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110,000 protest against Bush UK visit

Protesters topple a statue of US President George W. Bush during a 'STOP BUSH' protest organized by the Stop the War coalition in central London(AFP/Eva-Lotta Jansson)

Herald-Sun (Australia) reports:

LONDON – Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators, shadowed by thousands of police, yesterday marched through the heart of London to tell US President George W. Bush he is not welcome in Britain.

In a theatrical climax, they cheered the toppling of a statue of the President in the heartland of his staunchest ally.
Throngs of demonstrators pulled a flag over the head of the 8 metre effigy and heaved it down with ropes, in a symbolic echo of the destruction of Saddam's statue in Baghdad.

Then protesters tore it to pieces and stamped the remnants, Iraqi style, into the flagstones of Trafalgar Square.

The estimated 110,000strong crowd was the biggest demonstration of the anti-war, anti-Bush brigade's displeasure at the conflict in Iraq, carried out right under the nose of the visiting US leader.

Mr Bush and PM Tony Blair have vowed "not to flinch or give way or concede one inch" to terrorism in the wake of deadly bomb attacks on British targets in Turkey, but protesters said the close relationship between the two leaders made them deeply uneasy.

"We're angry that Bush appears to be leading our country," said marcher Ted Edwards earlier in the day. "Why Blair is allying himself to Bush I do not know."

Many in the crowd said yesterday's bombings in Istanbul, which killed at least 27 people, had strengthened their resolve to oppose US-British policy in Iraq.

"There have been more and more bombings since the action in Iraq and more terrorism," said Mischa Gorris, a 37-year-old London lawyer. "You will never change the hearts and minds of terrorists by bombing them. This is what you will get."

Mr Blair said he thought it was "bizarre" that people were protesting US-led efforts to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, given how those regimes brutalised their own people.

He said the "effect of us not doing this would be that the Taliban was still in Afghanistan and Saddam was still in charge of Iraq. And I think people have got to accept that this is the consequence of the position they're in."

Earlier in the day, Mr Bush offered his condolences to the families of British servicemen killed in the Gulf War, including those whose loved ones died at the hands of Americans. Mr Bush's spokesman would not say whether he had used yesterday's private meeting to apologise over the friendly fire incidents.

Mr Bush later gave a return banquet for the Queen at the Regent Park residence of the US ambassador to Britain, William Farish.

The mood at the dinner, attended by senior US and British diplomats, royals, actors and VIPs, was sombre, compared to the lavish state dinner that the monarch offered Bush at Buckingham Palace the day before.

Mr Bush was to travel with Mr Blair tomorrow to the Prime Minister's parliamentary constituency of Sedgefield, north-east England.

The two leaders were to have concentrated during their talks today on the way forward in Iraq, including prospects for a transfer of sovereignty next June to its post-Saddam Hussein governing council.

But at the Foreign Office press conference, Bush held out the possibility that US troop levels in Iraq could rise in the face of continuing deadly attacks on US, British and other occupation forces.

- AGENCIES

Perfect Magic Cube of Order 5 Discovered

Eric W. Weisstein reports:

November 18, 2003--This week, German mathematician and teacher Walter Trump and French mathematician Christian Boyer announced the discovery of a perfect magic cube of order 5, thus settling the long-open question of the existence of such a cube.

If only the above set of 3n2+4 diagonals sum to the magic constant, a cube is said to be semiperfect. If, however, the rows, columns, pillars, space diagonals, and diagonals of each n x n orthogonal slice (for a total of 6n orthogonal diagonals) sum to the same number, the cube is called perfect.

There is a trivial perfect magic cube of order one, but no perfect cubes exist for orders 2-4 (Schroeppel 1972, Gardner 1988). It was long not known if perfect (normal) magic cubes of orders 5 or 6 could exist (Wells 1986, p. 72), although Schroeppel (1972) and Gardner (1988) noted that any normal perfect magic cube of order 5 must have a central value of 63.

Then, on November 13, 2003, Trump and Boyer discovered the order five perfect magic cube illustrated above (Schroeppel 2003, Boyer 2003). As expected, this cube has magic constant 315 and central value 63. The method used by Trump and Boyer consisted of constructing auxiliary cubes of order three. These cubes were central symmetrical, meaning that all 13 lines of three numbers including the central number satisfied the identity x + y + 63 = 189, as well as a number of other partial magic characteristics. Using these auxiliary cubes, Trump and Boyer performed a large computer search to fill in the missing numbers, mainly using complementary numbers x + y + 189 = 315. As a result of this procedure, there are many symmetries present in this cube. After several weeks of computer searches and the construction of more than 80,000 different auxiliary cubes of order 3, Trump and Boyer found the first known order 5 perfect magic cube (Boyer 2003).

Trump and Boyer's discovery followed closely Trump's September 1, 2003 discovery of the first known perfect magic cube of order six, illustrated above. This cube was found using techniques similar to those used to attack the order 5 cube (Boyer 2003). As csan be directly verified, this cube has magic constant 651.

Happily, magic cube enthusiasts need have no fear that magic cubes hold no more mysteries or challenges. Even though perfect magic cubes of orders five and six are now known, there is still much that remains unknown about magic cubes. For example, a magic cube is called bimagic if it and the cube obtained by squaring each of its entries are both magic (although in this case, the squares cube is naturally no longer normal). The smallest known bimagic cube is of order 16, and the smallest known perfect bimagic cube is of order 32. Similarly, the smallest known trimagic cube is of order 64, and the smallest known perfect trimagic cube is of order 256 (Boyer, Heinz). Since no smaller examples have yet been discovered, this area of investigation remains wide open to enterprising "cubists"!

Nano-transistor self-assembles using biology

New Scientist reports:

A functional electronic nano-device has been manufactured using biological self assembly for the first time.

Israeli scientists harnessed the construction capabilities of DNA and the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes to create the self-assembling nano-transistor. The work has been greeted as "outstanding" and "spectacular" by nanotechnology experts.

The push to shrink electronic circuits to ever smaller dimensions is relentless. Carbon nanotubes, which have remarkable electronic properties and only about one nanometre in diameter, have been touted as a highly promising material to help drive miniaturisation. But manufacturing nano-scale transistors has proved both time-consuming and labour-intensive.

The team, at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, overcame these problems with a two step process. First they used proteins to allow carbon nanotubes to bind to specific sites on strands of DNA. They then turned the remainder of the DNA molecule into a conducting wire.

Proof of principle

"DNA is very good at building things in molecular biology, but unfortunately, it does not conduct electricity. We had to get a metal conductor on the DNA," explains physicist Erez Braun, who led the research.

"This is spectacular work," says Cees Dekker, a nanoscience expert at Delft University in the Netherlands. "It demonstrates that it's possible to use biology to build an inorganic device that works."

"But while it is a first step towards molecular computing based on this type of DNA configuration, we are still many years way from large scale self-assembly electronic devices, such as computers," Dekker cautions.

Bacterial protein

Braun's team began their manufacturing process by coating a central part of a long DNA molecule with proteins from an E. coli bacterium. Next, graphite nanotubes coated with antibodies were added, which bound onto the protein.

After this, a solution of silver ions was added. The ions chemically attach to the phosphate backbone of the DNA, but only where no protein has attached. Aldehyde then reduces the ions to silver metal, forming the foundation of a conducting wire.

To complete the device, gold was added. This nucleates on the silver and creates a fully conducting wire. The end result is a carbon nanotube device connected a both ends by a gold and silver wire.

The device operates as a transistor when a voltage applied across the substrate is varied. This causes the nanotubes to either bridge the gap between the wires - completing the circuit - or not.

Out of 45 nanoscale devices created in three batches, almost a third emerged as self-assembled transistors. They work at room temperature and the only restriction for future devices is that the components must be compatible with the biological reactions and the metal-plating process.

The team have already connected two of the devices together, using the biological technique. "The same process could allow us to create elaborate self-assembling DNA sculptures and circuitry," says Braun.

Journal reference: Science (vol 302, p 1380)

Urban Sprawl

A reconstruction of the growth of Baltimore, Maryland, over the last 200 years. The U.S. Geological Survey used historical records as well as Landsat satellite data to create this sequence. Courtesy USGS via NASA.

Top Ten Internet Fads

Frozen North (via kuro5hin.org) writes:

At the risk of sounding much older than I really am, I've been on the Internet since 1987. In that time, I've seen a number of Internet fads come and go. Some were excesses of the bubble years, but others weren't.

A fad, for purposes of this article, is an idea or technology which is briefly popular, but can't outlast its own novelty value. Once people get over the newness of it all, there isn't really anything special left. Here are the ten which stand out most in my mind.

10. Live Customer Service

At one point, when companies were selling anything online (see #2), someone realized that customer service was going to be an important part of the online retail experience. Of course, simply posting an E-mail address and a toll-free phone number wouldn't do! E-mail doesn't satisfy the need for live service, and a toll-free phone number was, well, so 80's.

Several companies jumped in to serve the need for a true Internet solution for live service. Some provided text chat technology, others went so far as to do Voice-over-IP (see #8) to the customer's web browser (you were SOL if you didn't happen to have a microphone connected to your computer). There were even a couple which did video. All of these were accessed though big "Click Here For Live Assistance" buttons.

Aside from the fact that many of these technologies simply didn't work very well, it seems that nobody bothered to ask customers what sort of live service they actually wanted. What most customers really wanted to do was pick up the phone and dial a toll-free phone number, or else send an E-mail.

9. Flash Mobs

Find a bunch of people who don't know each other, have them all gather at some specified time and place, do something off-the-wall, and then go away. That's pretty much the summary of a Flash Mob, the Big Thing of the First Half of 2003. The Internet is key because that's how you organize the Flash Mob, and post the photos afterwards.

Okay, this was cool the first couple of times. We have now proven that the Internet allows you to organize people to do stuff in the real world, and not just online. Somehow, it just doesn't seem to have much more staying power.

8. VoIP (Rounds 1 and 2)

Using the Internet for phone calls is becoming a hot topic again, which makes it easy to forget that this is actually the third time this particular technology has made an appearance.

I wasn't sure if I should call VoIP a "fad" or not, since there is some technology here which actually is useful, and many major phone companies are actually using the underlying technology for their internal networks. On the other hand, both of the previous appearances in consumer form were clearly premature, so those at least are fads.

The first time, it was strictly for the determined. Imagine using your PC as a really bad CB radio, and you get the basic idea. Most conversations were along the lines of "Can you hear me Isn't this cool! We're using the Internet for a phone call!" The listener typically heard, "-an y-----ear--e ------ool! We're u--ng the -nter------all!"

My own first exposure to VoIP technology was in graduate school in 1994 or 1995. Two of the postdocs in my research group were testing VoIP as a way to save money on our conference calls with a team we collaborated with overseas. They had set up two SGI workstations in adjacent offices, and attempted to set up a VoIP call. They closed the two office doors, and this is what I heard from my cubicle:

Postdoc #1: "Hello Hello Hello Can you hear me Can you hear me Hello CAN YOU HEAR ME"

[office door opens, Postdoc #2 walks out into Postdoc #1's office]

Postdoc #2: "I think the whole floor can hear you."

7. Thin Clients

Hey, we've got a web browser now. What do we need Windows (or MacOS) for anymore We can access everything through a browser!

This, in a nutshell, was the argument for the Thin Client. Conceived as a way to break the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop, a Thin Client would be nothing more than a web browser on a screen. Thus (the theory went) it would be cheaper to build than a desktop PC, and all the applications would run on the server with the Thin Client running the interface.

This idea was so wrong, I don't even know where to begin. For starters, this is nothing more than a reversion to the old mainframe computing days, with a prettier face. So instead of a dumb terminal, we now have a GUI-based browser, but there was a reason the world shifted away from mainframes and dumb terminals. At least I think there was.

Next, it turns out that in order to do a lot of the fancier stuff a browser is expected to do, you need to have things like a sound card, a pretty good (for 1996) graphics processor, and a hard drive to cache data. Oh, and it had to run Java, too. Guess what! Suddenly we've got a whole operating system again. And why exactly can't we use Windows for this

By the time someone actually built a Thin Client (I think it was Sun, but my memory is imperfect here), it turned out to be significantly more expensive than the sub-$1,000 personal computers which were making an appearance by then, and much less capable.

6. Digital Personae

Like the digital flotsam of a thousand shipwrecked business plans, you can still see the occasional Digital Persona wash up on a web site somewhere. The typical encounter is something like this: you go to a corporate web site somewhere, and start reading the web page. Suddenly, the web page starts talking to you! You notice an animation of someone talking in the corner of the window (typically an attractive young woman), giving a sales pitch with bad lip-sync. Sometimes, there's a box to type in questions and get synthesized responses, but more often, you get the pitch and she shuts up.

Believe it or not, at one time companies spent real money developing these things for their web sites, on the theory that it would make the web experience more "personal." More like interacting with a real person. There were even companies whose entire technology was built around improving these Digital Personae. I remember one in particular which had groundbreaking technology for improving the lip-sync, and they even got venture capital to do it. I think they were called RealLips or something like that.

The problem is that (a) if the customer wanted to interact with a real person, he or she would have picked up the phone or driven to a real store, and (b) once the novelty value wears off, the digital persona is absolutely nothing like a real person. Why do we want to interact with real people Because we want to have social relationships. You can't have a social relationship with a piece of software.

File this one under "Microsoft Bob."

5. The .sig Virus

Back in the days when everyone on the Internet was running UNIX from a command line, the way you would attach a "signature" to your E-mail was by creating a little text file called ".sig". Whatever was in that file would be appended to outgoing E-mail.

Sometime after the Morris Worm, the first major "virus" (technically a worm) on the Internet, this (and similar) text started appearing at the bottom of people's E-mails:

Hi, I'm a .sig virus! Copy me to your .sig file and help me propagate!

Of course, this was so cute and silly that lots of people really did copy it into their .sig files, allowing the .sig virus to propagate.

After a while, the novelty wore off, leaving the philosophy majors to argue that it really was, technically, a virus, since it contained instructions allowing it to self-replicate. It just happened that those instructions were carried out by a human rather than a computer. The computer science majors said, no, it's just a meme, not a virus. The rest of us went on with our lives.

4. WAP

WAP is the sound a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone makes when you throw it at a brick wall in frustration.

It also sounds for Wireless Access Protocol, and was an early attempt to squeeze big web pages into a teeny-tiny little screen. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that billions (with a "B") of dollars were spent on this idea, despite several subtle problems:

Viewing even a small web page on a screen with 12 lines of text is almost completely useless.

The per-kilobyte charges some cellphone companies were imposing were the equivalent of something like $100/hour for dialup Internet access.

Very few people actually wanted to surf the web from their cellphones in the first place.

In the last year, we've come full circle: the cellphone companies are once again selling gigantic Internet-enabled cellphones and expensive data plans with the hope of getting us to surf the web by the minute. Of course, everything is different now. Now we have better displays (in color even), and instead of WAP, we've got something called 3G.

3G is approximately the acceleration required to crush a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone in frustration.

3. Digital Acronyms (B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C, P2P, etc.)

The sociologists will tell you that one sign of "in group" behavior is the use of special language, words and phrases only understood by members of the crowd who "get it."

Whatever.

All I know is that these stupid acronyms with the number 2 standing for the word "to" drive me up the wall.

There was a time, around 1998 or 1999, when every VC PowerPoint contained at least one of these acronyms on every slide. Sometimes several. Anyone who invented a new one was a true visionary.

No wonder so many venture-backed startups failed.

Thankfully, I'm seeing these less and less often.

By the way, the acronyms I listed stand for (respectively): Business to Consumer, Business to Business, Business to Government, Government to Consumer (or Citizen), and Peer to Peer. Or maybe it was Bob to Charlie, Bob to Bill, Bill to George, George to Charlie, and Peter to Paul. I can never remember.

2. Anything Sold Online

Some things, like books and music, make a lot of sense to sell online. They're cheap to ship, and there's so much selection that it s hard for a retail store to stock everything.

Other things, like pet food, make no sense whatsoever to sell online.

A lot of supposedly very intelligent venture capitalists couldn't understand the difference.

I'm thinking of writing a self-help book about this called "Smart Money, Dumb Investments."

1. PointCast

For those who weren't on the Internet in 1997, let me describe what PointCast was.

PointCast was a screen saver. No ordinary screen saver, though. PointCast was a screen saver which was going to revolutionize computing and change the world.

PointCast wouldn't just show fish, or geometric patterns. PointCast (make sure you're sitting down for this) would display news headlines and stock quotes! Yes! And that wasn't all. PointCast was so unique, so radical, that a whole new category of business was created: push. Push meant that information would be "pushed" to people, rather than waiting for people to visit a web site and "pull" the data to them.

This whole concept was so cool that there were people (sadly, I was one of them) who would wait for their computer's screen savers to activate, just to watch the PointCast news headlines and stock tickers. It was mesmerizing. Bump the mouse, and you'd have to start all over again.

Push was so revolutionary, that there were other companies founded just to build technology to manage the flood of network traffic which PointCast was going to generate.

There were a few people who stood up in this madness (proudly, I was one of them) who pointed out that E-mail was a form of push, and one which was far more technologically advanced, more efficient, more flexible, more usable, friendlier, cheaper, and already being used for real business applications. None of this mattered, though, since E-mail didn't display news headlines and stock quotes on a screen saver.

(Oh, and as a geeky aside, PointCast wasn't really push anyway, since it simply used an internal web browser to get new headlines and quotes from PointCast's web site every few minutes. Technically, PointCast was more like a web browser set to auto-refresh. Classic, and boring, pull.)

At least Wired magazine came to its senses after a few years and published athoughtful obituary.

FDA Approves Chewable Birth Control Pill

The FDA on Friday approved a spearmint-flavored chewable version of Northern Ireland-based Galen Holdings' oral contraceptive Ovcon 35, the Baltimore Sunreports (Baltimore Sun, 11/15). The pill is the first chewable oral contraceptive pill for women, according to an FDA release. The chewable pills, which Bristol-Myers Squibb will manufacture and Rockaway, N.J.-based Warner Chilcott will market, contain progestin and estrogen -- the same hormones used in standard birth control pills. The pills will be available in a 28-day regimen with 21 white tablets containing norethindrone and ethinyl estradiol and seven green placebo pills that induce a menstrual period (FDA release, 11/14). Women will be able to chew the pills or swallow them whole; women who chew the pills must drink an eight-ounce glass of water afterward to ensure that the full dose reaches their stomachs. The chewable version of Ovcon 35 has similar side effects to other birth control pills, such as an increased risk for blood clots, heart attack and stroke, Reuters reports (Reuters, 11/14). (via Daily Reproductive Health Report)

Photo of the Day: IRAQ

U.S. Army combat engineers inspect the damage November 14, 2003 to a building in a former Republican Guard compound in Baghdad, which was shelled by the U.S. Air Forces. U.S. forces destroyed a building in the compound that they said resistance fighters used to launch attacks and struck more suspected mortar and rocket-launch sites. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

CIA on Iraq: 'We could lose this situation'

Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad, The Guardian, report:

The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.

The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.

One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.

An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".

"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.

"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."

Although, the report was an internal CIA document it was widely circulated within the administration. Even more unusually, it carried an endorsement by Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the US-run occupation of Iraq - a possible sign that he was seeking to bypass his superiors in the Pentagon and send a message directly to President George Bush on how bad the situation has become.

Proof of the strength of the insurgents and their ability to strike anywhere in Iraq was provided in another devastating suicide bombing yesterday.

This time the target was the Italian military police barracks in the south-eastern city of Nasariya.

At least 17 Italians and eight Iraqis were killed, striking a blow at one of the few nations prepared to send troops to help the US and Britain contain the rising violence.

Following crisis talks in Washington yesterday, Mr Bremer flew back to Baghdad armed with proposals to bolster the US-backed Iraqi governing council with more powers and more resources in an attempt to speed up elections.

Under one of the proposals, the council could be expanded or transformed into a full provisional government backed by an interim constitution.

That would represent a radical reversal of earlier US policy which was to put off the transfer of real power to an Iraqi government until after elections, which in turn would have to await a comprehensive new constitution.

The new blueprint, which reverses that methodological progression and which is closer to what was done in post-war Afghanistan, emerged from an urgently arranged series of meetings between the president, his top national security advisers, and Mr Bremer, as the security situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate rapidly.

In scenes last night reminiscent of the height of the war, US forces went back on the offensive with air strikes and armoured assaults on a suspected guerrilla stronghold near Baghdad. Guerrilla attacks, meanwhile, have become more frequent, bolder and bloodier.

In public at least, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has insisted that the attacks are the work of a few remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist party and a handful of Islamic jihadists from other Arab countries.

It is understood that Mr Bremer's administration is concerned about the impact of the decision by US forces to escalate their offensive against the insurgents, anxious that bombing and heavy-handed raids will increase popular support for the insurgency.

Mr Bremer refused to provide details of the new US plan, but US and British officials said he was carrying proposals from Mr Bush aimed at bolstering the interim Iraqi leadership in the hope of winning the confidence of Iraqis and paving the way for elections pencilled in for the end of next year. But, according to some US officials, elections could be held in four to six months.

The UN security council has given the Iraqi governing council until December 15 to come up with a constitutional blueprint and organising elections.

The council, deeply divided by internal disputes, has shown little sign of meeting that deadline, but the new US proposals would put it under pressure to accelerate its work and the transfer of power.

One of the options discussed in the White House yesterday was replacing the governing council with a new body.

The council was hand-picked by Washington after the war, largely from returning exiles, but it has since disappointed US officials by its slow progress. Many of its 24 members fail to turn up to its meetings, and the CIA report said the council had little support among the Iraqi population.

However, the secretary of state, Colin Powell insisted: "We are committed to the governing council and are prepared to help them in any way we can."

"We're looking at all sorts of ideas, and we do want to accelerate the work of reform," Mr Powell said.

"We want to accelerate the work of putting a legal basis under the new Iraqi government and we are doing everything we can to get the governing council equipped with everything they need."

Myths Over Miami

LYNDA EDWARDS, Miami New Times, reports:

Captured on South Beach, Satan later escaped. His demons and the horrible Bloody Mary are now killing people. God has fled. Avenging angels hide out in the Everglades. And other tales from children in Dade's homeless shelters.

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories." The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. "If you wake at night and see her," a ten-year-old says softly, "her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing."

The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name," says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. "I've seen her," he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county's various shelters and the streets. For these children, lasting bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is permanent. A common rule among homeless parents is that everything a child owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast packing. But during their brief stays in the shelters, children can meet and tell each other stories that get them through the harshest nights.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey No adult can steel such a child against the outcast's fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret stories" are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

An astute folklorist can see traces of old legends in all new inventions. For example, Yemana, a Santeria ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers' shrines. And in the Eighties, folklorists noted references to an evil Bloody Mary -- or La Llorona, as children of Mexican migrant workers first named her -- among children of all races and economic classes. Celtic tales of revenants, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, arrived in America centuries ago. While those myths may have had some influence on shelter folklore, the tales homeless children create among themselves are novel and elaborately detailed. And they are a striking example of "polygenesis," the folklorist's term for the simultaneous appearance of vivid, similar tales in far-flung locales.

The same overarching themes link the myths of 30 homeless children in three Dade County facilities operated by the Salvation Army -- as well as those of 44 other children in Salvation Army emergency shelters in New Orleans, Chicago, and Oakland, California. These children, who ranged in age from six to twelve, were asked what stories, if any, they believed about Heaven and God -- but not what they learned in church. (They drew pictures for their stories with crayons and markers.) Even the parlance in Miami and elsewhere is the same. Children use the biblical term "spirit" for revenants, never "ghost" (says one local nine-year-old scornfully: "That baby word is for Casper in the cartoons, not a real thing like spirits!"). In their lexicon, they always use "demon" to denote wicked spirits.

Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms, regardless of ethnicity (the secret stories are told and cherished by white, black, and Latin children), for the homeless youngsters see themselves as allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in their battle against shared spiritual adversaries. For them the secret stories do more than explain the mystifying universe of the homeless; they impose meaning upon it.

Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book Award and three Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children's literature), is the only children's author to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her best-selling books, The People Could Fly and Herstories, trace African-American folklore through the diaspora of slavery. "Folktales are the only work of beauty a displaced people can keep," she explains. "And their power can transcend class and race lines because they address visceral questions: Why side with good when evil is clearly winning If I am killed, how can I make my life resonate beyond the grave"

That sense of mission, writes Harvard psychologist Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children, may explain why some children in crisis -- and perhaps the adults they become -- are brave, decent, and imaginative, while others more privileged can be "callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre." The homeless child in Miami and elsewhere lives in a world where violence and death are commonplace, where it's highly advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are nowhere to be found. Yet what Coles calls the "ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good" -- a sense of mission -- is nurtured in eerie, beautiful, shelter folktales.

In any group that generates its own legends -- whether in a corporate office or a remote Amazonian village -- the most articulate member becomes the semiofficial teller of the tales. The same thing happens in homeless shelters, even though the population is so transient. The most verbally skilled children -- such as Andre -- impart the secret stories to new arrivals. Ensuring that their truths survive regardless of their own fate is a duty felt deeply by these children, including one ten-year-old Miami girl who, after confiding and illustrating secret stories, created a self-portrait for a visitor. She chose a gray crayon to draw a gravestone carefully inscribed with her own name and the year 1998.

Here is what the secret stories say about the rules of spirit behavior: Spirits appear just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead. For shelter children, spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels. And like demons, once spirits have seen your face, they can always find you.

Nine-year-old Phatt is living for a month in a Salvation Army shelter in northwest Dade. He and his mother became homeless after his father was arrested for drug-dealing and his mother couldn't pay the rent with her custodial job at a fast-food restaurant. (Phatt is his nickname. The first names of all other children in this article have been used with the consent of their parents or guardians.) "There's a river that runs through Miami. One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over," Phatt recounts as he sits with four homeless friends in the shelter's playroom, which is decorated with pictures the children have drawn of homes, kittens, and hearts. "The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim."

He explains that Satan harbors a special hatred of Miami owing to a humiliation he suffered while on an Ocean Drive reconnaissance mission. He was hunting for gateways for his demons and was scouting for nasty emotions to feed them. Satan's trip began with an exhilarating start; he moved undetected among high-rolling South Beach clubhoppers despite the fact that his skin was, as Phatt's friend Victoria explains, covered with scales like a "gold and silver snake."

Why didn't the rich people notice Eight-year-old Victoria scrunches up her face, pondering. "Well, I think maybe sometimes they're real stupid so they get tricked," she replies. Plus, she adds, the Devil was "wearing all that Tommy Hilfiger and smoking Newports and drinking wine that cost maybe three dollars for a big glass." He found a large Hell door under the Colony Hotel, and just as he was offering the owner ten Mercedes-Benzes for use of the portal, he was captured by angels.

"The rich people said: 'Why are you taking our friend who buys us drinks'" Phatt continues. "The angels tied him under the river and said: 'See what happens when the water touch him. Just see!'"

Phatt insists that his beloved cousin (and only father figure) Ronnie, who joined the U.S. Army to escape Liberty City and was killed last year in another city, warned him about what happened next at the river. (Ronnie was gunned down on Valentine's Day while bringing cupcakes to a party at the school where his girlfriend taught. He appeared to Phatt after that -- to congratulate him on winning a shelter spelling bee, and to show him a shortcut to his elementary school devoid of sidewalk drunks.)

One night this year Phatt and his mother made a bed out of plastic grocery bags in a Miami park where junkies congregate. It was his turn to stand guard against what he calls "screamers," packs of roaming addicts, while his mother slept. Suddenly Ronnie stood before him, dressed in his army uniform. "The Devil got loose from under the river!" Ronnie said. "The rich people didn't stop him! The angels need soldiers."

Phatt says his dead cousin told him that as soon as water touched the Devil's skin, it turned deep burgundy and horns grew from his head. The river itself turned to blood; ghostly screams and bones of children he had murdered floated from its depths. Just when the angels thought they had convinced Good Streets' denizens that they were in as much danger as those in Bad Streets, Satan vanished through a secret gateway beneath the river. "Now he's coming your way," Ronnie warned. "You'll need to learn how to fight." Ronnie nodded toward the dog-eared math and spelling workbooks Phatt carries even when he can't attend school. "Study hard," he implored. "Stay strong and smart so's you count on yourself, no one else. Never stop watching. Bloody Mary is coming with Satan. And she's seen your face."

Given what the secret stories of shelter children say about the afterlife, it isn't surprising that Ronnie appeared in his military uniform. There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh green palm leaf (to be used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on the beloved's grave.

This bit of folklore became an obsession for eight-year-old Miguel. His father, a Nicaraguan immigrant, worked the overnight shift at a Miami gas station. Miguel always walked down the street by himself to bring his dad a soda right before the child's bedtime, and they'd chat. Then one night his father was murdered while on the job. Recalls Miguel: "The police say the robbers put lit matches all over him before they killed him."

Miguel's mother speaks no English and is illiterate. She was often paid less than two dollars per hour for the temporary jobs she could find in Little Havana (mopping shop floors, washing dishes in restaurants). After her husband's death, she lost her apartment. No matter where Miguel's family of three subsequently slept (a church pew, a shelter bed, a sidewalk), his father's spirit appeared, bloodied and burning all over with tiny flames. Miguel's teachers would catch him running out of his school in central Miami, his small fists filled with green palm leaves, determined to find his father's grave. A social worker finally took him to the cemetery, though Miguel refused to offer her any explanation. "I need my daddy to find the fighter angels," Miguel says from a Salvation Army facility located near Liberty City. "I'll go there when I'm killed."

The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold, drinkable water winds among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed. Gigantic alligators guard the compound, promptly eating the uninvited. Says Phatt: "But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. I never seen it, but yes! I know it's out there" -- he sweeps his hand past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining the street on which the shelter is located -- "and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!"

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

By the time homeless children reach the age of twelve, more or less, they realize that the secret stories are losing some of their power to inspire. They sadly admit there is less and less in which to believe. Twelve-year-old Leon, who often visits a Hialeah day-care center serving the homeless, has bruised-looking bags under his eyes seen normally on middle-aged faces. He has been homeless for six years. Even the shelters are not safe for him because his mother, who is mentally unstable, often insists on returning to the streets on a whim, her child in tow.

"I don't think any more that things happen for some great, good God plan, or for any reason," he says. "And I don't know if any angels are still fighting for us." He pauses and looks dreamily at the twilight sky above the day-care center. "I do think a person can dream the moment of his death. Sometimes I dream that when I die soon, I'll be in some high, great place where people have time to conversate. And even if there's no God or Heaven, it won't be too bad for me to be there."

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis -- with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty -- often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

When seven-year-old Maria is asked about the Blue Lady, she pauses. "When grownups talk about her, I think she get all upset," Maria slowly replies. She considers a gamble, then takes a chance and leans forward, beaming: "She's a magic lady, nice and pretty and smart! She live in the ocean and comes just to kids."

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls "the pink haunted house." A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building's interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family's last food: a box of saltines. "He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here" -- Maria points to her forehead. "I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting." A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. "I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don't punish me no more!"

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. "Hurricanes ain't God," he said gently. "It's Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers." When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. "She smiled," Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. "My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she's my friend always. That's why she learned me the hard song." The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. "Then the Blue Lady sang it to me," she recalls. "She said it'll help me grow up good, not like daddy."

Maria's voice begins shakily, then becomes more assured: "If you believe within your heart you'll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you'll know you're right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it's yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!"

As she soars to a finish, Maria suddenly realizes how much that she's revealed to a stranger: "I told the secret story and the Blue Lady isn't mad!" She's awash with relief. "Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She's seen my face."

Shelter children often depict the Blue Lady in their drawings as blasting demons and gangbangers with a pistol. But the secret stories say that she cannot take action unless her real name -- which no one knows -- is called out. The children accept that. What they count on her for is love, though they fear that abstract love won't be enough to withstand an evil they believe is relentless and real. The evil is like a dark ocean waiting to engulf them, as illustrated by a secret story related by three different girls in separate Miami homeless facilities. It is a story told only by and to homeless girls, and it explains how the dreaded Bloody Mary can invade souls.

Ten-year-old Otius, dressed in a pink flowered dress, leads a visitor by the hand away from four small boys who are sitting in a shelter dining room snacking on pizza and fruit juice. "Every girl in the shelters knows if you tell this story to a boy, your best friend will die!" she says with a shiver. When the boys try to sneak up behind her, she refuses to speak until they return to their places.

She begins: "Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand looks like red fire. It's Bloody Mary dragging them in for slaves -- to be in gangs, be crackheads. But every 1000 girls with no home, is a Special One. When Bloody Mary comes, the girl is so smart and brave, a strange thing happens." Bloody Mary disappears, she says, then a pretty, luminous face glows for a moment in the dark. The girl has glimpsed what Bloody Mary looked like before she became wicked. "The Special One," Otius continues, "is somebody Bloody Mary is scared of because she be so good, people watch her for what to do. And if she dies, she will die good.

"Boys always brag what they can do, but this is the job of girls and -- I wish maybe I were a Special One," Otius says wistfully. "Maybe one of my friends from the shelters are now. I'll never see them again -- so's I guess I never know."

Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America nearly twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary's fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. (In Miami shelters, the mirror must be coated with ocean water, a theft from the Blue Lady's domain.) And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids' drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.

Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody Mary polygenesis, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was merely a partial explanation for the children's legend.

"Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: 'A friend's friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'" says Ellis, an authority on children's folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he's become an expert on polygenesis. "When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you've hit the ultimate non sequitur."

Folklorists have not discovered a detailed explanation for Bloody Mary's ravenous hatred of children, or her true identity. Today, however, shelter children say they've discovered her secret mission, as well as her true name. All of the secret stories about her enclose hints.

In Chicago shelters, children tell of her role in the death of eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer, who shot an innocent fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he mistook for an enemy. Cops combed the streets, shaking down gangbangers. In desperation Sandifer's gang turned to the one who could save them from justice. They sat in a dark room before a mirror and chanted, "Bloody Mary." The wall glowed like flames. A female demon weeping black tears appeared. Without speaking, she communicated a strategy.

That night, realizing his gang was going to kill him, Sandifer ran through his neighborhood, knocking on doors. "Like baby Jesus in Bethlehem -- except he was bad," explained an eleven-year-old at a Chicago homeless shelter. The next morning police found Sandifer's body, shot through the head, in a tunnel. According to the eleven-year-old, the boy was "lying on a bed of broken glass."

Bloody Mary commands legions. She can insinuate herself into the heart of whomever children trust most: a parent or a best friend. Miami shelter children say they learned about that from television. Salvation Army shelters offer parlors with couches, magazines, and a television. While their mothers play cards and do each other's hair, the children carefully study the TV news. They know how four-year-old Kendia Lockhart died in North Dade, allegedly beaten to death and burned by her father. Bloody Mary was hunting Kendia, shelter children agree. "Gangsters say that God stories are like Chinese fairy tales," observes twelve-year-old Deion at a downtown Miami Salvation Army shelter. "But even gangs think Bloody Mary is real."

This is the secret story shelter children will tell only in hushed voices, for it reveals Bloody Mary's mystery: God's final days before his disappearance were a waking dream. There were so many crises on Earth that he never slept. Angels reported rumors of Bloody Mary's pact with Satan: She had killed her own child and had made a secret vow to kill all human children. All night God listened as frantic prayers bombarded him. Images of earthly lives flowed across his palace wall like shadows while he heard gunfire, music, laughing, crying from all over Earth. And then one night Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven with an army from Hell. God didn't just flee from the demons, he went crazy with grief over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless children say the spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ's mother.

"No one believe us! But it's true! It's true!" cries Andre at the Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. "It mean there's no one left in the sky watching us but demons." His friends sitting on the shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary sightings: She flew shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School. She stalks through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars. "I know a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she burned through a shelter wall to get him!" a seven-year-old boy says. "When the people found him, he was all red with blood. Don't matter if you're good, don't matter if you're smart. You got to be careful! If she see you, she can hunt you forever. She's in Miami! And she knows our face.

miaminewtimes.com | originally published: June 5, 1997

Computer viruses now 20 years old

BBC reports:

This week computer viruses celebrate 20 years of causing trouble and strife to all types of computer users.

US student Fred Cohen was behind the first documented virus that was created as an experiment in computer security.

Now there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.

Virus writers have adapted to new technology as it has emerged and the most virulent programs use the net to find new victims and cause havoc.

Attack mode

Mr Cohen created his first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California.

Others had written about the potential for creating pernicious programs but Mr Cohen was the first to demonstrate a working example.

In the paper describing his work he defined a virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a ... version of itself".

Mr Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD that was written for a make of mini-computer called a Vax.

The virus hid inside VD and used the permissions users had to look at other parts of the Vax computer to spread around the system.

In all the tests carried out by Mr Cohen the virus managed to grab the right to reach any part of the system in less than an hour. The fastest time was five minutes.

Viruses used to travel via floppy
Mr Cohen presented his results to a security seminar on 10 November, 1983.

The creation of the virus gave rise to such consternation that other tests were banned, but Mr Cohen did manage to demonstrate a similar virus working on other computer systems.

In the paper Mr Cohen prophetically wrote: "they can spread through computer networks in the same way as they spread through computers, and thus present a widespread and fairly immediate threat to many current systems."

Soon after this pioneering work viruses written for the IBM personal computer, which had only just been created, started to appear.

The first of these is widely acknowledged to be the "Brain" virus that emerged in 1986 from Pakistan and was, apparently, written to help its creators monitor piracy of their computer programs.

The emergence of Brain kicked off lots of other viruses such as Lehigh, Jerusalem, Cascade and Miami.

All these were aimed at PC users and travelled in floppy disks that passed around as the programs they held were used on different computers. Though they were a nuisance to those they caught out they were something of a rarity.

Windows world

Efforts to spot and stop viruses forced creators of the malicious programs to find ways of hiding their creations sometimes by making them change form to avoid detection.

In 1992 the Michelangelo virus, that was due to strike on 6 March, caught the media's attention but the chaos it was predicted to cause never materialised.

The Love Bug tricked many people into opening it
As Windows emerged virus writers began targeting the new operating system.

This led to an explosion in so-called "macro" viruses that exploited the crude utility writing program in Microsoft Word.

These viruses were much more widespread because people shared far more documents than they did the programs that early viruses piggy-backed upon.

As Windows has emerged in successive versions, virus writers have kept pace with the new technology.

The Melissa virus that struck in March 1999 marked a new trend as it combined a macro virus with one that plundered the address book of Microsoft Outlook to e-mail itself to new victims.

The success of Melissa was largely due to the fact that the net was becoming increasingly popular and the most successful viruses of recent times have exploited weaknesses in e-mail programs or net connected PCs.

Almost every year since 2000 has seen the unleashing of a virulent program that uses the net to travel.

The Love Bug struck in 2000 and was followed by the Nimda and Code Red viruses that swamped net connections.

More recently we have had Sobig, Palyh, Slammer and MSBlast viruses that have spread further and caused more havoc than early virus writers could have ever imagined.

Man ships himself across US

A news.com.au correspondent in Texas writes:

A FORMER shipping clerk pleaded guilty in a US court today to shipping himself from New York to Dallas in a wooden cargo crate.

Charles McKinley, 25, pleaded guilty to stowing away on a cargo jet.

Possible punishment ranges from probation to a year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. He will be sentenced on February 4.

McKinley's lawyer Bill Glaspy said he advised his client to plead guilty because "he told what he did to every newspaper and television station in the country, I think".

McKinley, who worked at a New York warehouse, journeyed overnight about 2,415km by truck, plane and delivery van before popping out of the box September 6 at his startled parents' home in DeSoto, a Dallas suburb.

The shaken delivery company employee left the house and called police.

McKinley has said he made the 15-hour trip - eluding security at five airports - because he was homesick and thought he could save money by flying cargo.

McKinley said he took a cell phone, which didn't work, but no food or water.

He told some reporters he occasionally got out of the crate, which was only about a metre tall.

He also said an accomplice closed the box and shipped him. But in his signed statement to the FBI, McKinley claimed no-one else was involved.

The incident renewed debate over the United States' air cargo system's vulnerability to terrorists.

Unlike the tight federal security for airline passengers, air cargo receives little federal scrutiny and is the responsibility of the shipper.

The Associated Press

The White Collar Migration - Part 1

Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe, writes:

MANILA -- To hear how far and deep the outsourcing of American jobs has traveled, listen to Christian Mancenon in barely accented English take an order over the phone for HBO from a man in Lebanon, Ill.

"I'm showing here that you love movies," the 25-year-old Filipino said, while looking at his computer screen in a low-rise building in Makati, Manila's business district. Mancenon and 600 others work for a subsidiary of Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. that fields customer calls for Dish Network satellite TV of Littleton, Colo.

Like India, Pakistan, and Russia, the Philippines has a growing share of the world's high-tech jobs that have fled high-cost places, such as Massachusetts and California's Silicon Valley. But even workers filling customer orders, with few skills, have trouble competing with the $300 a month Mancenon is paid in the Philippines, one-fifth of what a worker in the United States would get for doing the same job.

The spread of outsourcing, beyond hard-hit technology workers, is a big reason the US economic recovery so far is a jobless one, and has stayed that way much longer than in previous upturns. A study released recently from the University of California at Berkeley says the country lost more than 1 million white-collar jobs in the 1990s and "hundreds of thousands more since the turn of the century."

Precise data are hard to come by and estimates vary widely, but the UC study says that outsourcing is accelerating. "If you simultaneously read Indian newspapers and US newspapers, you're going to get a good correlation between layoffs here and jobs being created there," said Ashok Deo Bardhan, a researcher for the study. He added that as many as 30,000 jobs were lost to India alone in June, and that 14 million US service jobs are vulnerable.

Lured by lower costs overseas that enable them to increase profits in tough times, companies like Dell Computer Corp., Procter & Gamble Co., American Express Corp., and Citibank employ 20,000 Filipinos to answer their phones. The Philippine government predicts that call center jobs will double over the next year.

Filipinos also are competing for high-tech jobs like software development and engineering, the kind of work US firms have been sending to India. US jobs also are going to Ireland, Russia, China, even Ghana.

Many economists say the lost jobs will be absorbed as the economic expansion lengthens and as baby boomers retire, shrinking the overall US labor force. But the UC study says that unless the US economy pioneers new high-wage industries to employ the displaced workers, they can expect a future of lower pay and a reduced standard of living.

US companies say they have no choice. In a global economy, they say, they must stay competitive with companies that operate in lower-cost countries -- akin to the argument that if one guy does it, everybody has to just to keep alive.

"Clearly, US companies have looked offshore because they have to reduce their operating costs in order to survive," said Rita Cruz, a partner at the consulting firm Accenture, which employs 2,000 Filipino software developers.

Inevitably, that means tougher times for many US workers. Despite a Commerce Department report last week that the economy grew at a 7.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the sharpest growth in 19 years, the economy still lost 41,000 more jobs.

One year before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Northwest Airlines employed more than 52,000 workers. By last September, that was down below 39,000. Meantime, the St. Paul, Minn., company employs computer programmers in Manila. Foreign workers "cover commodity tasks, enabling us to shift employees to focus on key innovation areas," said Mary Stanik, an airline spokeswoman.

One school of thought says that over time, Americans will benefit from the higher corporate profits that come from outsourcing. Low-level work will be performed in low-wage countries, saving US employees for more demanding, higher-paying tasks.

Mike Gildea, executive director of the Department for Professional Employees of the AFL-CIO, which represents 4 million white-collar workers, does not believe the explanation that Americans will do better in the long run. "It's a load of crap," he said. "This is exactly what we were told about manufacturing jobs 15 years ago."

In a country as poor as the Philippines, outsourcing is a bonanza. The Philippines is regarded as the Asian tiger that never roared, a promising country that did not achieve the booming economic growth that came to Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea. The country's 84 million people include a sizable middle class, but according to government statistics, average household income as of 2000 was about $2,600, with a third of all households earning less than $1,000 a year.

But the literacy rate is well over 90 percent. The universities produce 350,000 graduates a year, 50,000 of them engineers, more than the domestic economy can absorb. Most speak English.

Because the Philippines is near the Asian mainland and Australia, and because of longstanding economic and military ties to America, the country has superb telecommunications links. A network of undersea fiber optic cables connects the islands to North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, providing excellent voice and data communications at low cost.

But decades of corrupt misrule and martial law spoiled the Philippine economy. Once the only hope for educated Filipinos was a plane ticket out. Today, it's a phone or a computer terminal.

Cristina David, a 35-year-old engineer at Software Ventures International in Manila, oversees several software projects for US companies. Like many of her colleagues, she knows how things are done in America. "I worked there for two years," she said. "I felt so lonely, so I had to come back."

And why not She can do the same work in the Philippines, and although a $4,000 annual salary is sub-poverty in the United States, it lets David live the sweet life in Manila. She drives a Mitsubishi Lancer -- "fully loaded," David said.

In the home David shares with her widowed mother, there is a live-in maid who does all the cooking and cleaning, six days a week, in exchange for room and board and $50 a month. Every December, David and her friends fly to Hong Kong or Thailand for vacation. Software Ventures has been developing software in Manila for nearly 30 years. During that time, said president and CEO Gil Guanio, the company hired and trained about 6,000 people, only to see the best of them immigrate to the US, Canada, or Australia.

Today, the company finds it far easier to keep its 500 software developers at home because opportunity in the United States has dwindled but keeps growing in the Philippines. "The only way to keep what I call the best people," Guanio said, "is to pursue an offshore strategy that brings the work from out of the country into the country."

The strategy has been working as a growing number of US firms have sent programming work to the Philippines. Since 2000, Thomson West, an Eagan, Minn., publishing company, employed Software Ventures for software maintenance and support services. Con-Way Transportation Services, a major trucking firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., has had its older software maintained by Software Ventures since 2001. "It frees our people up to do more cutting-edge stuff," said Con-Way's marketing director, Joe DeLuca.

That's no solace to out-of-work US programmers, who are competing against the likes of Mary Rose Dela Cruz. She has worked for seven years as a software developer for Headstrong Corp., a Fairfax, Va., consulting firm. The company's global development center in Manila employs 150 software developers, tackling projects for US, European, and Asian firms.

Dela Cruz makes about $1,000 a month, a fraction of what an equally skilled American would earn. But in the Philippine economy, she can afford a car and overseas vacations, while providing financial aid to put other members of her family through school.

Most Philippine outsourcing jobs do not go to software engineers. The biggest boom comes in lower-skilled technology work like medical transcription. Consider eData Services, a Manila company that provides an 800 phone number in the United States for doctors to dial in and dictate medical information. The eData workers, all of whom hold a degree related to medical care -- usually nursing or physical therapy -- type it up. Doctors working for eData part time act as editors and check the accuracy of the work. Once it is verified, the transcripts are e-mailed back to doctors' offices in the United States.

At the call center where Mancenon works, the company sends workers through "Amspeak" training courses. The schooling seeks to purge workers' voices of "foreign" accents and familiarize them with the latest American slang.

Nonetheless, despite the training in American English and pop culture, Mancenon estimated that 3 of 10 callers realize they are speaking to someone outside America: "If they ask us if we're American, we proudly say 'no.'"

- Hiawatha Bray can be reached at .

© 2003 The New York Times Company

The White Collar Migration - Part 2

Chris Gaither, The Boston Globe, writes:

FRAMINGHAM -- Andre Brassard keeps sending out resumes but has largely given up on the profession that employed him for a decade: writing software.

In his old department at Mindspeed Technologies Inc., most of the software engineers are gone. The work Brassard and his colleagues did is now largely done in Ukraine for one-quarter to one-third the cost.

"What has happened to me is irreversible," Brassard said. "It's not like the downturn of 10 years ago. Then it was just bad times."

In the next generation of high-tech companies, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are making the outsourcing of jobs overseas part of their business plans from the start. Ruthlessly, perhaps, they see outsourcing as the latest innovation in an industry built on innovation.

"Right when you think about Employee 11, you should think about India," said Ravi Chiruvolu, a general partner with Charter Venture Capital, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that invests in fledgling technology companies. "My view is you should not start a company from scratch in the United States ever again."

Outsourcing is dramatically changing the way companies of all sizes distribute their workers, hitting hard places like Boston, the second biggest tech center behind Silicon Valley. People and companies are forced to adjust, often with great pain, to a fundamental restructuring of America's role in the global technology industry, one creating a sharp division between the people who invent and sell software and those who actually write and maintain those computer programs.

To the surprise of white-collar programmers who thought themselves immune, many of their jobs have turned into "grunt labor" positions exported to India, China, Russia, and other countries and filled with skilled but less expensive workers. IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., EMC Corp., and other high-tech leaders have set up software design and maintenance centers in India, and scores of other large companies have farmed programming work to Indian consultancies.

The Boston economy has gone through enormous transformations before. There was the 1980s defense industry crash, the 20th-century exodus of textile jobs, and the country's western expansion that made the region's farms uncompetitive by the late 1800s.

Each time, Boston survived, innovated, and ultimately thrived. Economists disagree on what will happen this time and when. Locally and nationally, it's clear right now that the economy is growing rapidly but job growth is not.

Proponents of outsourcing say the brilliant ideas that fuel new companies will continue to emerge and win venture capital in the United States. Start-ups will still incorporate in the United States with hopes of winning American customers and going public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. But after the first few employees create a technology and a plan for selling it, the costs of readying that technology for the marketplace will force young companies to think globally.

A prime example of the new tech model: Lumenare Networks, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that creates programs for testing complex software, network equipment, and data storage systems. Lumenare was on the verge of shutting down under heavy debt in early 2001. When the board hired new executives to rescue the company, one of their first moves was to fire 12 contractors writing software code for $180 an hour and replace them with a team of Indian programmers earning $10 to $20 an hour in Noida, a suburb of New Delhi.

Within a few months Lumenare was saving so much money that Phillip Cavallo, the chief executive, moved all software development and maintenance to India, despite resistance from some of his upper-level managers. He laid off 30 American programmers in Sunnyvale and hired replacements in Noida.

"Software engineers - India produces about a million of them a year - are a commodity," Cavallo said in a phone interview from India, where he was visiting employees and trying to sell software to Indian outsourcing firms.

Today 35 coders work in Lumenare's office in India, writing new software and testing it. In the Sunnyvale headquarters, which once employed 45 people, only 15 Lumenare employees remain: Cavallo and other executives, some accountants, the sales and marketing team, program managers who install the software for US clients, and engineers.

"I don't think the company would be here if we hadn't made these moves," Cavallo said.

The high-tech industry is legendary for booms and busts that produce millionaires and then pink slips. But losing jobs overseas was once a problem reserved mostly for blue-collar workers. The Internet boom, which at first sparked an employment surge in the United States, also created the means for a white-collar variety of offshore outsourcing. Information became increasingly digital. Faster and more pervasive Internet connections enabled anyone sitting at a computer, anywhere in the world, to do much of the same work as an American.

"I thought I was safe," said Janice Johnson Kuhl, a software engineer in Mill Valley, Calif., who until the work dried up two years ago, designed computer systems for two decades as a consultant for Visa International, Providian Financial Corp., and the California State Automobile Association.

Since then, Kuhl found only one monthlong contract, and that was for investigating why a $6 million programming job outsourced to a major Indian consulting firm was $40 million and 18 months overbudget, she said.

"War on Nerds" is how Keith Scruggs, a 38-year-old unemployed developer, described it on a picket sign he carried at a Concord, Calif., antioutsourcing Labor Day rally. About 30 software coders, dressed in Silicon Valley's rumpled uniform of jeans, T-shirts, and Hawaiian prints, sipped bottled water and exchanged pleasantries under the Northern California sun. Then the techies picked up their picket signs and began shouting for three hours outside Bank of America headquarters, decrying the company's use of foreign programmers to do work Americans once did.

Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research and consulting firm, estimates that 10 percent of all the jobs at US information-technology vendors and service providers and 5 percent of all tech jobs in more general companies will shift offshore by the end of next year. Fewer than 40 percent of American workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing will find work within the same company, Gartner forecasts.

Brassard has been trying to latch onto any tech company since Mindspeed, a California maker of networking chips with local offices in Westborough, let him go from his job writing testing software on Jan. 19, 2002.

"I can't even get replies on applications, let alone interviews," he said. "It's that tough."

Because of his wide knowledge of computer languages, Brassard once thought he was indispensable. He has since become certified as a tennis instructor and enrolled in a real estate appraiser training program.

Mindspeed hired ArrAy Inc., an outsourcing company based in Westborough, which shipped most of the work to the Ukraine. ArrAy now employs 40 programmers in Westborough and 60 total in the Ukraine and Russia. The company is exploring an expansion into China and Bangladesh.

"In order to stay competitive in the business we've built at ArrAy, we have to have offshore capabilities," said Charlie Palmer, ArrAy's CEO. "That's troublesome to me as an American citizen."

Still, there are many benefits to outsourcing. A recent report by management consultant McKinsey & Co. said outsourcing helps US companies become more profitable and cut prices to consumers, as well as boost the export of equipment and software to the developing countries doing the outsourcing work. "Unless we pander to protectionism, there is no good reason to believe that our dynamic job-creating economy cannot absorb the level of change" posed by outsourcing, the report said.

Just not immediately. Marc D. Lewis, president of Morgan Howard North America, a job placement firm, said software coders used to making $60,000 or more a year will have to learn newer programming languages to stay employed.

"The new jobs creation in this country will stem from intellectual property gains and creativity and better uses of human and machine intelligence," he said.

The invention of new applications, installation, and customization of new systems, and sales and marketing will stay in the country, said former Labor secretary Robert B. Reich.

"These are the jobs that cannot be done by specialists on other sides of the world," said Reich, a 2002 gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts. "When we get out of this jobs recession, there will be a large and growing number of technological specialties available to Americans."

- Chris Gaither can be reached at

© 2003 The New York Times Company

The White Collar Job Migration - Part 3

D.C. Denison, The Boston Globe, writes:

HANOVER, N.H. -- From where Diane Noyes is sitting, in a modest college cafe near the campus of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, outsourcing is not a threat.

She's thought about it, studied it as a member of Tuck's class of 2004, but instead sees the business trend that is sending thousands of American jobs overseas as a mixture of opportunity and necessity, both for her and the US economy.

"Outsourcing may actually work to the advantage of American-trained business students," Noyes, 29, said. "Management is something that developing nations will probably outsource to us."

Bart Cornelissen, a fellow member of Tuck's class of 2004, agreed. "If you look at it from just a US perspective, or a regional perspective, outsourcing can be daunting," he said. "But from our perspective, it's more like a shifting that moves in both directions.

"There's actually a lot of opportunity hidden in there," he said.

As American companies embrace the outsourcing of jobs and operations, causing widespread concern among employees and suppliers, one group is resolutely focused on the flip side of the trend: business school students and their professors. They are eagerly exploring the "hidden opportunities" that may exist in the midst of this global economic upheaval. And the way these students are thinking about outsourcing, as they start their careers in business, could foreshadow the long-term consequences of this restructuring of the American work force, and an indication of who is likely to win and lose as more jobs and functions move to developing countries.

Significantly, many business students do not share the anxiety about outsourcing that plagues many workers in manufacturing and high tech. Instead, these students eagerly embrace outsourcing as an inevitable, even necessary, corporate strategy that will enable US companies to compete in a global economy. Even those who are conflicted about its impact assume that outsourcing will be a major factor on the economic landscape for years to come.

Asked which industries will be most affected by outsourcing and globalization, Annie-Pierre Hurd, a second-year student in MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing program, paused.

"I'm trying to think of an industry that won't be affected," she said finally.

Many business students, in fact, are already planning careers around the premise that experience with outsourcing will be a crucial job skill, and are eagerly seeking out international experience as a way to increase their ability to manage offshore operations.

"To allow yourself maximum access to opportunity, you have to think globally," Noyes said. "You can't think, 'Well, maybe I'll work for an American company here, and maybe they'll send me abroad.' You have to think in reverse, about those up-and-coming foreign companies -- in China or Korea or wherever -- that will hire people like me."

The faculty at business schools are also increasingly focused on issues related to outsourcing. At Tuck, associate professor Matthew J. Slaughter teaches a required course called "Global Economics for Managers" and a popular elective called "Countries and Companies in the International Economy."

"There's now a premium placed on the ability to control these big global outsourcing networks," Slaughter said. "You can see it in the consulting firms, where many students aspire to work. McKinsey, for example, has just about doubled its offices around the world."

Tuck also has its bustling Center for International Business, which focuses on the economic, social, and political factors that affect business in global economies. David Pyke, the school's associate dean for the MBA program, teaches courses in operations management, logistics, and supply chain management -- the complex process of managing a corporation's many offshore operations and making sure that they all work together.

"It used to be that a company owned the supply chain," Pyke said. "If a company needed something, they made it. But now things are different. Now it's important for students to learn to think about 'Where do we make it Where should we make it' at a very high level."

Ethics, organizational impact, and "corporate citizenship" are integral parts of the outsourcing discussion at Tuck, according to professor M. Eric Johnson, who teaches a course on supply chain management. But "protectionism is no longer an option," he said.

"If you try to get protectionist about an entire firm, you won't be able to compete globally," he said. "Whereas if you are intelligent about what you outsource, you can grow in other directions."

At MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing program, sponsored jointly by the Sloan School of Management and the Engineering Systems Division in the School of Engineering, "we prepare people to be leaders in these global firms," said Bill Hanson, the program's codirector. "Our students understand that their careers probably won't be in one place."

Said Brian Bowers, who graduated from the MIT program last year: "What companies want now is people with the ability to make strategic decisions and operate in this global environment. They want to know, can you navigate all these different cultures"

At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which is better known for training hands-on scientists and engineers rather than business managers, the rise of outsourcing has led to a broadened mission to incorporate international experience. Today, more than half of the students participate in extended projects outside the United States while enrolled in the school, said Richard Vaz, the associate dean of the school's Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division.

Over the last 10 years, WPI has aggressively expanded its contacts with companies around the world as the school seeks to place students in two-month immersion engineering projects.

Chris O'Malley, a 2003 chemical engineering graduate who is working on a master's degree, is typical of many WPI students. He spent two months before his junior year working on an engineering project in Venice. Now O'Malley said he would not be surprised if his first job after school involves either working abroad himself or working for a company with extensive operations in other countries.

"A lot of the chemical engineering jobs that used to be here in New England have transferred to other countries," he said. "There's a good chance that when I finish my master's, the opportunities will be overseas."

The reality of globalization and outsourcing has changed the way WPI students think about their careers. "What many students are realizing is that virtually every job now involves either buying things from people in other countries, selling things to customers in other countries, or competing with firms in other countries," Vaz said. "It's almost impossible now for people going into science and technology to escape the fact that their careers will be played out on a global stage."

One undeniable factor at many of the world's elite business schools is the increasing number of international students. Dartmouth's Tuck School draws about 30 percent of its students from outside the United States; another 20 percent have worked internationally before matriculating.

John Owens, executive director of Tuck's Center for International Business, predicts that these American-trained business students will fuel increasing rounds of globalization and outsourcing.

"When you look at a country like China, what many of the companies there want and need is to understand how they can globalize," he said. "That's their goal: to become major global players. They need someone with an understanding of international markets, and they are looking to American-trained business managers to help them achieve that."

- D.C. Denison can be reached at .

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.