Some articles...
Jan. 20th, 2006 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
First things first, A Mark Morford article on tattoos.
One on web sites for babies....
Web Sites for the Brave New Electronic B@by
By SARAH KERSHAW
Dispatch from the future:
FROM: Carter Kohl, 34 inches, 30 pounds, 17 months.
TO: Friends and family.
MESSAGE: Feel free to contact me. Even though I cannot read just yet, you can still send me e-mail. My parents will read it to me and will help me respond to all your messages. In advance, thanks for getting in touch. I'll be reading and replying back to you before you know it!
YOUNG Carter may not know it, but along with a galloping number of tiny citizens, he is already wired. Despite his limited lexicon, featuring the words fish and light (pronounced "ish" and "ite"), Carter possesses his own e-mail address and an inbox filling up with messages from family and fans.
Luke Seeley, 22 months, has two Web sites of his own, including lukeseeley.com, a domain his father purchased soon after an ultrasound showed that his first child was a boy, four months before the baby was born. Given his more advanced age, Luke, who like Carter also has an e-mail address (luke@lukeseeley.com), possesses a slightly larger vocabulary, which includes computer, mouse and Google, said Gordon Seeley, his father. Luke "knows his animals," Mr. Seeley added, and understands that mouse has two different meanings: something small that moves things on a bright computer screen and something small that devours cheese and lives in terror of cats.
Carter and Luke are pioneers in the latest technobaby twist to hit the Web, as parents snap up Web sites and e-mail addresses in the names of the next generation, long before their children can read, eat solid food or, in some cases, have even left the womb.
"It's like owning a piece of real estate online for him," said Mr. Seeley, 34, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., and specializes in Internet sales for an advertising firm. "By the time he's a teenager and he's really into the Internet, who knows what's going to be left in terms of domains?"
The motivation, parents and other experts say, is akin to securing a good street address in a fast-developing city a decade early, so the children do not have to live on virtual Main Street, stuck when they eventually develop the motor skills to log on, with an obscure domain name like lukeseely.ce, or a pedestrian e-mail address like lukeseeley@hotmail.
With many free e-mail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo, the user typically has to sign on regularly to keep the accounts active. And, really, who has time when you are teething?
"There is a little bit of squatting, for lack of a better term, in trying to gather up some of these better domain names," said Kevin Kohl, Carter's father, who lives in Pennsylvania, holds a master's degree in information science and built the family Web site.
Mr. Kohl said he is considering buying Carter his own domain, instead of just the e-mail address he now has on the family site, which he did not want published to shield his family's privacy. But he has decided to wait at least, he said, until Carter "was old enough to start using the computer and understand what the Internet was."
It is impossible to say exactly how many preliterate children possess their own e-mail accounts and Web sites, but companies that sell domain names and e-mail accounts say the trend is increasingly common. It is the latest expression of baby obsession in cyberspace, following the explosion over the last few years of Web logs documenting a child's every milestone and similar family Web sites filled with photographs.
"Any life in transition, in a positive transition, that seems to be when people make the Internet their own," said Marci Hansen, the marketing director for Dotster, which owns three services that sell Internet domains. One, Namezero.com, one of the country's largest domain providers, markets heavily to parents, newlyweds, college students and retirees in the belief that people reaching a major milestone - marriage, graduation, retirement - will want to document it online.
Ms. Hansen said her company was looking into how e-mail addresses, domain names and help in building web sites for babies could become gifts for expectant parents.
Dotser's average prices, which reflect those of other domain providers, are $15 annually for a domain and $10 for an e-mail account at the domain, with additional costs for extra e-mail addresses
Needless to say, this has all been met with some annoyance, especially among the weary childless, who can easily overdose on baby gaga.
"Why would anyone do that?" asked Donna M. Stewart, an aspiring artist who lives in Seattle and heard about the baby e-mail fad from a friend. "That's like getting e-mail for your dog."
Ms. Stewart, who has a dog, added that while it seemed understandable to post photographs on a Web site, "nobody's going to actually e-mail the baby." She added, "I just thought that's absurd."
(She confessed, though, that she sometimes sends e-mail messages to friends from the point of view of her dog, a mixed-breed shepherd, whom she declined to name.)
But for those looking for e-mail addresses or Web sites in their children's names, it's a dog-eat-dog domain world, and the sites are selling rapidly.
A quick search on www.namezero.com, on whose home page you can type in a name to see what Web sites are still available, shows that unless you have an unusual name, many of the coveted dot-com, dot-net and dot-org sites are spoken for.
Beyond these familiar extensions, there are a fast-growing number of new ones, including dot-es, which stands for españa, or Spain, and is being marketed to Hispanics and does not require Spanish citizenship. There are many other country extensions, like dot-uk, for residents of Britain, and dot-ca, for Canadians. (Ms. Hansen noted that her kitchen contractor, a United States citizen, turned out to have a dot-to e-mail address, which stands for the country of Tonga and is what is known as an "open extension.")
On a list of 46 possible Web sites the only Smith domain still available is Smith.org.cn, which is only open to Chinese citizens (dot-cn stands for China). For Browne there are a few more options, including Browne.la, which stands for Laos but is open to Americans and popular with residents of Los Angeles and Louisiana, and Browne.md, which has been marketed heavily to doctors but is also popular with Maryland residents.
Nima Kelly, a vice president of one of the country's largest domain providers, GoDaddy.com, bought four domains for her 11-year-old daughter two years ago.
"People are moving away from free accounts, their name at Hotmail, or John Doe at Aol.com," she said. "What's happening is that if you don't have a personalized e-mail address, it's seen as having a lack of credibility."
Ms. Kelly, who lives in Phoenix, went a step further than most parents for her daughter, Mary Margaret. She bought marymargaretkelly.com of course ("I was nervous that it would be taken," she said) but also purchased two "devious" domains in her daughter's name.
It was an attempt, she said, to head off evil high school forces, future jilted ex-boyfriends or other potential enemies, who might buy profane domains devoted to skewering poor Mary Margaret. The domain names are too devious to print.
With less cynicism many parents say their motive in all this is driven by something other than a quest for URL cool: In the Internet Age, written diaries with locks of baby hair pasted on the pages and meticulously documented first words are fast being replaced by online baby journals and blogs; photo albums by digital pictures posted on Web sites, which can be viewed moments after birth; and congratulation cards and letters to new parents by e-mail messages.
So if a baby has an e-mail address, and people do write to him, he has a virtual time capsule waiting, messages from future friends and family, bulletins from the past written long before he even knew he was reachable online.
"Hello, little Carter," an old friend of his mother's e-mailed the baby soon after he was born. "I have been friends with your mommy for a long, long time. She is so terrific! I remember back when we used to play on the playground in fifth grade with Jessica and Maria and Tracey and Jordan ... all us girls had on one T-shirt over the other in bright fluorescent colors because it was cool. We even went to New York City twice!!"
One on corn and ethanol prices
Corn Farmers Smile as Ethanol Prices Rise, but Experts on Food Supplies Worry
By MATTHEW L. WALD
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa, Jan. 11 - Early every winter here, farmers make their best guesses about how much food the world will demand in the coming year, and then decide how many acres of corn to plant, and how many of soybeans.
But this year is different. Now it is not just the demand for food that is driving the decision, it is also the demand for ethanol, the fuel that is made from corn.
Some states are requiring that ethanol be blended in small amounts with gasoline to comply with anti-pollution laws. High oil prices are dragging corn prices up with them, as the value of ethanol is pushed up by the value of the fuel it replaces.
"We're leaning more toward corn," said Garold Den Herder, a farmer who cultivates 2,400 acres in a combination of corn and soybeans and is on the board of directors of the Siouxland Energy and Livestock Cooperative, which opened an ethanol plant here in late 2001. Last year a bushel was selling for about $2 here, but near the plant it was about 10 cents higher.
Farmers expect it to go higher soon if oil prices stay high. Ethanol was up to $1.75 a gallon, last year, from just over $1 the year before.
The rising corn prices may be good news for farmers, but they are worrying some food planners.
"We're putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm," said Lester R. Brown, an agriculture expert in Washington, D.C., and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Farms cannot feed all the world's people and its motor vehicles as well, Mr. Brown said, and the result is that more people will go hungry.
Others say that the price of goods that have corn as an ingredient, including foods like potato chips or Danish pastries, will rise.
But Robert C. Brown, a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University and a specialist in agricultural engineering, said the use of corn for nonfood purposes sounded harsher than it was. "The impression is that we're taking food out of the mouths of babes," Professor Brown said. In fact, corn grown in Iowa is used mostly to feed farm animals or make corn syrup for processed foods.
And Bernie Punt, the general manager of the Siouxland plant, said, "It's not as big a loss as what it seems like," pointing out that the corn remnants that come out of the other end of the plant were used for animal feed.
A global shift to farm-based fuel could reduce the need for oil and slow climate change. But Lester Brown is not alone in worrying about the effect on world hunger. For 20 years, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington, has maintained a computer model to predict food supplies, based on population changes, farm policies and other factors.
Until now, the institute's analysis had included the price of oil and natural gas only as a factor in production costs, including the price of making fertilizer, running a tractor or hauling food to markets. But last year, after Joachim von Braun, the director of the institute, went to Brazil and India, both of which make vehicle fuel from plants, he told his economists to change the model, taking into account the demand for energy from farm products.
Even a small shift could have big effects, Mr. von Braun said, because "the mouth of your car is a monster compared to your family's stomach needs."
"I do not just expect somewhat higher food prices, but new instability as well," he said in an interview. "In the future, instability of energy prices will be translated into instability in food prices."
Gustavo Best, the energy coordinator at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said growing crops for energy could provide new opportunities for small farmers around the world and finance the development of roads and other valuable infrastructure in poor rural areas.
But, Mr. Best added, "definitely there is a danger that the competition can hit food security and food availability."
Some experts scoff at the idea of corn shortages, but others say it is possible. Wendy K. Wintersteen, the dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University, said that possibly as early as this summer, "we will have areas of the state we would call corn deficient," because there will not be enough for livestock feed - the biggest use of corn here - and ethanol plants.
"It's a hard thing to imagine in Iowa," Ms. Wintersteen said. Eventually, experts say, American corn exports could fall.
Nationwide, the use of corn for energy could result in farmers' planting more of it and less wheat and cotton, said Keith J. Collins, chief economist of the Department of Agriculture. But the United States is paying farmers not to grow crops on 35 million acres, to prop up the value of corn, he said, and much of that land could come back into production.
A change is under way that experts say will tightly tie the price of crops to the price of oil: ethanol plants are multiplying.
Iowa has 19 ethanol plants now and will have 27 by the end of the year, said Mr. Punt, a former president of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. The Siouxland Energy and Livestock Cooperative showed a $6 million profit for 2005, Mr. Den Herder said, driven in part by the price of ethanol.
Many farmers here in the corn belt say they have the ability to grow the material for vast amounts of fuel. Another biofuel is a diesel substitute made from soybeans, which still leaves about 80 percent of the bean for cattle feed, advocates say.
Joe Jobe, executive director of the National Biodiesel Board, a trade group, predicted that more demand for soy oil as a diesel substitute would force production of meal, pushing down its price and thus making cattle feed cheaper.
"I think there's a historical shift under way, not to grow more crops for energy and less for food, but to grow more for both," Mr. Jobe said.
Nick Young, the president of an agriculture consulting firm, Promar, in Alexandria, Va., pointed out that corn products have been used for nonfood purposes for years, including to make fluids used to help drill oil wells. Mr. Young said it was an exaggeration to say that nonfood use of crops will make the world's poor go hungry, but he added that the use of vegetable oil as a substitute for diesel fuel had already driven up the price of canola oil.
"These markets are linked," Mr. Young said. "Inevitably, there's going to be some interaction on food prices."
On Bloomberg's accent.
Mayor's Accent Deserts Boston for New York
By SAM ROBERTS
You can take the boy out of Boston, Michael R. Bloomberg affirmed 40 years ago when he emigrated to New York. After only four years as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has demonstrated that you can also take Boston out of the boy.
The mayor, it appears, has been shedding his Boston accent while running New York City. Linguists enlisted by The New York Times to compare recordings of the mayor's first and second inaugural addresses detected several telltale signs of the change, suggesting that four years spent commanding the corridors of City Hall and navigating the five boroughs had taken its toll on Mr. Bloomberg's once-pronounced New England accent.
"The 2002 speech has a measurably higher incidence of words containing the 'signature sounds' of Boston," said Paul Meier, a University of Kansas professor and director of the International Dialects of English Archive there. William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of "The Atlas of North American English," said: "He's been interacting more closely with New Yorkers and has unconsciously shifted. He is not becoming a linguistic carpetbagger, but he's becoming a little bit more a New Yorker as time goes on."
The linguists said Mr. Bloomberg's pronunciation of several words - "father," "last," "because" and "our," for example - gave him away. He has been dropping his "r's" less than he once did, Professor Labov added. Dr. Labov said that while the mayor is "very careful to pronounce his 'r' all the time in New York," - in other words, no "Noo Yawk" - his "aw" instead of "ah" in words like "because" or "lost" was the most obvious cue to his distinctly New York shift.
A Bostonian's fathah might have lahst an election becahse of how he said something. In New York, his father would have lawst becawse of what he said.
It might be political calculation or better elocution in formal speech, or it could just reflect the linguistic rigors of his job. During his re-election campaign, Mr. Bloomberg soaked up the city's diverse communities by hopscotching across its ethnic neighborhoods, and he even studied Spanish. He recorded campaign commercials in two Chinese dialects, Russian, Urdu and Korean, among other languages.
Barry Popik, an administrative law judge with the city's Parking Violations Bureau and a member of the American Dialect Society, said: "It appears to me that Bloomberg's been studying two new languages - Spanish and New York Jewish. He's not sounding like Fran Drescher's 'The Nanny' yet, but it appears to me that he's picked some of that up."
Mr. Bloomberg, who hails from Medford, Mass., just six miles outside Boston, is hardly the first New York mayor to have been born or raised elsewhere (among others, Abraham D. Beame was born in London, David N. Dinkins in Trenton). But when Mr. Bloomberg first ran in 2001, he was a political novice, and his name, much less his voice, was barely known to the public.
Even after four decades of living and working in New York, he spoke with an accent that fairly or not distinguished him not merely as an out-of-towner, but, worse still, as having the nasal twang of what the writer Ford Madox Ford dubbed a "brick-throated bullfrog," which identified him as a Red Sox fan.
New Yorkers, especially statewide, tend to be tolerant of candidates who come from someplace else, and Mr. Bloomberg, perhaps with the public's ear already accustomed to the twang of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, a Boston import, in the 1990's, managed to overcome his potential handicap (as did Robert F. Kennedy, another Massachusetts transplant, when he ran for the United States Senate from New York in 1964). This year, William F. Weld, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1990 by defeating a native Texan, is mulling a race for governor of New York.
New Yorkers and Bostonians nevertheless have several linguistic traits in common, and by 2002 Mr. Bloomberg had already shed some of his accent anyway. But all of the half-dozen linguists consulted by The Times agreed after listening to the recordings of the two inaugural addresses that the mayor sounded less like a Bostonian in 2006 than in 2002.
"He is sounding quantitatively more like a New Yorker," said George Jochnowitz, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the College of Staten Island.
Joan Houston (pronounced HOWston, the New York way) Hall, a University of Wisconsin professor who is president of the American Dialect Society and editor of the "Dictionary of American Regional English," agreed.
"His pronunciation of 'last,' which I heard three times in each speech, was very much more Boston-like in 2002 than in 2006," she said.
In the earlier speech, she said in an e-mail message, "in unstressed syllables, as in 'together,' 'governor,' 'senator,' 'leaders,' 'transportation' (in the second syllable), 'energy,' and 'father,'" the 'r' was vocalized as an "ah," (as in "togethah" or "fathah").
In 2006, she said, Mr. Bloomberg used a lot more of what linguists call a post-vocalic 'r', the sound directly after a vowel in unstressed syllables (as in Harvard rather than Hahvaahd). She said he also emphasized his r's in words like 'our city' (which occurred very frequently, along with 'our schools,' 'our efforts,' 'our country'), Ms. Hall said, "which I suspect resulted from both conscious articulation and conscious political intent."
William A. Kretzschmar Jr., a humanities professor at the University of Georgia, said that in 2002 Mr. Bloomberg very often left out the "r" in unstressed syllables in words like "legislature" and frequently in stressed syllables in words like like "firefighters."
"For some time this loss of r's has been relatively stigmatized among educated speakers in New York, especially by younger speakers, and that is less true of educated speakers in Boston," Professor Kretzschmar said, adding that Mr. Bloomberg deleted his r's less in 2006.
"Mayor Bloomberg may now be a little less Boston and a little more New York in his 'lang-widge' " (his interesting pronunciation of 'language' - not a Boston feature)," Professor Kretzschmar said. "This would be most noticeable to local New Yorkers who are very sensitive to every nuance and inflection. And of course it is in the mayor's interest to sound more like his constituency."
For his part, the mayor was silent about his change in inflections. But Stu Loeser, the mayor's press secretary, said that any change in accent was because of his immersion in the city, not the result of cold political calculation or a vocal coach. "Four years ago the mayor was new to politics and new to public speaking, and since then he's had a lot of practice," Mr. Loeser said.
Professor Kretzschmar said: "Sounding more like your neighbors is actually a very natural thing to do, not some arch political act. It might be best to consider that Mayor Bloomberg is sounding a bit more like his New York neighbors and constituents as, over the past four years, he has paid close attention to what they say."
On the death knells of the Tappen Zee
A Bridge That Has Nowhere Left to Go
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
The Tappan Zee Bridge, the most critical transportation link across the Hudson River north of New York City, is not even half as old as the Brooklyn Bridge, but its warranty has already expired.
Started on the cheap during the Korean War, the Tappan Zee was deliberately built to last just 50 years. It passed that milestone last month, just days after transportation planners began gathering public advice about how to fix or replace it.
But the decaying, overburdened span's anniversary was more bitter than sweet. Little love has been lost between the Tappan Zee and the tens of thousands of commuters who depend on it. They complain about the poor condition of its roadway and the backups caused by every breakdown and flat tire.
Even before it was built, the bridge's own designers said it would be one of the "ugliest" in the region. Half a century later, the Tappan Zee has not aged gracefully. There are cracks in its concrete columns, its superstructure is rusting away and its deck is nearly worn through.
The New York State Thruway Authority, which owns the 3.1-mile-long bridge carrying the Thruway over the Hudson, has said that the deck, some structural steel, the concrete walkway and electrical systems have "deteriorated significantly." The authority plans to spend more than $100 million next year just to patch the bridge's holes and replace some of its corroded steel, a process sure to make travel even slower for commuters.
Catching daily glimpses of the long cracks in the bridge's superstructure frightens Brett Ruskin, who drives from his home in Monsey across the Tappan Zee to Tarrytown, where he catches a Metro-North train to Grand Central Terminal. "My biggest concern is not so much the traffic, because the big problem with the Tappan Zee Bridge is it's falling apart," Mr. Ruskin said. "Every morning I go out there and I pray. I say, 'Please God, don't let the bridge come down today. Let me get across it first.' "
After years of dawdling while the bridge crumbled, state officials say they are rushing to complete a review of the most feasible solutions to the problem of the Tappan Zee. But a decision is still two years off and a new bridge would require eight additional years and as much as $14.5 billion to build, they say.
To help defray the cost, Gov. George E. Pataki intends to renew his call for giving the private sector a role in the project when he presents his budget tomorrow, people who have been briefed on his plans said. Selling the bridge, in whole or in part, to one or more companies would require legislative changes that were rejected in Albany last year.
For many elected officials and transportation planners, the Tappan Zee, which carries about 140,000 vehicles per day, cannot be replaced soon enough. It was built between Tarrytown, in Westchester County, and Nyack, in Rockland County, at what is nearly the widest part of the Hudson River, in the 1950's, when Rockland was still largely rural and just beginning to attract New York City commuters.
The bridge, which cost just $81 million - the equivalent of about $550 million today - was built using a naval construction technique that incorporated a set of hollow concrete caissons to support the main span.
Unlike other bridges in the region - The Brooklyn Bridge is 122 years old, and the George Washington Bridge will turn 75 this year - the Tappan Zee was not built to last, because of wartime pressures, according to Ramesh Mehta, the divisional director of the Thruway Authority in charge of the southern Hudson Valley.
"The fact of the matter is that the bridge is past its usable life and no matter what repairs are done it must ultimately be replaced," said C. Scott Vanderhoef, the Rockland County executive. "It's reached its age limit and it's reached its capacity. We're just pouring money into a bridge that ultimately will not be there."
Mr. Vanderhoef's counterpart at the other end of the span, Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, blames the bridge's poor condition on the benign neglect of "screwed-up government." State officials consistently refused to level with the public about how much money was required to maintain critical infrastructure, like the Tappan Zee, he said.
"First of all, it wasn't built properly," Mr. Spano said. "Second of all, it wasn't maintained."
Governor Pataki first mentioned the possibility of replacing the bridge in 1999, but by early last year, scant progress had been made.
When the Thruway Authority and the two other agencies that had been charged with proposing solutions, the Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro-North Railroad, fell a year behind schedule last summer, Mr. Spano and Mr. Vanderhoef created a task force to spur the state into action.
"We thought they were dragging their heels," Mr. Spano said.
The agencies had hit an impasse on the question of whether a tunnel that could carry commuter trains should receive serious consideration as an alternative to a new bridge, transportation planners and officials said.
"In my experience, it's always good to put some person or entity in charge that can be held accountable," Mr. Vanderhoef said. By the fall, Mr. Pataki "did the right thing and said, 'Enough,' " he said, referring to Mr. Pataki's decision to hand control of the review process to the Transportation Department.
In late September, the three agencies announced that they had whittled the original list of about 15 alternatives down to six. Two of them involve keeping the old bridge and repairing it, either a little or a lot. A complete rehabilitation of the Tappan Zee would cost at least $2 billion, the planners estimated.
The four remaining options call for a new bridge, which would be built alongside the old one, just north of the existing span. Each involves a different configuration of mass transit - either commuter trains, light rail or express buses - sandwiched between the traffic lanes. The estimates for a new bridge range from $9 billion to $14.5 billion.
The planners ruled out a tunnel because it would cost considerably more, would have more harmful effects on the ecology of the river and would disrupt traffic patterns in Rockland County, they said. But Michael Anderson, the Transportation Department official who was installed as the team leader for the review, said no decisions have been made about what type of bridge would replace the Tappan Zee.
At a presentation last month in Nyack, Mr. Anderson said the planners expected to choose one of the alternatives by the end of next year. If a new bridge is built, he said, it would probably be completed in 2015. In the meantime, he assured the audience that "the roadway is safe and will be safe for the foreseeable future."
So far, not a dollar of the design and construction costs has been pledged by the federal government or by any state or local agencies. The bridge will vie for funding with a long list of major projects that would enhance the region's transportation network, not provide a transplant for one of its vital organs.
The competitors, each of which is expected to cost more than $5 billion, include the Second Avenue subway, connecting the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal and a proposed second passenger-train tunnel between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan.
Already, the Tappan Zee planners are assuming that the tunnel to Midtown, a pet project of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Jon S. Corzine, the state's incoming governor, will be built. Mr. Anderson said the Tappan Zee project would be "in competition for a limited amount of funds available for the next 25 years." To improve its chances, he said, the planners would soon take the unusual step of conducting a study of potential sources of funding, instead of waiting until they have a specific plan for the bridge.
The federal government does not usually allocate money for projects before local officials have settled on a proposal and conducted full reviews of its economic and environmental impacts. But some elected officials have criticized Governor Pataki and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for not demonstrating a stronger commitment to replacing the Tappan Zee.
Ryan S. Karben, a Democratic assemblyman from Pearl River, in Rockland County, said he was disappointed that no money has been included in the latest capital budgets of the Transportation Department or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for replacing the bridge.
Mr. Karben, who is an ardent proponent of adding commuter train service from Rockland County to Manhattan, said he wrote to Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials asking them to "give us at least a symbolic commitment, a symbolic set-aside of funds to encourage this process." But his appeal failed, he said. "I find it strange to have a conversation about what the best way to replace the Tappan Zee is, independent of an available funding stream, because the funding stream inevitably constrains our planning," Mr. Karben said. "Without a realistic financial strategy, the planning is for naught."
To secure federal funding for mass transit, the planners need to prove that the project would be cost effective, said Jeffrey Zupan, senior transportation fellow at the Regional Plan Association. He said he has pressed Mr. Anderson to be more forthcoming about estimates of how many people would ride trains or buses across the bridge and how much extra it would cost to connect trains running over the bridge directly to Metro-North tracks in Westchester for a "one-seat ride" to Manhattan.
"What they need to do is to be very open in public about the situation and not string people along who see the holy grail, which is the one-seat ride," Mr. Zupan said.
The voice of Mr. Vanderhoef, the county executive, who was born in Orangetown and graduated from Tappan Zee High School, carries no trace of sentiment when he talks about the future of the old bridge that sparked a boom in Rockland. The county's population has more than tripled, to 290,000 residents, since 1950, and is projected to increase by more than 25 percent in the next 25 years.
"I don't think it's that ugly," Mr. Vanderhoef said of the Tappan Zee, adding that he did not care about the appearance of its replacement.
"The key is that it operate, that it handle the traffic," he said. "If that requires a lack of aesthetic approach, then so be it. I'm not suggesting that we build an ugly bridge, but if it requires that, then fine."
An editorial on the need for engineering skills in Mecca
Why Mecca's Pilgrims Need Engineering, Not Just Prayer
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
MINA, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15 - In the valley where the devil once roamed, this narrow stretch of holy land, nestled between mountains of basaltic rock, has long bedeviled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a duty for devout Muslims.
Here, they believe, the devil sought to tempt Abraham into disobeying God as he took his son to be slaughtered, only to be pelted with stones by the prophet. Each year, pilgrims pelt three columns at the site, known as Jamarat, to re-enact the moment in a symbolic rejection of temptation.
But the site, where an imposing two-story overpass was built to carry the waves of pilgrims, has also been the scene of catastrophes. In 1994, 270 were killed in a stampede here. In 2004, 250 were pinned to a wall and died. Last week 363 pilgrims were killed at the entrance to a ramp leading up to the columns, raising fresh calls for a solution to the notoriously dangerous section of the hajj.
Finally, on Sunday, the bulldozers of the Saudi Binladen Group, the engineering and construction company owned by the bin Laden family, rolled in to change all that. (The family, which has disowned Osama bin Laden, spells the company name and family name differently.)
The pedestrian platform will be demolished to make way for a new four-story structure from which pilgrims can carry out the ritual.
"One of the biggest problems was this bridge," said Osama al-Bar, director of the Haj Research Center at Umm al-Qura University, which oversees the safety of the hajj. "After 32 years and 1,500 lives, it's finally going down. I'd really like to know who thought this structure up."
When first built, the bridge was seen as a great leap forward in allowing more pilgrims to pass through Mecca.
By numbers alone, the weeklong pilgrimage is a remarkable spectacle of mass migration. This year, more than 1.5 million pilgrims flew in on more than 3,500 flights; they joined about a million others who had come in by land, and they spent up to $2 billion by some estimates. Those numbers will only increase as the population of the Muslim world rises.
Even the morgue where victims were taken after the Thursday incident reflects the scale of the event, with space for more than 920 bodies in the coolers and a cemetery out back for burying them. Every year, dozens of pilgrims die of natural causes, in car accidents and in other incidents.
Of course, the hajj is not the only event that attracts millions at a time, and other events like the Olympics, a pope's funeral and the New York Marathon are held without catastrophe. Yet what makes the pilgrimage to Mecca so different, Mr. Bar insists, is the logistics involved in moving all those people simultaneously, at set times, along stations spanning 10 miles. Ultimately, it is a study in peak capacity, not average use.
"There's an incident every two years now," said Mr. Bar, who did not hide his frustration after having reviewed hours of videotape from the incident. "When you get 300,000 people seeking to move all at once, accidents are bound to happen, and they are quickly magnified."
Saudi authorities put the blame for the stampede on a rush of unruly pilgrims who insisted on moving at noon, when the stoning ritual begins, rather than spreading their observances over the afternoon.
On Thursday Mr. Bar took a deep breath and stared into the monitors before him in the Mina control room. The room has special indicators connected to systems for measuring the numbers of pilgrims at different locations and to help with crowd control, and other equipment for managing the flow of people.
Thousands of pilgrims had begun gathering in the valley below, and lookouts and cameras stationed in key places watched for the earliest signs of trouble.
But shortly after noon, the crowd jerked forward. In a few minutes, one or two people had fallen on bags that were in front of them, and soon people began falling all along the entrance to the ramp, even as a wave behind them continued to press forward. Voices crackled over the radio, there was shouting and the crowd began to look like a stretched out coil, jerking back and forth as a stampede gained momentum.
An hour and a half later, when the scene was finally under control, bodies had piled in layers up to seven deep and included some of the security guards trying to control the crowd.
After each such incident, Mr. Bar and his team have engineered new solutions.
When fires raged through the tent city at Mina one year, they required fire-retardant canvas for all the tents and banned gas canisters. When hundreds of pilgrims were pinned to the wall at the circular openings where they stoned the columns, Mr. Bar's engineers turned the circles into ellipses, which helped people move through, and widened the pillars into walls, to increase their surface area and make them easier to hit, also helping the pilgrims pass more quickly.
The latest solution has been four years in the making, Mr. Bar said.
"You can never predict the problems of the hajj," he sighed. "At one point it was the flow of people, and we solved it. Then this problem came up. Our job is to keep plugging the holes."
Critics say, however, that Mr. Bar's solutions only compound the problems, focusing on the symptoms, not the actual causes. The most immediate problems entail management, not construction, they say.
"The hajj is a complete system, and must be approached as a system, a flow," said Sami M. Angawi, a prominent architect in Jidda who founded the Haj Research Center in the 1970's. "What they do is concentrate and do a project, and put their hopes on that project until something wrong happens. But all that happens is this project creates new issues."
The latest construction project, costing about $1.8 billion, will upset the flow in other parts of the pilgrimage, Mr. Angawi said.
One floor of the new structure is to be dedicated to absorbing the flow of pilgrims from each end of the valley. Once those pilgrims are done, they all move down together toward the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the next stop, where they will circle the black cube, the shrine called the Kaaba, in an even bigger wave than they do today, he added. The solution this year, in other words, may simply move the problem downstream.
"The three main variables in managing the hajj are density, space and time," he said. "So far all they have been dealing with is space."
At the morgue on Sunday, Imran Mulhaq, from Kerala, India, had come to identify his daughter, who had gone ahead of her father and was killed in the stampede. An elderly man with a gaunt face, he quietly expressed his outrage at the incident, blaming the authorities for mismanagement. But then, in a thoughtful moment, he stopped briefly.
"She is dead now," he said, "but at least she will be buried in this holy place."
One on web sites for babies....
Web Sites for the Brave New Electronic B@by
By SARAH KERSHAW
Dispatch from the future:
FROM: Carter Kohl, 34 inches, 30 pounds, 17 months.
TO: Friends and family.
MESSAGE: Feel free to contact me. Even though I cannot read just yet, you can still send me e-mail. My parents will read it to me and will help me respond to all your messages. In advance, thanks for getting in touch. I'll be reading and replying back to you before you know it!
YOUNG Carter may not know it, but along with a galloping number of tiny citizens, he is already wired. Despite his limited lexicon, featuring the words fish and light (pronounced "ish" and "ite"), Carter possesses his own e-mail address and an inbox filling up with messages from family and fans.
Luke Seeley, 22 months, has two Web sites of his own, including lukeseeley.com, a domain his father purchased soon after an ultrasound showed that his first child was a boy, four months before the baby was born. Given his more advanced age, Luke, who like Carter also has an e-mail address (luke@lukeseeley.com), possesses a slightly larger vocabulary, which includes computer, mouse and Google, said Gordon Seeley, his father. Luke "knows his animals," Mr. Seeley added, and understands that mouse has two different meanings: something small that moves things on a bright computer screen and something small that devours cheese and lives in terror of cats.
Carter and Luke are pioneers in the latest technobaby twist to hit the Web, as parents snap up Web sites and e-mail addresses in the names of the next generation, long before their children can read, eat solid food or, in some cases, have even left the womb.
"It's like owning a piece of real estate online for him," said Mr. Seeley, 34, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., and specializes in Internet sales for an advertising firm. "By the time he's a teenager and he's really into the Internet, who knows what's going to be left in terms of domains?"
The motivation, parents and other experts say, is akin to securing a good street address in a fast-developing city a decade early, so the children do not have to live on virtual Main Street, stuck when they eventually develop the motor skills to log on, with an obscure domain name like lukeseely.ce, or a pedestrian e-mail address like lukeseeley@hotmail.
With many free e-mail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo, the user typically has to sign on regularly to keep the accounts active. And, really, who has time when you are teething?
"There is a little bit of squatting, for lack of a better term, in trying to gather up some of these better domain names," said Kevin Kohl, Carter's father, who lives in Pennsylvania, holds a master's degree in information science and built the family Web site.
Mr. Kohl said he is considering buying Carter his own domain, instead of just the e-mail address he now has on the family site, which he did not want published to shield his family's privacy. But he has decided to wait at least, he said, until Carter "was old enough to start using the computer and understand what the Internet was."
It is impossible to say exactly how many preliterate children possess their own e-mail accounts and Web sites, but companies that sell domain names and e-mail accounts say the trend is increasingly common. It is the latest expression of baby obsession in cyberspace, following the explosion over the last few years of Web logs documenting a child's every milestone and similar family Web sites filled with photographs.
"Any life in transition, in a positive transition, that seems to be when people make the Internet their own," said Marci Hansen, the marketing director for Dotster, which owns three services that sell Internet domains. One, Namezero.com, one of the country's largest domain providers, markets heavily to parents, newlyweds, college students and retirees in the belief that people reaching a major milestone - marriage, graduation, retirement - will want to document it online.
Ms. Hansen said her company was looking into how e-mail addresses, domain names and help in building web sites for babies could become gifts for expectant parents.
Dotser's average prices, which reflect those of other domain providers, are $15 annually for a domain and $10 for an e-mail account at the domain, with additional costs for extra e-mail addresses
Needless to say, this has all been met with some annoyance, especially among the weary childless, who can easily overdose on baby gaga.
"Why would anyone do that?" asked Donna M. Stewart, an aspiring artist who lives in Seattle and heard about the baby e-mail fad from a friend. "That's like getting e-mail for your dog."
Ms. Stewart, who has a dog, added that while it seemed understandable to post photographs on a Web site, "nobody's going to actually e-mail the baby." She added, "I just thought that's absurd."
(She confessed, though, that she sometimes sends e-mail messages to friends from the point of view of her dog, a mixed-breed shepherd, whom she declined to name.)
But for those looking for e-mail addresses or Web sites in their children's names, it's a dog-eat-dog domain world, and the sites are selling rapidly.
A quick search on www.namezero.com, on whose home page you can type in a name to see what Web sites are still available, shows that unless you have an unusual name, many of the coveted dot-com, dot-net and dot-org sites are spoken for.
Beyond these familiar extensions, there are a fast-growing number of new ones, including dot-es, which stands for españa, or Spain, and is being marketed to Hispanics and does not require Spanish citizenship. There are many other country extensions, like dot-uk, for residents of Britain, and dot-ca, for Canadians. (Ms. Hansen noted that her kitchen contractor, a United States citizen, turned out to have a dot-to e-mail address, which stands for the country of Tonga and is what is known as an "open extension.")
On a list of 46 possible Web sites the only Smith domain still available is Smith.org.cn, which is only open to Chinese citizens (dot-cn stands for China). For Browne there are a few more options, including Browne.la, which stands for Laos but is open to Americans and popular with residents of Los Angeles and Louisiana, and Browne.md, which has been marketed heavily to doctors but is also popular with Maryland residents.
Nima Kelly, a vice president of one of the country's largest domain providers, GoDaddy.com, bought four domains for her 11-year-old daughter two years ago.
"People are moving away from free accounts, their name at Hotmail, or John Doe at Aol.com," she said. "What's happening is that if you don't have a personalized e-mail address, it's seen as having a lack of credibility."
Ms. Kelly, who lives in Phoenix, went a step further than most parents for her daughter, Mary Margaret. She bought marymargaretkelly.com of course ("I was nervous that it would be taken," she said) but also purchased two "devious" domains in her daughter's name.
It was an attempt, she said, to head off evil high school forces, future jilted ex-boyfriends or other potential enemies, who might buy profane domains devoted to skewering poor Mary Margaret. The domain names are too devious to print.
With less cynicism many parents say their motive in all this is driven by something other than a quest for URL cool: In the Internet Age, written diaries with locks of baby hair pasted on the pages and meticulously documented first words are fast being replaced by online baby journals and blogs; photo albums by digital pictures posted on Web sites, which can be viewed moments after birth; and congratulation cards and letters to new parents by e-mail messages.
So if a baby has an e-mail address, and people do write to him, he has a virtual time capsule waiting, messages from future friends and family, bulletins from the past written long before he even knew he was reachable online.
"Hello, little Carter," an old friend of his mother's e-mailed the baby soon after he was born. "I have been friends with your mommy for a long, long time. She is so terrific! I remember back when we used to play on the playground in fifth grade with Jessica and Maria and Tracey and Jordan ... all us girls had on one T-shirt over the other in bright fluorescent colors because it was cool. We even went to New York City twice!!"
One on corn and ethanol prices
Corn Farmers Smile as Ethanol Prices Rise, but Experts on Food Supplies Worry
By MATTHEW L. WALD
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa, Jan. 11 - Early every winter here, farmers make their best guesses about how much food the world will demand in the coming year, and then decide how many acres of corn to plant, and how many of soybeans.
But this year is different. Now it is not just the demand for food that is driving the decision, it is also the demand for ethanol, the fuel that is made from corn.
Some states are requiring that ethanol be blended in small amounts with gasoline to comply with anti-pollution laws. High oil prices are dragging corn prices up with them, as the value of ethanol is pushed up by the value of the fuel it replaces.
"We're leaning more toward corn," said Garold Den Herder, a farmer who cultivates 2,400 acres in a combination of corn and soybeans and is on the board of directors of the Siouxland Energy and Livestock Cooperative, which opened an ethanol plant here in late 2001. Last year a bushel was selling for about $2 here, but near the plant it was about 10 cents higher.
Farmers expect it to go higher soon if oil prices stay high. Ethanol was up to $1.75 a gallon, last year, from just over $1 the year before.
The rising corn prices may be good news for farmers, but they are worrying some food planners.
"We're putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm," said Lester R. Brown, an agriculture expert in Washington, D.C., and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Farms cannot feed all the world's people and its motor vehicles as well, Mr. Brown said, and the result is that more people will go hungry.
Others say that the price of goods that have corn as an ingredient, including foods like potato chips or Danish pastries, will rise.
But Robert C. Brown, a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University and a specialist in agricultural engineering, said the use of corn for nonfood purposes sounded harsher than it was. "The impression is that we're taking food out of the mouths of babes," Professor Brown said. In fact, corn grown in Iowa is used mostly to feed farm animals or make corn syrup for processed foods.
And Bernie Punt, the general manager of the Siouxland plant, said, "It's not as big a loss as what it seems like," pointing out that the corn remnants that come out of the other end of the plant were used for animal feed.
A global shift to farm-based fuel could reduce the need for oil and slow climate change. But Lester Brown is not alone in worrying about the effect on world hunger. For 20 years, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington, has maintained a computer model to predict food supplies, based on population changes, farm policies and other factors.
Until now, the institute's analysis had included the price of oil and natural gas only as a factor in production costs, including the price of making fertilizer, running a tractor or hauling food to markets. But last year, after Joachim von Braun, the director of the institute, went to Brazil and India, both of which make vehicle fuel from plants, he told his economists to change the model, taking into account the demand for energy from farm products.
Even a small shift could have big effects, Mr. von Braun said, because "the mouth of your car is a monster compared to your family's stomach needs."
"I do not just expect somewhat higher food prices, but new instability as well," he said in an interview. "In the future, instability of energy prices will be translated into instability in food prices."
Gustavo Best, the energy coordinator at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said growing crops for energy could provide new opportunities for small farmers around the world and finance the development of roads and other valuable infrastructure in poor rural areas.
But, Mr. Best added, "definitely there is a danger that the competition can hit food security and food availability."
Some experts scoff at the idea of corn shortages, but others say it is possible. Wendy K. Wintersteen, the dean of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University, said that possibly as early as this summer, "we will have areas of the state we would call corn deficient," because there will not be enough for livestock feed - the biggest use of corn here - and ethanol plants.
"It's a hard thing to imagine in Iowa," Ms. Wintersteen said. Eventually, experts say, American corn exports could fall.
Nationwide, the use of corn for energy could result in farmers' planting more of it and less wheat and cotton, said Keith J. Collins, chief economist of the Department of Agriculture. But the United States is paying farmers not to grow crops on 35 million acres, to prop up the value of corn, he said, and much of that land could come back into production.
A change is under way that experts say will tightly tie the price of crops to the price of oil: ethanol plants are multiplying.
Iowa has 19 ethanol plants now and will have 27 by the end of the year, said Mr. Punt, a former president of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. The Siouxland Energy and Livestock Cooperative showed a $6 million profit for 2005, Mr. Den Herder said, driven in part by the price of ethanol.
Many farmers here in the corn belt say they have the ability to grow the material for vast amounts of fuel. Another biofuel is a diesel substitute made from soybeans, which still leaves about 80 percent of the bean for cattle feed, advocates say.
Joe Jobe, executive director of the National Biodiesel Board, a trade group, predicted that more demand for soy oil as a diesel substitute would force production of meal, pushing down its price and thus making cattle feed cheaper.
"I think there's a historical shift under way, not to grow more crops for energy and less for food, but to grow more for both," Mr. Jobe said.
Nick Young, the president of an agriculture consulting firm, Promar, in Alexandria, Va., pointed out that corn products have been used for nonfood purposes for years, including to make fluids used to help drill oil wells. Mr. Young said it was an exaggeration to say that nonfood use of crops will make the world's poor go hungry, but he added that the use of vegetable oil as a substitute for diesel fuel had already driven up the price of canola oil.
"These markets are linked," Mr. Young said. "Inevitably, there's going to be some interaction on food prices."
On Bloomberg's accent.
Mayor's Accent Deserts Boston for New York
By SAM ROBERTS
You can take the boy out of Boston, Michael R. Bloomberg affirmed 40 years ago when he emigrated to New York. After only four years as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has demonstrated that you can also take Boston out of the boy.
The mayor, it appears, has been shedding his Boston accent while running New York City. Linguists enlisted by The New York Times to compare recordings of the mayor's first and second inaugural addresses detected several telltale signs of the change, suggesting that four years spent commanding the corridors of City Hall and navigating the five boroughs had taken its toll on Mr. Bloomberg's once-pronounced New England accent.
"The 2002 speech has a measurably higher incidence of words containing the 'signature sounds' of Boston," said Paul Meier, a University of Kansas professor and director of the International Dialects of English Archive there. William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of "The Atlas of North American English," said: "He's been interacting more closely with New Yorkers and has unconsciously shifted. He is not becoming a linguistic carpetbagger, but he's becoming a little bit more a New Yorker as time goes on."
The linguists said Mr. Bloomberg's pronunciation of several words - "father," "last," "because" and "our," for example - gave him away. He has been dropping his "r's" less than he once did, Professor Labov added. Dr. Labov said that while the mayor is "very careful to pronounce his 'r' all the time in New York," - in other words, no "Noo Yawk" - his "aw" instead of "ah" in words like "because" or "lost" was the most obvious cue to his distinctly New York shift.
A Bostonian's fathah might have lahst an election becahse of how he said something. In New York, his father would have lawst becawse of what he said.
It might be political calculation or better elocution in formal speech, or it could just reflect the linguistic rigors of his job. During his re-election campaign, Mr. Bloomberg soaked up the city's diverse communities by hopscotching across its ethnic neighborhoods, and he even studied Spanish. He recorded campaign commercials in two Chinese dialects, Russian, Urdu and Korean, among other languages.
Barry Popik, an administrative law judge with the city's Parking Violations Bureau and a member of the American Dialect Society, said: "It appears to me that Bloomberg's been studying two new languages - Spanish and New York Jewish. He's not sounding like Fran Drescher's 'The Nanny' yet, but it appears to me that he's picked some of that up."
Mr. Bloomberg, who hails from Medford, Mass., just six miles outside Boston, is hardly the first New York mayor to have been born or raised elsewhere (among others, Abraham D. Beame was born in London, David N. Dinkins in Trenton). But when Mr. Bloomberg first ran in 2001, he was a political novice, and his name, much less his voice, was barely known to the public.
Even after four decades of living and working in New York, he spoke with an accent that fairly or not distinguished him not merely as an out-of-towner, but, worse still, as having the nasal twang of what the writer Ford Madox Ford dubbed a "brick-throated bullfrog," which identified him as a Red Sox fan.
New Yorkers, especially statewide, tend to be tolerant of candidates who come from someplace else, and Mr. Bloomberg, perhaps with the public's ear already accustomed to the twang of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, a Boston import, in the 1990's, managed to overcome his potential handicap (as did Robert F. Kennedy, another Massachusetts transplant, when he ran for the United States Senate from New York in 1964). This year, William F. Weld, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1990 by defeating a native Texan, is mulling a race for governor of New York.
New Yorkers and Bostonians nevertheless have several linguistic traits in common, and by 2002 Mr. Bloomberg had already shed some of his accent anyway. But all of the half-dozen linguists consulted by The Times agreed after listening to the recordings of the two inaugural addresses that the mayor sounded less like a Bostonian in 2006 than in 2002.
"He is sounding quantitatively more like a New Yorker," said George Jochnowitz, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the College of Staten Island.
Joan Houston (pronounced HOWston, the New York way) Hall, a University of Wisconsin professor who is president of the American Dialect Society and editor of the "Dictionary of American Regional English," agreed.
"His pronunciation of 'last,' which I heard three times in each speech, was very much more Boston-like in 2002 than in 2006," she said.
In the earlier speech, she said in an e-mail message, "in unstressed syllables, as in 'together,' 'governor,' 'senator,' 'leaders,' 'transportation' (in the second syllable), 'energy,' and 'father,'" the 'r' was vocalized as an "ah," (as in "togethah" or "fathah").
In 2006, she said, Mr. Bloomberg used a lot more of what linguists call a post-vocalic 'r', the sound directly after a vowel in unstressed syllables (as in Harvard rather than Hahvaahd). She said he also emphasized his r's in words like 'our city' (which occurred very frequently, along with 'our schools,' 'our efforts,' 'our country'), Ms. Hall said, "which I suspect resulted from both conscious articulation and conscious political intent."
William A. Kretzschmar Jr., a humanities professor at the University of Georgia, said that in 2002 Mr. Bloomberg very often left out the "r" in unstressed syllables in words like "legislature" and frequently in stressed syllables in words like like "firefighters."
"For some time this loss of r's has been relatively stigmatized among educated speakers in New York, especially by younger speakers, and that is less true of educated speakers in Boston," Professor Kretzschmar said, adding that Mr. Bloomberg deleted his r's less in 2006.
"Mayor Bloomberg may now be a little less Boston and a little more New York in his 'lang-widge' " (his interesting pronunciation of 'language' - not a Boston feature)," Professor Kretzschmar said. "This would be most noticeable to local New Yorkers who are very sensitive to every nuance and inflection. And of course it is in the mayor's interest to sound more like his constituency."
For his part, the mayor was silent about his change in inflections. But Stu Loeser, the mayor's press secretary, said that any change in accent was because of his immersion in the city, not the result of cold political calculation or a vocal coach. "Four years ago the mayor was new to politics and new to public speaking, and since then he's had a lot of practice," Mr. Loeser said.
Professor Kretzschmar said: "Sounding more like your neighbors is actually a very natural thing to do, not some arch political act. It might be best to consider that Mayor Bloomberg is sounding a bit more like his New York neighbors and constituents as, over the past four years, he has paid close attention to what they say."
On the death knells of the Tappen Zee
A Bridge That Has Nowhere Left to Go
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
The Tappan Zee Bridge, the most critical transportation link across the Hudson River north of New York City, is not even half as old as the Brooklyn Bridge, but its warranty has already expired.
Started on the cheap during the Korean War, the Tappan Zee was deliberately built to last just 50 years. It passed that milestone last month, just days after transportation planners began gathering public advice about how to fix or replace it.
But the decaying, overburdened span's anniversary was more bitter than sweet. Little love has been lost between the Tappan Zee and the tens of thousands of commuters who depend on it. They complain about the poor condition of its roadway and the backups caused by every breakdown and flat tire.
Even before it was built, the bridge's own designers said it would be one of the "ugliest" in the region. Half a century later, the Tappan Zee has not aged gracefully. There are cracks in its concrete columns, its superstructure is rusting away and its deck is nearly worn through.
The New York State Thruway Authority, which owns the 3.1-mile-long bridge carrying the Thruway over the Hudson, has said that the deck, some structural steel, the concrete walkway and electrical systems have "deteriorated significantly." The authority plans to spend more than $100 million next year just to patch the bridge's holes and replace some of its corroded steel, a process sure to make travel even slower for commuters.
Catching daily glimpses of the long cracks in the bridge's superstructure frightens Brett Ruskin, who drives from his home in Monsey across the Tappan Zee to Tarrytown, where he catches a Metro-North train to Grand Central Terminal. "My biggest concern is not so much the traffic, because the big problem with the Tappan Zee Bridge is it's falling apart," Mr. Ruskin said. "Every morning I go out there and I pray. I say, 'Please God, don't let the bridge come down today. Let me get across it first.' "
After years of dawdling while the bridge crumbled, state officials say they are rushing to complete a review of the most feasible solutions to the problem of the Tappan Zee. But a decision is still two years off and a new bridge would require eight additional years and as much as $14.5 billion to build, they say.
To help defray the cost, Gov. George E. Pataki intends to renew his call for giving the private sector a role in the project when he presents his budget tomorrow, people who have been briefed on his plans said. Selling the bridge, in whole or in part, to one or more companies would require legislative changes that were rejected in Albany last year.
For many elected officials and transportation planners, the Tappan Zee, which carries about 140,000 vehicles per day, cannot be replaced soon enough. It was built between Tarrytown, in Westchester County, and Nyack, in Rockland County, at what is nearly the widest part of the Hudson River, in the 1950's, when Rockland was still largely rural and just beginning to attract New York City commuters.
The bridge, which cost just $81 million - the equivalent of about $550 million today - was built using a naval construction technique that incorporated a set of hollow concrete caissons to support the main span.
Unlike other bridges in the region - The Brooklyn Bridge is 122 years old, and the George Washington Bridge will turn 75 this year - the Tappan Zee was not built to last, because of wartime pressures, according to Ramesh Mehta, the divisional director of the Thruway Authority in charge of the southern Hudson Valley.
"The fact of the matter is that the bridge is past its usable life and no matter what repairs are done it must ultimately be replaced," said C. Scott Vanderhoef, the Rockland County executive. "It's reached its age limit and it's reached its capacity. We're just pouring money into a bridge that ultimately will not be there."
Mr. Vanderhoef's counterpart at the other end of the span, Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, blames the bridge's poor condition on the benign neglect of "screwed-up government." State officials consistently refused to level with the public about how much money was required to maintain critical infrastructure, like the Tappan Zee, he said.
"First of all, it wasn't built properly," Mr. Spano said. "Second of all, it wasn't maintained."
Governor Pataki first mentioned the possibility of replacing the bridge in 1999, but by early last year, scant progress had been made.
When the Thruway Authority and the two other agencies that had been charged with proposing solutions, the Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro-North Railroad, fell a year behind schedule last summer, Mr. Spano and Mr. Vanderhoef created a task force to spur the state into action.
"We thought they were dragging their heels," Mr. Spano said.
The agencies had hit an impasse on the question of whether a tunnel that could carry commuter trains should receive serious consideration as an alternative to a new bridge, transportation planners and officials said.
"In my experience, it's always good to put some person or entity in charge that can be held accountable," Mr. Vanderhoef said. By the fall, Mr. Pataki "did the right thing and said, 'Enough,' " he said, referring to Mr. Pataki's decision to hand control of the review process to the Transportation Department.
In late September, the three agencies announced that they had whittled the original list of about 15 alternatives down to six. Two of them involve keeping the old bridge and repairing it, either a little or a lot. A complete rehabilitation of the Tappan Zee would cost at least $2 billion, the planners estimated.
The four remaining options call for a new bridge, which would be built alongside the old one, just north of the existing span. Each involves a different configuration of mass transit - either commuter trains, light rail or express buses - sandwiched between the traffic lanes. The estimates for a new bridge range from $9 billion to $14.5 billion.
The planners ruled out a tunnel because it would cost considerably more, would have more harmful effects on the ecology of the river and would disrupt traffic patterns in Rockland County, they said. But Michael Anderson, the Transportation Department official who was installed as the team leader for the review, said no decisions have been made about what type of bridge would replace the Tappan Zee.
At a presentation last month in Nyack, Mr. Anderson said the planners expected to choose one of the alternatives by the end of next year. If a new bridge is built, he said, it would probably be completed in 2015. In the meantime, he assured the audience that "the roadway is safe and will be safe for the foreseeable future."
So far, not a dollar of the design and construction costs has been pledged by the federal government or by any state or local agencies. The bridge will vie for funding with a long list of major projects that would enhance the region's transportation network, not provide a transplant for one of its vital organs.
The competitors, each of which is expected to cost more than $5 billion, include the Second Avenue subway, connecting the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal and a proposed second passenger-train tunnel between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan.
Already, the Tappan Zee planners are assuming that the tunnel to Midtown, a pet project of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Jon S. Corzine, the state's incoming governor, will be built. Mr. Anderson said the Tappan Zee project would be "in competition for a limited amount of funds available for the next 25 years." To improve its chances, he said, the planners would soon take the unusual step of conducting a study of potential sources of funding, instead of waiting until they have a specific plan for the bridge.
The federal government does not usually allocate money for projects before local officials have settled on a proposal and conducted full reviews of its economic and environmental impacts. But some elected officials have criticized Governor Pataki and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for not demonstrating a stronger commitment to replacing the Tappan Zee.
Ryan S. Karben, a Democratic assemblyman from Pearl River, in Rockland County, said he was disappointed that no money has been included in the latest capital budgets of the Transportation Department or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for replacing the bridge.
Mr. Karben, who is an ardent proponent of adding commuter train service from Rockland County to Manhattan, said he wrote to Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials asking them to "give us at least a symbolic commitment, a symbolic set-aside of funds to encourage this process." But his appeal failed, he said. "I find it strange to have a conversation about what the best way to replace the Tappan Zee is, independent of an available funding stream, because the funding stream inevitably constrains our planning," Mr. Karben said. "Without a realistic financial strategy, the planning is for naught."
To secure federal funding for mass transit, the planners need to prove that the project would be cost effective, said Jeffrey Zupan, senior transportation fellow at the Regional Plan Association. He said he has pressed Mr. Anderson to be more forthcoming about estimates of how many people would ride trains or buses across the bridge and how much extra it would cost to connect trains running over the bridge directly to Metro-North tracks in Westchester for a "one-seat ride" to Manhattan.
"What they need to do is to be very open in public about the situation and not string people along who see the holy grail, which is the one-seat ride," Mr. Zupan said.
The voice of Mr. Vanderhoef, the county executive, who was born in Orangetown and graduated from Tappan Zee High School, carries no trace of sentiment when he talks about the future of the old bridge that sparked a boom in Rockland. The county's population has more than tripled, to 290,000 residents, since 1950, and is projected to increase by more than 25 percent in the next 25 years.
"I don't think it's that ugly," Mr. Vanderhoef said of the Tappan Zee, adding that he did not care about the appearance of its replacement.
"The key is that it operate, that it handle the traffic," he said. "If that requires a lack of aesthetic approach, then so be it. I'm not suggesting that we build an ugly bridge, but if it requires that, then fine."
An editorial on the need for engineering skills in Mecca
Why Mecca's Pilgrims Need Engineering, Not Just Prayer
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
MINA, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15 - In the valley where the devil once roamed, this narrow stretch of holy land, nestled between mountains of basaltic rock, has long bedeviled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a duty for devout Muslims.
Here, they believe, the devil sought to tempt Abraham into disobeying God as he took his son to be slaughtered, only to be pelted with stones by the prophet. Each year, pilgrims pelt three columns at the site, known as Jamarat, to re-enact the moment in a symbolic rejection of temptation.
But the site, where an imposing two-story overpass was built to carry the waves of pilgrims, has also been the scene of catastrophes. In 1994, 270 were killed in a stampede here. In 2004, 250 were pinned to a wall and died. Last week 363 pilgrims were killed at the entrance to a ramp leading up to the columns, raising fresh calls for a solution to the notoriously dangerous section of the hajj.
Finally, on Sunday, the bulldozers of the Saudi Binladen Group, the engineering and construction company owned by the bin Laden family, rolled in to change all that. (The family, which has disowned Osama bin Laden, spells the company name and family name differently.)
The pedestrian platform will be demolished to make way for a new four-story structure from which pilgrims can carry out the ritual.
"One of the biggest problems was this bridge," said Osama al-Bar, director of the Haj Research Center at Umm al-Qura University, which oversees the safety of the hajj. "After 32 years and 1,500 lives, it's finally going down. I'd really like to know who thought this structure up."
When first built, the bridge was seen as a great leap forward in allowing more pilgrims to pass through Mecca.
By numbers alone, the weeklong pilgrimage is a remarkable spectacle of mass migration. This year, more than 1.5 million pilgrims flew in on more than 3,500 flights; they joined about a million others who had come in by land, and they spent up to $2 billion by some estimates. Those numbers will only increase as the population of the Muslim world rises.
Even the morgue where victims were taken after the Thursday incident reflects the scale of the event, with space for more than 920 bodies in the coolers and a cemetery out back for burying them. Every year, dozens of pilgrims die of natural causes, in car accidents and in other incidents.
Of course, the hajj is not the only event that attracts millions at a time, and other events like the Olympics, a pope's funeral and the New York Marathon are held without catastrophe. Yet what makes the pilgrimage to Mecca so different, Mr. Bar insists, is the logistics involved in moving all those people simultaneously, at set times, along stations spanning 10 miles. Ultimately, it is a study in peak capacity, not average use.
"There's an incident every two years now," said Mr. Bar, who did not hide his frustration after having reviewed hours of videotape from the incident. "When you get 300,000 people seeking to move all at once, accidents are bound to happen, and they are quickly magnified."
Saudi authorities put the blame for the stampede on a rush of unruly pilgrims who insisted on moving at noon, when the stoning ritual begins, rather than spreading their observances over the afternoon.
On Thursday Mr. Bar took a deep breath and stared into the monitors before him in the Mina control room. The room has special indicators connected to systems for measuring the numbers of pilgrims at different locations and to help with crowd control, and other equipment for managing the flow of people.
Thousands of pilgrims had begun gathering in the valley below, and lookouts and cameras stationed in key places watched for the earliest signs of trouble.
But shortly after noon, the crowd jerked forward. In a few minutes, one or two people had fallen on bags that were in front of them, and soon people began falling all along the entrance to the ramp, even as a wave behind them continued to press forward. Voices crackled over the radio, there was shouting and the crowd began to look like a stretched out coil, jerking back and forth as a stampede gained momentum.
An hour and a half later, when the scene was finally under control, bodies had piled in layers up to seven deep and included some of the security guards trying to control the crowd.
After each such incident, Mr. Bar and his team have engineered new solutions.
When fires raged through the tent city at Mina one year, they required fire-retardant canvas for all the tents and banned gas canisters. When hundreds of pilgrims were pinned to the wall at the circular openings where they stoned the columns, Mr. Bar's engineers turned the circles into ellipses, which helped people move through, and widened the pillars into walls, to increase their surface area and make them easier to hit, also helping the pilgrims pass more quickly.
The latest solution has been four years in the making, Mr. Bar said.
"You can never predict the problems of the hajj," he sighed. "At one point it was the flow of people, and we solved it. Then this problem came up. Our job is to keep plugging the holes."
Critics say, however, that Mr. Bar's solutions only compound the problems, focusing on the symptoms, not the actual causes. The most immediate problems entail management, not construction, they say.
"The hajj is a complete system, and must be approached as a system, a flow," said Sami M. Angawi, a prominent architect in Jidda who founded the Haj Research Center in the 1970's. "What they do is concentrate and do a project, and put their hopes on that project until something wrong happens. But all that happens is this project creates new issues."
The latest construction project, costing about $1.8 billion, will upset the flow in other parts of the pilgrimage, Mr. Angawi said.
One floor of the new structure is to be dedicated to absorbing the flow of pilgrims from each end of the valley. Once those pilgrims are done, they all move down together toward the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the next stop, where they will circle the black cube, the shrine called the Kaaba, in an even bigger wave than they do today, he added. The solution this year, in other words, may simply move the problem downstream.
"The three main variables in managing the hajj are density, space and time," he said. "So far all they have been dealing with is space."
At the morgue on Sunday, Imran Mulhaq, from Kerala, India, had come to identify his daughter, who had gone ahead of her father and was killed in the stampede. An elderly man with a gaunt face, he quietly expressed his outrage at the incident, blaming the authorities for mismanagement. But then, in a thoughtful moment, he stopped briefly.
"She is dead now," he said, "but at least she will be buried in this holy place."
