World's first commercial solar plant sees the light

In the arid Spanish countryside, PS10, a dazzling array of 624 1,292-square-foot mirrors, directs sunlight to a receiver atop a 35-story tower. There the blast of tight boils water into steam that generates 11 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 6,000 homes. The first commercial-scale power plant of its kind, PS10 came online in March. PS10-type technologies are less expensive to manufacture than photovoltaics, but they work only in very sunny areas. Abengoa, the company that built PS10, has begun a sister project nearby that wilt produce 20 megawatts of electricity. These, together with other planned solar projects at this site, will soon generate 300 megawatts, enough electricity to power 180,000 homes, equivalent to the neighboring city of Seville.

World's Craziest Hotels

1. Ice Hotel (Sweden): 6,000 square feet of ice and snow

Made up of over 6,000 square feet of ice and snow, it's the largest - and the original - ice hotel in the world. Guests sleep in a thermal sleeping bag on a special bed built of snow and ice, on reindeer skins. In the morning, a cup of hot lingonberry juice is brought to their bedside. After enjoying a good (?) night's sleep on a bed of snow, that morning delivery should be quite a delight. With an average temperature of 17 degrees Fahrenheit, bring lots of layers, or just visit the Absolut ICE bar and drink some vodka to stay toasty - in more ways than one.

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Attention Deficit Disorders: The Myths, the Facts

Myth: ADD is just a lack of willpower. People with ADD focus well on things that interest them; they could focus on any other tasks if they really wanted to.

Fact: ADD looks like a willpower problem, but it isn't. It's a chemical problem in the management system of the brain.

Myth: ADD is a simple problem of being hyperactive or not listening when someone is talking to you.

Fact: ADD is a complex disorder that involves impairments in focus, organization, motivation, emotional modulation, memory, and other functions of the brain's management system.

Myth: The brains of people with ADD are overactive and need medication to calm down.

Fact: Underactivity of the brain's management networks is typical of people with ADD. Effective medications increase alertness and improve communication in the brain's management system.

Myth: ADD is simply a label for behavior problems; children with ADD just refuse to sit still and are unwilling to listen to teachers or parents.

Fact: Many people with ADD have few behavior problems. Chronic inattention symptoms may cause more severe and longer-lasting problems in learning and relationships for those with ADD than behavior problems do.

Myth: Those who have ADD as children usually outgrow it as they enter their teens.

Fact: Often ADD impairments are not noticeable until the teen years, when more self-management is required in school and elsewhere. ADD may be subtle but more disabling during adolescence than in childhood.

Myth: Unless you have been diagnosed with ADD as a child, you can't have it as an adult.

Fact: Many adults have struggled all their lives with unrecognized ADD impairments. They haven't received help because they have assumed that their chronic difficulties, such as depression or anxiety, were caused by other impairments that did not respond to the usual treatments.

Myth: Someone can't have ADD and also have depression, anxiety, or other psychiatric problems.

Fact: A person with ADD is six times more likely to have another psychiatric or learning disorder than most other people are. ADD usually overlaps with other disorders.

Myth: Medications for ADD are likely to cause longer-term problems with substance abuse or other health concerns, especially for children taking these medications.

Fact: The risks of using appropriate medications to treat ADD are minimal, whereas the risks of not using medication to treat ADD are significant. The medications used for treating ADD are among the best researched for any disorder.

Myth: ADD doesn't really cause much damage to a person's life.

Fact: Untreated or inadequately treated ADD often severely impairs learning, family life, education, work life, social interactions, and driving safely. Most of those with ADD who receive adequate treatment, however, function quite well.

By Thomas E. Brown

10 Most Bizarre Museums

1. Museum of the Penis

The Icelandic Phallological Museum in Iceland is a museum devoted to phallology. As of July 2006, the museum houses 245 specimens displayed like hunting trophies, embalmed in formaldehyde, or dried in display cases. The museum attempts to collect penis specimens from every mammal in Iceland, including several species that are endangered or currently extinct in Icelandic waters. Sigurður Hjartarson, a former teacher, is the founder and director of the museum. The museum also exhibits a few specimens from mammals not living in Iceland, as well as folkloric specimens (alleged elves, trolls, sea monsters, etc.) and penis-themed art.

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The Big Money in Medicaid

A boom in HMOs for the neediest leads to litigation, controversy-and lots of profits

JOYCE HINES OF BALTIMORE is 45 years old and weighs just 87 pounds. Years of illness that began in the late 1990s with a bleeding ulcer left her jobless and dependent on Medicaid. She has an intravenous line that delivers both nutrition and medication, takes eight prescriptions, and has 11 doctors. But this is a radical improvement from a few years ago, when she was down to 67 pounds and spent over a third of the year in the hospital. Today she lives mostly at home, thanks to a team of caregivers that includes a nurse, a social worker, and a case manager. Hines credits Amerigroup, a publicly traded insurer that provides managed care for the Medicaid population. "No one seemed to know what was going on," she says. "But now we do."

Amerigroup, for its part, says that its approach to someone like Hines-whom it features in its annual report this year-can save taxpayers money by reducing hospital stays and emergency room visits. And saving money is critical for Medicaid, the $330 billion program that covers more than 50 million of the poorest Americans, including the elderly, the disabled, and children and their mothers. While Medicare gets most of the headlines, Medicaid-which funds over a third of all births in the U.S. and is paid for jointly by the states and the federal government-is just as apt to break the bank. On average, Medicaid now eats up the largest share of state budgets-around 22%, which is more than education-and is growing by 8% a year.

States have been putting their Medicaid populations into managed-care plans since the early 1990s, but in the past few years they have awarded contracts to a brand-new crop of companies-principally Amerigroup and three others, WellCare, Centene, and Molina-all of which focus on insuring Medicaid patients. While subsidiaries of multiline insurers like UnitedHealth and WellPoint are still the biggest players in Medicaid, the "pure plays," as they're called, have grown rapidly and now have 22% of the Medicaid managed-care market, up from 14% in 1999, according to Merrill Lynch analyst Doug Simpson. The four upstart companies now manage the care of about five million Medicaid patients, collect some $9 billion in annual premiums, and have a combined market capitalization of roughly $7 billion. Their remarkable growth-Amerigroup's revenues have risen at an annual rate of over 60% in the past decade-has been accompanied by generally stellar stock performance.

Jeff McWaters, 50, Amerigroup's CEO, is a proselytizer for his industry. Amerigroup's new headquarters in Virginia Beach feature a picture of President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1965 legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid. "The greatest generation made housing affordable, built roads, and sent a man to the moon," McWaters says. "The problem we have not figured out, and which is up to our generation to figure out, is this health-care problem."

Any business that is supposed to deliver a public good while maximizing profits for its shareholders invites skepticism. These companies "need to operate in a way that is squeaky-clean," says Dan Mendelson, who oversaw Medicaid at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration and is now president of consultant Avalere Health. But a close look reveals some blemishes-and more profits than anyone imagined.

THERE'S A LONG-STANDING JOKE in the industry that when you've seen one Medicaid health plan, you've seen one Medicaid health plan. Policies and reimbursements vary wildly from state to state, and the population that Medicaid serves is incredibly diverse.

Medicaid has traditionally been a tricky business for insurers. In the late 1990s states slashed the premiums they pay, and large commercial players like Aetna began exiting the business. But in 1997 the federal government abolished the requirement that health plans serving Medicaid patients get 25% of their members from the private sector, setting the stage for Medicaid-only plans. Then states began to raise premiums again as they realized that they needed insurers to stay in business. In 2005 a federal budget resolution sought to cut billions from Medicaid, but even that is seen as positive for the managed-care industry, because it will push more states to try to save money.

Both Amerigroup and Centene grew by acquiring smaller plans on the cheap. Venture capitalists saw opportunity too. In 2002, George Soros's Soros Private Equity (which has since been spun off and renamed TowerBrook Capital Partners) bought WellCare, a small Florida operation, and began to expand it. Molina, started in 1980 by a California emergency room doctor, also began to expand out of its home state, under the leadership of the founder's son, Dr. J. Mario Molina. By 2005 all four companies had gone public. Molina has struggled, in part because California has squeezed its insurers. Amerigroup and Centene both stumbled in 2005 and had to warn that profits wouldn't meet expectations, but their stocks have still trounced the S&P 500 since their IPO dates (see chart). WellCare, which also has a high-growth Medicare business, has been a Wall Street superstar: Its stock has more than quintupled since its IPO, to just over $90.

Investors and executives have made a ton of money. In August 2006, TowerBrook cashed out of the last of its $70 mil-lion investment in WellCare, reaping a total of almost $900 million. Since WellCare's IPO, CEO Doug Farha has sold over $37 million of stock, according to Thomson Financial. He still owns shares worth almost $100 million and has collected $3.5 million in cash compensation over the past four years. McWaters has received $6.5 million in cash over that period. He owns almost $25 million in stock. Centene's CEO, Michael Neidorff, has also gotten $6.75 million in cash and big helpings of stock, including a grant worth $24.6 million in November 2004.

The stock market rewards growth, and the growth in this business has been spectacular as states have awarded new managed-care contracts. But the companies' profit margins have also been outsized by Medicaid standards. An industry benchmark holds that plans should spend at least 85 cents of every premium dollar on medical care-a proportion known in insurance jargon as the "medical loss ratio." Indeed, a recent study by the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) says the average plan has a medical loss ratio of 86.5%. Administrative costs should run about 10 to 11 cents, with the remainder left over as a slim profit after interest and taxes. "Dad used to say that this was a business of nickels," says Dr. Molina, whose company has a medical loss ratio of about 86%. But with the exception of Molina, the pure-play Medicaid insurers spend less than 85% on medical care and more than 10% on administrative costs. In 2006, Amerigroup had a medical loss ratio of 82.1% and administrative costs of 13%. Over the past three years Centene's medical loss ratio has been around 82%, and WellCare's has been around 81%.

The CHCS study, co-authored by Dr. Robert Hurley, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has researched Medicaid for 30 years, concluded that the pure plays as a group were spending less on medical care. Dr. Hurley worries that because "Medicaid is a meager payer, how can anyone make money by paying even less and not suffer adverse consequences?" He says, however, that there is "no clear evidence" that the profit is coming at the expense of beneficiaries.

The companies claim they hold down their medical loss ratios by operating efficiently.

THERE HAVE BEEN disturbing episodes, however. In 2002 a former Amerigroup employee filed a whistleblower case alleging that the company's Illinois plan discriminated against pregnant women and others dubbed "unhealthies" by discouraging them from enrolling in its plan. (In 2002 and 2003, Amerigroup's medical loss ratio in Illinois was shockingly low-under 50%.) Last October, after a three-week trial, a Chicago jury found both Amerigroup Illinois and the parent company liable under the federal False Claims Act. Amerigroup's total bill-damages plus civil penalties-is $334 million, or more than three times its 2006 net income. Judge Harry Leinenweber, who oversaw the case, called Amerigroup's behavior "egregious and calculated." The company "pilfered money from Medicaid coffers to pad its own pockets," he wrote.

Amerigroup, which is appealing the decision, says the state told it to follow this policy to ensure that pregnant women could keep seeing their current doctors. "We did what we were asked to do," says McWaters.

Controversy has also arisen in Georgia, which in 2006 turned its Medicaid population over to Centene, WellCare, and Amerigroup. In its state budget, Georgia estimated that the move to managed care would save $84 million. But some physicians-who even staged a rally last August on the steps of the Georgia state capitol-say that the managed-care companies, particularly Centene, don't pay their bills in a timely fashion, don't have enough specialists in their networks to provide care for patients, and are discouraging preventive care. Dr. Beth Sullivan, a family physician in Commerce, Ga., says she had to send a boy with a broken arm to Augusta, 140 miles away, because no doctor any closer would accept a Medicaid managed-care plan.

Sullivan and others also say the insurers are discouraging prenatal care by cutting out a bonus that doctors used to receive for seeing an expectant mother before she was 13 weeks pregnant. The companies say they aren't aware of this issue; Centene says 95.2% of its claims are now paid in 15 days or less. In general, "the physician community has always fought reform," says Jim Carlson, COO of Amerigroup. "They're just trying to preserve the status quo that will bankrupt the state."

IT'S NO SURPRISE that in a business this highly regulated, the insurers would be politically connected. McWaters, for instance, served on President George W. Bush's Health and Human Services transition team, and the boards of the companies are stacked with politicos. A close look at WellCare's Florida operations reveals just how strong its political connections are. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration is the top regulatory agency in the state. A former WellCare board member, Dr. Andrew Agwunobi, stepped down in December 2006 to become the agency's secretary. During his brief time on WellCare's board-he joined in June 2006-he received stock in the company that was worth over $350,000 when he stepped down. (He has sold his stock.)

In addition, according to a FORTUNE analysis of campaign finance records, WellCare executives and their family members, along with the company PAC, gave a total of $1.5 million to Florida candidates for state and federal elections in 2006. Florida is already a profitable state for the insurers; in fact, the state "appears to be overpaying its Medicaid plans," wrote CIBC analyst Carl McDonald in a recent report. But this spring legislators slipped a rate increase into Florida's budget. They also removed a state requirement that insurers spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar meant for behavioral-health services on patient care. (In May, Amerigroup had to pay $5 million for failing to meet this requirement, which the company says is due to "startup issues.") A bill containing both provisions passed the Florida legislature. But on May 24, Governor Charlie Crist vetoed it, calling the provisions "alarming" and saying the rate increases were "not justified."

That may be a sign that the flush times for the pure-play Medicaid companies are over. "There's a consensus that the business won't be as lucrative as it has been," says Hurley. "States have an obligation to wise up in terms of how they monitor their plans." There may be other signs as well: Since late 2006, WellCare's chief medical officer and the head of its Florida business have resigned. In February, Amerigroup's chief medical officer resigned. The company also lost its EVP of plan operations. (Both companies say the turnover is normal.) At WellCare, insiders have sold over $25 million worth of stock since late 2006. The company says those are planned sales.

As for McWaters, he says his company is in the Medicaid business for the long haul. "We've got some people trying to knock us down, but over time they will stand down, because what we do is valid, capitalistic, and ethical," he says. But if profits do shrink, then how investors react will have a major impact on the Medicaid landscape. After all, McWaters's prescription for fixing the health-care system doesn't include unhappy shareholders.

By Bethany McLean

Discover the Facts You Need to Know About the World Pharmaceutical Market

Dublin - Research and Markets has announced the addition of "The World Pharmaceutical Markets Fact Book 2007" to their offering

Facts, figures, forecasts and statistics on pharmaceutical markets and companies around the world. The need to understand world pharmaceutical marketplaces, and be able to answer quickly those questions that arise daily, is essential. Therefore an authoritative, current and comprehensive market intelligence source is an invaluable aid for every executive. And that source is The World Pharmaceutical Markets Fact Book 2007.

The 318-page Fact Book brings together a range of often difficult to source information in one single, convenient publication. Keep it near to you at all times, or consider an electronic version to share with colleagues for the search and retrieval of specific information.

It covers 64 key countries and Performance information on 80 major companies The Fact Book presents financial performance figures on leading companies from Abbott and AstraZeneca to UCB and Watson.

Answer questions such as:

* Which country has the highest spending per capita on pharmaceuticals?
* Which pharmaceutical markets are growing the fastest?
* How does the Brazilian market compare with Mexico and Argentina in terms of total health expenditure?
* What demographic development is affecting the market in Latvia and Estonia?
* What will the value of the Russian pharmaceutical market be in 2009 and 2010 and what is the growth rate?

Areas covered:

* World overview
* Market data
* Market projections
* Americas
* Market data
* Market projections
* Asia/pacific
* Market data
* Market projections
* Eastern Europe
* Market data
* Market projections
* Middle east/Africa
* Market data
* Market projections
* Western Europe
* Market data
* Market projections
* Manufacturers� data

Summary:

Thousands of key market facts and statistics at your fingertips! Bringing together a comprehensive range of often difficult to source information in one publication, the Fact Book includes a global overview, five regional overviews and extensive data on 64 countries and 80 major pharmaceutical companies.

Which other business reference provides...

Key economic, demographic and health statistics on 64 markets around the world

Performance information on 80 leading pharmaceutical companies

Countries mentioned:

* Argentina
* Australia
* Austria
* Bangladesh
* Belarus
* Belgium
* Brazil
* Bulgaria
* Canada
* Chile
* China
* Colombia
* Croatia
* Cuba
* Czech Republic
* Denmark
* Egypt
* Estonia
* Finland
* France
* Germany
* Greece
* Hong Kong
* Hungary
* India
* Indonesia
* Ireland
* Israel
* Italy
* Japan
* Jordan
* Latvia
* Lithuania
* Malaysia
* Mexico
* Morocco
* Netherlands
* New Zealand
* Norway
* Pakistan
* Peru
* Philippines
* Poland
* Portugal
* Romania
* Russia
* Saudi Arabia
* Serbia
* Singapore
* Slovakia
* Slovenia
* South Africa
* South Korea
* Spain
* Sweden
* Switzerland
* Taiwan
* Thailand
* Turkey
* Ukraine
* United Kingdom
* USA
* Venezuela
* Vietnam

That Dull Word Interesting

However dazzlingly original people try to be with language, much of the time they fall back on set phrases that are not so much clichés as expressions of the universals of the human experience: hello, goodbye, please, thank you, I love you, I'm so sorry to hear….

And thus most chefs, I imagine, don't mind if their cuisine is pronounced "delicious" by those who have just enjoyed it. Many of those in other artistic fields - painting, music, landscape design - are pleased to hear their fans call their work "beautiful."

For those of us who toil in the world of news and public affairs, the word we most want to hear, day in and day out, is "interesting."

Interesting? It's not exactly on a par with the philosopher's ideal of the good, the true, and the beautiful, is it?

A reader has reminded me of this particular deficit in the language: "The word that I use so much and find so boring and can't seem to find better choices [for] is 'interesting,' " she writes. "I could use help with this."

Hey, you and me both, sister!

Journalists are people who live in constant fear that readers/listeners/viewers/ visitors are always on the verge of turning the page, changing the channel, or clicking away to something else. To be "interesting" - to hold the reader's attention to the end - is about as good as it gets in this world.

"Interesting" is sometimes a bit of diplomatic lingo to cover an unsuccessful experiment, notably in the kitchen. "This sauce, dear, is really quite interesting." Note that this comment is rarely followed by, "May I have a second helping?"

The etymological roots of interesting and of interest, whence it comes, are far from clear. "There is much that is obscure in the history of this word," says the Oxford English Dictionary of "interest."

As a Latin word, interest is a verb that means "[it] is of importance, makes a difference" - words that are music to a journalist's ears, truly.

Early examples of interest were financial and legal. Interest in the sense of curiosity goes back to 1771: "That sparked my interest," that is, my attention.

The financial/legal and the intellectual senses of interested have gotten a little muddled at times.

I remember reading a biography of a 19th-century financier referred to as being "interested" in a particular company. What was meant, I realized after a moment of confusion, was that he owned a share of the firm. It had captured not only his attention but a share of his wallet.

The knock on interesting is that it's a lazy word. It's often used to signal, "My wheels are turning, but I don't yet really know what to think."

What synonyms could we press into service? There's engaging. But engaging doesn't keep its distance quite the way interesting does. If I find a movie "engaging," I'm not thinking about it; I'm caught up in it. That's why engaging is an appealing concept, but also why it's not an ideal synonym for interesting.

Interesting is a "think"; engaging is a "feel." And engaging doesn't do diplomatic service the way interesting sometimes does, as in the "interesting sauce."

Back in the days when it was easier for audiences to think of a guy in a Wehrmacht uniform as a comic figure, Arte Johnson used to do a shtick as a German soldier on the old "Laugh-In" television show. He managed to make a national catch phrase out of his cryptic utterance, "ver-r-r-r-ry interesting." Often followed with an abrupt addendum, delivered in a similar comic accent - "but shtupit!" - it was his comment on whatever silliness his fellow troupers had just presented.

It provided some (much-needed) breathing room in the fast-paced show. And it maybe was about as "interesting" as interesting ever gets.

By: Walker, Ruth, Christian Science Monitor

Let real people have a crack

Those clever chaps that started Skype have done it again. They have found a smart way of making streamed online TV a reality: They call it Joost (joost.com). The big problems of storage space, bandwidth and the time it would take to download your favorite episode of "Mork & Mindy" have been solved by the cunning devils by distributing the content and serving it over a network of personal computers. Your computer speaks to thousands of other computers, simultaneously pulls down hundreds of little bits of the program and reconstructs them on the fly. Fast, cheap, desirable and still as funny as it was 20 years ago.

Apparently this is called distributed networking and the same concept is surfacing in our own industry. Let's call it "distributed creativity."

The basic idea is that you no longer rely on one or two brilliant creative minds to crack your problem (although that is still a very good place to start). Instead, you use the internet to spread the creative task across hundreds of ordinary brains and see what comes back.

Ten years ago, a British creative director thought he could make a business out of posting briefs to a web of established freelancers all around the world. It didn't quite work. The idea was right but the execution was flawed. You don't have to be a professional ad person to come up with great stuff. Just . Maybe they won't get it 100% right but they each might add a little bit of creativity. Sifting through those little bits and then making something of them produces some interesting twists. Trust people, give them somewhere to start and some assets to play with and you will be amazed at what comes back.

Recently, over here, Sony took this approach with their follow up to "Balls" for Bravia TVs. They made a great ad, "Paint" (bravia-advert.com) but then made many of the assets available for people to pick up, play with, repackage and then pass on. Some great stuff happened as a result (youtube.com/watch?v=6X_vAzixa6s). This didn't replace the great ad from Fallon at the heart of the campaign but it added depth, energy and broader appeal.

A fresh approach to generating great stuff. Distributed creativity.

We thought this was a new development over here until we saw the Doritos ads in the Super Bowl. Great minds and great industries think alike, eh? Nanu, nanu.

By: Pollard, Ivan, Advertising Age

Fish Stories

I am my father's daughter--even after all these years. No offense to my mother. It's just that, when I was 8 years old, my dad's outdoor-oriented life seemed more interesting than her house-centric one. I still think of myself as a gardener, not a housekeeper, so I own a small house on a large plot of land.

A big part of our father-daughter bonding process was going fishing. A quiet man with a wry sense of humor, fishing was my dad's one obsession. Every Sunday afternoon we would go to the same bend in the same muddy river and go through the same rhythmic rituals of casting and trolling and slowly reeling the fishing line back in--and repeating it all over again and again--into the twilight hours. Then, the mosquitoes would declare victory for the night and the chubby raccoons would claim their turn to fish.

Not all was idyllic. My father considered fish to be very sensitive and emotionally unstable. At the slightest disturbance, he believed, they would all swim in a flash to another part of the river. So, for me, there were endless fishing rules: no running on the bank, no jumping up and down, no loud talking, no skipping stones, no thrashing the water with a tree branch, no whistling, no sailing improvised rafts made of sticks. Just fishing.

Not all was sociable. He didn't like to share his part of the river with other fishermen. He would hide whatever fish he had caught and tell new arrivals, "This is the worst fishing hole ever! You're wasting your time if you stick around here. I'm thinking about moving myself." (Many people fell for this.)

What he did like was to tell fishing stories, as all fishermen do. I swear he remembered every fish he ever caught as well as every fish that got away. What type they were, how big, and how hard they fought being reeled in.

My favorite fish story is more of a fish myth. I'm sure versions of it are told in all parts of this country and quite possibly all around the globe by people of different nationalities, ethnicities and languages. It is the story about the big fish, decades old, that has never been caught, but everyone claims to have seen.

When my father first told me about him, I got so excited that I almost broke several of the fishing rules at once. His name was Big Cat, a reportedly huge catfish who lived in this bend of the river. He liked to sit and sulk, and twitch his big whiskers in the muddy, quiet water by the rocks, so the story goes. People argued about how big he was--30, maybe 40 pounds--and how old he was; some said several decades. My father saw him 30 years ago and has only seen him once since. I never saw him.

Folks worried about him. Some were afraid he might get caught by someone who didn't know how special he was. Once a group of beer drinking teenage boys fired shots down into Big Cat's hangout and someone called the cops. And they came!

Time would dictate that I would turn into a brat and stop going fishing with my father. But I keep a small freshwater fish tank, and down at the bottom, busily working away is Little Big Cat in memory of the legendary one who got away.

Happy fish tales. And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

By: Grayson, Mary, H&HN: Hospitals & Health Networks, Dec2006

The Obama phenomenon

WITH THE entry of Sen. Barack Obama, the emerging race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has become exponentially more interesting.

The 45-year-old Obama gives the field an infusion of youth and deprives the front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, of a monopoly on appeals to history-making. Clinton would be the first woman nominated by a major party; Obama would be the first African American nominee.

For the moment, at least, Obama is enjoying the glow of a candidate whose visceral appeal to voters has surged ahead of their knowledge of him. In these early windows, voters tend to project the qualities they long craved in a candidate onto the fresh face who is thrilling audiences with talk about "new ideas" or generational change. But the presidential process is grueling and revealing, and has a way of exposing the deficiencies in a candidate's positions or personal mettle, as Gary Hart learned in 1984 and Ross Perot found in 1992.

It's much too early to talk about handicapping a battle of the firsts, Clinton and Obama -- especially because some politicians who have been there before, namely John Kerry and Al Gore, may yet get into the race.

But it's not too early to anticipate that Obama will contribute to the scope of the debate in a positive way for Democrats. One of the traits that distinguishes him from other prominent Democrats is his comfort with public discussion of religious faith and patriotism. He has talked openly about his own faith as well as the party's need to reach out to evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.

The Republicans have artfully exploited the Democrats' unease with religion to help build a base in the so-called "red states" of the South and Midwest. Obama could help the party make inroads with what GOP strategists like to call "values voters."

Obama's entry also elevates the Iraq war as an issue in the Democratic primaries. Clinton and other Senate Democrats who were in office in 2002 carry the baggage of having voted for the authorization of force in Iraq. Obama, an Illinois state legislator at the time, opposed the invasion.

Now, Obama must fill in many blanks for voters as he tries to persuade them that his judgment, intellect and instincts can compensate for a comparatively short immersion in the issues confronting an American president.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA), Jan 18, 2007

In death, a president gets his respect

I find the recent love fest in the news media over what a wonderful "uniter" former president Gerald Ford was after the Watergate mess to be very interesting. This isn't the news reaction I remember at the time of Ford's presidency ("'Good and decent man' served us well," Opinionline, The Forum, Friday).

Just as Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a detached old fool by some members of the news media during his term as president and then honored as the slayer of the Soviet dragon after his death, Ford was once vilified by reporters and hounded by seemingly every wag with a camera or typewriter.

Ford was run into the ground by every outlet from Saturday Night Live to network news programs and newspapers.

Even good old Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., admitted during the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Awards ceremony in 2001 that he was once a Ford-basher, but that time had proved him wrong and that Ford was the right man for the time. Wow!

It wouldn't surprise me one bit that 30 years from now, we might be hearing a different account of the presidency of the liberals' favorite pioata, George W. Bush.

Robert Fillman

Indianapolis

Civility remembered

I did not vote for former president Gerald Ford when he ran in 1976; I voted for Jimmy Carter instead. At the time, I was angry over Watergate and Ford's pardon of former president Richard Nixon in September 1974. I think this pardon, more than anything else, contributed to Ford's electoral defeat in 1976.

Looking back more than 30 years later, I still believe that Ford's pardon of Nixon was wrong. Nixon was just as guilty as his aides, who were convicted for their Watergate crimes.

I would, however, take Ford over any modern-day, right-wing Republican, including our current president, George W. Bush. Ford seems moderate compared with the righties we have today in politics and their ultra right-wing, talk-radio cohorts.

If Ford were in politics today and expressed his past views, those right-wing, talk-show fanatics would have their knives and swords ready to stab him for his moderation.

Also, Ford and Carter deserve to be commended for the fine relationship they developed after they left politics. You never would have known they once ran against each other.

Unfortunately, that civility is lacking today and might never return.

Source: USA Today, JAN 03, 2007

Checking The Facts

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "facts" as "truth" and "reality", as a "thing that has known to have occurred, to exist, or to be true". Most people would have no problem with this definition, particularly when it comes to scientific facts. After all, gravity is gravity. Oxygen is oxygen. And that is all there is. But this simplistic perception is dangerously obsolete.

Scientific facts do not exist in "reality" as absolutes simply waiting to be "discovered". Facts become facts not just through the procedures of science but also through a social process; and every fact has a social history associated with it. The really interesting fact is that scientific facts come in a variety of forms -- as false facts, changing facts, sliding facts and contested facts.

A common false fact is oxygen. Every student learns that Lavoisier, the French chemist executed in the Revolution, discovered oxygen. But the name actually refers to a nonexistent element whose meaning comes from a false theory of chemical composition. For "oxy" means "sharp-maker"; its best translation is in German, Sauerstoff -- sour stuff. Lavoisier believed that this gas, when supporting the combustion of elements, made them into acids. This worked for sulphur and phosphorus. But Humphrey Davy showed that it did not work for "muriatic acid" -- what we now call hydrochloric acid. Its active constituent, chlorine, had no oxygen in it. So Lavoisier's theory was refuted, and oxygen deprived of its meaning, just two decades after its discovery. But try to find this in a chemistry textbook.

Textbooks themselves are a great place to find out how much the "facts" change. In some subjects, particularly chemistry, what is given to students as facts at one level is rejected as simplistic at the next. In other subjects, a given fact changes from one theoretical structure to another. For example, the "fact" that light behaves as a wave is conveniently forgotten in photovoltaic effects where it is treated as consisting of photons; but the "fact" that it behaves as a particle is ignored in explaining the phenomenon of Newton's rings. So the nature of calculation determines which "fact" is regarded as "fact". Even the facts that are by definition "constant" can change. Hubble's constant, which is the yardstick for measuring the size and age of the universe, has been bungee-jumping for decades.

Sometimes well-known facts become false in retrospect, thanks to the advances of science. A wonderful recent example is the total reorganisation of the classification of plants, thanks to the use of DNA techniques. All sorts of plants, which had been considered closely related because of superficial similarities, are now discovered to have very different DNA. The botanical map will have to be withdrawn; many of its previously accepted facts are now seen to be false.

Sliding facts appear where science meets public policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, newborn babies were given vitamin K to prevent bleeding. But in the 1990s, research linked vitamin K to risks of cancer in children. Similarly, when first used in the 1960s, breast implants were "safe". But in the 1990s they began to be linked to connective tissue diseases. In both cases, different studies prove different things -- and none of them have "proved" breast implants or vitamin K to be either "safe" or linked to statistically significant "higher risks". The "facts" slide from one position to another.

Given the risks involved, it is important for sliding facts to be pinned down. Indeed, when it comes to risks, all facts are contested facts. For example, since the late 1970s we have been hearing that children living near electric power lines have a higher risk of developing leukaemia. But what are the facts? Well, a number of epidemiological studies appear to confirm the fears -- but none of them have transformed the fear into a fact. The latest study, published in July 1997 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found a 24 per cent increase in risk. But this result is statistically non-significant and researchers have used the study to argue that there is "little evidence" for a risk of leukaemia from electric cables. However, a similar study by the World Health Organisation, which also produced a statistically non-significant result, actually provided "substantial" evidence for a link between passive smoking and lung cancer. So why is the latter generally accepted as a "fact" and the former not given half a chance?

A great deal of science depends on statistical inferences. But no statistical survey or test can ever "prove" a causal relationship between two factors. So results are always stated in terms of levels of "confidence". Different problems are conventionally investigated to different "confidence limits". Now, whether an inquiry is accurate to 95 or 99.5 per cent depends on the values defining the investigations, the costs and weight placed on social, environmental or cultural consequences. In other words, it is social and political power, backed by hard cash, that defines the level of confidence to which a risk problem is investigated.

For instance, when a dangerous chemical plant is placed in an area with an aware and politically active citizenry, the risks are worked out to a high level of confidence. However, when the same plants are located in an area where the citizens themselves are ignorant of the dangers and do not command political power, the confidence levels are much more relaxed. The people of Bhopal and Chernobyl know this to their cost. In the case of passive smoking, no one but the wicked tobacco companies will cast doubt on any "proof' of carcinogenicity. However, there are powerful interests with a lot at stake financially if power lines turn out to be carcinogenic.

So we can't take facts for granted. Neither can we uncritically equate them with "truth", "reality" and "existence". Indeed, we should assume that facts, because they are largely (although not wholly) socially constructed, will change and could be false. I think it is always necessary to ask how probable is a given "fact", how well supported is it by evidence, how well does it withstand competent criticism, how transparent are its promoters in explaining how their results were derived, and how sincere are they about engaging in dialogue with critics. Even then, I will keep my mind open for possible unexpected changes.

By Ziauddin Sardar