicago, Illinois. Already familiar with Indian art"My parents love India," she says, "in the living room we have lots of stuff from India"-she had, nevertheless, not seen anything quite so varied and colorful as these paintings. "They were modem, and I liked that," she says. She seems a bit amazed to discover she can feel this way about works created in the late 1700s. Just as Matthew and Rielly were astounded to find goddesses with multiple arms and bejeweled from head to toe, while the adults who brought them were thrilled to offer them this early connection to the rich and distant culture of India.

D About the Author: Lee Adair Lawrence is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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Recent years have seen striking new art museums open up around the world, from the Guggenheim in Barcelona to the Getty in Los Angeles. Now San Francisco's MOMA has a setting for its treasures that celebrates "the new religiosity" of modern art.

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t's September. A drizzle bursts down on unsuspecting tourists. A black metal sculpture, mute and drenched, sits alone on the garden terraces of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. People scuttle by heading across the street where banners wave down tourists like beacons of shelter. The seeming endless tranquility of the landscaped garden with its sculptures, waterfalls and graceful willows suddenly transforms into a crush of damp humanity.

They fill the tables outside the Cafe Museo, sipping lattes with their croissants. Some read books, others chat, network, while others watch the world without really seeing it. A long line shuffles slowly forward for tickets. Members are spared the wait. There is palpable excitement in the air. The city has been buzzing with the news ofthis new exhibition everyone claims is a must-see: The Alexander Calder (1898-1976) Retrospective.

Once upon a time, the collections and exhibitions of the SFMOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, were swallowed into near oblivion in the large gray building across from the glistening dome of the City Hall of San Francisco. This War Memorial Veterans Building was most unsuitable for any exhibition of modern art. In an effort to uplift the South of Market area and placate those screaming for a new home for the MaMA, the City of San Francisco trusted $62 million to the mind of architect Mario Botta. Botta envisioned and constructed a work of modern art, designed to house modern art. To Botta, "the museum's role in today's city is analogous to that of a cathedral of yesterday." A structure that transcends its physical functional delimitation, "dedicated to witnessing and searching for a new religiosity."

Built in the modernist tradition with powerful influences from Louis I. Kahn, designer of the Kimball Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; his own teacher in Venice, Carlo Scarpa, a great admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright; and the modernist Le Corbusier, the SFMOMA is a cathedral of modern art. The analogy is true from the sheer physical magnificence of the atrium to the intimate detailing that makes a cathedral spiritually inspiring. What's more, its beautifully lit niches enshrine modern art. The building is in itself a major attraction. The art inside makes an art lover's visit significantly more meaningful, much like the experience of a pilFar left: Thefacade of the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art seen from the Yerba Buena Gardens.

Left: Welcome is extended at the ticket counters against the stairwell in the museum grand atrium.

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grim within a grand temple. While the aura of the building is imposing, the objective, making the display, dialogue and education on modern art accessible to the public, is maintained.

Entering through the heavy stainless steel doors, one is immediately propelled into a dark gray and black entryway. There is a lot of gray inside the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gray is what gray is made to be. The dullness of the previous location is nowhere present, thanks to the masterful eye of architect Mario Botta. Here gray is alive, electrifying. It is a dramatic complement to black granite and pristine white walls simultaneously.

The play of contrast and complement is evident everywhere. The walls of the relatively low entry way, linear bands of mottled granite alternating rough gray and glistening black, acknowledge museum supporters and contributors. On the highly polished floor, a black slash parts the gray and black stripes right in the middle, dividing the colossal atrium in two halves. The stripes encircle four pillars that rise to the base of an enormous internal cylindrical aperture: an iridescent skylight 40 meters above, and lead the way to a narrow central stairway that branches outward at each level only to re-converge at white gypsum board balconies that overhang the atrium.

The pristine walls of the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Atrium, named after major contributors from one of San Francisco's most influential and historically significant families who founded and still control a major share of the famous Levi Strauss and Co., reflect and compound the glow of natural light from an enormous skylight 40 meters above. The bookstore, coat check and cafe form the peripheral structures at this level, seen only through their doors.

In addition, the first floor or lobby boasts the 280-seat Phillis Wattis Theater that accommodates all manner of presentationperformance, visual media (film, slide) interactive seminars, symposia and lectures. There are two large studio spaces for workshops, a photography and graphics arts study area for guest specialists, and a classroom seating one hundred. A library with over 65,000 books and documents is accessible to the public by appointment. The Charles and Helen Schwab Room, named after the investment banker and major donor, Charles Schwab, available for private receptions, meetings and sit-down dinners, may be used in conjunction with the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Atrium. The walls, lined with Nordic Birch, create an elegant contrast to the ebony-stained maple floor. Adjustable lighting designed to look like stars in a night sky creates a unique atmosphere.

Pools of light highlight the seamless semicircular wooden ticket desks that skirt two of the pillars. The strips ofpale Nordic Birch seem lighter against the even dark gaps in-between, creating a linear pattern. The counter is soft, pale and gracefully curved, adding the perfect complement to the strident floor.

Botta's choice of the pale golden-brown Nordic Birch for furnishings, wall and ceiling paneling throughout the museum's interior provides balance, calm and color-a necessary relief from the high contrast of white walls and dark granite stripes. The lengths of birch are set evenly apart. Botta masterfully retains consistency in theme, using negative space (seen as black spaces between the bands of golden birch) in the furnishings and the

ceiling to effectively enhance linear abstraction.

The first of the 4,650 square meters of gallery space begins at the second floor with the current exhibit, "Matisse and Beyond: A Century of Modernism Painting and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection."

In Matisse's Femme au Chapeau (Women with the Hat, 1905), bequeathed to the museum from the Elise S. Haas Collection, Madame Matisse, rendered lovingly with delicate intimacy in the best Fauvist tradition, gazes back challenging the viewer to question the green on her face. From there, interconnected portals, enfilade, create separate, yet continuous gallery space. The 65-meter lengths are filled with even, soft lighting from a strip skylight above.

The paintings transport you to other worlds. The joy and passion of Matisse, his command over line and form in his odalisque drawings are amazing. Simple lines speak volumes on weight, texture and mood. By contrast, one feels the sheer violence of Willem de Kooning befalling the canvas. A room full of Paul Klee's continually curious renderings in the exhibit, "Romantic Reflections," explodes to the expansiveness of the abstract expressionists: Franz Kline, Clifford Styli and Mark Rothko.

Juxtaposed in humorous contrast are Liechtenstein's prints of magnified cartoons. The stretch, reach and withdrawal ofthe artist is felt in the movement ofthe grand stroke and the deliberate drip.

In the protected environment of the third floor where the 3.6meter ceilings allow no natural light, precious photographs and other works on paper are displayed. Based on artificial lighting, the SFMOMA gallery layout is diametric to the new J. Paul Getty Museum with its architectural emphasis on natural light. There, paintings lit by diffused natural light from skylights, occupy the uppermost galleries. Photosensitive materials like documents, drawings and photographs, logically displayed in the lower levels, are hidden from damaging exposure.

The Calder exhibit is in the fourth and fifth floors. The 5.5-meter high rooms are ideal for his hanging sculptures. Suspended in perfect balance to eye level, these moving sculptures, first described as "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, challenged the notion of sculpture as an opaque, stable art.

At this floor, the stairwell breaks free of the center and curves along the exterior of the cylindrical funnel of the skylight. Huge

quartered circular windows cut into the curved inner wall of the stairwell and look down into the central piazza from opposite ends. Also visible, a profusion of seemingly ornamental circular apertures that rise along the cylinder to the upper lip of the skylight. While they complement windows visually, they serve as essential smoke vents. All along the exterior walls, vertical slits of light framed by horizontal bars of black grille reveal aerial glimpses of the city buzzing outside.

The two arms of the stairway meet at a metal bridge. A beautiful Calder mobile moves gently above. At 25 meters, a metal bridge provides an interesting overview of the piazza. Placed 20 meters beneath the enormous ribbed skylight, it reveals the space beneath which, with this elevated perspective, the atrium is the obvious heart of the building. Galleries encircle like protective ribs from either side of the stairwell. The highest gallery, on the fifth floor, boasts an even balance of natural and artificial light from the coffered vaults on the ceiling. Here, the space is fully exploited for Calder's mobile sculptures. Evocative of the natural world, these primarily metal creations take on the delicacy of a feather in the wind. The bold colors linked by black wire are reminiscent ofPiet Mondrian's paintings. I could understand the difficulty in choosing among the pieces for this retrospective. Each is exquisite in its own way. As an artist, however, I would have liked to have the space to really experience fewer mobile sculptures. I would have loved to see them perform their ethereal dance and get carried away with his vision, as the objective of his sculptures was motion and the appreciation of it relies on physical interaction with the viewer.

Botta's largest project in the United States, the SFMOMA occupies 20,000 square meters of which 4,600 square meters is gallery space with another 2,300 square meters available for expansion. Behind the public areas are the "restricted access" internals of any museum: art storage areas, receiving docks and mechanical rooms that house state-of-the-art equipment for temperature and humidity control essential for the preservation of the collections in storage and display. The curatorial and administrative sections lie tucked behind closed doors on the higher levels.

These offices have separate access from Minna Street to the right of this splendid museum. Walking around, one notices the detailed brick facade. Botta has played with bricks much like a jacquard weave in fabric, once again bringing stone to life. Bricks set on end, at angles vertical and horizontal, create simple geometric patterns that belie exquisite masonry. The repetition of design creates a cohesive relief and texture to the surface. The earthy red is warm and inviting compared to the surrounding white window glass skyscrapers.

The San Francisco Museum of Modem Art sits powerfully different in contour and colors from its environs. Massive horizontal tiers of windowless red brick are stacked symmetrically in defined rectangular blocks around a dramatically phallic, up-slanted skylight. As darkness falls, the lit skylight transforms into a beacon of culture.

D About the Author: Soumya Sitaraman is a visual artist and freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"And now, if you don't want to know today s Dow Jones closing, look away from your set until the music stops. "

"The good news is, since you made your last payment, my blood pressure s dropped a couple of points. " Drawing by Eric & Bill; Š 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

ONTHE LIGHTER SIDE

"] attribute it to human error, but then ] attribute everything to human error. "

PROJECT LEAD-FREE

By DINESH C. SHARMA

or the small family of Lotias from Rajasthan, living in Baswesvara Nagar in Bangalore, life was normal. The father-son duo ran the family business in the busy City Market area, while the mother took care of the house.

All was well till the father developed severe abdominal pain one day and was referred by a local doctor to the St. John's Medical College and Hospital. His blood tests alarmed the doctors-the lead levels were 10 times more than the prescribed limit. Then the other two members of the family were also checked for blood lead levels, although they showed no symptoms of lead poisoning. They too had alarmingly high levels of lead in their blood.

"None of them were in close contact to any known source of lead. So we wanted to investigate the cause of high lead levels further," recalls Dr. Thuppil Venkatesh, professor and head, department of biophysics at St. John's and chief coordinator of a project on blood screening for leadcalled Project Lead-Free, launched by the Bangalore-based George Foundation. "On detailed examination, we found that the family regularly used an electric grinder to make wheat flour. The grinder had developed some problem and lead from one of its joints got coat~d on the grinding plate, acting as a source of lead. They were practically eating lead every day."

This is just one of the several cases of lead poisoning that came to light in the largest ever screening of high-risk groups-such as children and pregnant women-for blood lead done in six Indian cities. Project Lead-Free covered 22,000 subjects in Bangalore, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai and Hyderabad. The study came up with some startling results-over 50

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percent of children below the age of 12 have blood lead levels higher than the prescribed 10 microgram per deciliter, and over 12 percent of the children surveyed have 20 microgram/dl. or higher of lead levels. Those surveyed included children (preschool, school and those living in slums), pregnant women and high-risk groups like traffic police and workers in battery and paint industries.

"Urban children have higher levels of lead compared to rural children, possibly due to lead in urban environment resulting from vehicular pollution. Another possible source is drinking water which gets contaminated due to pipelines and storage at homes in metal containers," said Dr. Venkatesh. Worldwide, the main sources that account for lead exposure are gasoline additives, food can soldering, lead-based paints, ceramic glazes, drinking water systems, cosmetics and folk medicines, and cooking utensils. In India, too, drinking water pipelines, paints, automobile pollution and traditional medicine are the main sources, besides odd sources like the electric grinder and particular brands of henna or mehendi applied by women.

Project Lead-Free is unique in several ways. Besides being the largest ever lead screening program undertaken in India, it is the first research study of its kind in India taken up solely as a private initiative and without any government funding. Yet it has attracted attention of international bodies like the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The George Foundation, founded by an Indian American Dr. George Abraham in 1995, took up the project consistent with its mission to serve the welfare of children, especially those who are victims of poverty and those who suffer due to adverse environmental conditions beyond their control.

"Lead poisoning due to vehicular pollution and other sources is a serious problem. When I first alerted the government agencies and even NGOs almost three years ago, none of them had any interest in the subject. No real research was being done by anyone, pollution boards were not monitoring lead in the air, and certainly no one had done large enough samples of blood," points out Dr. Abraham, who works as vice chairman and director of SunGard Treasury Systems, a New Jersey company specializing in international finance. So he decided to undertake research in this neglected area and started mobilizing groups and individuals in the U.S. and India.

Friends of Lead Free Children Inc., a nonprofit charity based in New York which has lead treatment projects in several developing countries, readily agreed to assist the foundation in launching the program in Bangalore. The New York City Department of Health provided hematofluorometers-machines for detecting lead, mercury and other harmful metals in blood, and also iron deficiency-to Friends of Lead Free Children.

These meters give instant test results on zinc levels at low cost per test, and require just one drop of blood to get a reading.

Fifteen such instruments were provided by the Friends of Lead Free Children Inc. during the initial year for screening purposes. Those with high zinc levels were further tested with lead analyzers purchased from ESA Inc. The machines are calibrated with specially prepared blood controls that are verified by the New York State Lead Laboratories. Determination of blood lead level was done as per the protocol suggested by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The project initially focused on the city of Bangalore and the vicinity, but later

was extended to five other cities. The clinics that participated in the screening program are K.J. Somaiya Medical College, Bandra Holy Family Hospital Society and Guru Nanak Hospital (all in Mumbai); National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad; Indira Gandhi ESI Hospital, New Delhi; R.G. Kar Medical College, Calcutta Medical College and Dr. B.C. Roy Memorial Hospital for Children (all in Calcutta); and K.J. Hospital, Chennai.

The St. John's Medical College and Hospital, Bangalore, was the coordinating center for the study. Other participating clinics from Bangalore were Baptist Mission Hospital, Lake Side Medical Center and Hospital, Cantonment X-ray and Laboratory, Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences and M.S. Ramaiah Medical College. he first major fallout of the project was an international conference on lead poisoning organized in Bangalore in February 1999, where findings of the survey were presented. This was the largest gathering of lead experts from all over the world, representing the World Bank, WHO, CDC, EPA, UNESCO, and scientists from 20 developed and developing countries, including the U.S., India and Mexico. Once again, it was the most important conference focusing on developing countries, with an emphasis on practical solutions that are affordable.

Professor N. K. Ganguly, director general, Indian Council of Medical Research, observed "most children with lead poisoning are never identified in our country.

Therefore, lead-screening program is today's requirement and the government needs to make better use of available information to ensure health and safety policies to protect children from lead

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poisoning." Based on the findings of the screening survey, it was decided to chalk out a plan of action. The conference was a great success in bringing awareness and getting people from different fields to share their ideas and experiences to formulate a national plan.

The project had three phases: testing, treatment and education/awareness.

For treating lead poisoning, the foundation program provided participating clinics with doses of the oral chelator meso 2,3-dimercaptosuccine acid or DMSAthe most effective treatment drug for lead poisoning used in most developed countries. But it could not be used pending approval of the Drug Controller of India (DCI). Tests are now being conducted to generate local data required for DCI approval. A dose of two pills a day for 19 days could remove heavy metals such as lead and mercury from the body, leaving behind essential materials like calcium, iron and magnesium. Simultaneously, in the U.S., Dr. Abraham is drafting a "White Paper on Lead Poisoning" that will focus on an implementation plan for prevention and treatment oflead poisoning. "This paper will be endorsed by several international organizations and heads of many scientific institutions in India before it is submitted to governments of developing countries," says Dr Abraham.

The gains of Project Lead-Free will not be just for India. An estimated 500 million children are affected by lead poisoning in the developing world. The WHO estimates that 15 to 18 million children in developing countries suffer from permanent brain damage due to lead poisoning. Lead poisoning is silent and insidious, accumulating in one's body with its full negative impact not realized until much later in life. "It is an alarming situation. Such high levels oflead could have disastrous effects on intelli-

gence levels of our children. It is a solvable problem, we know the effects and causes.

What we need is urgent remedial measures like introducing lead-free petrol," says Dr. Venkatesh.

"The prevention of lead poisoning is a coordinated society-wide effort," says Richard J. Jackson, director, National Center for Environmental Health. "In the U.S., we have been successful-the percentage of children with elevated lead levels dropped by 95 percent since the late 1970s. We hope to eradicate this disease completely by 2011. It is vital that information about the Indian situation be used wisely, so that India could also eliminate this entirely preventable disease."

Another George Foundation project currently underway is Shanti Bhavan, a free-boarding school for poor children with world-class facilities. It is located in Edipalli, an impoverished area in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. The children are selected from poor families from the surrounding areas of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. "We select children who have a reasonable chance for success based on natural ability," say schoolteachers. The school currently has a capacity to accommodate a maximum of 150 children. The overall goal of the project is to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, to enable the children to achieve their full potential and become productive individuals. In Dr. Abraham's words, "We are preparing these children to meet standards in the global marketplace."

Project Lead-Free and Shanti Bhavan are examples of what private initiative can achieve if there is determination and how resources can be mobilized for a good cause.

0 About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker based in Delhi.

The savings from privatization can oped world in the 1980s. For these nations accrue not only to the macroeconomy. It it was about more than just getting rid of can work magic all the way down to loss-making companies. It was about creating a new society, of constructing a capthe lowest rungs of officialdom. When italist economy with millions of private the city of Rajkot began awarding service contracts to private entrepreneurs stakeholders. Privatization was as much a social and political move as it was an ecofor various municipal services, costs nomIC one. plunged. Streetlight maintenance became 20 percent cheaper. Expenses on the In these circumstances, privatization upkeep of its gardens plummeted 70 percent.

Being less driven by the profit motive and thus the need for effiThroughout the world, the public ciency, state firms are often technosector was marked by poor logical laggards. This can have serireturns, undeserved government ous environmental consequences.

A study showed that Indonesia's bailouts and a tendency to fall state companies consumed five behind private competitors. times more water than equivalent private firms. The former communist countries of Europe are infamously scarred by toxic waste was done with almost unseemly haste. dumps, nuclear hazards and poison-emitCountries like Poland and Hungary ting smokestacks left by the old staterestructured their old state-owned firms owned industrial sector which was exempt before hawking them to the public. The from any ecological regulations.

The second rationale for privatization is Czech Republic, however, took a far more almost philosophical. This argument goes radical path, throwing companies into the private sector as fast as possible and givalong the lines that the state's role should be as limited as possible. If it sticks its ing away shares by the millions. Prague knew the firms needed revamping but calnose into areas it has no competence inculated that private owners would do a like running factories-it will be tempted better job of it than the state. to intrude into other areas of civil society as well. A state that plays entrepreneur will develop biases against private busiussia had one of the most ness. More importantly, it may use the sweeping privatization propublic sector to exercise political power grams. Russia issued vouchthrough patronage or simply get into the ers to each of its citizens, habit of muscling aside private players in even children, through which they could general. buy shares in any public sector company.

Boris Yeltsin explained, "We need milThough it harks back to the philosophical musings of 19th century classical lib- lions of owners rather than a handful of millionaires. The privatization voucher is erals, this sentiment is strong among new a ticket for each of us to a free economy." democracies in Latin American and East This process ran from 1992 to 1994. At its European countries. This is a direct product of their experiences with oppressive height, 900,000 Russian workers were regimes-military junta in the former being transferred from the public to the case, and communist dictatorships in the private sector a month. Nearly 40 million latter. East Europeans have produced Russians became shareholders. A pop some of the strongest philosophical argusong, "Wow Wow Voucher," reached ments against the existence of a public number five on the Moscow hit parade. sector.

It was ideologues like Thatcher and Eastern Europe was at the forefront of East European leaders like the Czech introducing privatization to the nondevelPrime Minister, Vaclav Klaus, who

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pressed for privatization even when there was no definite empirical evidence of its positive economic effects. When the success stories started coming in, multilateral financial and aid organizations moved to endorse privatization. By the mid-1990s these bodies had begun to incorporate privatization in the reform packages they offered to various ailing countries.

What swung opinion decisively in favor of privatization in these rarefied corridors was a seminal 1992 World Bank report on the economic consequences of privatization. Using 12 cases in four countries, a team of economists weighed all the pros and cons of privatization, toting up costs and gains to workers, consumers and organizations. The report's conclusion: overwhelming evidence that privatization's benefits to an economy outweighed the costs. Specifically, they found this to be the case in 11 out of the 12 cases. Net gains for the firms, post-privatization, averaged 26 percent.

The report noted that in many cases even though consumers were charged more, they still gained through better services. This was particularly true of telecom privatization. Public sector firms often set their prices at unrealistically low levels because of political pressure. This often meant terrible service, poor technology and an inability to expand because of a shortage of funds. The telephone was cheap, but always dead.

The report also wrote that another surprising discovery was that even in a monopoly situation, where a public company's stranglehold on the market was transferred to a private firm, privatization still came out a winner-albeit by a lesser margin than would be the case in a competitive environment.

It also concluded that the politically most sensitive aspect of privatizationemployment-was not as great a concern as originally thought. Of the 12 cases studied, in a quarter of them there was no change in the number of jobs. In three other cases, workers actually benefited.

One case study was of a Malaysian port.

Initially the port workers bitterly fought privatization. After privatization, they

experienced such improved working conditions that they launched another agitation-demanding that more ports be privatized.

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all countries has been that the more aggressively a government privatizes, the more successful it will be. Studies have also shown it makes no difference to the process whether a country is a dictatorship or a democracy.

Another factor that loads the dice in favor of success is macroeconomic stability. This is especially important if there are foreign buyers involved. A tight fiscal policy, shorn of subsidies and tax loopholes, makes a difference.

This forces the newly privatized firm to trim itself into shape. So does an open external sector, friendly to trade and investment, and a transparent and stable financial sector. Finally, privatization should enhance competition in that economic field. For one thing, it helps prevent the rise of the Russian phenomenon of a privatization "mafia." Also, this is the only way to ensure consumers get maximum mileage from the change. And nothing dissipates the political fallout of privati-

the traditional things like trash collection or power and telephones, the city has also privatized the management of city revenues and real estate records, sports facilities and the zoo, car parking, the sewers and more. Lastly, there is privatization in the form of displacement. This is a passive process where the government withdraws from an economic area and lets private players fill the vacuum or deregulates a sector and lets the public sector firm quietly shrivel on the vine.

rivatization often requires the laying off of workers. An extreme example was the sale of YPF, the Argentinean state oil company, which saw its payroll fall from 52,500 to a mere 5,800. But workers can exploit privatization to their benefit.

The first Russian government firm to be sold offwas the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory. he frontiers of privatization The buyers were its own workers. They continue to expand. Prisons, proved more savvy than the bureaucrats schools, policing, even sacrowho managed the enterprise earlier-they sanct areas like defense producpromptly sold an interest in the company to tion, are now being passed onto the pria French multinational firm. Privatization vate sector. Implicit is the beliefthat in the in Bolivia had a unique combination of case of almost any service or form of ecowelfare and market. The government aucnomic activity, it is best to motivate peotioned off a 50 percent stake in its public ple through their wallets rather than sector firms to a private partner who was appeals to morality or public service. To a also given management control. The other large extent this is only common sense. half of the equity was given to the The latter can work, but starts to national pension funds. Today, the flag after a short time. Privatization dividends from these holdings go reflects a worldwide trend away into the pockets of every Bolivian from government control and The manner and circumstances over 65 years old. toward a use of the market and under which privatization takes place competition to provide the public While privatization is an overall is crucial to its success. A government both protection and prosperity. boon to an economy, it is as complex and varied as an economic Franco Bernabe, who once headmust be prepared to grit its teeth activity can get. And it can go sour. ed Italy's flagship public sector and weather the fire.

The manner and circumstances enterprise, ENI, and shepherded its under which privatization takes conversion into a private concern, place is crucial to its success. gave government ownership a hardAt the top of the list of prerequiheaded requiem: "State companies sites is political will. As an International zation than happy consumers. are finished. They are basically archaic in Monetary Fund report said in 1995, privaLike the old Heinz soup lineup, studies a world that has lost many borders and tization is fundamentally a political act. have identified 57 varieties of privatizathat is becoming global. State companies "Each stage of privatization involves bal- tion. These are generally broken up into are inward looking and defensive, private ancing economic and political goals." three large categories. companies are outward looking. In a statePreferably, both the national leadership The first is the method normally associowned company, you are a state official, and the constituents affected should be in ated with the word "privatization"not an entrepreneur ....Nation states do not favor of it. Ifthe process is likely to attract divestment. This represents a one-time have the tools for competing in a global flak, a government must be prepared to shedding of the asset and its purchase by economy." The market, as the wags now grit its teeth and weather the fire. It helps private interests. Then there is delegation, say, produces entrepreneurs. Government if policymakers are able to maintain a where the government passes on the manonly breeds bureaucrats. It follows that high level of credibility. Thus, if it agement of an asset, normally by contract, the former are best equipped to manage promises there will be no renationalizato a private concern. This is now comthe businesses of a nation.

0 tion or that the new owners will be given monplace in the foothills of governancehire-and-fire rights, the government must local and municipal services. The city of About the Author: Pram it Pal Chaudhuri is be able to persuade investors it will be Buenos Aires has cheerfully brought in a Delhi-based senior assistant editor of the true to its word. The experience of almost private players to do everything. Besides Telegraph.

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laking Charge A skillful navigator can make a lasting success of that delicate moment when the new chief takes on a weary team.

Electricity fairly crackles in the air. The board of this important international airline has just fired the old chief. Now, minutes later, they've appointed a new recruit brought in "from the outside." He's a silver-headed ex-Air Force general who has also done a great job of running commercial airlines. He's pumped up and ready for business.

He glances at the chairman of the board. "Send me my men," he says.

A half-dozen dazed souls enter the boardroom. I've already interviewed and psych-tested them, so I know they're a battle- fatigued bunch, at best.

It's meant to be the new CEO's moment, but the shifty Wall Street banker who has bank-rolled the takeover suddenly springs forward. He's short and fat and sweating profusely. He holds up his hand, indicating silence, then belts out his mantra: "We have taken drastic action and brought in a new chief because"-both fists pump the air-"We Believe in People."

He pauses. Then waves the pointy parental digit before their noses. "Yes, yes! We Believe in People."

The battle-fatigued senior VP in charge of operations steps out of the bunch and into the awkward silence.

"Don't try to sell us that crap, Howard.

The only thing you believe in is money!

That's why all the good people have quit.

That's why you're left ranting to us-a bunch of second-raters who, not for lack of trying, simply can't land a job anywhere else."

A ghastly silence descends. All eyes pivot to the new CEO. The words, tone and demeanor he alights upon in this very moment will surely determine the fate of the airline.

A Question So, dear reader, what if you'd been that CEO? What thoughts and words would you have reached for? What stance might you have taken?

Would you have sent for a tray of cappuccinos and chocolate eclairs and invited your team to bare their souls over the course of a lengthy coffee break? Or might you have demonstrated your determination by fuing that uppity VP of operations right then and there? Perhaps you'd have gone on to tell this unhappy bunch that the airline was going to hell in a handbasket and

that there'd be no choice but to fire anyone else who failed to perform, too?

No prize for getting "right" answers, for there are none. This is neither an abstract academic exercise nor a casebook study dreamed up by some MBA professor. No, there really is a new chief. There really is a bummed-out international airline. There really is a burned-out, rightfully ambivalent team. And, of course, there really is a magic moment. So what happened?

Well, I was there, and it was a decisive moment for me, too. I'd not only found that CEO-I'd also psych-tested, analyzed him and checked his references. I'd liked everything I'd seen and heard, and I'd pushed his candidacy very hard. The upshot is that I remember everything as if it were playing out before my eyes right now ....

One Man's Answers The new CEO steps forward. Sunlight hits his face. He's fully focused but totally unfazed by the intensity that hangs in the air. He pauses to take in each face, lingering for a moment on the eyes of the VP of operations.

"Gentlemen," he says.

Hey, there, in one opening word he's set the tone for interpersonal relations. He's also drawn the sting from the VP's anger.

"You and I are going to build a truly great airline."

And in one short sentence, he's both described a vision and communicated a pithy mission statement. He'll go on to refine and focus it all later. For the moment, however, the words are reaching for the heart. They're inspiring, and they're inclusive.

"It'll take the unstinting help of each and every member of this team-but we're gonna do it."

He's talking we, not 1, and he's calling for team loyalty, not personal loyalty. He's also proclaimed this eclectic and ambivalent bunch a team. He believes it, too, of course. As well he should. They might not be the best team in the world, but they're the only team he's got.

"And there's only one way for us to do it. We're going to astonish and delight the customer. We're going to run an airline that people are proud to have flown on.

They'll know they got service, and they'll know they got value-and they'll tell their friends."

So now he's included the customer in the mission statement-and the promise of quality and value, too. He's appealing to the deep need within the human heart to provide real service in our daily work.

"It won't happen overnight. I know we've got problems."

They all nod. But they've noted the language: We've got problems. He's right in there with them.

"On the bright side, my hunch is that you already know what those problems are." He smiles. "And that you also have a pretty good fix on how to address them.

So just as soon as this. meeting is over, I'd like to start meeting with each of you in your respective offices."

Their offices, not his. Their opinions, not his. They seem both flattered and surprised.

"I want you to share your problems with me. I'll be ready to do some heavy listening." He smiles. "I'll also need you to tell me how we should begin to set

about solving them."

Hey, there's a smart move. He's moving the burden of problem-solving back to the team. He's telling them he's going to play coach, not savior. And, since he's no fool, he'll have the opportunity to assess the quality of their thinking.

"Then, we'll come together for another team meeting in the boardroom, 48 hours from right now. We'll formalize our goals, fix a plan and start making it all happen."

He pauses. "How does that sound to you guys?"

The VP of operations breaks the silence. "Sounds pretty good to me," he says. The others murmur their agreement.

"Great," says the chief. "So maybe I could start in your office. Can we meet in an hour?"

Smart move. That VP showed real courage in speaking up. He's the group's natural leader. The CEO can't afford to lose him. And ifhe wins him over-which I'm sure he will-the rubber will be about to leave the tarmac.

A Six-Point Plan My man came up with the goods-what a relief. I've been thinking about that assignment and scene for some years now.

So in case you ever find yourself in a similar position, let me offer a very brief sixpoint plan to help you carry the day.

Fix a mission that appeals to both head and heart.

A leader without a dream is a bureaucrat. Go for the big dream. Make no small plans. Include the customer in that mission, too. Differentiate yourself from the competition. Show the precise benefits to the customer base that you believe will permit you to realize your vision.

Instilldecent values.

The new chief demonstrated instant loyalty and trust. In so doing, he began to

build a new culture. What are the values you'd like to instill? Reach for the focused TORCH: Team orientation; Open communication; Recognition and respect for diversity and individuality; Commitment to the development of people; Honesty, trust, integrity and fairness.

Develop viable goals and a plan.

A goal is a dream with a deadline. We need long-term goals and short-term goals. Focus upon immediate "milestones." We need to know that we're on course and making good time. Realistic short-term milestones shorten the psychological journey and keep spirits high.

Monitor key behaviors.

Those 360-degree surveys of "high-performance" team behaviors have become enormously popular because, properly administered, they really can be amazingly effective. The key to the exercise lies in integrating insights into the development of the whole person. The best executive, most of the time, is also the best person.

Include recreation in the formal agenda.

To recreate means to re-create.

Apparently "fuzzy" activities such as weekend seminars, discussions and outings can have enormous long-term payoffs. For a team to become a real team, time must be invested. Morale is too important to be left to itself.

Walk the talk.

What more need I say?

About the Author: John Wareham is founder and chief executive of Wareham Associates, a human resource firm specializing in leadership search, assessment and development. He is author of The New Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter.

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Introduced to Hindustani classical music more than three decades ago, singer Harriotte Huriee has effortlessly bridged the gap between diverse cultures, traditions and languages in spite of the fact that she is blind.

Hers is a singular tale of romance with India.

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inger Harriotte Huriee believes her destiny was decided that one evening in 1967 when she attended a sitar recital by the Indian maestro Pt. Ravi Shankar at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was an undergraduate studying German and French literature, with a passion for bluegrass and folk music. What Huriee experienced during the concert was nothing short of a musical epiphany. More than three decades down the road, the memory of that experience brings a wave of joy across her face and in her tremulous voice as the sari-clad singer, who has been blind since childhood, sits cross-legged in a New Delhi living room speaking in chaste Hindi about her ongoing love affair with India and Indian classical music.

Since 1971, Huriee has visited India thrice for a period of two years each trip to study Hindustani classical music at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and to take singing lessons from her guru, the noted vocalist Pt. Balwant Rai Bhatt, a disciple of the legendary singer Pt. Onkarnath Thakur. During her second visit to India in 1989, Huriee completed her MA in musicology at BHU on a senior American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship. "This time I am here to do research for my PhD thesis," she explains.

"My topic is Hindustani vocalists. I shall compare the style of a gharana vis-a.-vis the style of an individual. I refer to the Gwalior gharana as an example, also because my dada guru, Onkarnath Thakur, belonged to this gharana. In my opinion, there must be some common traits which come together to form a gharana. The singers belonging to the gharana must be singing in a particular style. But when you talk to people, they only talk about individual artistes, like Ustad Amir Khan or

Abdul Karim Khan. Now gradually I have come to understand that though gharanas are there, and have existed for the last 250 years, sometimes a single musician can also form a gharana and enjoy respectability. For example, we have Abdul Karim Khan and Pt. Mallikarjun Mansur.

Then we have Kishori Amonkar. This aspect fascinates me no end."

It has been a long journey for a smalltown girl from the American Deep South to the ghats of Banaras, and an eventful one. In her musical quest, she has had to overcome her physical handicap, besides bridge the gap between diverse cultures, traditions and languages. But sitting in a room and hearing her speak, one would have to strain to notice any strangeness in her bearing. The posture, thoughts and expressions are thoroughly Indian.

She punctuates the conversations with hearty laughter and a succession of arre baap res! The transformation has been complete.

Harriotte Huriee was born in Georgia.

Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught music at a local school. The first major turning point in her life came when Huriee was six years old. A fall in the classroom caused the retina of her right eye to become detached, though no one noticed it at the time of the mishap. She began suffering from headaches but the doctor, unfortunately, did not advice her to consult an eye specialist. She took some medication and the headaches disappeared.

Believing herself cured, the little girl and her parents forgot about the incident. "I felt everything was all right. Besides I could see quite well with my left eye," Huriee says. "But I was a child and quite unaware of the damage done. Later on, when the extent of the damage was known, I had to undergo an operation. But

the retina, as you know, is a delicate part.

It has a network of nerves. If it remains detached for a period of over two weeks, it becomes practically impossible to bring it back to its normal position."

Soon afterward, Huriee began to lose vision in the left eye as well. "My parents tried hard for me," she recalls. "My father was a lawyer and as such there was no dearth of money. But my mother was a very strong and courageous person. She would repeatedly tell me that if you have a dream and you work hard, you're bound to realize it. She taught me not to worry about myself, simply go on in life. She was a remarkable woman."

When Huriee was about 10 years old, she developed a taste for singing and playing the piano at home. She also taught herself to play the guitar at the age of 16, playing bluegrass and folk music. The first hurdle in her musical career, and which would later have a bearing on her decision to learn Indian classical music, came up when she enrolled at Antioch University in Yellow Springs for her BA. Though already deeply involved in music, she ran up against a wall when it came to knowing notation. "I could not read music. In the braille script, they have some notations, which I tried to learn.

God! It was very difficult. Not at all straightforward. I felt so foolish. But then I happened to attend a concert by Pt. Ravi Shankar. I was 18. Concerts were a usual thing in college. I was completely spellbound. I was not aware of anything but the sound of the sitar and the tabla. It was so melodious."

With her interest sparked, Huriee began to listen to, and enjoy, recordings of Indian classical music brought back by her then boyfriend (later husband) from his trip to India in 1967-68 on a Wisconsin

University program. Following her graduation, they got married and moved from Ohio to New Hampshire where she began teaching music in a high school. Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, was about three hours' drive away to the south. It has run a world music program since 1963. Every year a nine-day festival ofIndian classical music, featuring prominent musicians from India, was organized in the campus by two Carnatic musicians, Dr. T. Viswanathan, and his brother, T. Ranganathan. The festival would be rounded off with a sumptuous feast. It was all very unusual and exciting for Huriee.

"There I got to hear Dr. Lalmani Mishra, the vichitra veena player, and his son Gopal Shankar. I also heard Vandanayaki Iyengar, a Carnatic singer and Dr. Laxmi Ganesh Tiwari, who became my first guru. I remember listening to Krishna Sanyal, the sitar player in 1970. 1 couldn't help wonder how these people learn their music without notation. I asked Tiwariji who replied, 'Sit before your guru. When he sings, you sing. And you can do it without notation."

It appeared to Huriee that she had finally found the way past her inability to cope with Western notations. From then on, more than anything, she would look eastward for her life's sustenance. The Indian musician resembles more a medieval troubadour than a composer sitting before blank paper at his desk, she understood. "An oral tradition is a wonderful thing, keeping meaning and purpose alive and accessible," she says. "In the Western tradition, as soon as an idea is confined to the printed page, an interpreter is required to unlock it. The Indian musician requires no intermediary."

Having taught for two years in the high school, Huriee now began to save money to visit India. She finally arrived here in November 1971, only a few weeks before the Bangladesh war. "I remember the blackouts in Banaras when we first reached there," Huriee says. "The first concert I attended was a violin recital by Dr. N. Rajam. As it turned out, she is my guruji's guru-behan. She too is a disciple of Pt. Onkarnath Thakur. So that's how my training started and I began to learn

music. At first I had a mind to stay in India for one year, but I stayed on for two."

What was it about Hindustani music which cast such a spell on her? Huriee believes it is the spiritual quality of the music. Having grown up on church music-Gregorian chants-she was attracted to the drone of the tanpura. "In the West, we get this drone from bagpipes and some bits of folk music. This commonality attracted me a great deal," she says. "In fact, when guruji dwells on sa... or when some great singer sings a particular note, you feel as if all the worries and sorrows have left you. You are completely immersed in the swara. It touches your mind and your heart. The tabla is an almost melodic instrument, the pressure of the player's hand altering the tension of the skin and therefore the pitch. The player can slide between notes with precision, accenting the rhythm with inflections of pitch, attack and volume."

Huriee believes one learns music if you are destined to. "One factor that was important in my learning Indian music was that you can learn it without notation. But from the point of view of rasa as well, I liked it very much. Now so many years have gone by, it's difficult to say when I began my music journey."

It is a journey that keeps bringing her back to India. As a matter of fact, the bond is stronger than ever, a gentle but

steady tug of the spirit that brings her back to learn more ...and more. When in the United States, Huriee teaches Indian classical music at Wesleyan University while working on her PhD thesis. She has two children; a son, Ashish, who is 14 years old, and a daughter, Maya Bhairavi, whom she adopted in India.

Both play the violin, though in the Western style. She however regrets the fact that working on her PhD does not allow her as much time for riyaz, as she would like to. It's a constant struggle between her academic involvements and the artistic urge to sing. "One needs a lot of concentration and practice. At least four to five hours a day for at least four to five years," she says. "Still I do have my favorite ragas although there is so much more that guruji has yet to impart to me.

"Here's an interesting bit, I must tell you. When I started learning, I did not like Yaman at all. I liked Malkauns and Vrindavani Saarang very much, which I learned from my first guru. It later dawned on me that ragas which have major intervals sound strange to Western listeners sometimes because their ears are used to ordinary shudh swara in keeping with harmony. Similarly, I did not find anything special in Durga and Bhopali-initially.

They are not Bhairavi, Gujari Todi and Mian Malhar, which have a lot of rasa.

There is komal swara in them like in Bheempalasi. But in 1983 guruji started teaching me Bhopali. When he started the rendition, it was very sober. I wondered, at first, how shudh swara would help. We need a bit of rishada, teevra ma and komal gandhar. But when he renders this raga, it is a marvel. Nothing to beat it. I don't want to listen to anything else."

As any Hindustani vocalist, Huriee understands the poetic element of a composition. You can enjoy rasa through swara only, but I feel that verses are like receptacles of rasa. You can go on filling them as much as you want. It is always so moving.

Take Padam Manjari. It makes my eyes moist each time I hear it. It is this quality of music to move one to the very soul that draws me back to India, to Banaras, to the sounds and chants of India's music. It is my destiny."

0

BAR CODES

continued from page 9

Bar codes prevent consumer "sticker shock"-seeing the high cost of a product staring them in the face as they're about to load it onto the checkout-counter conveyor belt, then tossing it aside at the last second. proving business efficiencies, with any consumer benefit a fortuitous by-product," Stephen Brown wrote in Revolution at the Checkout Counter, his comprehensive insider's account of the UPC. Small business benefits had been just as hazy.

"Independent guys over the years beat the chains because they were their own computer," explains Lawrence Russell, the Symbol Selection Committee consultant. "The really successful independents, as a natural part of business, were asking people what they wanted." The bar code gave national chains a similar edge. Every time a can of peeled tomatoes is scanned in a Safeway supermarket, for instance, it's instantly logged into a massive database that can track the purchasing habits of customers by region, city, neighborhood or particular checkout stand. The bar-code-generated register tape may even spit out a discount coupon for a competitor's brand or a news flash about this week's special on sweet potatoes, to accompany your already-purchased ham.

rB

iven rampant inflation, the early '70s beef boycott and the general atmosphere of social struggle lingering from the Vietnam War, Foreman cannot comprehend the industry's lack of foresight. "They were making this change in an era of protest," she says. "There was a demonstration about everything in those days! You had an industry that was full of middle-aged men and consumer groups full of younger women who were tasting the first fruits of a new wave offeminism."

One of the industry proposals was to hand out grease pencils so shoppers could mark prices on groceries before throwing them in the basket.

"I thought that was arrogance in the extreme," says Foreman. "'We're going to change our way of doing business without really asking your opinion. And if you don't like it, here's a grease pencil so you can do the work yourselves.'"

A 1979 study conducted by two Marquette University marketing professors revealed the obvious-that "shoppers at a store with item prices removed had a lower level of short-term awareness than shoppers at a store with marked item prices." More recently, the California Public Interest Research Group, drawing upon 1996 statistics from that state's food and drug administration, claimed that, absent item pricing, consumers were overcharged as much as $250 million a year due to database input errors. But neither of these critical studies tackled the more elusive issue of how many thousands of additional items are now being sold each day because consumers no longer have the luxury of suffering what was once called "sticker shock"-seeing the high cost of a product staring them in the face as they're about to load it onto the checkout-counter conveyor belt, then tossing it aside at the last second.

The red glow of an omnidirectional, or "starburst, " laser scanner reads the price and other product data encripted in the bar code on this 12-ounce can of Campbell's soup.

The supermarket industry forestalled some legislation to preserve price stickers through vigorous lobbying and educational visits to supermarkets with elected officials. California, however, along with some 20 other states, did pass compulsory item-pricing legislation in the late 1970s. But in California, for example, fines range only from $25 to $500, and the law has been so universally flouted that only a public-policy advocate would know it exists. In fact, the whole issue of item pricing has been obscured as new generations of consumers have entered the economy with few memories of grocery price stickers. Other bar-code detractors would emerge-privacy advocates concerned about the gathering and cross-referencing of a consumer's scanned data and Internet revelationists, who interpret an incipient human bar code as the mark of the beast. None, however, have managed to muster widespread concern.

Not 18 years after Phil Donahue introduced his audience to an unknown terror, the bar code would become so much a part of daily commerce that President Bush, bewildered by a next-generation scanner during a 1992 grocers convention, would appear hopelessly out of touch with the everyday American consumer.

Now, even the wholesale reshaping of the supermarket has become a distant memory. From an average of I, I00 square meters in the early '70s, the supermarket has grown to 2,300 square meters. Once typically stocked with 4,000 or 5,000 grocery items, it is currently able to offer as many as 25,000, because of the bar code's tight inventory control.

Carol Foreman, who now lobbies for progressive interest

groups as well as for firms such as Procter & Gamble, says that "it's been years since I've run into anyone still grumpy" about sticker removal. "I myself like my life to be just as easy as it can be, thank you very much." For price comparisons, she can rely on her bar-code-generated checkout slip, which contains the brand name, size and cost for each and every item. She also admires the bar code's ability to keep track of a once-unmanageable inventory and the supermarkets' ability to reorder accordingly.

II

ven in this bland commercial stretch of Dayton, Ohio, there are far more alluring attractions than the longtime headquarters of the nonprofit Uniform Code Council. Until last December, this squat one-story tan building was where applications for every nationally recognized UPC in America would be sent; where they would be processed, assigned and their specifications dispatched; where company questions or complaints about bar codes could be asked and answered.

Turn onto local route 725, and you are soon reminded of the mass retail climate that has bloomed so vigorously through the leveraging of the bar code. You pass Comp-USA, TJ MAXX, Rite Aid, Babies "R" Us, Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, all overstuffed with millions of consumer goods whose scannable icons can trace their genesis back to that single unimpressive building.

As of last winter, the UCC headquarters was employing only 67 Ohioans, a number that would seem immodest given the organization's original vision. Adhering to the provincial goals of the supermarket industry, the first head of the UCC was hired with the understanding that he would reduce his hours by 20 percent each year for five years, until he had worked himself out of a job.

Afterward, his lone assistant would stay on to allot five-number prefixes for every manufacturer who cared to have one, leaving manufacturers to assign additional numbers for various products and sizes on their own.

A talk with current UCC President Tom Rittenhouse reveals a grand departure from that provincial vision. "In our business," Rittenhouse says, "if you're not global, one has to question how long you can survive, because supply-chain management, including electronic commerce, is all global." In 2005, in concert with international numbering associations, Rittenhouse will preside over the implementation of EAN-13, which will harmonize the UPC with the

codes of Europe and the rest of the world. In order to better orient the uec toward international commerce, Rittenhouse has recently moved his corporate offices just outside Princeton, New Jersey, leaving only the customer service staff in Dayton.

While the UCC was a relatively late convert to global economics, the organization can take early credit for a retail transformation almost as extraordinary-the elevation of speed to a sales tool as powerful as reduced prices or boundless variety.

The automated checkout counter preceded pay-atthe-pump gasoline, ATM banking, Internet billing and other innovations that have hastened the pace of mass commerce. "The time-starved consumer," says Rittenhouse, "has found efficient ways to get the job done in record time. And speed is a major consideration."

The compulsion for ever-greater speed has spurred attempts at further retail automation. Under South Africa's pie-in-the-sky Supertag system, a cart full of groceries is merely shoved through an electronic tunnel, and the customer is checked out.

The items are identified through radio frequencies, not laser-scannable icons. Via these same radio frequencies, some New York City and Washington, D.C., commuters are having tolls charged to their credit cards without even braking at the booth.

Italian motorists are sped along by a similar system. In a mega-bookstore scenario, a clerk can roam the aisles with an RF device and locate an errant copy of Charlotte 50 Web that has somehow found its way into the travel section.

Bar-code acceleration has already started to spread from retail to raw materials. "In the ideal world," says Kevin Sharp, executive editor of JD Systems magazine, "as soon as you've bought a pair of green Levi's from Wal-Mart, not only is Wal-Mart going to order another pair, but their marketing department will know that green, which last year didn't sell for squat, is going to be big this year." Instantaneously, the retailer notifies Levi Strauss to start shipping more green pants and fewer purple ones. The manufacturer notifies its fabric supplier to step up production on green bolts; the fabric supplier orders its dye company to stop churning out purple in favor of green; and Wal-Mart gets stuck with fewer purple pants on its winter-clearance rack.

An array of special-use codes, including the Mini Code (top)-which uses a matrix symbology to get a lot of information into a velY small space-and the 3-D! code (thirdfrom top), designed for curved, shiny or irregular surfaces.

Speed is now a sales tool as powerful as reduced prices or boundless variety. The automated checkout counter helped hasten the pace of mass commerce.

Similarly, an expanded bar code on a package of chopped meat will not only contain the weight and price, but will identify the plant that processed this pound of ground round and the time period in which it was produced, so that if the package proves to be tainted, the manufacturer won't have to recall every package from every plant.

The Sunbelt supermarket chain Winn-Dixie has installed selfcheckout lanes in several states. Built by Productivity Solutions, Inc., the system, originally called the CheckRobot, allows consumers to scan their own groceries without the assistance of a retail clerk. The manufacturer predicts a cost savings of20 to 40 hours of paid labor a week per checkout stand. Since all items must pass through a security module, any shopper trying to put one over on the system will have his items automatically kicked back for rescanning. "If you scan in a lemon and switch it for a T-bone steak," says Winn-Dixie PR Director Mickey Clerc, "it'll know."

II

or the 1997 Christmas season, Toys "R" Us brought the concept of laser-driven self-service to some of its youngest customers. With parental consent and help, children were able to create a kind of high-tech letter to Santa by roaming the aisles and pointing handheld scanners at Barbies, baseball bats and bicycles. Toys "R" Us then generated personal computerized wish lists that could be accessed at any of their stores by Grandma, Uncle Bert or Mr. Claus.

In this climate of self-service, automation and speed, a lack of human contact can be preferable even during some oflife's most intimate retail experiences. At the national discount store Target, engaged couples and expectant mothers line up at the customer service desk; there, they can register for Club Wedd. the company's bar-code-driven bridal registry-which offers a scanner gun to be carried down the aisle in advance of flowers-or for its Lullaby Club, a computer-driven registry for new arrivals.

Still quite mobile in her maternity overalls, Christine Corona, 7Yz months pregnant, walks up to the Club Wedd/Lullaby Club kiosk. Although she has already registered for her baby shower, Corona, a 20-year-old medical-billing associate, has dropped by a Los Angeles Target this Sunday afternoon to revise her list.

Aided by a computer-generated voice and a touch screen, she prints out her personalized registration sheet. Accompanied by Nichol Granero, the baby's godmother-to-be, Corona checks out an LRT ETR Spectrum I Laser Radio Terminal, which looks like a sci-fi handgun with a calculator grafted on top. Locating a particular infant swing, Granero points the handheld terminal at the bar code on the shelf, but Corona knows better. "Vou have to scan the box," she explains, whipping around the cardboard container, finding the oversize icon and firing her weapon at it.

An Elmo dribble cup, a teddy bear and a pair of booties are scattered about the carpet of the baby aisles, but Corona navigates easily amidst the merchandise, unleashing her laser on a baby Bugs

Bunny washmit, burp-free bottles and an Honors Baby Terry Cloth Changing Table-in all, a blinding 43 items in only 15 minutes.

On a past excursion, she explains, she accidentally pulled the trigger for the Diaper Genie twice, but even that didn't require outside sales help. With a little reverse programming and a third blast of the laser, she managed to excise the excess Genie herself.

Born into laser-scannable swaddling clothes, Baby Garcia Corona will in time shop and work in an environment ever more radically remade by the bar code. Ifshe's late for the office, she won't need to fumble for her ID; a radio-frequency badge somewhere in her purse will produce a copy of her photo 10 on the guard's terminal. Via a constellation of radio-frequency tags deployed on her windshield, she will not only glide through every tollbooth from New York to Miami, but will also fill up on gas and drive-through fast food without once digging into her wallet. Back home, she might slide the bar code on her frozen potpie past the scanner on her microwave oven, which will download the proper cooking and temperature settings from a nationwide database. If that potpie has become part of a product recall, her oven-bells ringing and LCD f1ashingcould alert her to the hazard.

What she gains in speed and efficiency, however, she will lose in privacy. To save 30 cents on a jar of pickles, Garcia Corona will have to present her supermarket club card at the register, divulging all her purchases to the grocer's database. Her personal file-including a preference for too much hamburger and too little fish, too much soda and not enough fruit juice-could then be sold to a health insurer contemplating her as a policy risk. Her chain bookstore will record for posterity every book or magazine she buys there; her CD outlet will know her penchant for Mozart or acid rock. These customer databases, and a hundred others, will harbor potentially rich veins of information that could be tapped by direct-mail houses, telephone solicitors or even a persistent prosecutor.

But none of these coming intrusions are palpable as Christine Corona navigates her way through Target, scanning bibs and bottles for her baby. In fact, she is grateful for the seeming freedom of self-registration.

She's glad that no Target clerk is padding at her heels, eavesdropping on her personal conversation, trying to direct her attention to an elaborate stroller or a particularly gaudy rattle.

The bar code appears to liberate the expectant mother from all this meddling, just as it has transported her to a realm of such speed and self-sufficiency that she remains an island of consumer calm within the chaos of this overcrowded megastore. "You don't feel like they're watching over you," Corona says. "They give me the gun. They tell me to go, and they let me be free." D About the Author: Ed Leibowitz is a Los Angeles-based writer lVorking on a book about the bar code.

Feelance

PROGTO THE PEOPLE iguel de Icaza spends his days as a computer-network administrator at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City.

Watching over the network, he says, "gives me a lot of spare time"-time he spends answering e-mail and working on "fun little projects." His current spare-time computer activity, he thinks, is "really great." De Icaza is coordinating the GNOME project, a volunteer effort to develop a computer desk-

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Perhaps you are see1cingJonKatis series of articles related to recent events in Colorado. These articles include VOIcesfrom the HellmouU Mote Stones from the Hellmouth or The Price orEeing Dill'etent, With all the hype about the recent MindCraft LinuxlNT benchmarks, you might be interested in reading ESR's Response to the Mindctaf't.

Fiasco

top-a mouse-and-windows interfacethat will outdo the various incarnations of Windows that form the foundation of the Microsoft empire.

The GNOME desktop, its programmers say, will be faster, more powerful and less likely to crash than anything from Redmond, Washington. "It's a radical step forward in computer design," says Larry Mc Voy, a former Sun Microsystems programmer who now runs a networking startup in San Francisco called BitMover, "the coolest, whizziest thing out there."

And GNOME will be free: downloadable from the Internet without charge.

The notion of a small band of unpaid part-timers challenging one of the world's most dominant corporations may seem absurd, but the GNOME project intends to do exactly that. "They have decided to take the desktop back from Microsoft," says Eric S. Raymond, a free-software evangelist who is editor of The New Hacker's Dictionary. In his view, there is a good chance that the project could succeed. "It's not at all impossible," Raymond says, "that GNOME could push the software world into a dramatically different-and better-place."

Why would GNOME succeed where bigger, richer outfits-Apple, most prominently-failed?

Two reasons, according to its backers. First, GNOME is not starting alone. It is designed to work with an operating system called Linux ("LINN-uks"). Renowned for its speed, reliability and efficiency, Linux runs on as

many as 10 million computer systems around the world, ranging from small, geek-oriented networks at Internet-service providers and university computer labs to huge outfits like Wells Fargo and the U.S. Postal Service. With a user base growing at an estimated rate of 40 percent per year, Linux is the sole non-Microsoft operating system that is expanding its market share.

Although more than 20 small companies now sell computers preloaded with Linux, the system is rarely found in homes because its reputation for technical excellence is matched by its reputation for user-unfriendliness. Indeed, one standard installation guide begins by admitting that Linux is "one of the most complex and utterly intimidating systems ever written," because users must type runic commands like "awk," "grep" and "mount -t iso9660/dev/cdrom/mnt."

By providing a simple, intuitive point-and-click interface, "GNOME will make it possible for my wife, my mother and my grandfather to use Linux," says Michael Fulbright, a project member at Red Hat Advanced Development Laboratories, a corporatesponsored Linux think tank in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. "Finally, nongeeks will get to use something that geeks take for granted: software that works right." And once people see what it's like to use good software, Linux partisans argue, they will never go back to Windows.

The second, larger reason that GNOME could succeed is that, like Linux, it is a product of what is known as the "free-software" or "open-source" movement.

Linux is a hot topic on the Net, and one of Not only can GNOME be the best information sources about it is obtained free of charge, Slashdot, subtitled "News for Nerds. Stuff but its source code-the underlying instructions that Matters." Created by Rob MaIda, alias that most software firms "Commander Taco," who is a 22-year-old regard as their crown jewnerd himself, Slashdot gives a roundup els-will be available for of news, gossip and opinion about Linux. anyone to copy and modiIt profiles the heroes of the anti-Microsoft fy. By liberating the source code from the control of a movement and is an entertaining forum for single company, projects geeks. Articles and techie commentary gives like GNOME can harness an accurate picture of the geek underground. the contributions of thousands of programmers.

Because not even giant Microsoft can surpass the united talent of the whole world, free-software partisans argue, opensource software will always outstrip the competition.

"Produce something better and people will eventually notice," says Bruce Perens, a free-software programmer who works at Pixar Animation Studios in Richmond, California, "GNOME will be one ticket to the future."

In Mexico City, de Icaza describes the project in less grandiose terms. "GNOME will be fun," he says. "A really good hack."

liberated Code If GNOME, Linux and the free-software movement had a single beginning, it was the day in 1979 when Xerox donated one of the first laser printers to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT. The machine crashed a lot, inducing AI Lab programmer Richard Stallman to ask Xerox for the code that controlled the printer. Stallman planned to modify the program to respond to breakdowns by flashing a warning on the screen of everyone who was waiting for a printout-that is, everyone who had an incentive to fix the printer right away. In this way, the printer would always be quickly set right.

To make this modification, though, Stallman needed Xerox to give him the source code for the printer program. For him, this was an unexceptional request. In the freewheeling academic atmosphere of the AI Lab, programmers worked communally, constantly borrowing and tinkering with one another's code. Moreover, Xerox had given Stallman the source code for an earlier, equally trouble-prone printer. This time, however, Xerox refused-the company had copyrighted the source code.

Stallman was irate: Copyright was preventing him from improving a program.

"Xerox was hoarding software," he says.

"They were violating the Golden Rule."

Xerox was not alone. As software became big business, Silicon Valley lured away many of the AI Lab's best and brightest.

When these programmers worked for software companies, Stallman discovered, their code was proprietary-it

couldn't be shared and built upon.

Copyright, the idealistic Stallman slowly concluded, was destroying the programming community.

In 1984, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation. Its chief goal was to develop an improved operating system that looked like, but did not use the source code of, Unix-the most common operating system on big computer networks.

Invented in 1969 by two researchers at Bell Labs, Unix is now available in a dozen different versions from companies like IBM, Compaq and Sun Microsystems. Stallman called his version GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." To avoid "horrible confusion," he pronounced it "guh-new." In a tip of the hat to Stallman, GNOME, which stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is pronounced "guh-nome."

The challenge of GNU was enormous.

An operating system defines what services programs can ask of a computer (adding two numbers, moving information onto a hard disk, and so on) and directs requests for those services to the hardware (keyboard, monitor, microprocessors and so on). But the system is useless without hundreds of subsidiary programs to perform specific tasks such as managing windows and communicating with printers and other peripherals. To produce a functional system, the GNU project had to create all these programs.

"It's like building a jet plane from scratch in your garage," says Perens. "People thought it was impossible. And it probably would have been, if anyone less extraordinarily talented than Richard was in charge."

Based at MIT, the GNU Project was Geek Heaven-dim lights, bright monitors, late hours, Chinese takeout. At the center was the bearded, long-haired Stallman, pounding code late into the night and sleeping during the day on a cot in the offices. Every line he wrote was "copylefted"-users could freely change the software, as long as they didn't prohibit others from doing the same to their modifications. "Copyleft," Stallman says, "uses the tools of the software hoarders against them."

By the early 1990s, though, the GNU project was foundering. It had created scores of programs that were used all over the world-but had not produced the heart, or "kernel," of the GNU operating system. Part of the reason was that Stallman had chosen not to duplicate the tried and true Unix kernel but to base the GNU system on an advanced, experimental kernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon University. The only programmer ever to receive a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, Stallman was one of the few people in the world up to the task of developing a radically new kernel-and possibly the only one who could think of doing it almost single-handedly.

But then his hands, weary from typing so much code, gave out. For years pain prevented him from serious work at a keyboard, and his work on the kernel stopped.

Stallman tried to continue by employing MIT students as transcribers. Recalls Perens: "He would treat them literally as typewriters, saying 'carriage return' and 'space' and 'tab,' while he dictated what he saw in his head." Invariably these human typewriters quit after a short time, worn down by hours of robotically transmitting computer code.

Nobody stepped in to replace the sidelined Stallman. One reason, says Perens, was political. "Richard is the last of the pinkos. And people just didn't want to be associated with somebody whose ideas are fundamentally antagonistic to business."

The linle Operating System that Could Enter Linus Torvalds. A 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Helsinki in 199 I, Torvalds was far from an expert programmer-"I didn't even know what I didn't know," he says. But he knew Unix well enough to regard Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system as a mess-the digital equivalent of being forced to write with a leaky pen. Still, Torvalds wanted to program, and he got so sick of the long lines at the campus computer center that he bought a PC. The machine-a 386 with four megabytes of memory-was too small to run Unix. But

he still refused to subject himself to bad software. Ignoring DOS, Torvalds mashed together chunks of code from his instructors' and his own work.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Torvalds ended up with something like a Unix kernel. Because the GNU project had created the necessary subsidiary programs, he tweaked the kernel to fit them. Lo and behold, he had backed himself into creating a complete operating system. For the first time, the flexibility, stability and power of Unix were available on a small computer. Torvalds called his operating system "Freax." His friends thought the name was dumb and changed it to Linux.

On a personal level, Stallman and Torvalds are opposites. Stallman is provocateur with cheerfully irregular habits-a nocturnal bachelor who bites off the split ends in his long hair as he proposes the idea of a national campaign to mock Bill Gates. Torvalds is polite, softspoken and personally tidy-a married man with a regular job. But the pair share one important attitude: antipathy to software copyright. Torvalds covered Linux with Stallman's "copy left" and posted it online for anyone to download; when people added improvements, he put them, too, on the Net. Begun in 1991 as an Intel-only operating system with a single user (Torvalds), Linux had been modified by 1995 to run on machines from Digital and Hewlett-Packard and had half a million users, many in developing nations.

"Everything came together at the right time," says John Hall, a Linux maven who is a technical marketing manager for Compaq. "The price of PCs dropped and their power went up, so people in poor countries could maybe afford 486s and 386s that were halfway serious computers." This new wave of geeks wanted to try their hands at cutting-edge computer science. With few outlets in the developing world for their talents, they seized on the opportunity to participate in the development of Linux through the Internet.

"Suddenly," Hall says, "there was the possibility that not all of computer science would come out of Redmond, Washington."

The story of GNOME project leader

Miguel de Icaza illustrates the point.

Discovering the GNU project at the age of 18 in 1991 as an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, de Icaza quickly began working on its file manager program. "I wanted to give them something back because the software was so good," he says. Soon came Linux, which he coupled with GNU software and adapted to the Sun SPARC workstation. "Once I started contributing," de Icaza recalls, "people started sending me improvements and bug fixes and new features." No one cared that de Icaza wasn't American or that he hadn't finished college. (No one, that is, except the U.S. Government, which refused him a working visa when Cobalt Networks, a Mountain View, California, computer company, tried to hire him.)

Hundreds of programmers like de Icaza worked on Linux, adding utilities, fixing bugs, writing manuals, adding capabilities and porting it to different computer systems. New versions poured out at an astonishing rate-sometimes more than one a week. Each would be downloaded and worked on by people around the globe. Overwhelmed by the runaway project, Torvalds restricted himself to supervising the kernel. People interested in working on other pieces organized themselves, Andy-Hardy style: Hey, kids, let's make it page to disk. In the end, Torvalds says, "less than 5 percent" of the code is his. (He now works for Transmeta, an ultrasecretive Silicon Valley chip-design company. What is Transmeta? "We do stuff," Torvalds says, deadpan. "That is the official company line.")

To free-software advocate Raymond, the novel development of Linux presaged a sea change in software. In a widely read essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," he argued that software before Linux always had been produced in a "cathedral," by an isolated team of programmers, who worked on the code until releasing a final, finished version.

Linux, on the other hand, was assembled in a "bazaar," by a cacophonous scatter of independent programmers. And Linux was never finished. Ordinary users work with particularly successful "snapshots"

of the operating system, but programmers keep fiddling with it as long as they see something to add or fix. (Raymond has put the essay on the Web, at http://sagan.earth space. net/ -esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/.)

Writing software in a bazaar is easier, more efficient and more likely to be successful, Raymond believes. Because the source code is open to all, he says, "we very seldom have to solve the same problem twice." Commercial software developers, by contrast, are often forced to reinvent'the wheel-"an almost criminal waste of resources." When one company

ed or fixed quickly, because the source code is available to all. In a test of software reliability published in May 1998, seven computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin concluded, to their surprise, that GNU and Linux programs were "noticeably better" than their proprietary equivalents.

Open-source boosters say that Linuxl GNU has advantages for users, too--and especially businesses. Instead of being forced to accept the features that big vendors like Microsoft choose to make available, corporate information-systems departments can create software that exact-

The pNU Project was Geek Heaven-dim lights, bright monitors, late hours, Chinese takeout. At the center was the bearded, long-haired Stallman, pounding code late into the night ~d sleeping during the day on a cot in the offices.

invents a way to e-mail data from a program directly, for example, competitors can't build on the work and improve it.

Instead they must start from scratch and figure out a completely different way to do the same thing. The result, open-source devotees argue, is not healthy competition that produces incremental improvements, but a set of incompatible products that don't work very well.

In addition, open-source software can be tested more thoroughly. Even big companies typically field-test their operating systems only with a few dozen users, according to Compaq Marketing Manager Hall, who worked on operating systems for Digital-a far cry from the thousands who put each Linux version through the wringer.

Moreover, as Torvalds has argued, open-source programmers don't have to worry that "fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug." If Microsoft changes Windows 98, it can't easily peek into the source code of Quicken or WordPerfect to see what will happen; nor can independent hackers readily post a correction. By contrast, bugs in free programs can be avoid-

ly fits their companies' needs. Partly because of its easy customizability, free software is spreading into the business world (although some companies remain leery enough of the idea that systems administrators conceal it from management). Sega uses Linux to develop video games; Digital Domain, the James Cameron company, used it to produce digital special effects for Titanic. The U.S. Postal Service routes letters with RAF Mail character-recognition software, a commercial program that runs on Linux. Netscape and Intel announced in September that they were investing in Red Hat, the largest commercial Linux distributor.

But Linux has been almost shut out of one large arena: the consumer market. As long as it remains triumphantly nonintuitive-"a program for hackers by a hacker," as Torvalds puts it-its use would be confined to geeks. Which, to some Linux partisans, was not enough.

World Domination;Âť The obvious way to popularize Linux is to give it a point-and-click desktop akin to that of the Macintosh and Windows. Such a move, however, was of little interest to

the type of person who developed Linux.

Most programmers like typing on a command line because it lets them control the machine more precisely than they can by clicking on a mouse.

Torvalds himself says he doesn't care much about "nice graphical interfaces."

Indeed, at first he wasn't sure that Linux would function well with one. But Torvalds ultimately welcomed Miguel de Icaza's announcement in August 1997 of the GNOME project: an attempt to put together a graphical user interface. "I joke a lot about Linux taking over the world

version of Windows. On the other hand, "we don't have to go through the contortions they do," says Todd Graham Lewis, keeper of the frequently-asked-question file for GNOME. "One hour of work on Windows 98 means 15 minutes of working on functionality, and 45 minutes of checking on DOS compatibility, Windows 3.1 compatibility, and Windows 95 compatibility. One hour of work on GNOME is one hour of functionality." Partly for this reason, the project has moved quickly; version 1.0 may be available at www.gnome.org as early as this year.

Proponents say GNOME will deliver a more logical interface. Instead of scattering icons around the desktop to be covered up by windows, users can drag documents onto the "panel"-the GNOME version of the taskbar.

and how Microsoft should be afraid," says Torvalds, who has recently conducted "World Domination 101" seminars at Linux conventions. "But with something that makes it easy for the home usermaybe it just might happen."

Proponents of GNOME faced several obstacles. First, a Linux desktop project already existed. Based in Germany and called the K Desktop Environment (KDE), it was under heavy attack within the open-source community. In a perfect example of the arcane squabbling endemic to passionately idealistic enterprises, the open-source community battled over whether the KDE desktop was fatally tainted because it included code from a Norwegian company, Troll Technology, that" was not completely nonproprietary.

The short answer is: probably. Which was one reason de Icaza, and then much of the Linux community, shifted attention to GNOME. Within a year of the project's inception, more than 150 people were developing GNOME, about 20 of them full-time. Red Hat hired seven full-time programmers to work on it. This crew is, of course, infinitesimal compared to the battalions of programmers laboring to produce each new

Describing the result isn't easy, because the project is creating a desktop that users can configure themselves-in other words, one with no standard appearance.

"Windows has a set of colors and fonts you can change," says Carsten Haitzler, a GNOME programmer at Red Hat. "But that's all you can do. We want you to be able to customize everything from the ground up."

Users who don't want to tinker with the desktop can choose among scores of prefab "themes"-although most of the current themes, which have been produced by young male programmers, resemble the covers of science-fiction novels.

"People say my desktop looks like something out of Babylon 5," Haitzler says proudly.

The GNOME project aims to emulate what is best about existing interfaces.

"Microsoft did some things very well, and we're trying to learn from them," de Icaza says. At the same time, the project seeks to avoid some of Windows' annoying design peculiarities. GNOME users, de Icaza promises flatly, will not tum off their computers by clicking a button labeled "Start." Nor will they have to struggle with the Windows taskbar. To

bring a program up on the screen, Windows users click once on a taskbar button but, confusingly, must usually click twice on a tray icon.

GNOME, de Icaza says, will deliver a more logical interface. Instead of scattering icons around the desktop, where they are covered up by windows, users can drag documents onto the "panel"-the GNOME version of the taskbar. Multiple panels can be kept open in different places on the screen. Because the panels can change appearance-one Doom-influenced theme has a panel made from a line of skulls with icons in their yawning mouths-GNOME, McVoy says, is "serious eye candy."

Eye candy won't be enough to attract the novices if they can't do anything, though. One of Linux's most serious weaknesses is the relative paucity of business and home software available to run with the operating system. Few officesuite and game companies offer products that run under Linux. Two exceptions are id Software, which has Linux versions of the popular games Quake and Doom, and Corel, which has come out with WordPerfect for Linux and has promised to create Linux versions of the rest of its office suite. To make up the gap, both GNOME and KDE have launched freesoftware projects to create word processors and spreadsheets.

Microsoft, watching closely, is already proposing measures to counter Linux. But Lewis points out that open-source software has one undeniable competitive edge. "Microsoft kills its rivals by starving them of revenue," he says. "But they can't kill us that way, because we don't have any revenue. The free software movement is like Night of the Living Dead-we'll keep coming at them."

Adds Raymond: "There's a Gandhi quote Linux hackers love: 'First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.'"

D

About the Author: Charles C. Mann is a Massachusetts-based contributing editor at Atlantic Monthly and Science. He is the author of Noah's Choice, a book about the science of biodiversity.

books or wedding rings that might damage the fragile tiles below.

Kerr hunkers down to my left and crawls through a playhouse-size aluminum entry way, emerging onto a catwalk with a nice view of Columbia's spacious payload bay. He grasps a lab notebook and a sampling kit, including a chopstick, a bamboo skewer and an orange stick. He directs my attention to a pair of tiny dark craters, each about twice the size of a sharp pencil tip, bored into a white metal frame that holds up one of the spacecraft's antennas. Kerr uses a bamboo

says. During a mission in 1995, Columbia took a hit in a payload door that made a gash almost an inch across. If that piece had crossed into the payload bay and punched a big enough hole in the cooling system there, Houston controllers would have ordered the ship back to Earth immediately. One reason it didn't hit at a bad spot was that the NASA debris squad had predicted the risk beforehand, based on earlier shuttle flights, and suggested keeping one payload door partially closed to help shield the payload bay. Bernhard says that, from the metals found in the crater, the culprit on that mission was probably a fragment of circuit board. Where it came from nobody could say, but Science writers of the 1950s an explosion is likely. Space vividly described the risks has seen its share of silent to future spacefarers from blasts, some of them quite recently; in 1996 a Pegasus rocky micrometeoroids. rocket exploded and proBut near Earth, artificial pelled into orbit at least 700 meteoroids now pose a greater pieces more than four inches across. risk than the natural stuff.

Science writers of the 1950s vividly described the risks to future spacefarers stick and tape to gather up the smoky from rocky micro meteoroids near Earth, residue from each of the craters. He wraps but the prognosticators missed the boat on up the tape and each stick to preserve the what has turned out as a bigger deal, safesoot for microscopic scrutiny. ty-wise. Near Earth, artificial meteoroids A shout comes from a platform one level now pose a greater risk than the natural beneath us: others on the NASA debris stuff. Over the decades humanity has gone team have found another impact crater, this Saturn one better by putting up not just a time on the right payload door. As we head ring but a spherical shell of glittery down, I learn that NASA has logged 106 objects around the planet. It's a layer of significant hits on Columbia from this sin- camera lens caps, spent rocket boosters, gle mission, most of them caused by bolts, nuts, buckets of garbage, and countunwanted man-made particles in orbit. (On less flecks of dislodged paint and particles most missions, minor damage means that of solid fuel from booster rockets. at least one outer layer of window glass is Even full-sized spacecraft that can be replaced.) Bernhard is crouched under the tracked reliably with radar have begun to open door, craning awkwardly to look cross paths, causing encounters that while straight overhead at the white insulated rare are positively alarming. During his surface with a magnifying glass. He sug- four-month stay on the Mir space station, gests I take a look. Through the tear I see U.S. astronaut Mike Foale received three goldish-brown felt that's been singed by warnings of approaching space traffic. In the impact; on the white surface of the door the last incident, an obsolete American smoky soot trails off one side. satellite called MSTI-2 passed less than a These particular craters look pretty thousand meters from Mir. At the request small to me, and I ask Bernhard if tiny but of Russian controllers, Foale interrupted fast particles mean much. Yes, indeed, he his exercise-bike workout to join the cos-

monauts in the Soyuz (a Russian spacecraft that can return the cosmonauts to Earth) for a few minutes as a safety measure in case Mir was punctured. "We always looked outside [during the close passes] to spot them and it was inevitably futile," he says now. "Imagine trying to see a small dot 10 kilometers away over your left shoulder, and a second later it's right next to you, and another second later it's ] 0 kilometers over your right shoulder." Much more space traffic is on the way, including hundreds of satellites that are intended to provide portable telephone and Internet access by radio link sometime in the next 10 years.

A small but motivated corps around the world tries to sort out the dizzying whirl and figure ways to limit damage from the inevitable hits. They talk of stopping the "silver bullet," the piece that someday will take aim directly at a spacecraft's vital parts, or the astronauts inside. A silver bullet is small enough to escape radar surveillance but big enough to destroy.

"There is a possibility that you could be hit by one of those silver bullets on a bad day," Kerr says. "On that day you want to do the best you can to shield the vehicle."

Most spacecraft are launched in a generally eastward direction. They do not travel due east, however, staying over the same line of latitude. Some are aimed well north of the equator, and some are in polar orbit, perpendicular to the equator. A spacecraft can not only be broadsided, it can come close to a head-on collision, with each party traveling at 27,000 kilometers per hour.

Only imperfect means of tracking are in place now, and there's very little control.

Orbiting objects are entirely different from airliners that stay up only a few hours and obey air traffic controllers. Of the 100,000-plus objects posing a collision danger, fewer than 1 percent are satellites that can be moved around. The rest-a crowd of functioning and dead satellites and mostly bits of wreckagecannot. Their orbits change in tiny but perverse increments from day to day under the influence of the gravitational pull of the Moon and Earth's mountain ranges (whose extra mass adds to Earth's

gravitational pull), solar winds that warp the upper atmosphere and many other vexations. All these combine to keep space traffic from following precise and predictable paths.

Low orbits are self-cleaning because the smaller pieces of debris are dragged down by wisps of air and burn up in the atmosphere: but satellites in orbits above 640 kilometers or so can have a very long lease. The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite in 1958. It's still there, and due to reenter our atmosphere in about 600 years. A high-flying satellite launched today will still be circling Earth

NASA image of a projectile recovered from impact damage of the STS-73 Space Shuttle Columbia launched in October 1995 reveals typical orbital debris. Analysis found remnants of "electrical circuit board type components" in the 17 mm. x 11 mm. hole.

a million years from now unless somebody sweeps up the neighborhood.

The chances of a collision with space debris are small, considering the cloud of stuff that's up there, but they are real. All launches-commercial, NASA and of course military-are coordinated by the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs. When calculations show that collision with a piece of space debris is possible, the danger is avoided by closing the launch window by as little as one minute.

(In that time, an object orbiting at 27,000 kilometers per hour will have moved 455 kilometers.)

The unmanned Cassini mission to Saturn received special care because the spacecraft carried 32 kilograms of pluto-

nium. In the late summer and fall of 1997, there would be launch opportunities for 140 minutes each day for 86 days. Day after day, the U.S. Space Command and the Naval Space Command calculated what known pieces of space debris would be where for 180 launch windows each day. On October 15, 1997, only 16 of the 180 windows were closed by the possibility of collision. The $3.3 billion space probe was successfully launched.

During a shuttle flight, U.S. Space Command performs collision avoidance calculations the whole time. On at least five occasions, the shuttle has changed its orbit to keep clear of flying trash.

The military keeps track of objects down to a size of about 2.5 inches.

NASA's orbital debris program, working with radar and optical telescopes, takes statistical samples down to a little less than a tenth of an inch. Below that, the shuttle spacecrafts themselves are the sampling devices.

What tracking we can do today operates within the civilian space program and classified military efforts to warn the nation against missile attack. Again and again, my visits around the tracking system reminded me that the military pays the big bills. At the Colorado Springs command center, a duty officer warned me that if an "incident" developed I'd have to leave the room immediately. At a Navy command center in Virginia, I asked about a flashing red light mounted on the ceiling. "That means we are in a degraded classification level as long as you're in here," a lieutenant told me.

American spacewatchers use more than two dozen instruments for their traffic patrol, including exotic gear not found in any other branch of astronomy. I found one of the network's big eyes staring due north from the plains of eastern North Dakota, at Cavalier Air Station.

Four long green crates here offer a clue about the full-time job of this building.

They're stacked on the concrete floor.

Each crate holds a ten-foot-long vacuum tube for the Perimeter Acquisition Radar.

Originally built as an early-warning set for the Army's "Safeguard" antiballistic missile system of the 1970s, the array still

probes the northern skies night and day for the Air Force's 10th Space Warning Squadron. Its 6,144 antennas make a silvery sheen that adorns one flat face of this blocky building like a vast medallion. The radar, 33 meters high and sloped so it points into the sky slightly over the northern horizon, is not your ordinary revolving dish-type radar. Without moving an inch, this one uses tricks of electronics and computers to watch hundreds of objects at a time within its broad field of view. Or it can blast the whole 25megawatt beam at a dim object to get a bigger blip.

According to Cavalier's fun-facts list, its radar could spot a basketball in space 3,200 kilometers off and it uses more electricity than a small city. I was even more impressed with what Airman Mike Aubin tells me in a stairway: according to the regulars around here, a piece of steel wool dropped down the face of the radar will flash into flame. Aubin has the title of crew chief on his shift when I visit the station, but the Missile Warning Operations Center only has two-man crews and his crewmate is Lt. Brad Sumter, who outranks him.

Aubin sits me down at his radarscope so I can see what he does for a living. It's a large round monitor of the size that I've seen at air traffic control centers; green five-digit numbers representing space objects crawl across a silhouette of North America. The U.S. Space Command assigns the numbers consecutively in permanent fashion to every new trackable object. The Mir space station wears number 16609. Only 8,500 of all the 25,500 objects ever cataloged are still in space now. The rest have burned by falling into the atmosphere. The men tell me that I should have visited last weekend, when a spacecraft blew up and scattered 20 more parts into orbit.

Another part of the sprawling space surveillance network is run by landlubbing Navy people and their contractors. If you had radiosensitive eyeballs you could see the "Fence" running along the entire southern tier of states, from the Georgia coast all the way to Southern California. It is an invisible wall of energy that reaches

International Space Station Probabilty of No Impacts a > 1 cm 0 Debris

tens of thousands of kilometers above Earth. Like a continental-size burglar alarm, the system bleeps every time an object like a satellite or piece of debris flies through and reflects its radio waves.

Using signals from the six receiver stations, computers in Dahlgren, Virginia, calculate the position for each crossing of the Fence. It has picked up objects as far east as Africa and as far west as Hawaii.

Thirty kilometers from a paved road in southern New Mexico, I gain entrance through a remotely operated security gate

1. A computer projection of vulnerable areas of the international Space Station, now under construction, which will have to withstand a variety of debris bombardments -man-generated space trash and endemic debris such as meteorites.

2. Close-up of a partially deployed, damaged solar array before astronauts spacewalk to completely deploy it. The Hubble solar panels have sustained damage from hits.

Astronaut teams are sent to do repairs.

3. Thermal tile damage on the Space Shuttle Endeavor's orbital maneuvering system.

4. Debris hitting window as seen from inside the Gemini 10 spacecraft. Windows in space are often pitted and damaged by orbiting objects.

5. A space shuttle crew member took this picture of the Hubble Space Telescope through the flight deck window. The Earth forms the backdrop to the Hubble's starboard solar array panel.

and park my car at a single-story building painted battleship gray. I find technician Manny Sanchez monitoring a row of digital readouts from the Fence. Sanchez got his training in communications from the Army.

The business end of the operation is a short walk from the building. Sprawling across 80 hectares, the station operates 19 receiving antennas. Each is head-high and looks like a galvanized grape arbor running for thousands of feet.

Back in the building, I ask how things are going and Sanchez consults a computer printout. In the past 24 hours the receiver has counted 29,773 objects crossing the Fence within its viewing range; some of the objects are coming through again and again.

"The job is the same from year to year," he says, "except that there's a lot more of the objects now."

A lot more, indeed. Carroll "c.c."

Hayden remembers just how sparse space traffic used to be. Approaching retirement now, he's a program manager for the space surveillance system's nerve center in Dahlgren.

I ask about a faded plotting diagram leaning against the wall in Hayden's office. He tells me that in the early days of the space program, mathematicians read off signals from strips of recording paper.

They pushed pencils and slid slide rules and marked each satellite's passage on a plotting chart like the one Hayden still keeps. On June 29, 1961, in what appears to be the first explosion in space, a left-

over rocket body blew up and scattered a cloud of debris. Technicians had strip charts stretched all over the room trying to keep up with the blips, Hayden recalls.

In the years following, the military added more ears and eyes to its space surveillance system, such as sets of telescopes planted in New Mexico and on islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

This Ground-Based Electro-optical Deep Space Surveillance System collects orbital information about satellites too high for the Fence and for most of the big radar sets to detect, such as those in geosynchronous orbits 35,880 kilometers up.

While the U.S. Space Command specializes in larger objects, some workers are genuinely concerned about smaller but more numerous pieces of debris, which don't reflect enough light or radio waves to be tracked from the ground. These chunks, which range in size from a softball down to a pebble, are a lethal hazard because mission controllers won't have any warning to get spacecraft out of the way and because there are so many bullets in this shooting gallery-some estimates run to 400,000. "Getting hit with one of these is a lot more likely than getting hit by lightning down on Earth," says Jon Boers of the U.S. Naval Space Command.

This is where NASA comes in. For low-earth-orbit flights it estimates the current traffic hazards in space and prepares statistics to weigh the risk. Other telescopes funded by NASA survey space for pieces that are too small for military radar

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to detect (roughly the size of a softball and less) but still big enough to knock meaningful holes in low-orbiting spacecraft. I meet project scientist Mark Mulrooney at one of these debris-counting telescopes on a Saturday evening in June in the wooded mountains near Cloudcroft, New Mexico.

Mulrooney stops me at the dome entrance and goes in first, waving a gassampling wand to check for hazardous levels of mercury vapor. Instead of the usual aluminum-coated glass, the telescope's main mirror is a wafer-thin film of liquid mercury sitting inside a shallow round dish. Almost three meters in diameter, the dish rotates silently on a cushion of air. The slow spin pushes the surface of the 225 kilograms of mercury into the precise curve needed for an astronomical mirror. A liquid mirror can only point straight up, but that's fine for the job here, which is statistical sampling of the ever-changing debris population. Small fragments rain down into low-earth orbit from higher altitudes as their orbits decay, so each new shuttle mission meets a new population of debris at its flight altitude. Mulrooney says the liquid mirror in Cloudcroft can see oneinch objects in low orbit, and he predicts the latest observations will show some less than a half-inch across.

Another worker in NASA's spacecraftprotection effort is Ed Denzler, a transplanted New Yorker now living in New Mexico, who is lead technician at the White Sands Hypervelocity Impact Test Facility.

While Denzler bustles about to set up the day's shot, which will tryout another set of armor intended for the International Space Station, NASA Program Manager Michelle Rucker guides me around Building 272. She walks me down a long string of sturdy blue metal tubes and tanks mounted on a set of steel girders. Running the full length of the building, this is the lab's biggest gun. Each shot uses up to 1.5 kilograms of gunpowder. For reasons that go over my head, none of these "light gas guns" can fire bullets faster than about 35,700 kilometers per hour, and such speeds are so hard on a gun that the barrel lining has to be scrapped after every shot.

At the more typical speed of 22,500 kmph, the big gun can fire 20 to 30 halfinch projectiles before needing an overhaul. (A bullet fired from a deer rifle moves at something like 3,200 kmph.)

The big gun and its smaller brethren fire little pellets of plastic and metal to test the latest spaceship armor. A oneounce hunk of plastic launched from the big gun will blast a baseball-size hole through an inch of carbon steel. NASA has learned that astronauts' best hope if an impact occurs is something called a "Whipple shield" after inventor (and Smithsonian astronomer) Fred Whipple.

Rucker shows me a set of armor made up of ceramic, Kevlar and metal sheets with spaces between them. When a projectile moving at many thousands of kilometers per hour hits one of these sheets, it runs into the shock waves it itself causes; the

shock waves have not had time to "get out of the way." The shock waves actually break up the projectile, turning it into a molten spray that splatters on an inner shield. A thick slab of metal would not work nearly as well as these seemingly fragile layers.

Providing vehicles with the latest debris- fighting armor can bring some peace of mind, but prevention counts for more. Spacecraft designers are building in vents that dump leftover fuel into space after launch, reducing the risk of accidental explosions that have scattered so much debris. Separations between rocket stages and payloads now rely on mechanical releases rather than shrapnelproducing explosive bolts. Companies parking communication satellites into precious geosynchronous orbits are promising to leave enough fuel at the end of the active life to boost the satellites into higher "graveyard" orbits that free the slots for replacements. Defunct satellites closer to Earth will be nudged downward with the last dregs of fuel for immolation in the atmosphere.

It's a strange jumble of hazards we've left up there: museum artifacts and precision instruments mingling with garbage and scrap. Until we find a way-giant lasers, perhaps-to clean it all up, the future will be dealing with our spaceborne past.

0 About the Author: James R. Chiles is a Minnesota-based writer who frequently contributes to Smithsonian magazine.

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