SPAN: January/February 2005

Prinlmaking: Multiple Encounters Celesdal Collaboralors

The

National Museum of the

American ndian

~ the popular vote, while Kerry got 48 percent. Both candidates ~ feverishly courted the significant ~ "swing states," particularly Ohio :::;and Florida, which were the king~ > makers in this election. Decisive factors in the vote appeared to be both domestic and foreign; issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and the war in Iraq abroad helped tip the scales.

Voter turnout was exceptionally large, after campaign workers from both sides made concerted efforts to register new voters and encourage people to cast their ballots on Election Day. Election procedures were closely monitored, particularly where new electronic voting machines were used for the first time.

John Kerry conceded the election gracefully in Boston, warning of the danger of deep divisions in the country, and emphasizing the need "for unity, for finding common ground and coming together." He added, "Today, I hope we can begin the healing." President Bush underlined these concerns, telling the nation, "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us."

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was a near thing, a genuine cliffhanger, until election day, that is. Then the pundits and pollsters who tried to predict the out, come of the 2004 U.S. presidential elections were either vindicated or proved wrong, as George W. Bush and his running mate Vice President Dick Cheney beat the opposition candidate, Democrat John F. Kerry and his running mate John Edwards by three percent or 3,319,608 votes. It was a narrow margin, but it spelled victory for Bush, fulfilling the wishes of supporters who faithfully chanted "Four more years!" at campaign rallies throughout the United States. "America has spoken, and I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens," President Bush told well-wishers in Washington, D.C., on November 3.

On November 2, Bush won 274 electoral votes from 29 states, against 256 for Democratic contender Senator Kerry. Bush garnered 51 percent of

VOLUME

XLVI

NUMBER 1

National Museum of the American Indian

Publisher Michael H. Anderson Editor-in-Chief Robert B. Richards Associate

By Lea Terhune

Magic Wand

Editor

A. Venkata Narayana

By Owen Edwards

Hindi Editor Govind Singh

Have Palette, Will Travel

By Nell Boyce

Urdu Editor AnjLUnNaim

Democracy Is Elementary

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Hemam Bhatnagar Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Printing Assistant AJok Kaushik Business Manager R. Narayan Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center Front cover: Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Republican-Colorado (right), a Northern Cheyenne Indian, applaudes W. Richard West, Jr., director of the National Museum of the American Indian, at the museum's dedication ceremony in Washington, D.C., in September last year. Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite, Š AP-WWP.

By John Rosengren

Overcoming Barriers

Language

By Dinesh C. Sharma

Gadgets in the Superchip Age

By David H. Freedman

Get Out of My Namespace

By James Gleick

On the Lighter Side Printmaking: Multiple Encounters

By A. Venkata Narayana

Absence of Malice

By Ronald C. White, Jr.

Crime! Intrigue! Tragedy!

Mr. Lincoln's Washington

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

By Christopher Buckley

Low Power, High Intensity

Erratum: In the November/December 2004 issue, the text copyright line for the articles "Are CDs Rotting?," "A Vaccine for Your Phone" and "Getting Directions from Your Phone" on pages 56-57 should read "Coyright Š 2004 Tribune Media Services. Reprinted with permission."

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. 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, on~ year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

By Laurie Kelliher

Community

By Govind Singh

Money and Morals at

GE

Marked for Extinction

By Kim Clark

Celestial Collaborators

By Dipesh Satapathy

FM in India

A LETTER

FROM

he American Indians' ancient roots and current vitality have a new showcase in the National Musew11of the American Indian in Washington, D.c. Native Americans were heavily involved in all stages of planning and development, culminating in a colorful and emotional dedication ceremony In our cover story, "National Museum of the American Indian," Lea Terhune tells the story of the museum's creation, and the important symbolic role it can play for allAmericans.

The globalization and consolidation of the media industry doesn't have to be the death knell of local media. Community radio-nonprofit owned and operated stations broadcasting to the immediate community-can play an important role in local mobilization and education. Laurie Kelliher looks at the growth and development of American community radio in "Low Power, High Intensity." But this phenomenon is not limited to the United States, as community radio is also taking off in India. Although in its infancy, the high demand for licenses suggests great potential for democratization of the airwaves, says Govind Singh in "Community FM in India."

What's in a name? Perhaps more than you think says James Gleick in "Get Out of My Namespace."

With the globalization of business and the commercialization of the Internet, conflict is increasing over the use of names for everything from medicine to cars to your personal Web site address. Going from cyberspace to outer space, Dipesh Satapathy relates the history and accomplishments of U.S.-India collaboration in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics in "Celestial Collaborators."

Yournext TV may actually respond when you talk to it. Advances in computer chip technology are making possible a whole new generation of electronics to make our lives easier and more fun. Read "Gadgets in the Superchip Age," by David H. Freedman, to learn about some equipment and features you may have been expecting, and some surprises. Indian expertise is playing a big role in translating technology breakthroughs into new gadgets. Several of the world's largest technology companies have set up research centers in India, working on technology that helps all of us overcome language barriers. Dinesh C. Sharma provides all the details in "Overcoming Language Barriers."

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THE

PUBLISHER

Explorers on the American frontier were often accompanied by artists. Their works were influenced by their cultural perspective, which in turn influenced other's perceptions of the West. Some beautiful historical artworks and their story are in "Have Palette, Will Travel," by Nell Boyce.

You can enjoy still more impressive pieces in "Printmaking: Multiple Encounters," by A. Venkata Narayana, the story of a print exhibit that includes the work of 68 American and 65 Indian printmakers. This exhibition, the largest U.S.-India print exhibition ever, will be traveling to various sites throughout India.

Shifting from the visual to the musical arts, we recognize the life and the passing of Artie Shaw, legendary clarinetist from the big-band era, in "Magic Wand,"

by Owen Edwards.

"Absence of Malice," by Ronald C. White, Jr., looks at the context and intent of one of America's greatest historical speeches, Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address delivered as the Civil War was winding down. Christopher Buckley takes us to the lighter side in "Mr. Lincoln's Washington," by contrasting the current and historical uses of Washington, D.G., sites related to Lincoln.

Democracy isn't just about national elections, but built by the daily actions of all citizens. We see how a program promoting local organization and democratic action helps lay the groundwork for democracy in "Democracy Is Elementary," by John Rosengren.

The high profile CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, is working to instill values in everything the company does-from the business lines it enters to how it outsources work. Finding ways to combine doing good with making a profit would be immensely valuable for business worldwide. "Money and Morals at GE," by Marc Gunther, shows some ways that business is changing in this era of greater corporate responsibility. Business is already changing for all Americans used to writing checks. The check is on its way out, being replaced by electronic means of payment, but not everyone agrees that it is for the best.

Read "Marked for Extinction," by Kim Clark.

We hope you enjoy this issue.

few months ago a new jewel was added to the sparkling array of museums that line the Mall in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), 15 years in the making, is about the ancient roots of America. It is the first national museum to be devoted exclusively to the American Indian, and is unique in its presentation of history from the indigenous peoples' perspective. Native Americans from diverse tribes steered its development from the outset, planning exhibits, architecture and landscaping, all of which reflect tribal values.

Besides being a showcase for the thousands of objects collected by the Smithsonian through the years, NMAI highlights contributions of modern American Indians. The museum's founding director, W. Richard West, Jr., who himself is a Cheyenne Indian, said at the inauguration, "Visitors will leave this museum experience knowing that American Indians are not part of history.

We are still here and making vital contributions to contemporary American culture and art." Modern works may be found in the museum alongside precious treasures from the past, West emphasized. "For example, one gallery is devoted solely to modern, groundbreaking American Indian artwork, and we have a number of landmark pieces commissioned by the Smithsonian throughout the museum. In addition, we have thousands of our priceless objects-from our collection of 800,000-in the three

Above: Raven Steals the Sun, blown glass,

by Preston Singletary (Tlinsit), Seattle, Washington, 2003.

Top: Bear Mask, painted wood, metal, horse hair; glass beads, shell bone, fiber; by Rich Bartow (Yurok), South Beach: Oregon,

1990.

inaugural exhibitions and elsewhere in the museum." These "landmark" objects include a six-meter carved totem pole by a carver from the Tlingit tribe of the Pacific Northwest and other examples of modern paintings, sculpture, carving and weaving by artists from different tribes.

The fluid, curving lines of the sandcolored, Kasota limestone-clad museum building powerfully evoke the rugged terrain many Southwest American Indians inhabit. It was co-designed by architect Douglas Cardinal, a Blackfoot Indian of Ottawa, Canada, architect Johnpaul Jones, a Cherokee/Choctaw Indian, and GBQC Architects of Philadelphia. Among the several architectural firms on the project was Table Mountain Rancheria Enterprises, Inc., named after and operated by California Indians. Innovative use of light is one of the NMAI's striking features, notably the acrylic prisms facing true south that catch the changing angle of the sun's rays and reflect rainbows of light upon the interior of the 36-meter high Potomac atrium. The total construction cost of the museum is $199 million, plus $20 million for inaugural events, exhibitions and other programs.

The natural world and spirituality are intertwined in American Indian cosmology: each plant, animal and rock formation is imbued with its own spirit, and it behooves the human who shares the land to live in harmony with these sentient beings. So it's no surprise that landscaping covers more than 70 percent of the 1.7-hectare site, and is meant to give the visitor a sense of the typical environment of the Indians of the mid-Atlantic

region. Four distinct habitats were created: an upland hardwood forest, lowland freshwater wetlands, meadows and croplands. Trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants uti lized by indigenous peoples surround the museum. Plants such as wild rice and sunflowers were important foods, while buttercup and marsh marigold have medicinal uses. Food and medicinal" plants are grown on the croplands, where traditional irrigation and agricultural techniques are used, such as the ingenious interplanting of the "three sisters"-corn, beans and squash. The beans are twined on the cornstalk, the corn is nourished by the nitrogen pro-

duced by the beans, while the groundcovering leaves of squash provide a natural mulch. Forty boulders, called "grandfather rocks" because they are believed to hold the oldest memories of the earth, mark the entrance to the museum grounds. A nearby fire pit and offering area is a place for traditional ceremonies. Navajo/Oneida Indian ethnobiologist Donna House conceptualized and developed the landscape with a local landscape firm.

The purpose of the NMAI is communication of culture, through exhibitions, educational outreach, performances of music and dance, films, and other events.

It is a focal point of scholarly research on American Indian history and traditions. Museum « outreach programs to Native :2 ~ communities aim to help revive :~ and sustain

their cultural her-

~ itage. Food is part of culture, j'" too, and there is even a cafe that c

Jj serves updated versions of typ~ ical Native American dishes. ~ This multifaceted experience §1« has authenticity because it is ~ communicated through Native ffi American

voices.

Members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of the Cheyenne River Reservation of South Dakota perform at the Native Nations Procession on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in September 2004.

Far left: Wapass (root basket)

by Vivian Stu yat" Harrison (Yakama), Washington, 2003.

Middle: Eskimo (Kuswogmiut or Kuskokwim) mask representing a spirit (Amekak) that lives in the ground. Carved and painted wood with features.

Left: Lightning Strikes, blown glass, by Tony Jajola (Isleta Pueblo), New Mexico,

c.1990.

The opening of the museum realizes a dream that has great significance to American Indians. To many it is a move toward healing the breach created by hundreds of years of bloodshed during which American Indian tribes were decimated by war and disease, moved from their nati ve homelands to reservations, and their lands appropriated by European settlers. As Colorado Senator and Northern Cheyenne Indian Ben Nighthorse Campbell told the assembled crowd, "To all our Native American friends here today I say, The sacred hoop has been restored. The circle is complete." He added, "The re-emergence of the Native people has come true." Thousands of members of tribes from North and South America, Pacific Polynesia and the Caribbean attended the event. Some were participants, marching in the inaugural Native Nations Procession in their tribal dress, some 25,000 strong. Some were performers in the six-day "First Americans Festival"-fancy dancers wearing their finest beaded, butter-soft

buckskin costumes and feathered ornaments; storytellers, transmitting precious oral history, tradition and rituals; n~usicians and artists, weavers of distinctive tribal carpets, blankets and baskets. The heritage is rich, coming as it does from diverse places, from the Inuit of the icy Arctic, from the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho of the Plains, from the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni of the Southwest deserts, and from the Seminole in tropical Florida.

Nearly 600 tribes still exist throughout the Western Hemisphere, an estimated 40 million people.

The National Museum of the American Indian opens at a time of renaissance for some tribes which, after more than 100 years of desperate poverty, have taken advantage of federal and state laws that allow them to open gambling casinos and other enterprises on reservation lands. They have reformed corrupt tribal governments. Tribes that were struggling and squabbling over precious little a few decades ago are now able to provide important benefits such

as health and child care for tribe members. There are new job opportunities, because business is booming. Gambling is legal in only a few states, like Nevada and New Jersey, but American Indian reservations are exempt from anti-gambling laws, so casinos are springing up on American Indian lands from coast to coast. So are American Indian-run factories and supermarkets.

Although life has improved immensely for many American Indians, not all have benefited. Reservations are still poverty pockets, some of the worst in the United States, where poor nutrition has led to epidemic diabetes, and hopelessness to alcohol and drug addiction. Yet the opening of a museum honoring American Indian culture, one that is a major national museum housing the largest collection of American Indian artifacts in the world, is an indicator of a change in perception as well as an opportunity to change perceptions; it is a matter of pride and a place for coming together for both American Indians and non-Indians alike.

0

Left: Tlingit house posts from Dis'Hit (Moonhouse) of the Kwac'Kwan Clan, Yakutat, Alaska, c. 1840.

Right, above: Chiriqui gold bell, Pueblo Vieja, Bugabita, Chiriqui, Panama, A.D. 1000-1400.

Far right: American Indian, oil on linen, by Fritz Scholder (Luischo), New Mexico, i990. indian Arts and Crafts Board Collection, Department of the interior, at the National Museum of the American indian.

Right, below: Ceramic Whistle, Jaina Island, Campeche, Mexico, A.D. 500-900.

Below: "Untitled," colored pencil on paper, by George Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, 19192000), Grand Portage, Minnesota, 1995.

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an

The recordings of clarinetist Artie Shaw; who died last December; reca[[ the nostalgic power of the big-band sound

Artie Shaw's clarinets, which he donated to the Smithsonian.

sychologists tell us that our sense of smell conjures up some of our deepest emotional memories. Take a deep whiff of baby powder and you might be transported about as far back as you can go. (You're hungry, you're cranky ... better loosen your grip on that powder tin.) Our sense of hearing, however, must rank a close second as a time machine. In particular, it's the nature of music to flash us back to when and where we first heard a song or a fragment of a symphonic theme, or maddeningly, an inane sitcom theme. Melody and memory are constant companions. I was drawn to classical music not by my mother's playing of Chopin, but by the radio adventures of the Lone Ranger and the show's theme tunes-borrowed from Rossini and Liszt. I can never hear the overture to William Tell or Les Preludes without picturing myself sitting on a deep, striped sofa in my parents' house in Westfield, New Jersey, listening intently to a radio twice my size.

For many people of a certain age, the sound of classic swing music is the mnemonic key to the past. The famous bands arose at a time when entertainment was an integral element in America's eme~gence from hard times, as well as a salve for increasing anxiety about the distant rumble of war. Each of the top ensembles played songs that both defined the band and the times, hits such as Glenn Miller's "String of Pearls," Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump," and Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing." When Goodman's band, featuring Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa, brought jazz to Carnegie Hall in 1938, swing was king. For many fans, young jitterbuggers then who now look back fondly on the big beat and the big brass of swing, no bandleader better epitomizes the era than Artie Shaw, and no song opens the door to that dramatic, romantic tim~ more evocatively than "Begin the Beguine." Shaw passed away on this December 30 at his home in Thousand Oaks, California.

In 1935, Cole Porter wrote the song for a Broadway show called Jubilee. The musical died young, but "Begin the Beguine" lived on, in no small measure because of Artie Shaw's brilliant rendition. Fittingly, the song lyric is itself about memory"When they begin the beguine / It brings back the sound of music so tender ... "-and few who listened to Shaw's 1938 recording of the tune can forget the splendor of his clarinet's melodic line.

That clarinet, a Selmer, is one of two that Shaw donated to the Smithsonian. (The other is a Buffet that the bandleader used with his quintet, the Gramercy 5; the Selmer, Shaw says, had more "shout" than the sweeter, woodier Buffet, making it better in

P

Left: The Shaw (in described Beguine,"

big-band legend Artie California in 2003 at 93) his greatest hit, "Begin the as "a nice little tune."

Below: Shaw (c. 1950) played professionally from the time he left home at age 15.

front of a big band.) For romantic couples and jazz lovers before, during and long after World War II, these clarinets are nothing less than magic wands, and they join a collection of numinous instruments that includes Lionel Hampton's vibraphone, Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet and Tito Puente's timbales.

Shaw's band was well on the road to success by 1938, the year he recorded the Porter tune as an instrumental. The record sold more than a million copies-a tremendous number in those 78 rpm days-and within a year or so the band, with the handsome, tuxedo-clad Shaw doing clarinet solos, was earning a reported $60,000 a week. Though later the 93-year-old Shaw described "Begin the Beguine" merely as "a nice little tune from one of Cole Porter's very few flop shows," the power of his version turned it into the theme song of countless courtships.

Although the record was made the year I was born, it was such a standard in later years that I can still remember my feeling, every time I heard it as a teenager (in those pre-rock 'n' roll years), that this melody carried all the magic and mystery of what it meant to be a grown-up. I had no idea that a beguine was a rumba-like dance from the islands of Martinique and St. Lucia, nor the remotest notion of what "a night of tropical splendor" might comprise, but Shaw's playing struck the same responsive chord within me as it did within my parents.

The reaction must have been nearly universal, because the record became one of the biggest sellers of its era, and Shaw rose to such iconic status that, in the late 1930s, on the eve of World War II, Time magazine reported that the German public thought of America as "skyscrapers, Clark Gable, and Artie Shaw."

Shaw, a teenage saxophonist who switched to the clarinet, began playing professionally shortly after leaving his Connecticut home at the age of 15. A few years later he discov. ered two disparate geniuses-Igor Stravinsky and Louis Armstrong-and the influence of these two musical pioneers led

him to play and compose classical music as well as swing and jazz. After Pearl Harbor, Shaw joined the Navy, formed a band, and played throughout the Pacific as MacArthur's island-hopping advances unfolded. In 1954, Shaw, still tremendously popular, retired from music-perhaps deciding he wanted to quit at the top of his game.

He went on to become a nationally ranked marksman and expert fly fisherman. When asked recently if he still practiced on his clarinets, he said, "I haven't played them for 50 years."

Which, for anyone listening today to his rapturous versions of "Begin the Beguine," "Frenesi" and "Stardust," seems a shame.

As Smithsonian curator John Hasse said at the donation ceremony for Shaw's clarine~s, "His playing was virtuosic, lyrical and passionate. Gifted with a sensitivity to melody, Shaw was a master of melodic invention and paraphrase, as he created, on the spot, compositional perfection in his solos." The highest accolade for any artist is that his or her work cannot be imagined any other way; Shaw's solos, Hasse said, sounded "logical and inevitable."

Inevitably, Shaw was compared to the equally gifted clarinetist, Benny Goodman; the public, he said, perceived the two musicians as engaged in a kind of performers' duel. Yet he dismissed the idea of any such competition. "You have to have a sound that is yours," he said. "You're not in a footrace, after all."

Looking back on his brilliant career, Shaw tended not to make too much of his talent or his instruments. He even said, with casual heresy, that for the recording of "Stardust" he used a less expensive plastic reed. "The difference between players," he said, "is in the details. You're never completely happy with your playing. Sometimes you come close, but those occasions are very rare. I call myself an 80 percent loser."

Given the hundreds of thousands of lives Artie Shaw's music touched, that is far too modest an assessment. But even if it were true, could there be a more fabulous 20 percent?

0 About the Author: Owen Edwards is a freelance Francisco.

writer based in San

vc fA

Will Travel Explorer-artists western vision

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he motley crew that set out with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 to explore the American West included geologists, trappers, carpenters, blacksmiths, interpreters, and even a dog. But although some of them could sketch a crude picture, the team lacked a real artist. Lewis often bemoaned this oversight as he tried to capture the unexpected grandeur of the West. While struggling over a sketch of the Great Falls of the Missouri River, for example, he declared himself "disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed of the scene."

Later expeditions to the uncharted lands west of the Mississippi remedied the error, and the artists who went along played a key role in shaping how people back home perceived the wild frontier. Like other artists who accompanied explorers to faraway places like the Arctic, Australia, and the tropics, those who visited the American West did more than just record what the explorers saw. They offered their own vision of the lands and peoples Thomas Moran (right). and placed the explorers in a visual narrative, showing them braving the elements and interacting with native peoples.

Foreshadowing. The earliest professional artists out west were Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale, who accompanied an 1819 expedition to the Rockies. Their small sketches and watercolors have long been overlooked as mere illustrations, and amateurish ones at that, says Kenneth Haltman of Michigan State University. But he sees a rich subtext in these images: Seymour portrays a circle of American Indians and white explorers from a perspective in which they appear to face off in opposing lines, foreshadowing con'l:1ictsto come. In another image, the expedi-

Above: Thomas Moran's masterpiece, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, painted in 1872, was the first landscape to hang in U.S. Capitol. Moran worked in a studio from sketches he made out west.

Left: A watercolor by Samuel Seymour, who went west in 1819, shows the expedition dwarfed by the Rockies.

tion team advances toward the Rockies looking tiny and almost antiheroic, dwarfed by the mountains and a group of American Indians looming large in the foreground.

Many of the early artists out west depicted native peoples, but none did so with the passion of George Catlin. After meeting American Indians who had traveled east in the 1820s, this lawyer-turn ed-painter ventured west on his own to record cultures in their own territories in the short time they had left. He assumed they would soon be destroyed by encroaching settlers. Catlin's portraits of tribal leaders brilliantly capture each one's individuality in an era when many artists depicted generic, stereotypical Indians.

Later, as romantic landscape paintings became more popular in the mid-19th century, the West's canyons and mountains became the inspiration for huge, lush canvases. Artists including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran came back from their

Right: Swiss artist Karl Bodmer joined an 1832 expedition

by German Prince Maximilian and depicted this wilderness scene at the Missouri River.

Below: Lawyerartist George Catlin, who went west to record the American Indians, portrayed a Blackfoot chief, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, in 1832.

travels with sketches, photos, and quick watercolors, which they converted to lavish oils in their studios. These artists relied in part on their imaginations-Bierstadt, influenced by his beloved Alps, painted mountains so craggy that critics scoffed.

Moran, aware of those criticisms, tried to stay more true to nature, says art historian Joni Kinsey of the University of Iowa, though he wasn't above inserting an Italian pine tree or other foreign elements to balance a composition. Moran's 1872 masterpiece, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a mammoth canvas measuring 2 meters by 3.6 meters, was the first landscape to hang in the U.S. Capitol, where it was unveiled right after Congress established Yellowstone as the first national park.

Moran's work became hugely influential in popularizing an idea of an expansive, beckoning American frontier. New printing technologies in the late 1800s made his work widely available in books, magazines, and even advertisements for the burgeoning railroads. The iconic images created by Moran and other early artist-explorers have inspired generations of travelers to venture west. But unlike the explorers themselves,who wanted to experience the thrill of the unknown, these tourists go to revel in the carefully constructed vision that adventurous 0 artists first brought home.

About the Author: Nell Boyce is a senior editor with U.S. News & World Report.

Democracy Is

ementdry

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute puts the tools of democracy in the hands of youth who then work to better their communities

arents wanted a playground at St. Bernard's Catholic School other than the asphalt parking lot that sent children home scraped and bruised. But neighbors of the inner-city St. Paul school feared an open playground might foster gang activity in their backyard. They voiced their opposition loudly.

Strongly. Frustrated, the parents gave up.

So the kids stepped in. A group of 8- to 12-year-olds hatched a plan, enlisted the support of key community leaders, won over the neighbors, raised funds, and built the 'Playground their parents

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couldn't. That's democracy in action.

More specifically, that's Public Achievement at work.

Public Achievement, an initiative of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute, redefines the role of youth in democracy.

A grass-roots effort with global reach, Public Achievement is based on the premise that children's interests, insights, tenacity, and passion for issues have been underestimated and uncultivated. The Public Achievement curriculum gives young people a voice and the means to effect the changes they desire by teaching them to work within

the political system. It teaches them to become active citizens.

"Young people experience the world as set," says Harry Boyte, founder and co-director of the center. "Public Achievement is a way to break some of that open and give kids freedom to tryout different roles, different talents, to develop a broader imagination."

A variety of institutions, including K-12 (kindergarten through standard 12) schools, colleges and universities, youth clubs, and community centers, have implemented the citizen-building curriculum.

The Public Achievement staff trains adult coaches in some

basic methods for taking public action and provides a conceptual framework for learning by doing. These coaches guide the youth, who participate on a voluntary basis and choose the issues they want to address. Along the way, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, one of 10 research and outreach centers at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, seeks to accomplish its mission to develop theories and practices that enrich democracy. Public Achievement embodies its essence,路 "citizens doing public work."

At St. Bernard's, a school of 600 K-12 students on St. Paul's North End, a group of third- through eighth-graders identified a new playground as their cause. It could just as easily have been shutting down a nearby brothel, organizing a peace march, erecting flashing lights at a school crosswalk, stopping fireworks sales at a local roller rink, or lobbying for equal access to higher education for immigrants-as other groups have worked Public Achievement across the United States.

Public Achievement projects must be legal, nonviolent, and make a contribution to the community, but each one takes on the complexion of the group and the issues it addresses. "It's not a program, it's more like jazz," Boyte explains. "It's a culture, it involves a lot of improvisation. It looks different in a working-class public school than in a suburban youth club."

Zach Bauman was a thirdgrader at St. Bernard's who, like any kid, wanted a decent place to play during recess.

Not only was the asphalt 101

available to them unsafe-he had collected his own scrapes on it, and a girl in a class ahead of him had suffered a concussion in a fall-it was sometimes full of cars. Since the asphalt doubled as the church parking lot, it filled up on days there were funerals, and the children had no place to play.

Bauman and his classmates latched onto the vision of a new playground, which represented a better world to them.

The playground became their Public Achievement project.

Over the course of five years, in their Thursday afternoon Public Achievement meeting hour and on their own time, Bauman and the other St. Bernard's students came up with a plan, then put it into action. The Public Achievement group needed to raise $60,000 to fund their vision. Bauman and his classmates laid out their plans at local business association meetings and secured donations. They also convinced the school to dedicate money raised in the private school marathon to the playground.

They reached their financial goal.

They forged an alliance with the parish council, which offered a lot donated to the parish. The kids hired a construction company to demolish a vacant house on the lot and level the ground. They invited playground equipment representatives into their classroom and weighed their sales pitches. They designed the playground, selected the equipment, and chose a safe surface.

Along the way, they encountered obstacles. Many, including the parents who had been unsuccessful in their efforts, doubted the children would succeed. They didn't

think it could be done. Once the youth movement gained momentum, however, the doubting Thomases quieted.

An alley dividing the school from the playground lot posed a potential safety problem for young children crossing it.

Bauman and several others met with neighbors and city council members to explore closing off the alley. They realized that there was relatively little alley traffic during school hours, which reduced the safety concerns. Instead, they decided to fence in the playground. They also convinced the city council to zone the lot for a neighborhood playground.

Then there were those reluctant neighbors. Since the site the parents originally proposed was so controversial, the students selected an alternate site. Neighbors still voiced concerns at an informational meeting, but the students tried to convince them that the playgn?und's benefits to the area outweighed its potential risks. "By then, the kids knew they had the power

of a weekend, the children, their parents, parishioners, and neighbors dug holes, poured cement, and put the equipment into place. When Bauman was in eighth grade, his group's efforts culminated in a dedication ceremony for their new playground.

They had realized their dream. In doing so, these students, most of them city kids from working-class backgrounds, had learned to work the system to their favor. They experienced a powerful handson lesson in democracy.

"The biggest thing that I learned was to stay with something and keep working no matter what the obstacles are," says Bauman, now a senior at St. Bernard's. "I learned that a lot of times the fastest way to a solution isn't always the shortest way. A lot of times you're not going to be able to get exactly what you want, you're going to have to work on a compromise."

The Public Achievement process changes those who are part of it. "It's pretty evident how kids are transformed

Zach Bauman, a senior at St. Bernard's Catholic School in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his classmates used the democratic process to build a playground. to put it up," says Jeff Maurer, a St. Bernard's religion teacher and Public Achievement coach. "They basically said, 'We're here to inform you of this. We would like it if you worked with us.' Some of the neighbors did work with them."

The students signed those neighbors up to construct the playground. Over the course

through Public Achievement, especially in their public speaking skills," says Maurer.

"They develop the confidence to stand up in a group and talk about something they're passionate about. They learn that there are a lot of components to getting things done."

The goal is to change them for life. "One of the goals is to make them active citizens,"

The Humphrey Institute Centers he Center for Democracy and Citizenship is one of 10 public policy research and outreach centers at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Each center conducts research on public policy issues and engages in outreach efforts such as the Public Achievement initiative that have regional, national, and international significance. The institute seeks to engage communities in examining and proposing solutions for public policy issues.

"The centers facilitate the collaborative problem-solving approach demanded by the cross-disciplinary nature of public policy, management, and planning issues," according to the Humphrey Institute's Web site. The individual centers do not receive funds from the University of Minnesota; they raise

T

Maurer says. "By working through the system, the translation will be when they get older they won't be afraid to take on issues in their community and be leaders."

Public Achievement actually got its start at St. Bernard's a dozen years ago. In the late 1980s, then Humphrey Institute dean Harlan Cleveland asked Harry Boyte to "do something to fix democracy."

Boyte, whose interest in civic action dated back to his work with Martin Luther King, Jr., was nationally known for his research and writing on democracy.

He began by listening to adults, then young people in a

series of roundtable discussions on how to develop a program that encouraged civic participation.

The outcome was a temporary outreach center called Project for Public Life, which launched the Public Achievement initiative at St. Bernard's in 1991. When the Project for Public Life charter expited, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship took its place.

In line with its mission to develop theories and practices that enrich democracy, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship has fashioned two other initiatives.

The Jane Addams School for Democracy works with Hmong and

ublic Achievement has taken root in seven areas across the United States and in 10 Northern Ireland communities. Another nine countries are exploring Public Achievement strategies.

P

their own funds and operate like nonprofits. In lieu of a board, a faculty member or senior practitioner directs each center.

The Humphrey Institute's centers include: ~ Center for Democracy and Citizenship ~ Center for Labor Policy ~ Center for Nations in Transition ~ Center for School Change ~ Center for Women and Public Policy ~ Center for Science, Technology, and Public Policy ~ Freeman Center for International Economic Policy ~ Humphrey Institute Policy Forum ~ Roy Wilkjns Center for Human Relations and Social Justice ~ State and Local Policy Program

Latino immigrants on St. Paul's West Side to prepare them for citizenship.

The Neighborhood Learning Community develops a culture of learning, both formal and informal, also for St. Paul residents on the West Side.

Not all of the projects take place in St. Paul. The center's most widesprea~ and most visible initiative, Public Achievement has taken root in seven areas across the United States and in 10 Northern Ireland communities.

Another nine countries, from Bosnia to Brazil, are exploring Public Achievement strategies.

Meanwhile, the program continues to thrive at St. Bernard's.

A group there recently planned a "Welcome Back, Snoopy" event that turned into a neighborhood pride extravaganza to honor the reinstatement of a vandalized Snoopy statue.

The St. Bernard's playground proves what Harry Boyte heard adults and young people say in their roundtable discussions: Basically, that they will succeed in a democ-

racy if they're given the means. "Kids can succeed where adults can't," Maurer says. "They have the drive.

They were really passionate about this playground-it was their issue."

It's fitting that students choose causes close to their hearts where they can practice citizenship. "Public Achievement isn't always about playgrounds, but perhaps they make the perfect metaphor for this story," an informational Public Achievement video explains. "We associate them with the innocence of childhood, but in a way, playgrounds are studies of democracy, of cooperation, of free: dom, and ultimately, of something called the pursuit of happiness."

Today, the children build playgrounds. Tomorrow, they build a better world. That's the aim, anyway, of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship's initiative to fix democracy. 0 About the Author: John Rosengren is afreelance Minneapolis.

writer based in

Overcoming

e~arriers American IT companies focus research on technologies and products specific to the Indian market a11U1Skar! Aaj hudhwar hai. Yeh ek suhani suhah hai," Ashish Verma speaks into a microphone attached to his computer and the words pop up in Devanagari on the wide computer screen. Verma works with the technology center of the IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL) located in New Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology (lIT). The technology he is demonstrating is known as speech recognition. It helps those not familiar with the English language and keyboards to easily use the computer. Right now, the system can recognize 65,000 Hindi words, and this vocabulary will ultimately be increased to 125,000 words.

Speech-to-text is one of the key areas of human-computer interaction research that IRL is tackling, along with electronic commerce, e-governance, bioinformatics, unstructured information management and e-business on demand. Being part of IBM's global research effort, IRL is working on technology areas that are critical for IBM's global corporate and commercial

goals. At the same time, it has research projects designed specifically for Indian markets. IBM is not alone in doing this. Hewlett Packard (HP) is engaged in similar activity at its laboratory in Bangalore, where software giant Microsoft too is setting up its research center to develop products tailored for the multilingual Indian environment.

Multiplicity oflanguages, cultural diversity, low literacy rates, price sensitivity and low usage of personal computers are all challenges to the information technology industry. Because of

these factors the digital divide today is more than a cliche-it's a reality. Although India has carved out a niche for itself in the global software and services markets, domestic consumption of IT products and services remains abysmally low.

"HP realizes that a very significant part of its growth is going to come from rapidly developing economies such as China, India, Russia and many economies in central Europe and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region. In order to best take advantage of this growth opportunity, we need to innovate for the customers in these markets, because the needs of these markets are unique," says Ajay Gupta, director of HP Labs India in Bangalore. "It is for this reason HP Labs India has been set up. For real innovation to take place, researchers need to be thoroughly immersed in the context. HP Labs India is executing on this corporate strategy."

At IRL, researchers have extended IBM's Via Voice speech recognition technology to develop a system for Hindi and "Indian English." This system understands and transcribes human speech with minimal use of keyboards thereby helping people unfamiliar with computers or the English language. Since there are no standard keyboards available in Indian languages, speech recognition eliminates the need to learn non-standard keyboard mapping. The system has been tested and trained for variations over a large number of speakers from different regions of the country. " 'Indian English' is an interesting phenomenon. There are a lot of sounds that are additional in 'Indian English' and word usage is also different. Pronunciation of Indian names also produces different types of sounds. Then there are regional accents.

Hp, IBM and Microsoft are making products and technology more friendly for the average Indian.

So, all this requires a certain special level of attention," points out Ponani S. Gopalakrishnan, director of IRL. In view of the growth of phone banking and inquiry assistance services, the lab is working on a system that can recognize a speaker's voice in Hindi and other Indian languages.

This system will use speech as an input rather than digits punched through a telephone keypad used in interactive voice response systems currently. IRL researchers have developed a prototype of an acoustic model for Hindi to decode the speech

in response to a given prompt.

Although most Indian languages pose challenges similar to Hindi, IRL does not plan to extend its work to all such languages.

"We want to prove feasibility and effectiveness of the system in certain core languages. We will also look at partners from the academic community to come together for this program. A lot of our research agenda is driven by our commercial agenda. It depends on what the marketplace is asking for," says Gopalakrishnan. However, core technologies developed at IRL may be applicable to other emerging markets as well, though the language part remains specific to India.

Like IRL, HP Labs India too is trying to break the English language barrier by exploring the use of handwriting as an input.

Millions of forms, like the ones for railway reservations, are filled out every day and in different Indian languages. Therefore, the lab is developing a technology that can recognize handwriting as well as capture image data for further processing. A prototype of such a script-independent device called Script Mail has been developed for sending and receiving handwritten e-mails.

Voice or speech is one of the most prevalent forms of communication. HP Labs India has come up with a telephone-based railway inquiry system providing information on ticket availability and the status of wait-listed tickets for trains running between four Indian metros. In the next stage, online booking may be developed. This system is also accent-independent and works for Hindi and "Indian English." HP Labs took a generalpurpose engine .for speech recognition and synthesis, generated by a team of researchers worldwide and freely available to the software professional community, and combined it with their own recognition models specific to Hindi and "Indian English." This system too can accept and process a variety of Indian accents and speaking styles.

Yet another way to overcome problems of low literacy is a text-to-speech system that can let users listen to any information rather than reading it off the screen. Such a system can provide voice output in contexts where visual interface may not be appropriate. HP Labs India is developing text-to-speech systems for Hindi and "Indian English."

Microsoft has also trained its research attention on the multilingual Indian puzzle. Its research lab, scheduled to become operational early this year in Bangalore, will develop software technologies that could help content creation, storage, search, access and interaction in multiple languages by deploying natural language processing and speech recognition technologies. Another key research area will be to understand the role of technology in emerging markets including countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America and come up with innovations to meet their special requirements.

Above: A "customer" using a prototype of a telephone-based railway inquiry system, developed by HP Labs India, which provides information on ticket availability and the status of wait-listed passengers.

Left: At the IBM Research Laboratory in Delhi a staff member testing a model of the Hindi speech-to-text conversation system.

All these technology company research labs have strong ties with local academic and engineering communities. IRL is physically located on the IIT Delhi campus and interacts with the institute. HP Labs India has set up a separate laboratory at IIT Chennai, while there is a Microsoft Lab working at IIT Kharagpur. Microsoft hopes that its new research lab in Bangalore will boost its ongoing university relations program.

"One of the unique aspects of Indian researchers is that they are tremendously concerned about the practical and social implications of their work. They're trying to solve immediate problems facing Indian society today," says Mythreyee Ganapathy, who manages Microsoft's university relations program started in 2001.

"What is interesting is that some of these problems are universal, and solutions developed by these researchers will be applicable in many other developing countries."

In fact, a strong technical and academic environment is one of the key reasons why American companies set up research labs in India. This allows them to tap into high class local talent as well as provide a channel for IT professionals of Indian origin who want to come back to work in India. Many people working in such labs have come from parent companies in the United States or from other American companies or academic institutions.

IRL's Gopalakrishnan, HP's Ajay Gupta and P. Anandan, who will head the Microsoft lab, are examples.

Cost is another major driver of outsourcing R&D to India, said

Ashish Gupta, country head of the U.S.-based consultancy Evalueserve. This firm helps American technology companies evaluate India as an R&D destination and tackle issues like location, size and hiring of local talent.

In the past five years, more than a hundred U.S. technology firms have set up their development and engineering centers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon. They have invested more than one billion dollars so far. And this investment seems to be paying off, judging by the contribution these units make to their parent companies' global product lines and their creation of intellectual property. Over 1,000 patent applications were filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the top dozen entities of foreign companies in India from their start ti.ll September 2002, according to a survey by Evalueserve. This includes about 120 patents filed by IBM from India. HP Labs said over 20 of its innovations are in the process of patenting.

With Bell Labs' recent announcement of starting an R&D center in Bangalore, the development of products focused on local market demands seems quite vibrant. In the next couple of years, more American IT companies are likely to enter the Indian market.

D About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based science and technology journalist, who writes for Cnet News.com (USA) and The Lancet (U.K.).

n a lab at Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, researchers are stalking the solution to one of the great problems of modem life: having to hunt through hundreds of television channels for something you'd like to watch.

The lab's answer is a TV that recognizes you when you walk into the room, knows you like occult thrillers, finds one it recorded at three in the morning, and puts it up on the screen. Alongside will be smaller images of a British news report on the company you just invested in, the Web page carrying the eBay auction you bid in, and the high-resolution video scene you recorded on your cell phone earlier in the day. Ready to switch channels? Just speak up and tell the TV what you want.

Perhaps the best thing about this talented device is that you'll be able to buy it in about seven years for about what you'd pay for a dumb television today. Philips has already demonstrated these sorts of capabilities in its lab and recently rolled out a semi-intelligent prototype. "We can already produce a mostly digital television that allows you to add functions through software and that will cost in the ballpark

of a conventional analog set," says Theo Claasen, chief technology officer for the company's semiconductor group.

We've come to take for granted that the electronics industry keeps hurling new and improved products at us, and it's a solid bet that this won't slow down in the near future. Electronic products are largely defined by the microprocessors inside them, and the power and speed of these chips continue to climb exponentially. The amazing resiliency of Moore's Law-Intel cofounder Gordon Moore's prediction nearly 40 years ago that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year-means that chips have gone from having a few thousand transistors three decades ago to over 100 million today, while the price per transistor has dropped from $1 to a millionth of a cent. And since transistor density roughly translates to computing and communications speed, you can thank Moore's Law for innovations like online shopping, in-car navigation systems, and cheap cell phones.

"Transistors are free," says Krishna-

murthy Soumyanath, director of communications-circuits research at Intel.

"We can solve problems by throwing more transistors at them."

Despite skeptics' perennial warnings that Moore's Law will peter out, the industry is set to hew to it for at least the next three generations of microprocessors, expected to come out over the next six years. Right now the smallest standard features of the fastest silicon transistors are 90 nanometers wide.

Before the end of 2005, manufacturers expect to make 65-nanometer transistors.

And blueprints for reducing that to 45 nanometers by 2007 are in the works.

Miniaturization means that more transistors can be squeezed onto a chip.

This makes microprocessors faster, in part because electrons have less distance to travel between transistors. It also makes memory chips more capacious. Today, the fastest consumer microprocessors have about 180 million transistors and operate at a speed of about three gigahertz-or roughly speaking, three billion simple operations per second-while the adjacent random-access memory chips hold two

AGE gigabytes of data or more. By 2007, processors will pack more than a billion transistors, hit speeds approaching 10 gigahertz, and be backed up by several gigabytes of RAM. With .that kind of power and memory, PCs will be able to transport you to ultrarealistic online virtual worlds, bold up their end of a ponversation (on certain topics, anyway), and quickly search through hours of your vacation videos for that bit where Uncle Arnold capsizes his canoe.

Predicting what other sorts of gadgets will result from this explosion in computing power is, of course, the $64,OOO-make that the $64 bil1ion-

Semiconductor makers will soon be able to cram a billion transistors onto a single microchip. Here's what all that new computing power will do for vou.

question. For all his prescience about chips, Gordon Moore himself failed to foresee the PC or the Internet, never mind the personal digital assistant or smart cell phone. Home videophones and pen-based computers, on the other hand, have managed to stay off consumers' radar screens despite decades of hype. "If ten years ago someone told you about the World Wide Web, MP3 players, and video cameras that fit in the palm of your hand, you wouldn't have believed them," says Jeffrey Bokor, a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California,

Berkeley. "What we're going to see over the coming years will be equally hard to imagine."

MoVies on Your Phone But plenty of experts are willing to take a stab at it. Near the top of everyone's list is the cell phone, which appears to be due for a serious makeover. For starters, says Peter Kastner, chief researcher at the Aberdeen Group, a market research firm in Boston, cell phones will pack in the electronics needed to communicate via a number of different frequencies and dataencoding schemes, so that they can constantly hunt for the channels that will give

them the best data transfer rates at the lowest costs.

That means these new phones will receive data 20 or more times faster than today's mobile phones, without sending service bills through the roof. To handle these data transfer speeds, the phones will operate at frequencies in the two-gigahertz range and above, well beyond the frequency range of most cell phones today. That hasn't been cost-effective until recently because the analog circuits that process traditional audio and visual signals enlist special ized transistor designs and materials. Analog circuits are also sensitive to the electronic "noise" from digital circuits, meaning they're usually stuck on separate chips-a costly and inefficient arrangement that limits devices' ability to handle ultrafast signals.

But now, thanks to the performance boost that comes from more densely packed transistors, digital circuits are becoming quick enough to mimic many of the functions of analog circuits, including dealing

features, and navigation aids with detailed maps-all accessed via a voice interface. Right now, about half of the transistors in a cell phone go toward interacting with the user rather than processing calls, but Philips's Claasen says the number of transistors dedicated to the user interface will increase by a factor of 10 over the next several years.

That will "drive a new cycle of cellphone buying," predicts Kastner.

And it's not just cell phones that will benefit from microprocessor enhancements. PCs and gadgets will also become friendlier. As devices and the network gain intelligence, they'll require less attention from you. That's critical to their acceptance, says James Meindl, director of the Microelectronics Research Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"Until now, we haven't had enough electronics to make the operations of these machines completely simple," he says.

Take televisions. In the sets Philips is planning, says Claasen, fully 80 percent

says Aberdeen's Kastner, when electronics start understanding plain English (or Finnish or Mandarin) commands. Speech recognition is often portrayed as a software problem, he notes, but it can in fact be solved with the vast increases in processing power and memory that wi II be afforded by the coming generation of chips. Appliances and handheld devices that can handle simple spoken commands are already hitting the shelves, and according to Kastner, machines should be able to engage in rudimentary conversation with us by 2010. "With all that power, you can throw multiple algorithms at the problem," he explains. "We won't have all the capabilities of HAL lan intelligent computer] from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we'll be a lot closer."

Patrick Gelsinger, chief technology officer at Intel, says the company has already achieved significant improvements in speech recognition in its labs by using multiple microphones to add directionality to incoming sound infor-

Industrv experts agree that the next three generations of microprocessors will simplv extend the familiar properties of silicon. with fast-changing, high-bandwidth radio signals. "We can take an analog radio signal right off an antenna and quickly move it into digital logic," says Dennis Buss, vice president of silicon-technology development at Texas Instruments, which is already rolling out integrated, singlechip wireless devices based on the new techniques.

With their near-broadband connections, these new phones will enable fast, high-resolution Web surfing, and even passable real-time video, meaning that they could incorporate video cameras for recording, videoconferencing, and sophisticated game playing-possibly even movie watching.

They'll be smarter, too, assuming more and more of the functions of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and even PCs, including online shopping, e-mail anci calendar

of the computing power on the main chip will be used, not for image-processing chores, but for an adaptive interface that will assemble content from multiple sources geared to your viewing habits and present you with choices in whatever format you're most comfOltable with. TVs will become so dependent on computing power, says Claasen, that consumers will soon be shopping for them the way they now select PCs: according to processing speeds, memory size, and communications capabilities rather than their functionality, which will be provided by software and will upgrade itself automatically over the Internet.

And say goodbye to annoyances like having to wrestle your way through four screens of menus to get your PDA to cough up the name you're looking for.

Most usability problems will go away,

mation and adding lip-reading capabilities via video camera. "If homes are going to go from having four computers to having 400, we've got to make those other 396 a lot easier to use," he says.

That increased user-friendliness, he adds, will result in large part from the improvements in microprocessor speed coming down the pike.

Silicon Magic What sort of huge breakthroughs will allow the semiconductor industry to make these leaps? Actually, none. The experts all pretty much agree: the next three generations of microprocessors, at least, will simply extend the familiar properties of silicon. It's not that there aren't plenty of dramatic innovations at the ready, including more-exotic semiconducting materials like germanium and

indium phosphide and techniques for stacking layers of transistors into threedimensional chips. It's just that the industry can do it with silicon, so it willbecause it's cheaper. "Each time someone develops workable new materials or exotic device structures, silicon researchers keep catching up," says Berkeley's Bokor. "There's a very strong interest in industry in making the least-radical change possible."

Chip makers will still have to make a few key modifications to today's methods, starting with the photolithographic process used to chemically etch circuit patterns onto chips. In photolithography machines, lenses focus ultraviolet light through a stencil-like "mask" onto silicon wafers coated with a photosensitive materiaL The photolithography machines used to produce today's chips aren't precise enough to project 65-nanometer features.

But new, higher-resolution techniques are being worked out-for example, ultrafine gratings that break up and recombine the light beams so that they reinforce each other at the tiny spots where light is needed and cancel each other out everywhere else. To get to 45 nanometers and below, manufacturers may switch to machines now under development that use either extreme ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength and can therefore be used to etch smaller features, or beams of electrons, which can be finely controlled to etch patterns onto silicon directly, without a mask.

New forms of silicon will also lend a hand. For instance, chips will get a speed boost from silicon that has been deposited over a layer of silicon germanium, whose atoms cause the slightly misaligned atoms of pure silicon to stretch out a bit. This "strained" silicon speeds the journey of electrons through transistors. An additional boost will come from adding a layer of insulating material underneath the semiconducting layers, further enhancing their electrical properties.

Microprocessor maker AMD has reported speed jumps of up to 25 and 30 percent, respectively, for the two techniques. IBM and InttÂť have

already begun making chips with strained silicon, and IBM says products combining strained silicon with "silicon-on-insulator" designs could be on the market within several years.

Transistors are also getting a makeover. As the features of transistors shrink, electrons are more likely to stray off their intended course and leak across barriers, even when the transistor is supposed to be off. This leakage wastes power and interferes with transistors' ability to switch between their 0 and 1 states reliably-and it's going to get worse. To plug the leak, the industry is turning to a slightly different transistor design, one pioneered by Bokor and his Berkeley colleagues Tsu-Jae King and Chenming Hu in the late 1990s.

In a conventional transistor, the main point of leakage is a channel of material squeezed between the source and the drain, two larger blocks of silicon that define electrons' principal entry and exit points. A structure called a gate lies atop the channel, like a pontoon bridge across a canal. When a positive voltage is applied to the gate, negatively charged electrons are drawn toward it, opening up a pathway for more electrons to flow through the channel from the source to the drain. The problem, as transistors get smaller, is that electrons can sneak through the thin channel even when the gate isn't charged. The Berkeley group's "fin" design ameliorates leakage by raising the whole transistor above the silicon's surface and reshaping the channel as a narrow, vertical fin that stretches from source to drain like the crossbar of an H. The fin sits on an insulating material, which reduces electron leakage, and the gate drapes over the fin, touching it on both vertical surfaces, which doubles the effect of the positive voltage. Intel is already turning to a variation of this design, which should start showing up in microprocessors by 2007.

As a bonus, higher-performing materials and transistor designs make it possible to run chips at lower voltages. This reduces power consumption and, consequently, the risk of overheating, which rises as chips get denser.

The Fab Realitv New generations of far more powerful microprocessors are not a done deal.

Even if the chips come off assembly lines with all the hoped-for performance, the industry might have trouble keeping their costs low enough that the cell phones and televisions they go into will still seem like bargains. The culprit is the mushrooming cost of constructing a leading-edge chip factory, which is already about $3 billion-out of reach for all but perhaps a dozen companies worldwide.

Of course, the makers of the best-selling electronic products will be able to spread those up-front costs over tens of millions of chips, keeping prices down for at least some products. But rising fab costs could lead to yet another problem for consumers: finding products in stock.

Capital investment in the semiconductor industry has fallen by about half in the down economy of the past few years, and observers have issued predictions that the industry will face a shortage of chip-making capacity just as consumer demand for new-wave devices skyrockets.

"Everyone assumes the industry is capable of coming up with whatever capacity is required," says Richard Gordon, vice president of research for the semiconductor group at market research firm Gartner. "But bringing on more capacity is difficult, and with production concentrated in a handful of companies, there's going to be a problem."

But there's good reason to bet the industry will dodge these and any other bullets that come its way. After all, the chip world's ability to prove Moore right year after year without making the daunting leap away from silicon has defied even optimistic expectations. "No matter what the constraints, this industry always pulls off miracles," says Steve Jurvetson, managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Just tell your cell phone to keep you posted on the latest developments.

0 About the Author: David H. Freedman is a freelance journalist based in Massachusetts and the author offive books.

As globalization and the Internet make the world smaller, there are not enough names to go around-and more reasons to fight over them

u don't own your name. Just ask any John Smith. Then gain ....• The Seattle coffee company known as Starbucks has sued to stop a pair of coffee shops in Shanghai from using the name XINGBAKE. In Chinese, star = xing, and in a way Starbucks = Xingbake. "We came first," Xingbake's general manager said.

"We can't lose." His name is Mao .• An Atlanta music writer known as BILL WYMAN received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stones bass player known as Bill Wyman: demanding, that is, that he "cease and desist" using his name. In responding, Bill Wyman No.1 pointed out that Bill Wyman No.2 had been born William George Perks .• The German car company known as Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG has fought a series of battles to protect the name CARRERA. But another contender is a Swiss village, postal code 7122. "The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark," Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche's lawyers .• A Canadian businessman known as Jeff Burgar, living in High Prairie, a small town in Albelta, owns lots of names in dot-com territory. He registered J.R.R. Tolkien's name as an Internet domain in 1996 and held on to JRRTOLKIEN.COM until this year, when a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) took it away from him. The name Tolkien-just the name, as distinct from the prose, stories, characters and ideas-is big business. Burgar, meanwhile, has taken some other names in vain: CELINE DION, ALBERT EINSTEIN, MICHAEL CRICHTON and about 1,500 more. In many of these cases, battles have ensued-even the ghost of Albert Einstein fought back, via the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Burgar loses most of these cases, but not all.

The world is running out of names. The roster of possible names seems almost infinite, but the demand is even greater.

With the rise of instantaneous communication, business spreading across the globe and the Internet annihilating geography,

conflict is rampant in this realm of language and of intellectual property. Rules are up for grabs. Laws regarding names have never been in such disarray.

People war over names with the passion and righteousness seen in ancient battles for parcels of land. A select few namesthink of them as the pinnacles and hilltops-develop a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word NlKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much. No wonder the lawyers gird their loins.

Computer science offers a useful term of art: namespace-a territory within \yhich all names are distinct and unique; no fuzziness allowed. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be BLOOMINGDALE'S as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be FORD as long as you weren't making cars.

But traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together.

Certain namespaces have grown dangerously overcrowded.

Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them and vet them. The Food and Drug Administration now reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and subjective ..

Rigor may be impossible, and mistakes cause death.

METHADONE (for opiate dependence) has been administered in place of METHYLPHENIDATE (for attention-deficit disorder), and TAXOL (a cancer drug) for TAXOTERE (another cancer drug). Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: ZANTAC/XANAX; VERELANNIRILON. Linguists are devising scientific measures of the "distance" between drug names. But LAMICTAL and LAMISIL and LUDIOMIL and LOMOTIL are all approved drug names. Meanwhile, of course, drug companies have other worries; they spend millions on market research to make sure their names are both serious and sexy.

ROGAINE, the hair-growth treatment, was deliberately chosen to make you think "regain."

"Names are perhaps the single-most important issue of corporate communication today," said Naseem Javed, founder of a corporate naming company called ABC Namebank International.

"With millions and millions of product names clashing in cyberspace, a name is no longer something people can sit around a kitchen and come up with." A company can no longer say, "We make machines for business and we are international, so we will be INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES." "GENERAL MOTORS worked for an industrial giant in the 1920s, but it doesn't work today," Javed said. 'The loose change is gone-all those zodiac signs and constellations, GENESIS and PEGASUS, they're all gone. Apples, oranges, pineapples. Look at the newspaper business-you have thousands of papers, and they're all COURIER or JOURNAL or DISPATCH or POST. These people have a hell of a problem going into cyberspace."

The desperation of company founders and marketing departments to find new names sometimes brings ludicrous results. To single out some of the worst, a California naming company has created the Shinola Awards; recent "winners"-futuristic, forgettable, pseudoLatinate, barely pronounceable-include ACHIEVA, 'l.,.{Ij " ALTRIA and CRUEX. The Royal Mail>'ll(~ of Britain spent millions of pounds to reinvent itself in 2001 as CONSIGNIA-a name that lasted barely a year before dying under the weight of derision.

Occasionally, though, desperation can lead to brilliance. It is surely not a coincidence that the two spectacular naming triumphs of the cyberworld are coinages verging on nonsense: YAHOO! (never omit the exclamation point) and GOOGLE. Globalization tears down the walls that divide our collective mental universe. Some walls are geographic; others are just semantic. What is, for example, DOMINO? It depends on the context. Maybe your first thought involved pizza? Or was it sugar? In the software world, Domino is the name of e-mail server software. Elsewhere, it is a record label. And a game. As for DOMINO. COM, it belongs to none of these. As for the trademark, the United States has awarded ownership rights to several hundred contending parties. In a complex world, the simplest words are the most oversubscribed.

One approach to settling name disputes is to get inside our heads and figure out what's there. Litigators tried that in a famous Domino case, pizza v. sugar, employing public-opinion surveyors to find out which of the competing connotations dom. inated, mentally. Each side managed to produce surveys proving its points; this was done by asking different types of people.

Customers buttonholed in Domino's pizza outlets tended to think pizza; housewives reached at home tended to think sugar. (A federal judge finally ruled that the two Dominos could coexist.)

There are six billion of us, but even as individuals, we are mercurial, our brains notoriously in flux. Whether MADONNA evokes the singer or the Virgin might depend on mood or time of day. So might the mental "distance" between the drugs ZELDOX and ZOVIRAX and ZEPHREX and ZYPREXA. The law, for better and for worse, insists on mind reading: cases hinge on psychological concepts like distinctiveness and confusion.

Most such battles now play out in the online world. Internetstyle name disputes began breaking out in the last decade and became epidemic during the dot-com boom; they are now • ~ growing particularly knotty. The Internet is not just a 15,

churner of namespaces; it is also a namespace of its own.

Navigation around the globe's computer networks relies on the special system of domain names, like COCACOLA.COM. Technically these names are just stand-ins for numbers, Internet Protocol addresses. The Internet's computers perform the conversions behind the scenes: translating, for example, COCACOLA.COM to 129.33.45.163. The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network, under the control of a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Virginia-a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box. The Internet's naming system was designed in an atmosphere of idealism and naivete, by technically minded people with no trademark lawyers on the payroll. Domain names were handed out to anyone who asked, first come first served. The storehouse seemed limitless, after all. This is where Jeff Burgar of High Prairie came in.

"I was working for an Internet service provider, and we had to register a domain name for our own company, and it just struck me that, Gee, this is a very interesting situation," he said. "I looked out, and that's when I discovered that domain names

were free. And we had a lot of faith in the Internet and what it could do." This was 10 years ago.

Burgar does not make himself easy to find; JRRTOLKIEN.COM and many of his other celeblity domain names are registered to an enterprise called Alberta Hot Rods. (A clerical error, he insisted.) He was wary of talking at all, because he did not want to be accused of the particular sin associated with this business: registering other people's names in the hope of extolting money from them. He denied that he has ever done this. He's just a collector, he said, or a publisher. "This is basical]y freedom of the press," he said. "Why can't I publish a Web site about Carmen E]ectra and cal] it CARMENELECTRA.COM? "I really resent it when people accuse me of being a notorious cybersquatter, because I am not," he said.

He managed to hold on to the BRUCESPRINGSTEEN.COM domain name thanks to a split ruling by a pane] ofWIPO arbitrators.

He registered it on behalf of the "Bruce Springsteen C]ub" of High Prairie, A]berta-an organization that, in other ways, seems not to exist. The panel decided that the real Bruce Springsteen, "the famous, almost legendary, recording artist and composer," has some rights to his name but that Burgar was not using it in bad faith.

If he isn't trying to sell them, what does Burgar do with them?

Here he was a bit vague: "The same thing we were going to do

ride" on its good name. Tata won an injunction in 1999. This, however, as handed down by the Honorable High Court of Delhi, had no practical effect on the porn site in New Jersey. So the company filed a complaint with the World Intellectua] Property Organization, demanding the cancellation of the domain name.

The arbitrator's decision has become notorious.

First, he ruled that TATA is an exemplary trademark: "It is now generally accepted in most countries that well-known marks, particularly those surrounded by an aura of high repute, excellent quality and respectability, deserve wide protection."

Then he considered the problem of the extra word, BODACIOUS. The problem was whether TATA and BODACIOUS-TATAS were "confusingly similar"-the canonical test of trademark violation. He decided they were: "The addition of a word like bodacious ['South Midland and Southern U.S. ]. thorough; blatant; unmistakable; 2. remarkable; outstanding; 3. audacious; bold; brazen' -Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1989], and the addition of the letter s, does not render the Domain Name less identical or less confusingly similar to a trade or service mark. Indeed, the opposite is true, pmticularly when one considers most of the meanings atuibuted to the word bodacious." Because of the Internet's "tremendous reach," he ruled, people might well be fooled into thinking that the Tata Group had gone into the pomography business. Domain name canceled.

This caused a mild Intemet storm. James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Techno]ogy, which tracks many WIPO decisions on name disputes, considers this one an abuse of power. "I can't imagine that anyone would think that a domain called BODACIOUSTATAS had anything to do with this industria] giant, or that th~y would type it in by mistake," he said.

The world's czar of domain-name disputes may be a courtly Australian named Francis Gurry, deputy director general of WI PO, who is responsible for many of its various electronic-age activities. He is soft-spoken and unruffled and entirely convincing when he says that he had no idea what "tatas" meant. For a czar, his authority is quite circumscribed-even a bit peculiar, as he is the first to point out.

The World Intellectual Property Organization is an international body established by treaty among 180 sovereign states, yet in this one realm it is subordinate to a private corporation in the United.

States: Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Icann oversees the management of Internet names and addresses-in other words, the Black Box. It farms out responsibi]ity for registering the domain names to a collection of profitmaking companies, more than ] 00 at last count, all of whom agree to abide by a dispute-resolution procedure drawn up in consu]tation with WIPO. The nuts and bolts of dispute resolution is farmed out, in turn, to arbitration bodies, principally WIPO. The first flood of disputes came with the dot-com boom, which meant a quantum change in the nature of the domain name itself. "I think the correct characterization of it is that it was a spontaneous mutation," Gurry said. "These were technical addresses for a while, and then what caused the mutation was the

The World Intellectual Property Organization is trying to broaden domain-name rules to cover problems lying outside the realm of trademark law. with any of the Web sites." Is the idea to create a fan site, then?

Many celebrity names were first registered not by extortionists but by genuine fans. "Well, let's see," he said sardonically. "We have GENGHISKHAN.COM registered, and if! put up an information site about him, would you call that a fan site?" Actually, though, the Genghis Khan information site must be in the nature of a future project. That domain name, like almost all of Burgar's, redirects users to a generic celebrity site he also owns.

Before there was an Internet, Ratan N. Tata of Bombay, chairman of the Tata Group, had no occasion to butt heads with an American pornographer, but he cares about his name and its value. He has controlled Tata Steel, Tata Engineering, Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Tata Finance, Tata Telecom and Tata Tea, not to mention Tata Sons Ltd. and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust.

Then a New Jerseyan registered the domain name BODACIOUS-TATAS.COM and used it to display what subsequent legal proceedings referred to as "sexually explicit material." The House of Tata went to court, arguing that the Web site was taking "a cash

allowance of commercial activity on the Internet. If you were only using it as a research medium, nobody was going to be more than passingly amused if you were going to be registering McDonald's or Coca-Cola or whatever it might be."

With commercialization, everything changed.

The McDonald's Corporation (and, for that matter, The New York Times Company) cadged their eponymous domain names from individuals who had presciently registered them. Other companies with important trademarks struggled, until lcann and WIPO established their system. Then came a surge of cases in the general category of trademark holder v. cybersquatter, routinely decided in favor of trademark holder. Time Warner won a case involving 108 variations on the theme of Harry Potter. Telia, the Swedish telecommunications giant, tried to win back 204 variations and succeeded with all but one: itelia.org. Such cases seemed fairly easy, to WIPO, at least. The new generation of name disputes is far more troublesome.

In these proceedings, trademark law is the elephant in the room, but trademark laws vary from country to country, and in theory the arbiU'atorsare not supposed to rely on any nation's laws. They use Icann's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, or UDRP. This boils down to a three-part test, each part meant to be straightforward and clear-cut: The complainant must have rights to the name, or to a name "identical or confusingly similar." The name doesn't actually have to be a registered trademark, but it needs to have been used in commerce, like a brand.

Actors, musicians, even authors get protection this way, while politicians, scientists and religious figures do not. (FRANCIS GURRY? "No," Gurry said. ''I'm not commercializable, unfortunately. As it exists at the moment, the trademark system is a very materialistic conception. And when you put it on the Internet, it's not necessarily the result that people want.")

The domain-name holder must be shown to have no legitimate rights to the name. This is not always as simple as it sounds.

The domain-name holder must be using the name in "bad faith."

This crucial term is not well defined. In practice, any attempt,' ~ to get money for the domain name con- .' :;','" stitutes prima facie evidence of bad faith. .

WIPO is trying to broaden domain-name ',,; rules to cover problems that lie outside the realm of trademark la~. Its rulings apply.directly only :;~~ to Internet domam names, but the Issues reach. ';{ ~l increasingly far, and the most difficult ques-~~~t tions are only now beginning to arise, Gurry ri:iV,i ?aid. "It's a problem that's larger than the . Internet," he added. "It's a problem of a name having a certain status in a certain\

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locality, and now telecommunications and transportation are such that the name travels beyond the locality. Governments are no longer able to control the movements of persons, goods, capital, ideas, viruses or anything else across frontiers. There are consequences for names and for many other things as well."

Trouble looms in international names for pharmaceuticals, because the drug companies' interest in proprietary trademarks comes into conflict with a public interest in generic names that patients can recognize wherever they may happen to be. Names based on geography have special problems too. "They are not really being dealt with," he said. "Country names, city names, towns, geoethnic names. ARAB, EUROPE, AMERICA: should there be any entitlement to these? What about names of indigenous people and tribes? Most have been registered, and the more we stray into the territory of naming systems and geography, the more we realize the illogicality."

Here are two familiar names of beverages: MANHATTAN and BORDEAUX. Both are geographical names, but their legal status is entirely different, for a technical reason. One of these drinks has qualities delived from the region-its soil and grapes, specifically-and one does not. A true Bordeaux must hail from southwest France; you can mix an authentic Manhattan anywhere. Here is another: BUDWEISER. Before this was an American beer, it was a Czech town.

"There is a longstanding dispute," Gmry said, "between the Czechs, who say that you cannot have 'Budweiser' in the Czech Republic, and Budweiser, which has a trademark. You can't buy Budweiser here in Switzerland for that reason."

There are easy cases and hard cases. An easy case might be MADONNA.COM. The singer Madonna Ciccone won MADONNA. COM from one Dan Parisi, who was running yet another "adult-entertainment ~ portai," even though he pointed out that she was hardly the name's original user. His site had carried the disclaimer "Not affiliated or endorsed by the Catholic Church, Madonna College, Madonna Hospital or Madonna the singer." At the last minute, he tried to transfer the domain name to the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, but the arbitrators were unmoved.

But what about Anand Ramnath Mani, a graphic artist in Vancouver, who generally abbreviates his names? He registered ARMANI.COM, bumping into a trademark owned in many countties by Giorgio Armani and his representatives, who then spent years trying to get it away from him. They finally brought WIPO proceedings, pleading that "every day, all over the world, people which are looking for the site of the famous stylist, finds, with surprise, the site of Mr. Anand .~ Mani in Vancouver"-though, in fact, " Mani never bothered to put up a Web site. ~~>;~' ()o Jhe panel not only rejected the I

W£lA--KJr."' •... 05

complaint but also rebuked the company for a bad-faith abuse of the process.

To most Americans, CRAZY HORSE is the name of the revered Oglala warrior aka Ta-Sunko-Witko. In 1992, it also became the name of a malt liquor marketed by the Stroh Brewing Company. The year after that, predictably enough, it also became the name of a national boycott and public education program; eventually the brewers apologized to the Crazy Horse Defense Project, though remnants of the litigation continue to this day. In another namespace, meanwhile, Crazy Horse signifies something altogether different: France's leading nude dance revue and nightclub. When a Parisian buys a Crazy Horse baseball cap, Tshirt, cigarette lighter or dressing gown, Native American tradition doesn't enter into it.

In the academic study of names-onomastics, as the discipline is called-it is axiomatic that expanding social units lead to

al property, the response has been a sort of panic-a land grab.

Trademarks are a case in point. As recently as 1980, the United States registered about 30,000 a year. Last year, the number was 185,182, ajump of nearly 50 percent from just two years before.

The vast majority of trademark applications used to be rejected; now the opposite is true.

Notorious forms of litigation flow from the overprotection of names. Every small-business owner is burdened by frivolous cease-and-desist letters; sending these is a cottage industry. The Fox News Network was laughed out of court trying to control the use of the words "fair and balanced"; yet for now, at least, Fox still does own trademark rights in those words, in two categories: television news programs and neckties. The organization that maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system sued a librarythemed hotel for using its numbers-Room 700.003, for example, dedicated to the performing arts. (The case has been settled.) Pet Friendly of Alabama, maker of rope chew toys, is threatening Pet Friendly Rentals of California. Santa Claus has been trademarked in several hundred ways.

None of this serves the public interest. It's wasteful overhead, it's expensive and it's noxious.

Time Warner surely ought to control HARRY-POTTER.COM, having licensed the rights from the wizard's inventor, J.K. Rowling, but just as surely the company is not entitled to every variation on the theme. Let the I-LOVE-HARRY-POTTER Web sites bloom.

DaimIerChrysler may own DODGE and VIPER, but others, too, may have legitimate, partial interests in those words, arguably including Brad Bargman of Florida, who originally registered DODGEVIPER.COM and used it to offer advice and discu~sion for Dodge Viper enthusiasts. (WIPO nevertheless transferred the domain name to the company.)

So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. "It's a business," he said. ''The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another"-from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. "The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities."

To cope with the dynamic, entangled, variegated nature of our . information-governed world, perhaps the law just needs to relax-loosen the cords, instead of tightening them. A system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach.

The principle that people really care about is authenticity and truthfulness. The law needs to prevent miscreants from pretending to be people they're not or from passing off spurious products-but that is all. BODACIOUS- TATAS.COM may be unsavory, but it was not fooling anyone; it was not trying to impersonate the House of Tata; its wares were exactly as advertised.

Namespaces will collide. Let them.

D

Notorious forms of litigation flow from the overprotection of names. Every small-business owner is burdened by frivolous cease-and-desist letters. expanding name systems. In tribes and villages, single names were enough; everyone knew who was designated by ULF or OLGA, and there was no need to fight about it. But tribes gave way to clans, cities to nations, and people had to do better: surnames and patronyms; names based on geography and occupation. A half-century ago, Ernst Pulgram wrote in his illustrious "Theory of Names" that "an increase in the complexities of the administrative and social constitution of an ethnic or political group tends to produce, as a rule, an increase in the complexity and rigidity of the onomastic system." So here we go again, he might say today. Cyberspace and globalization represent not just new opportunies for fights over names, but a sea change in the scale of modern society. Entities multiply.

"Consider the word apple," Pulgram wrote. To the horticulturalist or expert grocer, it hardly occurs: instead we have "Pippins, Codlins, Reinettes, Baldwins, McIntosh Reds, Biffins, Rome Beauties." Now, of course, an Apple is a computer. It's also a record label and holding company for the Beatles. Apple Computer and Apple Corps managed to coexist for a quarter-century, but now Apple Computer has a music store, and the Beatles' representatives have filed suit. Gurry updates Pulgram this way: "People go in and out of different contexts, and they use different instruments that decontextualize and recontextualize, and they're here and there and everywhere. Communications and transportation have challenged the contextual basis of naming systems."

As these conflicts have rattled the legal edifices of intellectu-

About the Author: James Gleick, a former editor with the New York Times, is the founder of the Internet portal, the Pipeline.

ON THE

LIGHTER SIDE

"This company is going places-for starters we're moving offices to a building with lower r:nt."

Copyright © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Well, enough about us-let's

talk about them. "

Copynght .

© The New Yorker Collection 2004 Michael Maslin from Cartoonbank.com.

All Rights Reserved.

J

.

\

{.

"They 've redesigned our cubicles. " Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 2003 M· k S from C b IC tevens artoon ank.com. All Rights Reserved.

"Let me be more precise-maybe

yes, maybe no. "

Copyright © Tribune Media ServiceS' , Inc . All ng . h ts reserved.

....

T

General SUSANNA BERGTOLD Etching with aquatint 39 cms x 29 cms, 2002

Gateway MERSIDMER Mezzotint 34 cms x 60 cms, 2002

FREDERICK

"Untitled (Song)" GWENN THOMAS Etching with aquatint and sugar lift 11 cms x 15 cms, 2003

Printmaking

ultiple Encounters The printmakers' urge to experience and experiment with new tools is fulfilled by this Indo-U.S. exhibition and digital workshop traveling to numerous Indian cities this year

hese are heady and exciting days for Indian printmakers. With the expanding art market artists are exploring new options for their visual expressions. To realize their dreams and experiment with new printmaking tools, 48 artists gathered at the American Center in New Delhi on December 29 and 30 to participate in a two-day digital prints workshop entitled "Multiple Encounters." The workshop-part of a larger event, Multiple Encounters: The Exhibition of Indo-U.S. Prints in India, 2004-2005-was cosponsored by the American Information Resource Center, a division of the Public Affairs Section of the American Embassy, where artists, both novice and established, demonstrated and finetuned their computer skills to make digital prints while sharing their experiences.

Printmaking took a big stride in the West, where it acquired the respectable status of an art form. In India, however, the medium is still in its infancy. Most Indian artists who flirted with this form of art for a while were established painters or sculptors who indulged only in conventional printmaking techniques such as lithography, wood or metal blocks, but not with digital tools. Even though there is no profound antipathy toward printmaking as an art medium, most artists, due to lack of public demand, tend to produce experimental prints and only in small editions.

Inaugurating the workshop, L.M. Singhvi, former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, said: "India is a classical example of multiple encounters. There has been cultural plural. ism in the country since ages ago. But this workshop is perhaps a beginning to forge a strong cultur111bonding and bring about a

T

The Egg-Brahmand JYOTI M. BHATT Digital print 48 ems x 37 ems, 2000

creative spirit between the United States and India. No one else but the artist community is equipped to bring about this transformation." He observed that this traveling group exhibition on Indo-American artists, which was recently on view in New Delhi, provides a visual feast to art lovers who can get a glimpse of Indian art. Paying tribute to the great masters of printmaking such as Raja Ravi Verma, Singhvi stated: "The prints and lithographs of masters like Ravi Verma are respected and they are

The Flute Charmer AJITSEAL Lithograph 42 cms x 53 cms

prized possessions of the entire art world."

The digital workshop, which will travel to other Indian cities this year, is expected to herald a new era in Indian printmaking.

"It has become a sensation among Indian printmakers, and down the line this is going to emerge as a major event," said Dipankar Roy, international director of Multiple Encounters.

With the application of digital tools, countless varieties and options are available to printmakers. "This will definitely bring a huge change to printmaking. We have invited well-known painters to the workshop like Ved Nayar, Gogi Saroj Pal, Anupam Sud and Dattatrey Apte, who are occasional printmakers but have had no exposure to the digital forms. But, at the end of the day, they were tremendously excited and impressed with the new computer tools and their applications. I am sure that this effort will pave the way to promoting digital printmaking that would further the emergence of a new generation of printmakers," added Roy. The workshop helped the participants break barriers and cross over into new areas of printmaking.

The prints produced by artists at the workshop were aesthetically lively and diverse in their range, thus foiling the Right: Dinkar Kowshik, former principal of Kala Bhawan in Santiniketan, inaugurating the Multiple Encounters workshop.

Far right: Printmaker Avijit Roy working with a participant at the workshop cosponsored by AIRC in New Delhi.

assumption that digital tools limit artlstlc improvisation.

"Certain techniques were developed in the workshop to create a simultaneous process, bringing all colors onto a single 'plate' using exciting methods," says Saroj Pal, a Delhi-based painter who enjoyed working on computers. "The artist develops a tangible relationship to the material at hand even if it is a digital format," she said, adding, "I have tried and explored all media.

If the print is not liked by people, it is the failure of the artist, not the medium." Echoing the same sentiment, another painter Anupam Sud expressed: "Digital medium is the real thing of the

"D.LGS" ANUPAM SUD Etching (Dimensions not available)

future." Hemant Bhatnagar, SPAN art director and workshop participant, feels that the digital tools offer almost unlimited options for graphic printmakers. "The computer, with features like 'Undo' and 'working on layers,' allows artists greater freedom to create and experiment as compared to the conventional tools," Bhatnagar says.

While India is struggling hard to establish itself as a major printmaking nation, its American counterparts have made many technical advances. "What the American artists have achieved from the technical standpoint, we have a long way to go to real-

The Search Within-I KAVITANAYAR Etching 50 cms X 40 cms, 2000

ly catch up with them. Indian artists have been viewed as contributing very little to printmaking techniques even though they are quite innovative and artistically expressive. In spite of several drawbacks that we have, printmaking as an art medium is making some progress, and with the introduction of these new tools, it may reinvent itself," says Sud. The year-long Multiple Encounters exhibition was first showcased at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi last November. This traveling exhibition and the digital workshops that follow are billed as the biggest ever U.S.-India printmaking show. The organizers are planning to conduct three more workshops in Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai this year where the exhibition will also be held. This exhibition, which showcases works of 68 American and 65 Indian artists, will travel to different cities throughout India this year including Chandigarh, Srinagar, Vadodara, Bangalore, Goa, Lucknow and Ahmedabad.

Some of the other artists in the Indian contingent are Ajit Seal, K.S. Viswambara, Pramjeet Singh, Kavita Shah, Jyoti M. Bhatt, Kavita Nayar, K.R. Sibbanna and Hema Guha. The American artists include Richard Lubell, Barbara Yoshida, Frederick Mershimer, Carolyn Sheehan, Gwenn Thomas, Judith Heath and Susanna Bergtold.

Multiple Encounters aims to establish an effortless rapport between the printmakers and the common man, with digital technology providing a platform where artists encounter new challenges, experiments and expressions.

0

BSENCE OF LICE The author, a historian, explains why Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, given just weeks before he died, was his greatest speech

"For wo long," says Ronald

C. White,

Jr., "Lincoln's

Second

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this was his best effon."

does wo. In his new book, Lincoln's

White

fascination

Greatest Speech: The

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still moves people powerfully. these

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of a war that had lasced longer than anyone thought bur whose end, at last seemed Jackson,

in sighL

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32 years before, had any President

it would,

since Andrew

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second term, and says White, "there had been no expectation iL There much

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Confederate

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poetry. Five hundred

Lincoln

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repetition White

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from human

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generals and soldiers."

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and

of the words are of a single syllable, "bur

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Presidencs,

likens

on

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the

limescone

Inaugural

White believes, as a "culmination

walls

Address

of

the

Lincoln

can be underscood,

of Lincoln's own struggle over

the meaning of America, the meaning

of the war, and his own

struggle with slavery."

And, he adds, a blueprinc

for colerance. "Lincoln

this speech was laying the groundwork compassion

and reconciliation."

hoped that

for a reconstruceion

of

resident Abraham Lincoln had every reason to be hopeful as inauguration day, March 4, 1865, approached. The Confederacy was splintered, if not shattered. On February 1, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman led 60,000 troops out of Savannah. Slashing through South Carolina, they wreaked havoc in the state that had been the seedbed of secession. To celebrate victories in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, Lincoln ordered a nighttime illumination in Washington. Crowds celebrated these achievements in song as the harbinger of the end of the hostilities.

At the same time, Union General Ulysses S. Grant was besieging Petersburg, Virginia, twenty miles south of Richmond.

Despite Confederate General Robert E. Lee's previous record for forestalling defeat, it was clear that the badly outnumbered Confederates could not hold out much longer. Everything pointed toward victory.

Apprehension intruded upon this hopeful spirit. Rumors were flying about the capital that desperate Confederates, now realizing that defeat was imminent, would attempt to abduct or assassinate the President. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton took extraordinary precautions. All roads leading to Washington had been heavily picketed for some days and the bridges patrolled with "extra vigilance." The 8th Illinois Cavalry was sent out from Fairfax Court House with orders to look for "suspicious characters." The problem was greatly Opposite page: complicated by the presence of large The medium was in its numbers of Confederate deserters infancy when Scottish who now roamed the capital. Stanton photographer Alexander posted sharpshooters on the buildings Gardner captured Lincoln that would ring the inaugural (behind white table, on ceremonies. Plainclothes detectives the Capitol's East Portico) roved the city keeping track of giving his Second questionable persons.

Inaugural.

After four years as a war President, Lincoln could look ahead to four years as a peace President. With no Congress in session until December to hamper him, he would have free rein to do some peacemaking on his own.

Gamblers were even betting that the 16th President would be inaugurated for a third term in 1869. The President, who had been battered by critics in Congress and the press for much of the war, was finally beginning to receive credit for his leadership. Many were suggesting that the stakes were about to get higher. Would Lincoln, the resourceful commander-in-chief, guide a reunited nation during what was beginning to be called "Reconstruction"?

As the day for his second inauguration drew near, everyone wondered what the President would say. No one seemed to know anything about the content of Lincoln's speech. A dispatch from the Associated Press reported that the address would be "briefnot exceeding, probably, a column in length." It was recalled that he took 35 minutes to deliver his First Inaugural Address. The New York Herald reported that "the address will probably be the briefest one ever delivered." Another report said the address would take only five to eight minutes.

P

If reports about the length of the address were correct, how would Lincoln deal with questions that were multiplying? Would he use his rhetorical skills to take the hide off his opponents in the South and North? Was the Confederate States of America to be treated as a conquered nation? How did one demarcate between the innocent and the guilty, between citizens and soldiers? What would Lincoln say about the slaves? They had been emancipated but what about suffrage?

All of these questions involved complex constitutional issues.

405,000 died. In the Korean War, the death toll was 54,000. In the war in Vietnam, the number of Americans killed was 58,000.

Deaths in the Civil War almost equal the number killed in all subsequent wars.

Washington had never seen so many people as those who converged on the capital for Lincoln's second inauguration.

Trains roared and smoked over the double tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. The Washington Daily National

Left: The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., under construction,

1860.

Right: This 1881 painting shows the Grand Review of Union troops, looking down Pennsylvania A venue toward the Capitol building, May 23-24,1865.

Lincoln had used a good portion of his First Inaugural to argue carefully and logically his understanding of the indissoluble Union in light of the Constitution. The New York World, a New York City newspaper that had been a thorn in his side all through the war, contended that the Second Inaugural Address "ought to be the most significant and reassuring of all his public utterances."

Just beneath the outward merrymaking lay a different emotion. A weariness of spirit pervaded the nation. Government officials were fatigued from four long years of war. The agony of battle took its toll on families everywhere. Many citizens were filled with as much anger as hope. Even the anticipation of victory could not compensate for the loss of so many young men, cut down in death or disabled by horrible wounds just as they were preparing to harvest the fruits of their young lives.

And death and despair reached into nearly every home. An estimated 623,000 men died in the Civil War. One out of 11 men of service age was killed between 1861 and 1865. Comparisons with Americans killed in other wars bring the horror home. In World War I, the number killed was 117,000. In World War II,

lntelligencer reported, "Every train was crowded to repletion."

Visitors were greeted by a band playing "The Battle Cry of Freedom." Each day the Washington newspapers listed the notables who were arriving. All knew they were coming to witness a unique event.

Hotels were overflowing. Williard's, the grand five-story hotel. at Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, set up cots in its halls and parlors. The Metropolitan and the National were filled.

"The hotels are literally shelving their guests," reported the correspondent for the New York Times. Lincoln-Johnson Clubs lodged more than 1,000 visitors. Firehouses offered sleeping spaces.

Friends and supporters of the President, who was beleaguered during much of his first term, now declared that the recent events vindicated his leadership. In an editorial published inauguration morning, the Illinois Daily State Journal, a friend of Lincoln's from his earliest campaigns as a legislator, declared, "All honor to Abraham Lincoln through whose honesty, fidelity, and patriotism, those glorious results [of the war] have been

achieved." The Chicago Tribune, also a staunch supporter, proclaimed that "Mr. Lincoln ... has slowly and steadily risen in the respect, confidence, and admiration of the people."

This second inauguration, so some of his supporters argued, ought to be a time for Lincoln to crow a bit. The Daily Morning Chronicle agreed. "We shall not be surprised if the President does not, in the words he will utter this morning, point to the pledges he gave us in his inaugural of 1861, and claim that he has not departed from them in a single substantial instance."

In spite of the inclement weather, Friday morning, March 3, visitors crowded the streets of the capital, where spring rains had just begun to turn the grass from winter brown to green.

Within the government, there was no time yet for celebration.

Lincoln met Friday night with his cabinet until a late hour, working to finish business related to the last acts of the outgoing 38th Congress. The Senate had been meeting all day and continued its session into the evening. As tempers flared and energy sagged, this legislative all-nighter became a strange prelude to the inaugural ceremonies on the morrow.

The Senate and House worked on until seven o'clock in the morning. On one occasion a sudden burst of rain suggested "an explosion inside the building," causing many "to run towards the doors." The leaders of the House and Senate convinced the members to come back to their seats.

Fog continued to hang over the city as the crowd began arriving at the east entrance of the â‚Źapitol, with its radiant iron

dome topped by its statue, Armed Liberty. (Despite the war, Lincoln had insisted that the work on the dome proceed; its completion represented his hope that one day all the states and their representatives would meet again to do the nation's business.) Carriages were in great demand. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the arriving throng was present "in force sufficient to have struck terror into the heart of Lee's army (had the umbrellas been muskets)." As visitors and residents walked toward the Capitol, they encountered military patrols on horseback at every major intersection.

The ceremonial procedures would not differ substantially from Lincoln's first inauguration.

Yet there were differences. Instead of the small clusters of soldiers in 1861, large numbers of military could be observed throughout the city. In certain sections of the capital, multiplying numbers of Confederate deserters could be seen.

Twelve hundred and thirty-nine disheartened Confederate soldiers had arrived in February. All the soldiers were marked by their wounds.

Amputation had become the trademark of Civil War surgery. According to federal records, three out of four operations were amputations. Too often the surgery had to be repeated. Many visitors professed shock at the sight of so many young men with amputated legs or arms.

Black soldiers had changed the composition of the army from 1861 to 1865. For the first two years of the war, the Union Army was all white.

Lincoln had initiated the North's employment of African" American troops when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

The use of black troops prompted protests both in the North and in the South, but 179,000 black soldiers and 10,000 sailors would serve in the Union forces before the end of the war. By inauguration day, black soldiers had become a common sight in Washington.

The presence of so many blacks in the inaugural crowds particularly struck the correspondent for the Times of London.

He estimated that "at least half the multitude were colored people. It was remarked by everybody, stranger as well as natives, that there never had been such crowds of negroes in the capital." Whereas many in the crowds, because of the mud, were dressed in "old clothes," African Americans, despite the dismal weather, were noticeable also because of their dress "in festive reds, blues, and yellows, and very gaudy colors."

By midmorning, the inaugural parade, which preceded the swearing in ceremonies in Lincoln's time, was forming. Grand Marshal Ward Lamon, an old friend from Illinois, went to the White House to escort the President to the Capitol. Lamon had arranged to have 13 brightly clothed United States marshals and 13 citizen marshals accompany Lincoln's carriage. Lamon did not know that Lincoln had driven off to the Capitol earlier in the

morning to sign some bills, abandoning the usual protocol. As one observer noted, the parade was the "the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out."

Far down the parade line was something never before witnessed at a presidential inauguration. Four companies of black soldiers, members of the 45th Regiment United States Colored Troops, marched smartly. Immediately following was a lodge for African American Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization. The crowd cheered.

Next in line came a selies of floats, patriotic but a bit dowdy.

First was the Temple of Liberty, a tent made out of muslin, now soggy. The original intention had been to sun'ound the tent with young "maidens" from each state of the Union. The rain prompted the float's organizers to replace the young girls with boys. The boys entertained the crowd by singing patriotic songs such as "Rally Round the Flag" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom." The next float-drawn by four white horses, soon spattered with mud-presented by members of the Lincoln-Johnson Club of East Washington, bore a replica of the iron warship Monitor.

The crowd buzzed as the third float, carrying an operational printing press, came into view. Staff members of the Daily Morning Chronicle busily printed a four-page inaugural newspaper that contained a program for the day, copies of which were tossed to the spectators on both sides of the avenue.

The special marshals and the President's Union Light Guard escorted Mrs. Lincoln. The crowd cheered the presidential coach along the route from the White House to the Capitol, not knowing that the President was not present.

After a festive beginning, the parade suddenly came to a halt in a snarled confusion of horses, troops, and fire engines.

Following 20 minutes without movement, an impatient Mary Lincoln commanded her driver to pull out and proceed by a back way to the Capitol. The parade finally resumed, now without either the President or the President's wife.

At 11:40 the rain had suddenly ceased, and arrangements were completed to hold the ceremonies outside. President Lincoln was escorted through a corridor to the temporary wood platform that extended from the east front of the Capitol. Noah Brooks, who was Lincoln's friend as well as correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, descri bed the immense crowd as a "sea of heads. As far as the eye could see, the throng looked like waves breaking at its outer edges."

Soldiers were dispersed throughout the crowd. Some had come in uniform from the camps. Many more came from area hospitals. Lincoln was always the soldiers' President. He liked to mingle with enlisted men and often visited wounded soldiers.

The military personnel had returned a 75 percent vote for him in his re-election the previous November. Now thousands of them were present to witness the inauguration of their President.

In the crowd, Lincoln recognized Frederick Douglass, the articulate African American abolitionist leader, reformer, and newspaper editor. Lincoln's. First Inaugural Address had

dismayed Douglass. He had found Lincoln's words much too conciliatory toward the South. Douglass visited Lincoln in the White House in 1863 and again in 1864 to speak with the President about a variety of issues concerning African Americans. Douglass's attitudes about the President during the Civil War had whipsawed back and forth from disgust to respect, and from despair to hope.

Up behind the right buttress stood the actor John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had seen Booth perform at Ford's Theatre the previous November. Booth, 26 years old, had been an actor since he was 17. Seething with hatred, Booth had been working on a plan to abduct Lincoln and take him to Richmond. Now that the South's military fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. Booth resolved that stronger measures were needed. He was in touch with the Southern Secret Service as he sought an opportunity to do something "heroic" for the South. He came to hear the Second Inaugural for his own dark motives. He must have wondered, what would this false President say?

When Lincoln was introduced, the crowd exploded. Brooks repOlted, "A roar of applause shook the air, and again, and again repeated." The military band played "Hail to the Chief," helping to build the enthusiasm of the gathering. The applause and cheers rolled toward those in the fmthest reaches of the crowd. Finally, George T. Browne, sergemlt-at-arms of the Senate, m'ose and bowed with black hat in hand, a signal for the crowd to become still.

Abraham Lincoln rose from his chair. He stepped from underneath the shelter of the Capitol building and out past the magnificent Corinthian columns. At 56, he looked older than his years. He advanced to a small, white iron table, the single piece of furniture on the portico. We do not know how it got there. It well may be tha~ its maker, Major Benjamin Brown French, a Lincoln admirer, simply placed it there. The table, made out of pieces from the dome's construction, symbolized for French the reuniting of the fragments of the Union. A lone tumbler of water stood on the little table.

As Lincoln rose, he put on and adjusted his steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He held in his left hand his Second Inaugural Address, printed in two columns. The handwritten draft had been set in type. The galley proof was clipped and pasted in an order to indicate pauses for emphasis and breathing.

Precisely as Lincoln began to speak, the sun broke through the clouds. Many persons, at the time and for years after, commented on this celestial phenomenon. Michael Shiner, an African American mechanic in the naval shipyard in Washington, recorded his awe in his diary entry for March 4: "As soon as Mr. Lincoln came out the wind ceased blowing and rain ceased raining and the sun came out and it became clear as it could be and calm." Shiner continued: "A star made its appearance ... over the Capitol and it shined just as bright as it could be." Brooks reported the same phenomenon. "Just at that moment the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor, and flooded the spectacle with glory and with light."

Lincoln prepared to speak:

THE SECOND MARCH

INAUGURAL 4, 1865

Fellow countrymen: At this second appearing, to take the God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. extended address than there was at the first. Then a The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it years, during which public declarations have been must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by constantly called forth on every point and whom the offence cometh!" If we shall phase of the great contest which still suppose that American Slavery is one of absorbs the attention, and engrosses the those offences which, in the providence of enerergies [sic] of the nation, little that is God, must needs come, but which, having new could be presented. The progress of continued through His appointed time, He our arms, upon which all else chiefly now wills to remove, and that He gives to depends, is as well known to the public as both North and South, this terrible war, as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably the woe due to those by whom the offence satisfactory and encouraging to all. With came, shall we discern therein any high hope for the future, no prediction in departure from those divine attributes regard to it is ventured. which the believers in a Living God always On the occasion corresponding to this ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hopefour years ago, all thoughts were anxiously fervently do we pray-that this mighty directed to an impending civil war. All scourge of war may speedily pass away.

National Archives and Records Administration Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all dreaded it-all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, years of unrequited ~oil shall be sunk, and until every drop insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn without war-seeking to dissole [sic] the Union, and divide with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; righteous altogether[."] and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And With malice toward none; with charity for all; with the war came. firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us One eighth of the whole popUlation were colored slaves, strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend with all nations. this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed That night, at a reception at the White House, the President no right to do more than to restrict the territorial sought out abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "I saw you in the enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address," Lincoln said. magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.

"How did you like it'" Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease Douglass demurred. "I must not detain you with my poor with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each opinion," he said. But Lincoln pressed on. looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental "There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the than yours," he said. "I want to know what you think of it." same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It "Mr. Lincoln," Douglass replied, "that was a sacred effort." may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Forty-one days later, on April 15, 1865, Lincoln was dead. 0

Crime! Intrigue! Tragedy!

MR. LINCOLN/S WASHINGTON The house where the conspirators hatched their heinous plot now serves sushi, and the yard where they were hanged is a tennis court. But much of the slain 16th President's capital remains surprisingly intact. n the 137th anniversary of the day Mr. Lincoln was shot, I joined a tour in Lafayette satirist Christopher Buckley, who says that Square, on Pennsylvania Congress in 1783 debated a "bill reguiring Avenue across from the White House, air bags and rear brake lights on stagecoachconducted by Anthony Pitch, a spry man es." Buckley, a Washington resident since wearing a floppy hat and carrying a Mini198 I, has spent years making sport of polVox loudspeaker, Pitch is a former British itics; his first novel, The White House Mess subject, and the author of a fine book, The (1986), gave us the feckless President Burning of Washington, about the British Thomas N. Tucker, or TNT, who declared torching of the city on August 24, 1814. war on Bermuda, and Buckley's most recent, Pitch once saw, in the basement of the No Way to Treat a First Lady (2002), posits a White House, the scorch marks left over chief executive done in by overexertions in from the incident. But for a thunderstorm the Lincoln Bedroom. In Washington ScMepped that must have seemed heaven-sent, many Here, published in 2003, Buckley makes his of the city's public buildings might have usual merry, but also shows a thoughtful burned to the ground. It's often said the fondness for what he calls this "Rome-onpresidential residence was first painted to the-Potomac landscape of gleaming white cover up the charred exterior, but official granite and marble buildings squatting on a White House historians say that isn't so, vast green lawn." He bases his book on four and point out that the building of pinkish walking tours, along the way tossing off sandstone was first whitewashed in 1798 facts (the spot where Francis Scott Key's and was known informally as the White son was fatally shot) and lore (a ghost is House before the British ever set it said to haunt the Old Executive Office aflame. Theodore Roosevelt made the Building). "Washington is a great city to name official in 1901 when he put "The walk around in," Buckley says. "For one White House" on the stationery. thing, it's pretty flat. For another, someBut Pitch's theme today is Abraham thing wonderfully historic happened every Lincoln, and his enthusiasm for the man is square foot of the way." In this excerpt, little short of idolatrous. "He was one of the most amazing people who ever Buckley covers the Washington of Abraham walked the earth," says Pitch. "He was Lincoln:

Washington, torians,

but

D.C., is chockablock perhaps

none

with his-

so jaunty

as

O

self-taught and never took umbrage at insults. That such a man was shot, in the back of the head, is one of the most monstrous insults that ever happened." I liked Pitch right away.

We crossed the street and peered through the White House fence at the North Portico. He pointed out the center window on the second floor. (You can see it on a $20 bill.) On April 11, 1865, he told us, Abraham Lincoln appeared there and gave a speech. "It was the first time he had said in public that blacks should get the vote," Pitch explained. A 26-year-old actor named John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd outside, along with a man named Lewis Paine (born Powell). Booth had been stalking Lincoln for weeks. Booth growled, "That means nigger citizenship: That is the last speech he will ever make .... By God, I'll put him through."

Another man in the crowd that day was a 23-year-old physician, Charles Lea1e, who would be the first to care for the mortally wounded President. Pitch pointed out another window, three over to the right. "That room was called the Prince of Wales Room. That's where they did the autopsy and the embalming."

My mind went back 20 years, to when I was a speech writer for then Vice President George H.W. Bush, to a night I

had dinner in that room, seated at a small table with President Reagan and two authentic royal princesses, both of them daughters of American actresses (Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly). I mention this not to make you think, Well whuptydo for you, Mr. Snooty. Let me emphasize: 99.98 percent of my dinners in those days took place at a Hamburger Hamlet or McDonald's or over my kitchen sink.

But at one point in this heady meal, President Reagan turned to one of the princesses and remarked that his cavalier King Charles spaniel, Rex, would begin barking furiously whenever he came into this room. There was no explaining it, Reagan said. Then he told about Lincoln and suddenly the President of the United States and the two princesses began swapping ghost stories and I was left openmouthed and a voice seemed to whisper in my ear, 1 don't think we're in Kansas anymore, TOlo. For two years, I had a White House pass that allowed me everywhere except, of course, the second-floor residence. One time, hearing that Jimmy Cagney was about to get the Medal of Freedom in the East Room-where Abigail Adams hung out her wash to dry, Lincoln's body lay in state, and I once sat behind Dynasty star

Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., (right) where the fanatical actor John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln during a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin on April 14, 1865. The photograph shows soldiers guarding the closed theater after the assassination.

Mourning bands hang from the windows. Today Ford's Theatre houses the Lincoln Museum (far right).

Joan Collins while she and husband number four (I think it was) necked as Andy Williams crooned "Moon River"-I rushed over from the Old Executive Office Building just in time to see President Reagan pin it on the man who had tap-danced "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and was now a crumpled, speechless figure in a wheelchair. I remember Reagan putting his hand on Cagney's shoulder and saying how generous he had been "many years ago to a young contract player on the Warner Brothers lot."

During the administration of George H.W. Bush, I was in the State Dining Room for a talk about Lincoln's time at the White House by professor David Herbert Donald, author of the muchpraised biography Lincoln. I sat directly behind Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and remember that for an hour General Powell did not move as much as a centimeter. What I also remember of the evening was Professor Donald's stories about Mary Todd Lincoln's extravagances. Mrs. Lincoln was the Imelda Marcos of her day. This woman shopped. Among her purchases was the enormous rosewood bed that became known as the Lincoln Bed, even though her husband never spent a night in

it. (The Lincoln Bedroom would become notorious during the Clinton years as a sort of motel for big donors to the Democratic Party.) At any rate, by 1864, Mary Todd Lincoln had run up a monumental bill. While field commanders were shouting "Charge!" Mrs. Lincoln had been saying "Charge it!"

Professor Donald ended his riveting talk by looking rather wistfully at the front door. He said that Mrs. Lincoln hadn't wanted to go to the theater that night.

But the newspapers had advertised that Lincoln would attend the performance of Our American Cousin, and the President felt obliged to those who expected to see him there. In his wonderful book, April 1865, Jay Winik writes that Abe said he wanted to relax and "have a laugh." Never has a decision to go to the theater been so consequential.

"And so," said Professor Donald, "they left the White House together for the last time."

We're standing in Lafayette Square in front of a redbrick building, 712 Jackson Place. The plaque notes that it's the President's Commission on White House Fellowships, the one-year government internship program. But in April 1865 it .was the residence of a young Army major

named Henry Rathbone, who was engaged to his stepsister Clara, daughter of a New York senator.

As Professor Donald recounts in his biography, April 14, 1865, was Good Friday, not a big night to go out, traditionally. It's hard to imagine today, when an invitation from the President of the United States is tantamount to a subpoena, but the Lincolns had a hard time finding anyone to join them at the theater that night. His own Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, declined. (Mrs. Stanton couldn't stand Mrs. Lincoln.) General Grant also begged off. (Mrs. Grant couldn't stand Mrs. Lincoln.)

Lincoln was subsequently turned down by a governor, another general, the Detroit postmaster (!), another governor (Idaho Territory) and the chief of the telegraph bureau at the War Department, an Army major named

Thomas Eckert. Finally Abe turned to another Army major, Henry Rathbone, who said to the President, in so many words, O.K., O.K., whatever. The image of the President pleading with an Army major to sit in the President's box is the final tragicomic vignette we have of Lincoln. It's of a piece with rus humanity and humility.

After Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone lunged for Booth. Booth sank a viciously sharp seven-inch blade into his arm, opening a wound from elbow to shoulder.

Rathbone survived, but the emotional wound went deeper. One day 18 years later, as U.S. Consul General in Hanover, Germany, he shot his wife dead. Rathbone himself died in 1911 in an asylum for the criminally insane. "He was one of the many people," Pitch said, "whose lives were broken that night."

I had last been to Ford's Theatre on my second date with the beautiful CIA officer who eventually, if unwisely, agreed to marry me. The play was a comedy, but even as I chuckled, I kept looking up at , Lincoln's box. I don't know how any actor can manage to get through a play here. Talk about negative energy. And it didn't stop with the dreadful night of April 14, 1865.

Ford's later became a government office building, and one day in 1893, all three floors collapsed, killing 22 people.

You can walk up the narrow passageway to the box and see with your own eyes what Booth saw.

It's an impressive leap he made after shooting Lincoln-almost 12 feet -but he caught the spur of his boot on the flags draped over the President's box and broke his leg when he hit the stage.

Donald quotes a witness who described Booth's motion across the stage as "like the hopping of a bull frog."

In the basement of Ford's is a museum with artifacts such as Booth's .44 caliber single-shot Deringer pistol; a knife that curators believe is the one that Booth plunged into Rathbone's arm; the Brooks Brothers coat made for Lincoln's second inaugural, the left sleeve tom away by relichunters; the boots, size 14, Lincoln wore that night; and a small bloodstained towel.

Members of a New York cavalry unit tracked down Booth 12 days later and shot him to death. Four of Booth's coconspirators, including Mary Surratt, proprietress of the boardinghouse where they plotted the assassination, were hanged on July 7. (The military tribunal that presided over their trial requested a lighter sentence for Surratt, but the

request went unheeded.) Also displayed are the manacles the conspirators wore in prison awaiting their execution. Here, too, are replicas of the white canvas hoods they wore to prevent them from communicating with each other.

Inevitably, one thinks of the Washington heat. Beneath a hood is a letter from Brevet Major General John F. Hartranft, commandant of the military prison, dated June 6, 1865: "The prisoners are suffering very much from the padded hoods and I would respectfully request that they be removed from all the prisoners, except 195." That was Lewis Paine, who at about the same time Booth shot Lincoln attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home on Lafayette Square, stabbing him in the throat and face.

There's a photograph of Paine in manacles, staring coldly and remorselessly at the photographer. Perhaps it was this stare that persuaded Major General Hartranft that the hood was best left on.

We left Ford's Theatre and crossed the street to The House Where Lincoln Died, now run by the National Park Service. I had been here as a child, and remembered Left: This sketch by newspaper artist Albert Berghaus shows Major Joseph B. Stewart, sitting in the front seat of the orchestra, climbing on to the stage and pursuing the assassin Booth, who is shouting "Sic Semper Tyrannis" (Thus always to tyrants), the motto of the state of Virginia, on the stage.

Right: Surratt Boarding House in present-day Washington, D.C., where Booth plotted Lincoln~' assassination with four coconspirators including Mary Surratt, proprietress of the boardinghouse.

Far right: The house where Lincoln died, which is across the street from Ford's Theatre.

with a child's ghoulish but innocent fascination the blood-drenched pillow. It is gone now. I asked a ranger what happened to it. "It's been removed to a secure location," she said. Secure location? I thought of the final scene in the movie Raiders oj the Lost Ark, as the ark is being wheeled away to be stored amid a zillion other boxes in a vast government warehouse.

She added, "It was deteriorating." O.K., I thought, but better not tell me where it is, I might steal it.

The air inside the house is close and musty. A little sign on a table says simply, "President Lincoln died in this room at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865." Lincoln was 6-foot-4. They had to lay him down on the bed diagonally, with his knees slightly bent. He lived for nine hours.

I went back outside. Pitch was telling the story of Leale, the young Army surgeon. The first doctor to reach the Ford's Theatre box, Leale knew right away the wound was mortal. He removed the clot that had formed, to relieve pressure on the President's brain. Leale said the ride back to the White House would surely kill him, so Leale, two other physicians

and several soldiers carried him across the street, to the house of William Petersen, a tailor. According to historian Shelby Foote, Mrs. Lincoln was escorted from the room after she shrieked when she saw Lincoln's face twitch and an injured eye bulge from its socket.

Secretary of War Stanton arrived and set up in the adjoining parlor and took statements from witnesses. A man named James Tanner, who was in the crowd outside, volunteered to take notes in shorthand. Tanner had lost both legs at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 but, wanting to go on contributing to the war effort, had taken up stenography. He worked through the night. Later he recalled: "In 15 minutes I had enough down to hang John Wilkes Booth."

Mrs. Lincoln, having returned to the bedside, kept wailing, "Is he dead? Oh, is he dead?" She shrieked and fainted after the unconscious Lincoln released a loud exhalation when she was by his face.

Stanton shouted, "Take that woman out and do not let her in again!"

Leale, who had seen many gunshot wounds, knew that a man sometimes

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swollen from shaking hands with congratulating supporters." Then there's one of the museum's "most treasured • 11 icons," Lincoln's top hat, 800TIL worn to the theater the night War Department, Washington, April 20, i865, he was assassinated.

Here, too, is the bloodstained sleeve cuff of Laura Keene, star of Our American Cousin, who, according to legend, cradled Lincoln's head after he was shot.

No tour of Lincoln's Washington would be complete without his memorial, on the Potomac River about a mile west of the museum.

KU~~;.! ~~~i~o~~~~ti.:'- appnthe.ufloll. iJ:l addition to reward otrered by Finished in 1922, it was built over a filled-in swamp, in an area so desolate that it seemed Win be paid for th(lspprehonsion or JOHN B. SURRA'M', OD6 or Booth's AooompliOOL an insult to put it there. In the early 1900s, the speaker of the Will be paid for the Ilpprohtmlion of .o,.rid C. Harold, an~ber or Booth'. aooompliooa.

House, "Uncle Joe" Cannon, > id'''r.D' ~Ul"Olld",,"'I" 1tw.aN'\:.l!'t••r('ilb •.,ofUtt- ~ o 11ll_1<1iI"iul .•.lJftbt-ir..c.·.)lllplk-.. harrumphed, "I'll never let a ~.Il.I~f\':>~~-;:Ir;TlI~~J:7~orr~Z":~·~I~ofll~~~=::ti<~ofl~~ 3 tlu{!:'.ud>ohln bo;;W;ectLl.lmJ ~.llil'liIr) l~t\';"Il,,1ld ihet"lllWllao.·lIlurntUTII. memorial to Abraham Linl.ct l»e tOO puni-hl!lMiI &fiM ~ '> .\U ~-ood e.lb4rirodtoaid IJ'Iblw j•••• ~ l"I<o;~W1. &"\''Y wmidrr hi·o ••••_,.,iaatle it coln be erected in that ~ EDWIN M. ~"'l'A1\'TON, Seerelar,- or w••..

Goddamned swamp." There is 8 "C~hl):t~;~I~~k'\~~H r~'~~\,.'t J.linch<? high, ~kwkf build, hJi(b f""'hfiW, Mac!,; bJt.ir. bl••£'k ef~ something reassuring about ;wi f\ual\", r"t~ /l1l ~bt iii,.Upi ~ /inll!Y awL thwarted congressional assev§ h~~'1"~ ~:,J"j~;:~lJ ~~l~::~,:t~~rh:~~;t~~~~i;.I~~tt:::;~~$i\~~~1i 0:; >. lvokln;;:llt:tl~ erations. ~OTICK~tn ~ddi6ot,to W. 3bt.••.

C',SiatCllM (I~ authorilit»IIlt'e ofttud rt.-rthal\lOUll~ 10 ~ ooe __ ~ lln'd 1~ ~ "lIkir.s::an~~cof:l.btrJ' TWO HUNDRBD THOUSAND DO~ U ••••• ••••• Lincoln's son, Robert Todd o Lincoln, who had witnessed Lee's sUtTender to Grant at A U.S. War Department poster announcing a Appomattox on April 9, 1865, $!00,000 rewardfor apprehending Lincoln s assassin. and was at his father's side when he died six days later, attended the memorial's dedication. regained consciousness just before dying.

He held the President's hand. Lincoln Robert was then 78, distinguished-looking never regained consciousness. When it in spectacles and white whiskers. You can see from a photograph of the occasion that was over, Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages." he had his father's large, signature ears.

Mrs. Surratt's boardinghouse, where (Robert, who had served as ambassador to the conspirators hatched their plot, is not Great Britain and was a successful busifar away, near the comer of H and 6th nessman, died in 1926.)

Also present at the memorial's dedicaStreets. It's now a Chinese-Japanese restaurant called Wok and Roll. tion was Dr. Robert Moton, president of It's only a few blocks from The House the Tuskegee Institute, who delivered a Where Lincoln Died to the Smithsonian commemorative speech but still was National Museum of American History. required to sit in the "Colored" section of There you'll find a plaster cast of the segregated audience. It's good to Lincoln's hands made in 1860, after he reflect that the wretched karma of this won his party's nomination. A caption insult to the memory of Abraham notes that "Lincoln's right halld was still Lincoln was finally exorcised 41 years

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later when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the memorial steps in front of 200,000 people and said, "I have a dream."

Inside the memorial, graven on the walls, are the two speeches in American history that surpass Dr. King's: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. I read the latter aloud to myself, quietly, so as not to alarm anyone. It clocks in at under five minutes, bringing the total of those two orations to about seven minutes. Edward Everett, who also spoke at Gettysburg, wrote Lincoln afterward to say, "I should flatter myself if I could come to the heart of the occasion in two hours in what you did in two minutes."

Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Lincoln that stares out on the Reflecting Pool, studied a cast of Lincoln's life mask. You can see a cast in the basement of the memorial, and it is hard to look upon the noble serenity of that plaster without being moved.

Embarking from Springfield, Illinois, in 1861 to begin his first term as President, Lincoln said, "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington." When I first read that speech as a schoolboy, I thought the line sounded immodest. Harder than what Washington faced? Come on! Only years later when I saw again the look on Lincoln's face that French had captured did I understand.

French knew Edward Miner Gallaudet, founder of Gallaudet University in Washington, the nation's first institution of higher learning for deaf people ..

Lincoln signed the bill that chartered the college. Look at the statue. Lincoln's left hand seems to spell out in American Sign Language the letter A, and his right hand, the letter L. Authorities on the sculptor say French intended no such thing. But even if it's just a legend, it's another way Lincoln speaks to us today.

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They bought their equipment on e-Bay. Their antenna is attached to a water pipe on the roof.

They have only two staff members, but more than 50 people volunteer in the studio on their time off from jobs as factory workers, busboys, and grocery clerks. Few at the station speak English. Some are illiterate. No one has any previous experience in radio. It's WSBL-LP in South Bend, Indiana, and it's low-power FM.

Low Power, High ntensity the nincreasingly corporate world of radio, lowpower FM isn't about how far your signal reaches but how near. These are neighborhood stations with 100-watt signals that travel single-digit kilometers. They are run by civil rights organizations, by environmental activists, by church groups and school districts. They are voices that have either been pushed out of the radio spectrum or never invited into it, and the appetite for them speaks to a growing need in this country for community. And with a recent technical study providing leverage in low-power's struggle with big radio, there just might be more of them on air.

Low-power FM licenses were introduced in January 2000 under William E. Kennard, then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman. The move was partly a strategy to control the proliferation of unlicensed pirate channels, partly a reparation for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated radio and set the stage for media consolidation. The idea was simple: low-power FM stations would be small

I

enough to fit between the frequencies of existing full-power stations, and their licenses would be granted to noncommercial organizations for educational purposes. "When hundreds of stations are owned by just one person or company," Kennard said in March 2000, "service to local communities and coverage of local issues lose out."

On the west side of South Bend, losing out meant a Hispanic community with no Spanish-language radio station. When WSBL-LP began its Spanish-language broadcast in September 2002, the community not only heard traditional and contemporary Hispanic music but also received English-language vocabulary lessons during the breaks. The station raises money for a local scholarship fund and helps collect com flour for the local food ban1e WSBL-LP regularly runs public service announcements for early-childhood vaccinations, prostate cancer

testing, and HIV screenings, and can measure the results. "The statistics at local clinics jumped from last year to this," says Eliud Villanueva, director of WSBL-LP. "We have really made a difference, and that surprised us more than anyone else."

For Villanueva, an electrical inspector with no previous radio experience, the road to WSBL-LP began with a 1,120-kilometer drive to Maryland. That's where the Prometheus Radio Project was holding a "radio barn-raising" seminar at the site of another low-power FM station, WRYR-LP in Sherwood, Maryland.

Prometheus, a nonprofit organization devoted to the growth of noncommercial community radio, offers legal and technical support to communities that want to build a low-power stationsomething that can realistically be done for about $10,000. The barn-raising offers three days of classes (including "Intro to Radio Engineering," "Running an All-Volunteer News Operation," "How the FCC Works") and concludes with the raising of a transmission tower and the station's first broadcast.

"Once these stations were just a glint in the eye of the village wacko," says Pete Tridish, technical director for Prometheus.

"People would say, 'You can't build a radio channel, only Clear Channel can build a radio channeL'" Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, Texas, now owns more than 1,200 radio stations in 230 cities and has become Exhibit A for opponents of media consolidation. Many of its broadcasts originate in locations other than the cities where they are heard, saving Clear Channel considerable money. Low-power FM is technically and philosophically the opposite, originating locally and focusing tightly on local needs and concerns. "The purpose of low-power FM isn't profit," says Tridish. "The purpose is to rethink how we use media to bring communities together."

The storefront window of KRBS-LP in downtown Oroville, California.

Mike Shay was a member of a Maryland environmental group battling to prevent a Chesapeake Bay wetland area from being developed into a supermarket when his organization applied to the FCC for a construction permit to build WRYR-LP. "We thought of it as a way to fight billionaire developers and corporations on a playing field that was not level," says Shay. WRYR-LP identifies itself as the first radio station owned and operated by an environmental group. Amid a mix of gospel, jazz, and alternative music, the station runs programs dedicated to local and national environmental issues. WRYR-LP also offers coverage of county council meetings and local elections, with particular emphasis on land-use and zoning issues. The programs on the station feature local musicians and writers, and are hosted by local residents. "We thought if we could celebrate our community, we would make it stronger," says Shay.

As with most low-power FM stations, WRYR-LP is funded through the donations of local residents and businesses. Running the station is a challenge for a volunteer staff with other full-time jobs, but the difficulties haven't deterred them. Shay, who traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to deliver a statement at the FCC's public hearing on broadcast ownership rules there in February 2003, says he is disgusted with media deregulation and the buildup of media conglomerates: "Everything is going in such a wrong direction. Low-power FM is the one bright spot."

The birth of the low-power FM movement is generally attributed to DeWayne Readus, later renamed MBanna Kantako, who in 1987 began. a one-watt broadcast out of his apartment in Springfield, Illinois. "Kantako was the Johnny Appleseed of micro-radio," says Peter Franck, a San Francisco lawyer who

he introduction of frequency modulatio~ (FM) in India has not only resuscitated the once dying airwaves, but the country may well be on the road to revival of radio's golden age. India seems at the threshold of true democratization of the airwaves. The radio profession is poised for a further leap toward reform with the advent of "community radio," a development that may help the public realize the true potential of radio. In 1947, India had only six radio stations under a central government-run structure. Now we look forward to 5,000 stations in a more decentralized system.

"Use of the airwaves, which is public property, must be regulated for its optimum use for

T

advised Kantako on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild when the FCC fined Kantako for broadcasting without a license.

Kantako was broadcasting to the African-American community in the John Hay Homes housing project where he lived, and his shows discussed the issues concerning that community, particularly issues related to police brutality in Springfield at the time.

"People with alternative concerns of all kinds want to speak to their community," says Franck. "They want media that is not mediated by the government or by corporate advertisers."

But with limited spectrum space, radio has always necessitated some sort of regulation. And it is the appOitionment of that spectrum space that is at issue in the low-power FM movement. When the FCC opened its first window for low-power construction permits in May 2000, 720 applications were filed. At the same time, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), joined by National Public Radio (NPR), raised concerns with the U.S. Congress about the potential interference low-power FM channels might cause to existing full-power channels, and asked that the prescribed minimum dial distance between the two be increased.

More distance meant fewer low-power channels. Though studies done by FCC engineers showed that the low-power signals were too small to cause interference at the designated distance, Congress complied with the NAB and NPR request for further study in December 2000. This effectively knocked out of contention more than half the original applications and all but excluded low-power stations from congested urban markets.

Low-power advocates were appalled. "It has never been appropriate policy in this country for Congress to make engineering decisions," says Cheryl Leanza, deputy director of Media Access Project, a public-interest telecommunications law firm based in Washington, D.C. "They were persuaded by incumbent broadcasters."

The results of the independent study requested by Congress

public good for the greatest number. ... Broadcasting is a means of communication and, therefore, a medium of speech and statement. Hence in a democratic polity, neither any private individual, institution or organization nor any government can claim exclusive right over it. Our Constitution also forbids monopoly either in the print, or electronic media."

This significant judgment by Supreme Court Justices P.B. Sawant and S. Mohan in February 1995 raised new hopes for radio's revival.

This historic Supreme Court judgment kicked off a debate on privatization of the airwaves. Two years earlier, in 1993, All India Radio stations had begu~ allocating ti me-slots for FM. In 1999, the

were released in July 2003 and concluded what low-power FM advocates and FCC engineers had always maintained: that the majority of interference issues voiced by the NAB and NPR were not legitimate. A public comment period was opened until October 14. "Right now is a very important time for media policy," says Leanza. "Low-power FM is one step we can take on a national level that says we support diversity and localism in media."

Which makes a station like Radio Bird Street grateful it has its license. "I would have been a pirate station if it weren't for low-power FM," says Erv Knorzer, general manager of KRBSLP in Oroville, California. When KRBS-LP moved into an abandoned laundromat, its goal was to bring community radio to Oroville. In the process it brought some life back to a downtown area that had been deserted years ago for outlying strip malls. The station runs public service announcements for the local library, community theater, and senior center. It broadcasts the independent news program Democracy Now!, offering an alternative to the nearby commercial stations, five of which are owned by Clear Channel. Knorzer's daughter, Marianne, serves as the station manager and arranges a programming schedule that includes Hmong-language news broadcasts for the Oroville Laotian community and a labor issues show that keeps local hospital workers up to date with news of the local Steelworkers Union. The station's youngest deejay is 10, the oldest 72. The board of directors includes members of the local Mexican American, Native American, African American, and Hmong communities. The studio on Bird Street is often crowded with people from the 65-member staff of volunteers who make the station run. "This station gives hope to a lot of people," says Marianne.

D About the Author: Laurie Columbia Journalism Review.

government announced a new FM policy and invited private commercial broadcasters to apply for licenses. In all, 110 channels having 10-kilowatt radio transmitters were given licenses in 40 cities.

Shortly after, private broadcasting truly took off in India in 2001.

In this first phase of radio privatization, there are now 185 FM relay stations in the country, of which 139 are run by the government-owned All India Radio, and 46 by semi-government and private broadcasters. And the government plans to raise the number. The initial license fee system made profit-making difficult but the government plans to find a way to help the FM stations be commercially viable. There is discussion, for example, of opening up FM stations

Kelliher

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Above: Children of Angada village, near Ranchi in lharkhand, listen to a community radio program produced by Charkha. Far left: Distance education program being produced by IGNOU.

to foreign direct investment (FDI).

However, despite privatization, the image of FM radio remains that of an entertainment medium and not as a pow-

University in Chennai; the other four are erful communication tool, because private broadcasters are still not allowed to run by private organizations which use air news. But this could change in the the relay facilities of Akashvani stations.

These stations, with a power of 50 watts next phase of privatization. or less, have been allowed to cover a Regardless of news, other media just cannot match radio's reach. In India, small area of five kilometers radius. the United States or any other country, Except for a spectrum usage fee, the govit is the most direct, accessible, fastest ernment doesn't levy any licence fee for such stations. Charkha, a voluntary body and cheapest medium-a true mass communication tool. Perhaps that's based in Ranchi, Jharkhand, is one such why the public has such high expectaorganization.

According to Shankar tions from it. In this respect, community Ghosh, director of Charkha, "The coverradio-targeted at and run by a specific community-recognizes radio's power.

Specific groups of people, NGOs or academic institutions can run a community radio service. Reaching the common man, involving the community and democratizing communications are its ~ prime strengths. Service providers are B generally staffed by volunteers with a ~ certain commitment to the society and, 8 therefore, are answerable to the public.

No other media can match This strengthens the government-public relationship, empowers the community the reach of radio. It's the and promotes transparency. fastest, cheapest and the most Community radio in the United States accessible medium-a true started in 1946 when Lewis Hill, with a few fellow radio journalists, set up a mass communication tool. radio station on the West Coast under the aegis of the Pacifica Foundation. In the 1950s it became a hit on American age area is very small. It should be campuses. Then in 1979 the U.S. govincreased." He voices the belief of those ernment stopped issuing licenses to engaged in community welfare that radio mini FM radio stations, but began issuis a potent medium: "A small investment ing them again in 2000. Since then radio of half-a-million to a million rupees enables one to enter the communication stations have been growing in number steadily. Today there are nearly 13,700 field. It is also not bound by the need for literacy. It is a true people's medium. The radio stations in the United States, 8,000 of which are community radio stations. government should speed up the process All these stations provide FM services of issuing licenses to as many broadcasters as it can." and have emerged as an alternative The concept of community radio was medium. Because mainstream radio is behind the government's decision to commercially-driven, and often controlled by large companies, community allow the Indira Gandhi National Open radio stations have become the voice of University (IGNOU) to operate 40 FM the ordinary people. stations, although the university has In 2002, the Indian government started started only 16. However, its experigiving serious thought to community ence of providing distance education radio, and it now has plans to issue 5,000 through radio has been quite produclicenses for such stations. Some progress tive. According to Divesh Kishore of department of education, has been made in this direction, but so IGNOU's far only five such stations have been set research and training, "Our experience up. The first station was star!ed by Anna has been very interesting.

Through

radio, students can communicate directly with their area counselor. And since its reach is about 70 square kilometers, they can also meet in person.

Commercial radio has the potential to be profitable. The revenue of commercial FM services in the country has shown rapid growth in the past two years. Out of the total budget for media advertising in India last year, radio received a mere two percent or Rs. 1,500 million, with FM getting Rs. 500 million. But the revenue share of FM radio has been steadily growing for the last five years, as FM is now being perceived as a regional medium. In contrast, community radio is, by and large, considered advertisement free because it is run by nonprofit organizations and generates revenue primarily through donations. The Task Force on Information and Broadcasting, set up for the Tenth Five Year Plan, reported that community radio should be run as a public (meaning nonprofit) service much like the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). But Rakesh Kakkar, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's adviser on broadcasting, said recently that everyone hour of radio programming should have five minutes of ad time so the broadcaster does not suffer losses.

America, which has a lively, welldeveloped, privately-owned radio system offering news, information and entertainment options to serve diverse urban and rural needs, has had some influence on FM or community radio broadcasting-be it the conceptual framework or programming.

J agdish Sarin, who heads Voice of America's Hindi service, says: "Indian media has been deeply influenced by U.S. media, be it a talk show, or programs on cookery, home decor, fitness, talent hunt or a show like Kaun Banega Crorepati. Such shows originated on U.S. television or radio. These were highly successful and were then adapted by the Indian media." Regardless of the origin of FM radio, its tremendous growth leaves little doubt that we shall witness the return of the golden age of radio.

D

MONEY AND MORAlS at

Jenlmmelt wants to instill values in everything the company doeswithout compromising the profit principle

ew mont sag ( Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman and chief executiv fficer of he w old's most valuable and most admired company, stoo e ore General bJectnc s LOO co rp orate officers and said It would take four things to keep the company on top. Three of those were predictable: execution, growth, and great people. The fourth was not: virtue. And it was at the top of his list.

Virtue is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think about GE. An industrial and financial services giant that is on track to generate $150 billion in revenues this year, GE under Jack Welch was known for hard-driving management and for delivering market-beating shareholder returns. Immelt wants GE to stand for all that, and more. To be a great company today, he likes to say, you also have to be good company. "The reason people come to work for GE," he says, "is that they want to be about something that is bigger than themselves. People want to work hard, they want to get promoted, they want stock options. But they also want to work for a company that makes a difference, a company that's doing great things in the world."

Immelt's emphasis on values is one way he is putting his own stamp on the company, and it's having an impact throughout GE. It affects how the company runs itself and treats its employees; the kinds of companies and countries it chooses to do business with; and the technologies it invests in. Immelt takes it as a given that companies have an obligation not just to make money and obey the law but also to help solve the world's problems. "Good leaders give back," he says. "The era we live in belongs to people who believe in themselves but are focused on the needs of others."

Of course, GE isn't the first big company to wrestle with questions of corporate social responsibility. In fact, it has been slow to join the debate. But when GE talks, people listen. As GE perpetually reinvents itself-by embracing Six Sigma quality [a standard of quality in management], globalization, buying and selling on the Internet-it often sets the standard for how global companies should be run.

To be sure, no one's going to confuse GE with Ben & Jerry's as long as Immelt's in charge. A 6-foot-4 bear of a man who played football at Dartmouth and routinely works 14-hour days, he is every bit as tough as the legendary Welch. GE may well aspire to be virtuous, but only when it makes business sense. The company has been slow to clean up polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) it discharged into the,Hudson River, for example, and it

fought off a shareholder group that wants GE to stop operating in the rogue state of Iran.

But there's no doubt a new attitude has taken hold at GE, one that reflects new realities. Immelt became CEO on September 7, 2001-four days before the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., shortly after the stock market bubble burst, and just as Enron's collapse began what, even today, feels like an unending parade of corporate wrongdoing.

"The world's changed," Immelt says. "Businesses today aren't admired. Size is not respected. There's a bigger gulf today between haves and have-nots than ever before. It's up to us to use our platform to be a good citizen. Because not only is it a nice thing to do, it's a business imperative."

GE has changed too. In 2002, Immelt appointed GE's first

vice president for corporate citizenship. Bob Corcoran, 48, a trusted ally who worked for Immelt when he ran the health-care business, now holds the job. Corcoran has spread the gospel to the company's far-flung business units. Today GE audits its suppliers in the developing world to make sure they comply with labor, environmental, health, and safety standards. It has performed 3,100 audits since the program began in 2002. The company has opened up discussions with so-called socially responsible investment funds. Last year GE was admitted to the Dow Jones sustainability index, a collection of 300 best-of-class firms that meet detailed criteria for environmental, social, and financial sustainability. Although Welch got GE going on diversity, Immelt moved the ball forward. The company last year won high-profile awards for promoting women and African Americans into its executive ranks. It granted domestic-partner benefits to its gay and lesbian employees.

Meanwhile, GE has set out to globalize its philanthropy, notably by launching an ambitious health-care project in rural Ghana. And this spring GE will publish its first corporate citizenship report.

"It is not a radical approach," says Noel Tichy, a former GE executive who works with GE, Procter & Gamble, and 3M through his Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative at the University of Michigan. "But Jeff has moved the needle considerably."

As an old-line manufacturer, GE tended to view environmental rules as a cost or burden.

Now Immelt sees growth opportunities in cleaning up the planet. He wants GE to be known as one of the few companies with the scale and know-how to tackle the world's toughest problems. Since 2001, GE has purchased a water-purification company, a maker of solar-energy equipment, and a wind-energy business. Last October GE Energy signed an agreement with the Shanghai Power Industrial & Commercial Co. to supply wind turbines to the first two utilityscale wind-energy projects in China.

"Wind, water, lowering emissions, having an environmental service business ....The economics of scarcity are going to drive lots of technological innovation over the next 10, 20, 30 years," Immelt says. "This is an approach to growing the company faster."

Like most new ideas at GE, the company's thinking about corporate citizenship took shape at Croton ville, New York, its famed corporate learning center. Every fall several dozen highpotential executives, most in their thirties and forties, spend three weeks studying a big subject-China, say, or digitiza-

tion-before reporting back to the senior executives. It's GE's highest-level class, and the students function as in-house consultants. Two years ago they studied corporate social responsibility at Immelt's request.

What the executives learned surprised them. They visited investors, regulators, activists, and 65 companies in the U.S. and Europe, including Johnson & Johnson, IBM, BP, Eli Lilly, Nike, and Chiquita, all of which had confronted a range of social and environmental issues. GE, the executives found, was perceived as a laggard. "That was at some level disturbing to me, because I didn't see that kind of conversation happening within GE," says class member Srini Seshadri, a marketing executive at GE Healthcare. In their presentation to GE's top brass, they cited a survey that ranked GE in the top five U.S. companies for its management quality, talent, and investment value. It was ranked No. 72 for social responsibility.

GE's not the first company to

discover values.

But when

it acts, others follow.

The executives told Immelt what he had already sensed.

Corporate social responsibility, they said, matters to employees, to a small but growing number of investors, to customers-especially in Europe-and to governments and activist groups, whose power to influence business is growing. Top executives at GE, like Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr., senior vice president for law and public affairs, .argued that the company needed to invest more in its reputation. "Just as there's goodwill on balance sheets," he says, "and just as brand has value, reputation, broadly defined, has enormous value for companies."

Immelt was ready to embrace this idea in a way Welch had not been. While Welch was relentless on the issues of integrity and compliance, he had scant interest in debating the finer points of corporate social responsibility. Welch thought it was enough that GE stood for productivity, growth, rising profits and shareholder returns. He succeeded so spectacularly-GE's market value rose from $14 billion in 1981 to more than $400 billion when he retired 20 years later-Fortune called him the manager of the century in 1999.

But that was last century. In a post-Enron era, Immelt feels GE needs to be more conscious of how it relates to the world around it. In part because of his roots in sales and marketing, he has more of an external focus than Welch did. "There's no doubt that I have always looked at this company from the outside in," Immelt says. His perspective is also shaped by his father, Joseph Immelt, who worked for GE's aircraft engines division in Cincinnati for 38 years. "I sat around the table every night with a GE man," Immelt says. "I have a very good sense of what people in the ranks of GE expect from their leaders."

So when big companies were challenged around the issues of

corporate governance and earnings manipulation in 2002, Immelt acted quickly. He pushed to add independent directors to GE's board and encouraged directors to dig into GE operations and meet without management present. The company began accounting for the cost of stock options, and split GE Capital into four separate businesses, in part to provide investors with a clearer look at its operations. The board also gave Immelt, who has no contract, a performance-based pay package that was applauded by shareholder advocates.

It takes three hours to travel about 160 kilometers of rutted, dusty roads between Accra, Ghana's capital, and the city of Asesewa in a rural eastern region where nearly half the people live on less than $85 a year. I'm in the back seat of a Toyota SUV

with Bob Corcoran on the way to the dedication of a new hospital, made possible by donations from GE. I ask him, politely, what the hell we are doing here, and why is GE spending $20 million of its shareholders' money on health care in Ghana, a country where it does almost no business?

At the simplest level, he says, it is because GE wants to be known as a good company, not just in the United States. but around the world. And expectations of what big business should do are rising.

"Think about your neighbors," he says. "If they obey the law, if they pay their taxes, if they don't park their Winnebago on the street, are they just compliant? Now what about the neighbor who organizes the block party? Or the one who picks the kids up after school? That's a good neighbor. And that's what we mean

when we say we want to be a good company. The question of how much better we have to be to be recognized as a good company, we don't know. It is more today than it was five years ago."

The Ghana project has a strategic component too. Immelt had been asked by people in GE's African American Forum whether GE could do more in Africa. He couldn't see a way to locate a business there, and so instead looked for other ways to help. GE decided to form a broad partnership with Ghana's public health service, committing $20 million over five years. The company donated ultrasound equipment, X-rays, patient monitors, incubators, refrigerators, and freezers to the hospital. It also provided a power-generator and water-treatment system to Asesewa, a place where most people do without electricity or running water. GE

In one survey, GE was ranked a in social responsibility.

lowlv 12nd

1. Schoolchildren in Asesewa, Ghana, where GE has launched its $20-million health care and education initiative. The GE Foundation is matching GE employee contributions to send these children to school.

2. GE Vice President for Corporate Citizenship Bob Corcoran (center) in front of a GE ultrasound machine at the Asesewa Hospital.

3. GE is still tangling with environmentalists over cleaning polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)from the upper Hudson RiVe!: This area, known as the Thompson Island Pool, is said to be the most contaminated by PCBs. 4. GE's Klondike Wind Power Facility in Wasco, Oregon.

executives also agreed to train health workers in leadership, Six Sigma, and project management skills.

Hundreds of schoolchildren from miles around turned out to greet us when we got to Asesewa. The dedication ceremony was long and hot, the sound system malfunctioned, and speeches had to be translated into Dangme, the local language. Still, there was literally dancing in the streets by the time it was over.

Immelt later told me that he could justify the project in several ways. "For young African American leaders, there's an incredible fascination with Africa," he says. "They view this as being an extreme positive." The knowledge and goodwill generated in Ghana also could eventually payoff for GE. "If you look over the long term, there is a decent chance that the continent of Africa becomes a market that we want to understand," Immelt says.

The more you listen to Immelt and his people, the more it becomes clear that GE's practice of corporate citizenship is guided by this kind of business calculus. Immelt says as much: "If

this wasn't good for business, we probably wouldn't do it."

In that context, it's a no-brainer for GE to sell more wind power or energy-efficient locomotives. When it comes to philanthropy, or supply-chain audits designed to keep GE from being linked to sweatshops, or decisions about granting domestic-partner benefits, the business case usually comes down to GE's reputation, and in particular its desire to attract and engage great people. GE decided some years back, for example, not to sell low-end ultrasound machines in China (and to put warning labels on the high-end machines it did sell), because it did not want the machines to be used for sex screening that could lead to abortions. The potential harm to GE's image was too great to take the risk.

But applying that kind of cost-benefit analysis to decisions with moral dimensions is a tricky business. GE operates in more than 100 countries. It has decided not to do business in Myanmar. Why? Because the government is a notorious humanrights violator, spotlighted by human-rights groups, and because the business upside is limited. GE has judged that it has more to lose than to gain by being there.

By contrast, GE, through its wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries in Italy, France, and Canada, sells oil-and-gas equipment, hydropower, and medical equipment to Iran, a country that the U.S. government has identified as a state sponsor of terrorism. The Iranians are said to be developing nuclear weapons, financing the Hezbollah telTorist group, and quite possibly supporting people who are trying to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Defense Department official who now runs the Center for Security Policy, wants pension funds to divest companies like GE that do business in rogue states. "One doesn't do business in a country like Iran without the acquiescence of the regime," he says. "Typically, that means doing business with the regime, its cronies, or others who enrich the powers that be."

While American firms are barred by law from doing business in Iran, GE notes that their foreign-owned subsidiaries are permitted to do so. What's more, unlike Myanmar, Iran is a big and potentially wealthy country where GE would like to expand someday, and where its European competitors generate substantial sales. A 2003 shareholder proposal from the pension funds of New York City police officers and firefighters asked GE to review its operations in Iran with respect to the reputational and financial risks. The proposal was defeated, at GE's urging.

Immelt says, ''This is an issue that is under constant review by the company and the board." GE executives note that some foreign-policy experts believe that "constructive engagement" in places like Iran is the best way to bring about reform.

In the old GE, that would have been a sufficient response. But Immelt wants today's GE to be held to higher standards of goodness and virtue. Ordinarily such pursuits are not subject to costbenefit analysis. How GE goes about untangling knotty questions like these will be fascinating. You can be sure that much of corporate America will be watching.

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he check, that slip of valuable paper that is an ingrained part of American financial life, is headed toward cancellation.

The rise of cheaper and faster payment alternatives such as credit cards, debit cards, and online banking started eating into the check's market share in the 1990s. And a new law that took effect in October last year will eliminate many of the check's few remaining advantages for consumers. As a result, the current four percent-a-year decline in check writing is expected to accelerate. Within a generation, checks are likely to be a rarity, used only by a few stubborn oldsters or in special situations, such as giving a nephew money as a graduation gift.

Many consumers and businesses say checks are so antiquated and expensive that their demise can't come soon enough.

But some consumer advocates and fraud experts warn that while paper checks are vulnerable to forgers, they nevertheless provide more privacy and security than many of today's electronic alternatives.

"There aren't a lot of strong controls on all the doors into checking accounts," says Avivah Litan, vice president of Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Gartner.

"And there are a lot of doors."

Still, the fate of the check seems sealed.

Americans wrote a peak of 50 billion checks a year in the mid-1990s but last year penned only about 37 billion.

Meanwhile, the use of electronic payment methods is skyrocketing. Credit cards are now used 23 billion times a year, according to the Nilson Report, which monitors the payment industry. In the 1990s, debit and check cards became popular. Debit cards, also known as ATM cards, require a personal identification number, while

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check cards require only a signature (and sometimes not even that). Both immediately withdraw funds from your bank account. Consumers have doubled their use of debit cards in the past four years and now use them nearly 19 billion times annually, the Nilson Report estimates.

In addition, banks and businesses eager to cut down on paper formed a cooperative in the mid-1970s called the Automated Clearing House (ACH) that allows members to electronically transfer funds.

That's spuned a boom in all kinds of epayments such as direct deposit, online

banking, and automatic bill payment, where consumers give businesses permission to debit their checking accounts to pay monthly bills like mortgages. Last year, the ACH said it would handle nearly eight billion payments, up 40 percent from 2000.

As a result, in 2003, for the first time, more shoppers chose plastic over paper for payments. The reasons for the switch are clear. Electronic payments are faster, easier, and cheaper for shoppers, merchants, and banks alike. Banks, for example, have to transport an estimated 101

million checks-weighing 163 tonseach day, at a cost of about 16 cents apiece. Clearing an e-payment through the ACH costs banks only about 2 cents.

So banks are using all kinds of carrots and sticks to herd consumers onto the electronic payments highway. Wells Fargo, for example, offers frequent-flier miles to customers who buy, say, their groceries with debit cards instead of checks. And many lenders, such as student loan giant

far less than the 5.7 million Americans whose credit cards were used without their permission, it's now the fastestgrowing type of financial fraud. "Credit card issuers use sophisticated neural network and scoring techniques to detect suspicious credit card transactions," says Gartner's Litan. "This level of sophisticated fraud detection does not exist in the checking account world."

In a troubling example of the new dangers, two men who claimed to be British residents got access to an estimated 90,000 U.S. checking account numbers and set up a phony company called Pharmacycat路ds.com in 2003. They then ordered automatic debits of $139 from each account starting in January 2004. It But some consumer and fraud experts say the very things that make checks a took months of complaints by angry consumers before ajudge shut down the operhassle also serve as a protection against ationin May. Meanwhile, the men drained the kind of privacy invasions and scams that are becoming rampant. By turning $3.5 million from about 25,000 checking accounts. Many of the victims will never checks into electronic images, banks get their money back because of loopholes could collect the kind of financial data in checking account laws, which vary by about consumers that credit card compastate, says Laureen France, the Federal nies have long amassed. And those files will be at least as vulnerable to hackers as Trade Comrrrission investigator who is credit card databases have been. A comhandling the case. Victims whose checkputer filled with hundreds of credit card ing accounts were tapped through the numbers at the headquarters of B.J.'s ACH received a refund from the bank if Wholesale Club in Natick, Massachusetts, . they complained within 60 days of noticfor example, was hacked last year. ing that $139 was missing. But many of those whose checking accounts were tapped otherwise, such as through a Frank Abagnale, whose life as a check swindler was portrayed in demand draft, weren't so lucky. (Demand the recent movie Catch Me (f You Can, drafts are unsigned forms bearing a cussays the digitization of payments "is a tomer's name and account number that function like checks; businesses use them forger's dream come true." For all their to collect certain payments, such as those faults, paper checks can at least be dusted authorized by consumers via telephone.) for fingerprints and provide other clues.

Many state laws don't provide for refunds Abagnale, who now lectures on financial security, says that Check 21 and recent of unauthorized demand drafts, she says. technological advances are making it France figures banks will eventually harder to prosecute financial fraud. His plug the newly revealed holes in the elecpayment choice? A credit card, because tronic payment system. Until then, France federal law caps its liability at $50 in says she'll stick with paper checks. And unauthorized charges. it's not just because of the security and record keeping. She likes her check The new vulnerabilities are already being exploited. In a recent survey, design, which has a "Celebrate Diversity" Gartner found that approximately two message. "I'll miss checks when they're million Americans discovered unauthogone," she says.

0 rized withdrawals from their checking About the Author: Kim Clark is a senior accounts in the past year, often through writer with U.S. News & World Report. stolen check card numbers. While that's

Lionto spurious checks each year. Retailers suffer even more from bad checks, says Jolm Hall, spokesman for the Amelican Bankers Association. Speeding up clearing will cut down on scams such as check kiting, where con attists play the float of one bank against another. "Banks will be able to stop payment quicker and have a better chance of apprehending the criminal," Hall says. In addition, the rate of bogus e-checks is far below that of paper checks, he says.

Within a generation, checks are likelv to be a raritv in the linanciallile in America.

Sallie Mae, give discounts to those who have monthly loan payments automatically debited from their checking accounts.

Digital trail.

The drive to go electronic will most likely shift into hyperspeed now that the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act," or "Check 21," took effect on October 28. The law, inspired by the snafus caused by the grounding of planes after 9/11, allows banks, retailers, and others to replace paper checks they receive with electronic versions.

The potential savings thrills bankers, but Check 21 voids many of the things that check writers like. The law, for example, allows banks, retailers, and businesses to destroy the original paper checks they receive. That will be a disappointment to the more than 45 million banking customers who currently get their checks back with their monthly statements. They will be able to get copies of the "substitute checks," as the new e-checks are called, but often only if they ask. And consumers who write a check to the dry cleaners on Wednesday hoping to take advantage of the float until payday on Friday at'e in for a shock: Their accounts will be debited much sooner.

The big question: How safe are the new electronic payments? Many in the banking industry insist that eliminating paper increases security. Checks printed with a name, address, and account number have long been notorious aids to identity thieves.

And American banks lose about $700 mil-

Pertect con.

U.S.-India cooperation in astronomy and astrophysics hink of astronomy and astrophysics and many of us are perplexed. The cosmos, and more specifically research associated with it, seems too complex to appreciate. But in this cosmos and its diverse phenomena lie the unsolved mysteries of matter.

Astrophysicists spend years, and at times decades, to stumble upon a small finding that adds to the gamut of existing knowledge about matter and the universe.

Just after independence in, 1949, Indian astronomer Manali

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Kallat Vaini Bappu went to Harvard and discovered the "BappuBok-Newkirk Comet" with colleagues Bart Bok and Gordon Newkirk. Later he went to the Palomar Observatory in California where he and Colin Wilson discovered the "Wilson-Bappu Effect," which is one of the fundamental relations used to determine a star's luminosity. Among the initial collaborations between the United States and India in this field was a cosmicray experiment in the early 1950s carried out by Eknath V. Chitnis of the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory

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Below, left: The Baker-Nunn station under construction at the Uttar Pradesh State Observatory (UPSO) in Nainital, 7958.

Center: c.c. Kandpal (right), UPSO's senior scientific assistant, and Samuel Whidden of the Smithsonian Institution make final adjustments on the Baker-Nunn satellite-tracking camera.

Right: The Baker-Nunn camera being unloaded at UPSO. The person with a camera next to the fork is then UPSO director M.K. Vaini Bappu.

At the doorway to the left is assistant director S.D. Sinvhal.

with George W. Clark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. Another event that received public attention was the Indian cosmic-ray experiment Anuradha flown aboard the Spacehab-3 shuttle in 1985.

Also known is the ongoing collaboration between Jayant V. Narlikar from Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (mCAA) in Pune and Geoffrey R. Burbidge from the University of California at San Diego on the nature of quasars, which are star-like objects that seem to be moving away from earth at high-speeds. Working with the late British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, they also introduced in 1993 the QuasiSteady State Cosmology, an alternative to the Big Bang Theory on the origin of the universe. But there are numerous other exampies-both past and ongoing-that are quite significant from the research perspective but are not well known outside the astronomical community. Many such joint works are voluntary oneto-one interactions between researchers from both sides without any formal institutional agreement.

The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital, formerly called the Uttar Pradesh State Observatory (UPSO), has a long history of American collaborations. A project on optical tracking of artificial earth satellites was started in 1958 in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that continued for about two decades. SAO loaned a Baker-Nunn camera and ancillary equipment to UPSO. Satellites photographed included India's Aryabhatta and Apollo-ll, 12 and 17 of the United States.

ARIES and the Vaini Bappu Observatory at Kavalur, Tamil Nadu, have participated in the Whole Earth Telescope (WET)

between the central processes of these two quasar types.

In the mid-1990s, Stephen A. Drake from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Kulinder Pal Singh, who was also at GSFC, studied the X-ray emission from the outermost layers (coronae) of "acti ve" stars (stars of similar or lower mass than the sun that are much stronger X-ray and radio-wave emitters).

Singh later returned to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai and continued the work with Drake along with co-researchers from ARIES. "The acti ve stars are particularly interesting because they are often very young compared with the sun-maybe a hundredth of the sun's 4.6 billion years of age. In the last 15 years our work has helped establish that such 'adolescent stars' are present in the solar neighborhood (within, say, 100 light-years) which was previously thought to consist of only middle-aged stars like the sun," Drake explains. About half-a-dozen American institutes are collaborating with ARIES on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons that are about a million trillion times as bright as the sun. "India is halfway across the world iยง~ from the observatories in the USA and hence a very critical site for us," says Anjum Mukadam, an astrophysicist from the University of Washington in Seattle, who is also involved in the WET project.

The U.S.-funded Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) studies seismic oscillations of the sun to know more about its internal structure and dynamics. GONG selected the Udaipur Solar Observatory (USO) of the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory as one of the six observation sites worldwide and began a three-year observation program in 1995.

Photographs courtesy JOHN LEIBACHER Excellent initial results led to upgradation

effort coordinated by the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and Iowa State University in Ames through which variability of astronomical objects are studied by astronomers worldwide.

Scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation Satellite Centre (lSAC) in Bangalore have been working with American colleagues on this project since 1988 and have taken part in seven campaigns to date. In a typical WET campaign, about 15 observatories participate for around two weeks to get continuous data. 'The Indian longitude has formed one of the important links in the WET, because there are very few collaborators covering the Asian longitudes. We are still continuing our collaboration," says S. Seetha from ISAC. Quasars are enormously bright objects at the edge of the universe that emit massive amounts of energy. The first quasars discovered were very powerful sources of radio waves that are lowenergy electromagnetic radiation much longer in wavelength than light. These travel at the speed of light, and the telescopes

An image of the sun (above), taken at Udaipur Solar ObservatOlY by the U.S.-funded Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), shows a large jiligree pattern of magnetic field. These constantly changing patterns are carried across the face of the sun in about two weeks as the sun rotates once evelY 27 days. John Leibacher (right) ji'om the National Solar ObservatOlY is the director of GONG

used to detect them are much larger than optical telescopes. But over the past 40 years astronomers have shown that less than 10 percent of all quasars are strong radio wave emitters. Despite the large difference in the intensity of radio waves from "radioquiet" and "radio-loud" quasars (this phenomenon is called "quasar dichotomy"), the extraordinary amount of energyoften a trillion times that of the sun-coming from both is very similar in many parts of their spectra. Ram Sagar and C.S. Stalin from ARIES, and Gopal Krishna from National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) in Pune, along with Paul Wiita from Georgia State University in Atlanta and a German astrophysicist, started a detailed investigation of quasar dichotomy about a decade ago. They found thene is no fundamental difference

of instruments at USO, and the collaboration is now planned to continue indefinitely, says GONG director John Leibacher from the National Solar Observatory (NSO).

IUCAA is a partner in the International Yirtual Observatory Alliance (IYOA). The U.S. Yirtual Observatory (YO) project aims to achieve for astronomical data worldwide what the World Wide Web has achieved for documents, i.e., data from world's telescopes-both ground and space based-will be available anywhere via the Internet. IUCAA has pioneered a VO-India initiative funded by the Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and helped by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bangalore is also participating in YO-India.

A replica of the data archive from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-by far the largest astronomical survey ever undertaken, with an information content greater than the total information in the U.S. Library of Congress-is being hosted at IUCAA so that Indian astronomers can access it more efficiently. JHU has also provided the Web interface and software tools

which published its finding in the Astrophysical Journal last May, says it is the first known pulsar in the globular cluster NGC 1851. Globular clusters are huge, spherical concentrations of stars, tens of hundreds of light-years in diameter. Pulsars are fast rotating stars made up primarily of neutrons.

Joanna Rankin from University of Vermont, who has extensively interacted with Indian astronomers, participated in discussions to establish GMRT. She has worked on pulsars with Avinash Despande of the Raman Research Institute (RR!) in Bangalore, who is now with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Rankin was to access the data, and a software program developed at IUCAA instrumental in an NSF grant in 1992 to promote an Indo-U.S. prohas been incorporated into a larger SDSS application to access gram on pulsars that continued for eight years. She continues her data. "India's talent in computational fields and IUCAA's involvement can bring a lot to VO's efforts," says G. Jogesh work with NCRA's Dipankar Mitra.

The late K.R. Anantharamaiah from RRI was well known at Babu, director of the Center for Astrostatistics at Pennsylvania State University, who is helping VO-India. the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array Last March a joint team from ruCAA, the University of Delhi, (VLBA) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) the University of North Carolina and the National Optical in Socorro, New Mexico, where he spent five years. These <mays function as the radio equivalent of WM. GOSS Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, completed a sevenyear task of creating a library of spectra (spectrum is the distriba zoom lens. On a Jansky Fellowution of wavelengths and frequencies) of 1,273 stars, which is ship awarded by NRAO, Ananthathe largest such library to date. A star's spectrum gives informaramaiah was active in research on "radio recombination lines"-a tion used in automated classification of stellar and galaxy specnatTOWfield of high-energy astrotra. In yet another effort IUCAA's Sanjeev Dhurandhar, physics-at VLA from 1986 Caltech's A. Lazzarini and Penn State's S. Finn are researching through 1989. With NRAO's Tim gravitational-wave signal extraction techniques for binary sysCornwell and others, Ananthatems-a pair of stars or black holes or one each that go around each other emitting gravitational waves in the process. ramaiah started work on radio Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time recombination lines from spiral galaxies (these are one of the four produced by violent events in the distant universe and are emitmajor types of galaxies classified RRf's late K.R. ted by accelerating masses. by astronomer Edwin Hubble) Anantharamaiah at Then there is Yogesh Wadadekar, the only Indian in a lO-memSocorro, 1989. beyond our own galaxy-the ber team working on the Archival Pure Parallel Program (APPP), Milky Way. "Anantha was the drithat aims to process and combine about 2,000 high-resolution WFPC2 (Wide Field Planetary Camera) images obtained in parving force for this innovative, difficult and exciting research," allel with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) instruments. These said one of his American colleagues after he died of cancer in processed images will be used to discover galaxies and address a 2001. An additional area of ground-breaking research in the 1980s was the confirmation of carbon recombination lines at low wide range of science topics, says Wadadekar.

Astrophysicists from MIT, Cornell University and NCRA got frequencies in a particular direction by Anantharamaiah and V. Radhakrishnan from RR! and a few others using the Green Bank together to discover a pulsar-the first using NCRA's Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT). The four-member team, Telescope in West Virginia. Anantharamaiah spent two years at Socorro from 1997 to 1999 and revived a lot of the Left: NRAOs Miller Coss, ongoing research on the central region of galaxies whose observatory has (called "Galactic Center" or GC). He also collaborated collaborated with three on GC studies with NRAO researchers, including major Indian astronomy Miller Goss, the former director of VLA and VLBA institutes. and now head of NRAO's Division of Science and Academic Affairs.

Far left: Joanna Rankin "We had a tremendous amount of success in detectfrom the University of ing radio recombination lines from external galaxies.

Vermont has interacted This is important because this is the way to determine with many Indian the physical properties of the gas that is being ionized astrophysicists. by various types of stars in the galaxies," says Goss, IUCAA s Sanjeev Dhural/dhar (right) and Caltech sA. Lazzarini are joil/tly working on gravitational waves.

with whom RRl's Neeraj Mohan continues to work.

NRAO has also collaborated with IIA on VLA. Goss says Indians provided part of the engineering expertise on VLA decades back. In fact, GMRT's correlator-an instrument used to put together signals from all their radio telescopes-is an exact copy of the one at VLBA, according to Goss. "More recently, our Paul Wiita ojthe Georgia Indian colleagues have provided State University has worked tremendous stimulus to the types on quasars with Bose of work that we can do with these 'Institute's Sandip Chakrabarti. instruments. We really benefited Wiita is also collaborming from the astrophysical expertise with IUCAA on the Virtual of our colleagues in the three Observatory-India project.

Indian institutes [IIA, GMRT and RRI]," he says. V. Radhakrishnan, a former RRI director, working with other astronomers at Caltech in the 1960s, pioneered new observational techniques for radio astronomy.

Since June 1999, IIA has been collaborating with the McDonnel Center for Space Sciences of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in the area of astronomical transient phenomena, specifically on the installation and utilization of two Cassegraine telescopes. This will form the Antipodal Transient Observatory-the telescopes, one each in India and Arizona will be at approximately opposite ends of the earth (antipodes) 170 degrees apart. Apart from round-the-clock monitoring of transient phenomena in the sky, this can also monitor the afterglow produced by gamma-ray bursts. The Indian telescope is being commissioned at Hanle in Ladakh.

IIA and Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona have agreed to collaborate on a Himalayan Binocular Telescope (HBT) at Hanle. This collaboration, flagged in a meeting of the Indo-U.S. Roundtable during President Bill Clinton's visit to India in 2000, was also discussed at the bilateral conference on space last June in Bangalore. IIA and Steward Observatory are discussing adopting the design of the U.S.-based Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) for HBT, says llA professor R.e. Kapoor. After completion, LBT will be the world's most advanced optical telescope to photograph planets outside the solar system. IlA researchers also have and have had joint work with many American institutes. A brief picture of some of these follows.

Gajendra Pandey and N. Kameswara Rao are working with UT Austin's David Lambert on the origin and evolution of stars deficient in hydrogen. They are investigating the possibility of an evolutionary connection between such stars and normal stars and also testing the proposed scenarios for the formation of these enigmatic stars by estimating their chemical composition.

Jagdev Singh visited the IVtt Peak National Observatory in

Arizona in 1984 to work with W.e. Livinston and 1. Harvey on solar physics. They analyzed the excellent coronal spectra obtained during the total solar eclipse of 1983 at Tanjung Kodok, Indonesia, to study the flow of plasma in the polar regions of the corona to understand the heating processes in the solar corona. The team also found that it is possible to study the variation of the sun's rotation rate with time. (The sun does not rotate like a rigid body; it rotates faster at the equator and slower at the poles.)

B. Eswar Reddy and Lambert teamed up with UT Austin's Jocelin Tomkin to select and study samples of stars from different parts of our galaxy. "By chemically tagging samples of stars drawn from different locations of the galaxy, we are hoping to understand better the chronological formation and evolution of our galaxy," Reddy says. Reddy and Lambert are working with Bruce J. Hrivnak of Valparaiso University in Indiana to understand a small group of stars with surprisingly large amounts of lithium, and with Iowa State's Guillermo Gonzalez on richness of metals in stars and their relationship with surrounding planets. llA's M. Parthasarathy worked with the McDonald Observatory of UT Austin to understand the early chemical history of our galaxy. He has also used HST observations to discover a specific planetary nebula (a nebula forms when a star blows off its outer layers) the study of which led to the understanding of the birth and early evolution of planetary nebulae and the advanced stages of evolution of stars with low mass.

In 1982-83 IlA's Siraj Hasan worked with NSO astrophysicists at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, on tiny grass-like patterns of gases on the sun's boundary called "spicules." From 1991 to 2004 he was associated with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Cambridge for NASA-funded joint work OIi the sun's magnetism. In 1995, he spent four months on related work at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado.

Sandip Chakrabarti, who heads the astrophysics division at the Bose Institute (BI) in Calcutta, teamed up with W.O. Arneet of the University of Chicago on black hole identification when he was a R.e. Tolman Fellow at Caltech from 1985 to '87. He has also worked with Paul Wiita on quasars and active galaxies and with GSFC on interpretation of satellite observations. GSFC has been regularly allocating observational time to BI researchers on the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite for the past eight years for work on observational techniques, according to Chakrabarti. Bose Institute's B. Mukhopadhyay is now at Harvard researching nuclear reactions around black holes and T. Das has recently completed his two-year research at the University of California in Los Angeles on cosmic radio jets and outflows from black holes.

Researchers admit that many of these findings may not have irru11ediate applications but they do immensely contribute to the spirit of scientific exploration. The field of astronomy itself being free of boundaries, investigators on both sides understand that cooperation is the key to future advances. Joint activities galore, and the sky is not the limit for these researchers.

D

e giant underwater earthquake in the Indian Ocean lasted only a few minutes, but the resultant tidal wave destroyed countless lives and demolished villages. With the death toll rising above 150,000, it is one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. Many victims are from India. Since the deadly tsunami struck on December 26, 2004, there has been an outpouring of donations from both the government and citizens in the United States. Shocked by the magnitude of the catastrophe and the human loss, Americans displayed their generosity to help the victims. Some donated money, while others organized neighborhood drives to collect essential relief items. A few even traveled to affected areas to help directly. The Internet has made donating easier, and international aid organizations have reported a phenomenal jump in donations. News organizations, Web browsers and celebrities all helped the effort.

After President George W. Bush pledged $350 million in relief funding, he drafted former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to spe1U=headadditional fundraising through the USA Freedom Corps. This White House-based council, chaired by the President, coordinates volunteer efforts, networks with NOOs and encourages Americans to give their time for humanitarian service. Aid is being channeled to affected countries, including Indonesia, Sri ~anka, the Maldives, Thailand, Malaysia, Somalia, the Seychelles and India.

In India, USAID has been instrumental in

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distributing funds through grants for relief in afflicted areas. To date $3.1 million in humanitarian assistance has been given by the U.S. government through USAID. USAID, as always working in partnership with the Indian government and local NGOs, is helping ensure drinking water, essential supplies and basic sanitation. Among the NGOs on the scene, World Vision India will

construct temporary shelters and give survivors in Tamil Nadu an opportunity to earn money to meet their needs. Project Concern International India will fund rebuilding and recovery of villages. U.S. funds have gone to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund, the International Red Cross, CARE USA and Catholic Relief Services for humanitarian relief.

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