Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth

Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:43 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Solar-Flare.html

DENVER (AP) -- The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible hit Earth early Wednesday, threatening power outages, disrupting airlines communications and damaging some satellites.

Space weather forecasters at a federal laboratory in Boulder said the first pulse of highly charged particles from the sun collided with Earth's magnetic field at 1 a.m. EST, about 12 hours earlier than predicted.

The storm is rated a G5, the highest intensity on scientists' scale of space weather. The last time a G5 storm hit Earth was in 1989, researchers said, which damaged the power grid and caused electrical blackouts in Canada's Quebec province.

``It is extremely rare to get this level of geomagnetic storming,'' said Larry Combs, forecaster for the Space Weather Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. ``This is one of the strongest storms that we have received during this cycle.''

There were few immediate reports of damage related to the geomagnetic storm.

However, Combs said, ``We know that our power grids are definitely feeling the effects of this.''

Those charged with monitoring electrical grids are watching ``very closely for their triggering devices,'' he said.

He also noted that there had been radio communications disruptions in recent days for airlines, especially those on North Atlantic and polar routes.

Another strong storm, although weaker than Wednesday's, occurred last week.

The sun generates particle storms in 11-year cycles and storms of this magnitude are rarely seen, scientists said. The current solar cycle peaked nearly three years ago, and such a powerful event occurring on the cycle's downside is especially surprising.

In Tokyo, Japan's space agency announced the Kodama communications satellite malfunctioned after being effected by the flare. The agency said it was temporarily shut down and would be reactivated after the storm subsided, but there was no major communication disruption.

The G5 storm was spawned early Tuesday by a spectacular eruption from a sunspot blemish on the surface of the sun that sent charged particles hurling toward Earth. The cloud is 13 times larger than Earth and travels at more than 1 million mph.

The explosion of gas and charged particles into space from the corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, was the largest observed in 30 years, scientists reported. It isn't harmful to people.

In Southern California, wildfires already have knocked out many microwave communication antennas on the ground, making satellite communications important to emergency efforts. Researchers said safety personnel might encounter communications interference.

Federal researchers had turned off instruments and taken other precautions with science satellites.

A positive note: Strong geomagnetic storms can produce colorful auroras in the night sky visible as far south as Texas and Florida, beginning late Wednesday.

Scientists compared the latest flare to the ``Bastille Day storm'' of July 14, 2000.

``The Bastille Day storm produced considerable disruption to both ground and space high-tech systems,'' said Bill Murtagh, a space weather forecaster for NOAA.

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On the Net:
http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0322.html
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/

Cosmologists Point to God

Zillions of Universes? Or Did Ours Get Lucky?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/science/space/28COSM.html

CLEVELAND — Cosmology used to be a heartless science, all about dark matter lost in mind-bending abysses and exploding stars. But whenever physicists and astronomers gather, the subject that roils lunch, coffee breaks or renegade cigarette breaks tends to be not dark matter or the fate of the universe. Rather it is about the role and meaning of life in the cosmos.

Cosmologists held an unusual debate on the question during a recent conference, "The Future of Cosmology," at Case Western Reserve University here.

According to a controversial notion known as the anthropic principle, certain otherwise baffling features of the universe can only be understood by including ourselves in the equation. The universe must be suitable for life, otherwise we would not be here to wonder about it.

The features in question are mysterious numbers in the equations of physics and cosmology, denoting, say, the amount of matter in the universe or the number of dimensions, which don't seem predictable by any known theory — yet. They are like the knobs on God's control console, and they seem almost miraculously tuned to allow life.

A slight tweak one way or another from the present settings could cause all stars to collapse into black holes or atoms to evaporate, negating the possibility of biology.

If there were only one universe, theorists would have their hands full trying to explain why it is such a lucky one.

But supporters of the anthropic principle argue that there could be zillions of possible universes, many different possible settings ruled by chance. Their view has been bolstered in recent years by a theory of the Big Bang, known as inflation, which implies that our universe is only one bubble in an endless chain of them, and by string theory — the so-called theory of everything — whose equations seem to have an almost uncountable number of solutions, each representing a different possible universe.

Only a few of these will be conducive to life, the anthropic argument goes, but it is no more surprise to find ourselves in one of them than it is to find ourselves on the moist warm Earth rather than on Pluto.

In short we live where we can live, but those can be fighting words.

Scientists agree that the name "anthropic principle," is pretentious, but that's all they agree on. Some of them regard the idea as more philosophy than science. Others regard it as a betrayal of the Einsteinian dream of predicting everything about the universe.

Dr. David Gross regards it as a virus. "Once you get the bug you can't get rid of it," he complained at the conference.

Dr. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., had agreed to lead a panel discussion on the notorious principle. Often found puffing on a cigar, he is not known to be shy about expressing his opinion.

"I was chosen because I hate the anthropic principle," he said.

But playing a central role in defending the need for what he called "anthropic reasoning" was Dr. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas. Like Dr. Gross, Dr. Weinberg is a particle physicist who is known for being a hard-core reductionist in his approach to science, but he evinces a gloomy streak in his writings and his talks. He is still famous for writing in his 1977 book, "The First Three Minutes," "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

Dr. Weinberg is among the most prominent of theorists who have reluctantly accepted, at least provisionally, the anthropic principle as a kind of tragic necessity in order to explain the gnarliest knob of all.

Called the cosmological constant, it is a number that measures the amount of cosmic repulsion caused by the energy in empty space. That empty space should be boiling with such energy is predicted by quantum theory, and astronomers in the last few years have discovered that some cosmic repulsion seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. But theoretical attempts to calculate this constant, also known as lambda, result in numbers 1060 times as high as those astronomers have measured.

So despairing are physicists of understanding the cosmological constant that Dr. Weinberg joked earlier at the meeting that he would no longer read papers about it.

Back in 1989, before any cosmological constant had been discovered, Dr. Weinberg used the anthropic principle to set limits on the value of the constant. Suppose instead of being fixed by theory, it was random from universe to universe. In that case the value of the cosmological constant in our universe may just be an "environmental effect," he explained, and we shouldn't expect to be able to predict it exactly any more than you can calculate how much rain will fall in Seattle this Christmas.

In his paper, Dr. Weinberg argued that lambda in our universe could not be too big or the repulsive force would have prevented the formation of galaxies, stars and us. Since we are here, the constant should be small.

The recently discovered "dark energy" causing the cosmic acceleration fits comfortably inside Dr. Weinberg's limits, vindicating in a way the anthropic approach.

In his talk, Dr. Weinberg described the anthropic principle as "the sort of historical realization scientists have been forced to make from time to time."

"Our hope was to explain everything," he said. "Part of progress is we learn what we can explain on fundamental grounds and what we cannot."

Other panelists, including Dr. Alex Vilenkin, a physicist from Tufts University, suggested that the anthropic reasoning was a logical attempt to apply probabilities to cosmology, using all the data, including the fact of our own existence. Dr. John Peacock, a cosmologist at the University of Edinburgh, argued that the anthropic principle was not a retreat from physics, but an advance. The existence of an ensemble of universes with different properties, he explained, implies a mechanism to produce variation, a kind of cosmic genetic code, the way that evolution implies the existence of genes.

"You gain new physics," Dr. Peacock said.

But when his own turn came, Dr. Gross questioned whether the rules of the anthropic game were precise enough. What were the parameters that could vary from universe to universe? How many could vary at once? What was the probability distribution of their values, and what was necessary for "life"?

Anthropic calculations are inherently vague and imprecise, he said. As a result, the principle could not be disproved. But he was only getting warmed up. His real objection, he said, was "totally emotional."

Ascribing the parameters of physics to mere chance or vagaries of cosmic weather is defeatist, discouraging people from undertaking the difficult calculations that would actually explain why things are they way they are. Moreover, it is also dangerous, he declared to ringing applause.

"It smells of religion and intelligent design," he said, referring to a variety of creationism that argues that the universe is too complex to have evolved by chance.

Dr. Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysicist from Case Western who had organized the conference and recruited the panel, characterized the anthropic principle as "a way of killing time" when physicists didn't have a better idea. Dr. Krauss, who has battled creationists over biology instruction in the public schools in Ohio, said he had encountered anthropic arguments as an argument for fine-tuning, the idea that God had fixed the universe just for us.

Dr. Weinberg replied that the anthropic principle was not really a part of science, but rather "a guess about the future shape of science."

"If we didn't have things in our universe that seem peculiar, like the value of the cosmological constant, we wouldn't worry about it," he said.

Dr. Weinberg compared the situation to a person who is dealt a royal flush in a poker tournament. It may be chance, he said, but there is another explanation: "Namely, is the organizer of the tournament our friend?"

"But that leads to the argument about religion," he said to much laughter.

In fact, Dr. Weinberg said, the anthropic principle was "a nice nontheistic explanation of why things are as nice as they are."

By then the audience was squirming to get in on the action. Hands were waving as Dr. Gross called the session to an end. "Clearly there is a diversity of opinion," he intoned. "Some people find the small value of cosmological constant so bizarre that only the anthropic principle will pick it out."

Nobody who adheres to the anthropic principle, he said, would hold on if there were "an honest old-fashioned calculation," that explained the cosmological constant.

Given the floor for the last word, Dr. Weinberg agreed that it was too soon to give up hope for such a breakthrough. "I'm prepared to go on hoping that one will be found," he said. "But after the passage of time one begins to entertain other possibilities, and the anthropic explanation is another possibility."

Applying that mode of reasoning, he said, could help make the cosmological constant less peculiar,

"But we don't know if that's the help that we really deserve to get," he concluded.

And it was time for lunch.

Dr. Gross reported later that younger physicists had thanked him for his stand.

Dr. Weinberg said the panel had generated more fuss than the subject deserved.

"Those who favor taking the anthropic principle seriously don't really like it," he said, "and those who argue against it recognize that it may be unavoidable."

Libertarians Pursue New Goal: State of Their Own

Libertarians Pursue New Goal: State of Their Own
By PAM BELLUCK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/national/27LIBE.html

KEENE, N.H. — A few things stand out about this unprepossessing city. It just broke its own Guinness Book world record for the most lighted jack-o'-lanterns with 28,952. It claims to have the world's widest Main Street.

And recently, Keene became the home of Justin Somma, a 26-year-old freelance copywriter from Suffern, N.Y., and a foot soldier in an upstart political movement. That movement, the Free State Project, aims to make all of New Hampshire a laboratory for libertarian politics by recruiting libertarian-leaning people from across the country to move to New Hampshire and throw their collective weight around. Leaders of the project figure 20,000 people would do the trick, and so far 4,960 have pledged to make the move.

The idea is to concentrate enough fellow travelers in a single state to jump-start political change. Members, most of whom have met only over the Internet, chose New Hampshire over nine other states in a heated contest that lasted months.

(The other contenders were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. One frequently asked question on the project's Web site was "Can't you make a warmer state an option?")

Once here, they plan to field candidates in elections and become active in schools and community groups, doing all they can to sow the libertarian ideals of curbing taxes, minimizing regulation of guns and drugs, privatizing schools and reducing government programs.

"We want to make New Hampshire our home, and we want to make it a better place for everybody," said Elizabeth McKinstry, a project spokeswoman. "Many times government gets in the way."

One appeal of New Hampshire is the state's reputation for flinty individualism (although it has only about 400 dues-paying Libertarian Party members). The 150 Free Staters already living here lobbied hard for the state, and Gov. Craig Benson, a Republican, met with visiting members and told them to "come on up, we'd love to have you."

If the idea catches on, the movement may benefit from the unusually high political profile New Hampshire has because of its early presidential primary.

Some Free Staters plan to move when the project attracts 20,000 participants, which it hopes to do by 2006. But many intend to move sooner, and a few have already arrived.

"Having so many people move into a state means we can really raise issues," Mr. Somma said. "Once we start to elect people to the Statehouse, I think the low-hanging fruit will be issues like educational reform and medical marijuana."

Keene, a college town of 24,000, is not the only Free Stater destination in New Hampshire. Indeed, as many members acknowledge, one quandary for a movement of individualistic people is that it can be hard to get everyone on the same page.

Devera Morgan and her husband, Bruce, a computer consultant, plan to move soon from Royse City, Tex., possibly to far-north Coos County or the White Mountain town of North Conway. "I didn't think I would ever leave Texas; that's how much I believe in this project," said Ms. Morgan, 34, who wants to lift restrictions on home schooling and says she may run for office in New Hampshire.

Although Jackie Casey had voted for Wyoming, she just moved from Portland, Ore., to Merrimack, between Nashua and Manchester, renting a basement apartment with her cat, Soopa Doopa Hoopa, and her two 9-millimeter handguns. (She wants a machine gun "or at least a rifle" for Christmas.) She has already hung one wall and her bathroom with framed posters of Frank Zappa, who was a libertarian himself.

"I don't like to go places that don't let me have my gun," said Ms. Casey, 33, who sells memberships to a Las Vegas survivalist training institute and models for comic books (her likeness has graced the cover of one called Reload). Her New Hampshire plans include starting eight businesses "because nine out of every 10 fail, and I've already started two, so I need to do eight more."

"I want to be a billionaire in my lifetime," she added, "and I don't want to live among people who think that's bad."

One project member chose the tiny town of Freedom. Also planning to move to New Hampshire are two candidates for the 2004 presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party.

Some project members favor zeroing in on one county or town to maximize their influence, and are scouting out about 30 communities light on property taxes and strictures like building codes. "We completely support and respect that," Ms. McKinstry said. "We just would never dictate to people."

The Free State has its opponents here, and shoulder shruggers too.

"If you've got people saying we just want to mind our own business, keep government out of our lives, hey, we all feel that way," said Kathy Sullivan, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. "But if they want to have a radical change in our form of government, no, you're not welcome here."

Michael Blastos, Keene's Democratic mayor, said he was not concerned because Keene had too little housing to accommodate many newcomers, and "anything at all that would stimulate the voters and get them stirred up is a good thing."

Linda Fowler, a government professor at Dartmouth, called the project a "gimmick" and dismissed "the idea that 20,000 people are going to make a critical difference in New Hampshire, a state of a million and a half people with very high voter participation."

But, she said, "I suppose if they really did produce 20,000 people, then that might provide a margin in some legislative elections in some parts of the state."

That seems to be exactly what the project has in mind, according to an article by its founder, Jason Sorens, a political science lecturer at Yale.

"When we arrive in our state, we will have to do our best to blend in, lay down roots in the community, and slowly build our individual reputations," he wrote. "If we come in trumpeting an `abolish-everything' platform, we will make enemies out of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to us. The key idea behind the F.S.P. is that for every activist, we will be able to generate several voters."

Dr. Sorens wrote that "within about 10 years after our move, we should have people in the state legislature and we should have entrenched political control of several towns and counties." He added that "once we have control of the county sheriffs' offices, we can order federal law enforcement agents out, or exercise strict supervision of their activities," and "once we have obtained some success in the state legislature, we can start working on the governor's race."

New Hampshire's constitution guarantees the "right of revolution" if "the ends of government are perverted and public liberty manifestly endangered."

But that is not their intention, Ms. McKinstry said, pointing to their mascot, a porcupine — "a friendly little forest creature who doesn't harm anyone else, minds his own business, but is not really someone that you want to mess with or you might get stuck and a little ouchy."

Dr. Sorens, 26, said the project reflected his upbringing in Houston as the son of a single mother who pulled herself out of poverty with help from relatives and a Christian charity. He also drew on the migration of the Mormons, the journey of the Pilgrims and the movement of many liberal-minded people to Vermont in the 1970's.

Free Staters, many of them college graduates under 50 earning $60,000 or more, were looking for a state that was small (fewer than 1.5 million people), with low campaign spending, so Free State candidates could compete.

New Hampshire's lack of income tax and sales tax, relatively healthy economy, liberal gun laws and proximity to Boston helped. A big plus was its legislature, the country's largest with 417 members and a state representative for roughly every 3,000 people.

"In New Hampshire, there's so many elected positions that anyone can become cemetery trustee or dog catcher," Ms. McKinstry said.

About 1,000 project members opted out of moving to New Hampshire, largely for geographic reasons, and Dr. Sorens said the project might eventually designate a second free state out west. Ultimately, he said, he hopes for regional chapters and a new political party with broader appeal than the Libertarian Party.

So far, Free Staters range along the libertarian spectrum, some more moderate than others.

Ms. Casey advocates eliminating entitlements because "then you'd only attract immigrants who are hard-working people." She said: "I radically oppose public education. It's demeaning and it creates criminals." And she says "the thing that hurts poor people is they don't know how to think of themselves as rich."

Mr. Somma doesn't argue against public schools, but maintains that they get too much money, which is good only "if you have to have nice school buildings and computers and all that." "Back in the day," he said, "they didn't need all that to teach kids. Back in the day, you were sitting around on rocks and listening to a guy talk."

Mr. Somma, who grew up in Brooklyn, confessed that he and his wife moved for lifestyle reasons, too, not just political ones.

Otherwise, he said, "I could never pitch to my parents, my wife: Listen, here's this group of people going to move to another state, and I'm going with them."

The Opt-Out Revolution

The Opt-Out Revolution
By LISA BELKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26WOMEN.html

The scene in this cozy Atlanta living room would -- at first glance -- warm an early feminist's heart. Gathered by the fireplace one recent evening, sipping wine and nibbling cheese, are the members of a book club, each of them a beneficiary of all that feminists of 30-odd years ago held dear.

The eight women in the room have each earned a degree from Princeton, which was a citadel of everything male until the first co-educated class entered in 1969. And after Princeton, the women of this book club went on to do other things that women once were not expected to do. They received law degrees from Harvard and Columbia. They chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply support them. They waited to have children because work was too exciting. They put on power suits and marched off to take on the world.

Yes, if an early feminist could peer into this scene, she would feel triumphant about the future. Until, of course, any one of these polished and purposeful women opened her mouth.

''I don't want to be on the fast track leading to a partnership at a prestigious law firm,'' says Katherine Brokaw, who left that track in order to stay home with her three children. ''Some people define that as success. I don't.''

''I don't want to be famous; I don't want to conquer the world; I don't want that kind of life,'' says Sarah McArthur Amsbary, who was a theater artist and teacher and earned her master's degree in English, then stepped out of the work force when her daughter was born. ''Maternity provides an escape hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and convenient exit.''

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the 50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.

We've gotten so used to the sight that we've lost track of the fact that this was not the way it was supposed to be. Women -- specifically, educated professional women -- were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half. The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power -- making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world.

''We thought there would be a woman president by now,'' says Marie Wilson, director of the Ms. Foundation for Women and president of the White House Project, who has been fighting to increase the representation of women in work and politics since 1975. ''We expected that women would be leading half the companies in this country, that there would be parity on boards.'' Instead, Wilson has just finished a book that includes an examination, in her words, of ''how far we haven't come,'' titled ''Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World.''

Arguably, the barriers of 40 years ago are down. Fifty percent of the undergraduate class of 2003 at Yale was female; this year's graduating class at Berkeley Law School was 63 percent women; Harvard was 46 percent; Columbia was 51. Nearly 47 percent of medical students are women, as are 50percent of undergraduate business majors (though, interestingly, about 30percent of M.B.A. candidates). They are recruited by top firms in all fields. They start strong out of the gate.

And then, suddenly, they stop. Despite all those women graduating from law school, they comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms. Although men and women enter corporate training programs in equal numbers, just 16 percent of corporate officers are women, and only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female C.E.O.'s. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, 62 are women; there are 14 women in the 100-member Senate.

Measured against the way things once were, this is certainly progress. But measured against the way things were expected to be, this is a revolution stalled. During the 90's, the talk was about the glass ceiling, about women who were turned away at the threshold of power simply because they were women. The talk of this new decade is less about the obstacles faced by women than it is about the obstacles faced by mothers. As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''

Look, for example, at the Stanford class of '81. Fifty-seven percent of mothers in that class spent at least a year at home caring for their infant children in the first decade after graduation. One out of four have stayed home three or more years. Look at Harvard Business School. A survey of women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 found that only 38 percent were working full time. Look at professional women in surveys across the board. Between one-quarter and one-third are out of the work force, depending on the study and the profession. Look at the United States Census, which shows that the number of children being cared for by stay-at-home moms has increased nearly 13 percent in less than a decade. At the same time, the percentage of new mothers who go back to work fell from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000.

Look, too, at the mothers who have not left completely but have scaled down or redefined their roles in the crucial career-building years (25 to 44). Two-thirds of those mothers work fewer than 40 hours a week -- in other words, part time. Only 5 percent work 50 or more hours weekly. Women leave the workplace to strike out on their own at equally telling rates; the number of businesses owned or co-owned by women jumped 11 percent since 1997, nearly twice the rate of businesses in general.

Look at how all these numbers compare with those of men. Of white men with M.B.A.'s, 95 percent are working full time, but for white women with M.B.A.'s, that number drops to 67 percent. (Interestingly, the numbers for African-American women are closer to those for white men than to those for white women.)

And look at the women of this Atlanta book club. A roomful of Princeton women each trained as well as any man. Of the 10 members, half are not working at all; one is in business with her husband; one works part time; two freelance; and the only one with a full-time job has no children.

Social scientists -- most of them women -- have made a specialty in recent years of studying why all this is so. Joan Williams (''Unbending Gender''), Sylvia Ann Hewlett (''Creating a Life''), Arlie Russell Hochschild (who coined the phrase ''the second shift'') and Felice N. Schwartz (who made popular the phrase ''the mommy track''), to name just a few, have done important work about how the workplace has failed women.

But to talk to the women of the book club -- or to the women of a San Francisco mothers' group with whom I also spent time, or the dozens of other women I interviewed, or the countless women I have come to know during the four years I have reported on the intersection of life and work -- is to sense that something more is happening here. It's not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.

I say this with the full understanding that there are ambitious, achieving women out there who are the emotional and professional equals of any man, and that there are also women who stayed the course, climbed the work ladder without pause and were thwarted by lingering double standards and chauvinism. I also say this knowing that to suggest that women work differently than men -- that they leave more easily and find other parts of life more fulfilling -- is a dangerous and loaded statement.

And lastly, I am very aware that, for the moment, this is true mostly of elite, successful women who can afford real choice -- who have partners with substantial salaries and health insurance -- making it easy to dismiss them as exceptions. To that I would argue that these are the very women who were supposed to be the professional equals of men right now, so the fact that so many are choosing otherwise is explosive.

As these women look up at the ''top,'' they are increasingly deciding that they don't want to do what it takes to get there. Women today have the equal right to make the same bargain that men have made for centuries -- to take time from their family in pursuit of success. Instead, women are redefining success. And in doing so, they are redefining work.

Time was when a woman's definition of success was said to be her apple-pie recipe. Or her husband's promotion. Or her well-turned-out children. Next, being successful required becoming a man. Remember those awful padded-shoulder suits and floppy ties? Success was about the male definition of money and power.

There is nothing wrong with money or power. But they come at a high price. And lately when women talk about success they use words like satisfaction, balance and sanity.

That's why a recent survey by the research firm Catalyst found that 26percent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don't want the promotion. And it's why Fortune magazine found that of the 108 women who have appeared on its list of the top 50 most powerful women over the years, at least 20 have chosen to leave their high-powered jobs, most voluntarily, for lives that are less intense and more fulfilling.

It's why President Bush's adviser Karen Hughes left the White House, saying her family was homesick and wanted to go back to Austin. It's why Brenda C. Barnes, who was the president and C.E.O. of Pepsi-Cola North America, left that job to move back to Illinois with her family. And it's why Wendy Chamberlin, who was ambassador to Pakistan, resigned, because security concerns meant she never saw her two young daughters.

Why don't women run the world?

Maybe it's because they don't want to.

ttitudes cluster in place and time. This is particularly true of a college campus, where one-quarter of the student population turns over every year. Undergraduates tend to think that the school they find is the one that always was, with no knowledge of the worldview of those even a few short years before. Looked at that way, the women of the Atlanta book club are a panoramic snapshot of change.

Sally Sears, the oldest of the group, entered Princeton in the fall of 1971. Women had been fully admitted two years earlier, and the school was still very much a boys club. Sears had gone to a small public school in Alabama and entered college ''very conscious of being a representative of women and a representative of the South.'' As she describes it, the air was electric with feminism. ''Margaret Mead came to talk one night, and I was stunned by how penetrating her questions were about what it was like to be the first women,'' she says. ''I thought, my God, she's thinking of us as Samoans.''

Upon graduation in 1975, Sears felt both entitled and obligated to make good. ''The clear message was, 'You've been given the key to a kingdom that used to be denied to people like you,''' she says. ''It never occurred to me that my choices would be proscribed. I could have anything I wanted.''

What she wanted, at first, was to be ''a confirmed single person, childless, a world traveler.'' She spent a couple of years running The Childersburg Star, a small Alabama newspaper owned by her family, and then, in 1978, she took a job on the air at a television station in Birmingham. That led to a job in Memphis, followed by a yearlong trip around the world, then another TV job in Dallas. By 1984 she was on the air in Atlanta, where she became a local celebrity and where she met Richard Belcher, a fellow reporter and now a local anchor. They were married in 1988, when Sears was 35.

Three years later, their son, Will, was born. Soldiers of feminism take only the shortest of maternity leaves, and as soon as Sears recovered from her C-section she was back at work. The O.J. Simpson trial was the first real test of what she calls ''work plus love plus a child,'' because both she and her husband were sent out to California for the duration. ''I got my mom and dad to bring Will out, and we all camped out at the New Otani Hotel for a few weeks,'' she says. ''I was determined not to blink.''

By the time Katherine Brokaw arrived on campus, seven years after Sears got there, women were no longer a curiosity. ''I guess I knew I was a significant minority,'' Brokaw says, ''but I never felt like I didn't belong there.''

Clearly she belonged there. She'd been scoring off the charts on tests since she started taking them, and by seventh grade she was a serious student of Latin and French. In high school she added ancient Greek and slam-dunked her SAT's. Two of the best classics departments in the country were at Princeton and Harvard; she was accepted to both and chose Princeton.

When Brokaw and her classmates spoke of the future, it was not about blazing paths, as Sears's generation had done, but it was certainly not about fitting work around motherhood either. ''I always knew I wanted to get married and have children,'' she says, ''but I was looking at careers in terms of what would I find intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling.''

Brokaw thought briefly about pursuing a Ph.D. in classics. Worried that she would chafe within the ivory tower, she opted for law school instead. Because she would be paying for her law degree herself, she worked for several years -- first as the principal speechwriter for Gov. Thomas Kean of New Jersey and then as the speechwriter for the March of Dimes Foundation. She began Columbia Law School in the fall of 1987. There she met a student at the business school, and they were married in 1990.

Success followed her to Columbia, in the form of a spot on a prestigious law journal, internships at New York's top law firms and a job offer from every firm to which she applied. She also nabbed a clerkship with a federal judge and then went on to become an associate at the firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell.

After Brokaw had been at Davis Polk for a year, her husband was offered a position in Atlanta that was worth the move. The change was particularly appealing to Brokaw, because Atlanta offered her something that Manhattan could not -- an easy commute. ''I could practice law in a top firm and still be only 10 minutes from home,'' she says. ''It seemed like an ideal way to have children and a career.''

Three years later she became pregnant for the first time and went into labor at the office at 9:30 one November night. During her three-month maternity leave she had access to the firm's e-mail system through her laptop and then went back to work full time, ''which was always my intention.''

At first, she says, her new equation was ''more manageable'' than she had expected. She had a ''wonderful nanny,'' and for a couple of months, her workload was relatively light. Her hours were regular; she took her breast pump to the office. But that didn't last. In mid-May she learned that a major case, on which she was the lead associate, had been moved up on the calendar by the presiding judge and would go to trial in mid-August.

For the next three months Brokaw worked a crushing schedule, up to 15-hour days, seven days a week, while still nursing her daughter, who was not sleeping through the night. When the trial date came, she was exhausted but prepared. That morning, though, the judge postponed the case, and by the end of the week he announced that he had taken it off his calendar indefinitely. Later Brokaw would learn that he had decided to go fishing for two weeks.

That Sears and Brokaw were schooled in different generations is made clear by the different ways they gave up their jobs. Sears took nine years to quit. And she did so with great regret. ''I would have hung in there, except the days kept getting longer and longer,'' she explains. ''My five-day 50-hour week was becoming a 60-hour week.'' As news reports could be transmitted farther and farther from the ''mother ship,'' she found herself an hour or two from home when the nightly news was done. ''Will was growing up, and I was driving home from a fire,'' she says. ''I knew there would always be wrecks and fires, but there wouldn't always be his childhood.''

First she tried to reduce her schedule. ''The station would not give me a part-time contract,'' she says. ''They said it was all or nothing.'' So in August 2000, she walked away from her six-figure income and became a homeroom mom at her son's school.

''It was wrenching for me to leave Channel 2,'' she says. ''I miss being the lioness in the newsroom -- to walk through and have the interns say, 'There she goes.' It kills me that I'm not contributing to my 401(k) anymore. I do feel somehow that I let the cause down.''

Brokaw, while torn about leaving, did so without nearly as much guilt or angst as Sears. She did not think for a moment that she had failed the movement, though she did wonder whether she had failed herself. Even while she was preparing for her trial she raised the possibility of a part-time schedule. She wrote a proposal that was circulated among the partners, and some back-and-forth had begun about, among other things, whether reduced hours would count as time toward partnership.

''Every once in a while I would raise my head from the grind of getting this case ready and I would say, 'Where are we with my proposal?''' she remembers. ''Finally, when the case was pulled from the calendar, I did a lot of soul-searching. My life, my home life and my new family life were at the mercy of other people's whims. The judge had chosen to go fishing. My partners had chosen not to place my request on high-enough priority.''

One night she and her husband sat down, and he asked, ''What is the ultimate goal?''

''In theory,'' she answered, ''the goal is to become a partner.''

''Does your life get better or worse if you become a partner?''

''Well, financially it gets better, but in terms of my actual life, it gets worse.''

And that is when Brokaw quit. She now cares full time for that eldest daughter, as well as the two children who followed. ''I wish it had been possible to be the kind of parent I want to be and continue with my legal career,'' she says, ''but I wore myself out trying to do both jobs well.''

Fast-forward a decade, and compare the decision that Brokaw, class of '82, made with that of Vicky McElhaney Benedict, class of '91. ''Even before I became a mother, I suspected I wouldn't go back to work,'' she says.

The Princeton Benedict entered was on its way to complete coeducation, and, she says, ''I never felt discriminated against in any way.'' From there she went to Duke University School of Law, where she met her future husband, who was there earning his M.B.A. A native of Dallas, she ''had fabulous offers from firms back home, but I didn't take them,'' she says. Though not yet engaged, she decided to follow Charlie Benedict to Atlanta instead, ''where I joined a law firm that was not as high-profile.'' She made the choice, she says, looking back on it, ''because I knew that the long-term career was going to be his.''

The couple were married in 1995. Benedict quit her law job after nine months and began working in the development office of Emory University. Her daughter was born in 1998, and she quit that job while on maternity leave. Her son was born three years later, and she says she is secure with her decision.

''This is what I was meant to do,'' she says. ''I hate to say that because it sounds like I could have skipped college. But I mean this is what I was meant to do at this time. I know that's very un-p.c., but I like life's rhythms when I'm nurturing a child.

''I've had people tell me that it's women like me that are ruining the workplace because it makes employers suspicious,'' she continues. ''I don't want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight a fight for some sister who isn't really my sister because I don't even know her.''

These are fighting words of a most retro sort, and, no doubt, a 70's feminist peering in the window would be confused at best and depressed at worst. But unmapped roads are not, de facto, dead ends. Is this a movement that failed, or one reborn? What does this evolving spectrum of demands and choices tell us about women? And what does it mean for the future?

atherine Brokaw and I were classmates. We did not know one another well at school, but the Princeton she describes was the one that I knew too. We were told we could be anything then, which we took to mean we could do everything, and all of it at the same time. We felt powerful and privileged when it came to being women (and, let's face it, only during freshman year did we learn to actually call ourselves women). Any generalization is dangerous, but for the most part we didn't feel the same obligation to succeed as the women before us, nor were we bordering on blase, like those who would follow.

I rarely thought about combining life and work while I was at Princeton. In fact I never remember using the two words together in the same sentence. The only choice I thought I had to make was between journalism and law. Having chosen the former, I set my sights on the highest goal I could think of -- becoming editor of this newspaper, perhaps, or at least editor of this magazine -- and figured the path would be upward and linear. Then I got down to work.

I enjoyed the work -- loved the work -- but life got in the way. My first readjustments were practical; while a national correspondent in Houston I learned you can't hop on a plane every morning to explore the wilds of Texas while leaving a nursing baby back home.

Quickly, though, my choices became more philosophical. My second son was born while I was back in New York, working as a metro reporter. I decided to leave that full-time job in the newsroom for a more flexible freelance life writing from home, and I must admit that it was not a change I made only because my children needed me. It's more accurate to say I was no longer willing to work as hard -- commuting, navigating office politics, having my schedule be at the whim of the news, balancing all that with the needs of a family -- for a prize I was learning I didn't really want.

I will never run this paper. But I will write for it, into old age, I hope, and that piece of the work is enough for me. Much of the writing I do now is in the form of a biweekly column for The Times about life and work. Over the years I have written more than 100,000 words and received more than 10,000 e-mail messages from readers on the subject. It's not a scientific sample, but it is a continuing conversation, and a surprising amount of the talk is not about how the workplace is unfair to women, but about how the relationship between work and life is different for women than for men.

''Sometimes I worry that we're really just a little bit lazier,'' Sears says. ''But in my heart of hearts, I think it's really because we're smarter. Maybe evolution has endowed us with the ability to turn back our rheostat faster, to not always charge ahead after one all-consuming thing. To prefer a life not with one pot boiling but with a lot of pots simmering; to prefer the patchwork quilt, not the down comforter. Oh, God, would you listen to these domestic analogies? Are they really coming out of my mouth?''

Sarah Amsbary also raises the question of biology. ''It's all in the M.R.I.,'' she says, of studies that show the brains of men and women ''light up'' differently when they think or feel. And those different brains, she argues, inevitably make different choices. Amsbary graduated with a degree in English, not science, in 1988, and while at Princeton she was one of the first women in the University Cottage Club, which, when I was there, was still an all-male eating club known for attracting preppy good ol' boys. I can only imagine that being the first woman in such a place was its own kind of Darwinian experience.

When I talk to Jeannie Tarkenton, another member of the book club, biology comes up yet again. ''I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver,'' Tarkenton says. ''I think we were born with those feelings.''

Tarkenton graduated in 1992 and worked first in publishing and then on the start-up of the Atlanta Girls' School, until she had her first child in 2000. She went back and worked three days a week, until her second child was born last year. ''I didn't want to work that hard,'' she says of her decision to quit completely. ''Women today, if we think about feminism at all, we see it as a battle fought for 'the choice.' For us, the freedom to choose work if we want to work is the feminist strain in our lives.''

When these women blame biology, they do so apologetically, and I find the tone as interesting as the words. Any parent can tell you that children are hard-wired from birth: this one is shy, this one is outgoing; this one is laid-back; this one is intense. They were born that way. And any student of the animal kingdom will tell you that males and females of a species act differently. Male baboons leave their mothers; female baboons stay close for life. The female kangaroo is oblivious to her young; the male seahorse carries fertilized eggs to term. Susan Allport, a naturalist, writes in her book ''A Natural History of Parenting,'' ''Males provide direct childcare in less than 5 percent of mammalian species, but in over 90 percent of bird species both male and female tend to their young.''

In other words, we accept that humans are born with certain traits, and we accept that other species have innate differences between the sexes. What we are loath to do is extend that acceptance to humans. Partly that's because absolute scientific evidence one way or the other is impossible to collect. But mostly it is because so much of recent history (the civil rights movement, the women's movement) is an attempt to prove that biology is not destiny. To suggest otherwise is to resurrect an argument that can be -- and has been -- dangerously misused.

''I am so conflicted on this,'' says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and author of ''Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.'' Female primates, she says, are ''competitive'' in that they seek status within their social order. So it would follow that women strive for status too.

But there is an important qualifier. When primates compete, they do so in ways that increase the survival chances of their offspring. In other words, they do it for their children. ''At this moment in Western civilization,'' Hrdy says, ''seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care. So it's not that women aren't competitive; it's just that they don't want to compete along the lines that are not compatible with their other goals.

''I'm very interested in my family and my environment and my work, not in forging ahead and climbing a power structure,'' Hrdy explains by way of personal illustration. ''That is one of the inherent differences between the sexes.'' Then she warns, ''But to turn that into dogma -- women are caring, men are not, or men should have power, women should not, that's dangerous and false.''

n a loftlike apartment in San Francisco, a weekly play group is meeting over lunch. Lisa Tafuri Krim is ''hands down'' the best cook in the group, the other mothers all agree, as they grab bites of her crepes with goat cheese and tomato while chasing their toddlers. The conversation, mostly about food allergies and baby music classes and coming birthday parties, occasionally drifts toward the faraway world of work.

''I got a call from a guy that I hired,'' says Krim (University of Michigan '93; Harvard Business School '98), who is working part time now at a brand-consulting firm she joined before she became pregnant. ''Now he's way ahead of me on the ladder. He calls and says, 'Hi, stay-at-home mom.'''

The women of this play group did not know each other when they were matched, purely on the basis of their children's ages, by the Golden Gate Mothers Group, an organization designed to make it easier to be a mom in San Francisco. But when they made their introductions at their first gathering more than a year ago, they saw themselves reflected in the capsule descriptions of one another's lives.

''Everyone had an M.B.A.,'' says Tracey Liao Van Hooser, the only one in the present group without one, though she does have a degree from Brown University and a decade of work in advertising and marketing to add to the cumulative resume. ''It was wonderful to find a group of women who had made the same decisions I had. This play group is the reason I feel so happy with my choice.''

Since that first meeting, and even in the months since I first spent an afternoon with them this summer, those capsule descriptions have changed. Van Hooser, still home full time with Jack, is now pregnant with her second child. Anne Kresse (Stanford '91, U.C.L.A. '98), who had been working four days a week as a senior marketing manager and spending one day with Jackson, switched to three days, then just last month, quit completely. She's pregnant again, too. Courtney Klinge, on the other hand (Colgate '88, Harvard '95), had stayed home for a year and a half with her daughters, Eliana and Paulina, but last month she went back to work three days a week.

All that coming and going, they say, is the entire point. ''This is not permanent,'' Kresse says. ''It's not black and white; it's gray. You're working. Then you're not working. Then maybe you're working part time or consulting. Then you go back. This is a chapter, not the whole book.''

Van Hooser says: ''I am not a housewife. Is there still any such thing? I am doing what is right for me at the moment, not necessarily what is right for me forever.''

Talk to any professional woman who made this choice, and this is what she will say. She is not her mother or her grandmother. She has made a temporary decision for just a few years, not a permanent decision for the rest of her life. She has not lost her skills, just put them on hold.

''I'm calling this my 'maternity leave,''' Sears says. ''As long as I have the chit on the table that says 'This is not forever,' then I feel O.K. about it.''

Brokaw agrees, protesting, ''Don't make me look like some 1950's Stepford wife.'' In the years since she left her law firm, she has helped found the Atlanta Girls' School (the same place where Tarkenton once worked) and also raised a successful challenge to a bridge that was to have spilled its traffic into her residential neighborhood. ''I use my legal skills every day.''

Don't look at her as something out of ''The Bell Jar'' either. She is not trapped. This is a choice. And don't worry for her that she will have no resources should something happen to her spouse, his career or their marriage, she insists. ''My degree is my insurance policy.''

But is it enough insurance? Not only in the event that she needs to go back to work, but also when the time comes, that she wants to. Because at the moment, it is unclear what women like these will be able to go back to. This is the hot button of the work-life debate at the moment, a question on which the future of women and work might well hinge. For all the change happening in the office, the challenge of returning workers -- those who opted out completely, and those who ratcheted back -- is barely even starting to be addressed.

If that workplace can reabsorb those who left into a career they find fulfilling, then stepping out may in fact be the answer to the frustrations of this generation. If not, then their ability to balance life and work will be no different than their mothers', after all.

On the one hand, there are examples out there of successful women whose careers were not linear. Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton and the first woman to run the university, spent years deflecting administrative jobs -- exactly the sort of jobs that traditionally lead to becoming university president. And Ann Fudge, now chairman and C.E.O. of Young & Rubicam, left the fast track for two years to travel the world with her husband and help start a tutoring program for African-American children.

There are also trends working in these women's favor. One legacy of the dot-com era is that nonlinear career tracks are more accepted and employers are less put off by a resume with gaps and zigzags. Second, a labor shortage is looming in the coming decade, just as this cohort of women may well be planning to re-enter the work force.

On the other hand, the current economy is hardly welcoming to re-entrants, and the traditional workplace structure does not include a Welcome Back mat. ''As a society we have become very good at building offramps,'' says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who caused a stir last year with her book, ''Creating a Life,'' which postulated that the more successful the woman the less likely she was to marry or have children. ''But we are seriously lacking onramps.''

Hewlett has recently founded the Center for Work-Life Policy and, along with Cornel West, a Princeton professor, and Carolyn Buck Luce, a senior partner at Ernst & Young, has created a task force to study what she calls the ''hidden brain drain'' of women and minorities from the work force. (I have been invited to join that group.) Task-force members include representatives from a wide range of power bases -- large law firms, accounting firms, investment banks and universities -- who are coming to recognize that it is not enough to promote and retain talent. You have to acknowledge that talented workers will leave, and you have to find a way to help them come back.

The task force begins its work this winter. But Hewlett's preliminary research makes her pessimistic about what today's women will face when they want to return to work. At any given time, she says, ''two-thirds of all women who quit their career to raise children'' are ''seeking to re-enter professional life and finding it exceedingly difficult. These women may think they can get back in,'' she said, when I told her of what I had been hearing in San Francisco and Atlanta and on my own suburban street, where half the women with children at home are not working and where the jobs they quit include law partner and investment banker. ''But my data show that it's harder than they anticipate. Are they going to live to the age of 83 and realize that they opted out of a career?''

If so, they say they are braced for the trade-off. ''I don't know how you just step out for three to five years until your kids are in kindergarten and then announce to the world that you're ready to pull out your resume and take on the challenging, fulfilling job that you deserve,'' Kresse says. ''If and when I go back, it may never be full time. So given that I'm going to be a part-time person, is it also a given that my male colleagues are going to get ahead of me? Or is it going to be a meritocracy where talent really does matter most? I can't know that now.''

Some are already preparing for re-entry by working part time. Sally Sears is one. The same television station that refused to give her a part-time contract in 2000 has started calling her in for periodic projects: a week of work during the summer while her son was at camp; five days straight when the Legislature opened its session. ''The benefit to them is they get a seasoned, savvy reporter to grab the ball and run,'' she says. ''And the benefit to me -- I get to say no.''

Brokaw was asked back, too, but she declined -- for now. In the years since she left, her law firm has allowed several litigators to work a shorter week, and she has watched them struggle. One of those litigators, a member of the book club who would not let me use her name, asks: ''How do you litigate part time? It's supposed to be 10 to 5 -- at a law firm, that's part time -- but lately I've been working until 4 a.m. because I have a project due. It's the type of job where if something's due, you work until it's done.''

For the moment, therefore, the future is a question mark. ''I assume my daughter will work,'' Jeannie Tarkenton says, ''and I want to give her some example of working women as she grows up. I plan for this example to come from me, somehow. Maybe it will be part-time work, maybe full time, or maybe just through stories about the 10 years I worked before she arrived.''

There is a powerful institution run largely by women: Princeton University. Shirley Tilghman is a molecular biologist who took the top job more than two years ago. Her provost, Amy Gutmann, is a professor of politics and was dean of the faculty before being appointed to the post by Tilghman.

Of the five academic deans who report to Gutmann, three are women: Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a historian, is dean of the college; Maria M. Klawe is dean of the school of engineering; Anne-Marie Slaughter, a lawyer, is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. On top of that, Janet Lavin Rapelye is the new dean of admissions.

This has not gone unnoticed. One member of the class of '41 wrote to the Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine that since ''we now have a lady president and a lady second in command, to save time I recommend that the trustees promptly convert Princeton to a single-sex female university and be done with it.'' Another wrote to suggest that the name of the school be changed to ''Princesstonia.''

Tilghman says she was not really surprised by this old-guard crankiness. These were the same alums, she says, who objected to coeducation in the first place, arguing that women would not donate large amounts to their alma mater after they graduated. Meg Whitman, class of 1977 and president and C.E.O. of ebay Inc. seems to have silenced that objection with her recent $30 million gift.

What did surprise Tilghman, though, was the reaction -- or lack of reaction -- from current female students. Last spring, after one of these new deans was appointed, The Daily Princetonian ran an editorial suggesting that the president was practicing ''gender-based affirmative action.'' Tilghman waited for the women on campus to ''rise up in protest'' at the implication that ''the only way you can possibly justify appointing a woman is in the interest of affirmative action, because, after all, it couldn't possibly be because they were the best person for the job.''

But nothing of the sort happened. ''Have these young women internalized the idea that women really do not lead?'' she asks sadly. ''There was a time when that kind of thinking would have inspired outrage.''

One such time was in 1968, when Tilghman graduated from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. ''I am very much a child of that revolution,'' she says of the early years of the women's movement. ''I came of age at the time when Betty Friedan set things in motion, and it had a tremendous impact on my life. It opened doors for me,'' as a woman in the sciences, ''beyond a shadow of a doubt.''

Now Tilghman finds herself presiding over a new generation, one that is, arguably, more accomplished and more qualified than any that has come before, but one that is not at all sure what to do with all that talent. She raised her son and daughter on her own (she was divorced when her children were young), and she is more than aware of the compromises made both at work and at home. She sees the effect those compromises have had, particularly on her daughter, a 2003 Princeton graduate.

''A life in science, combined with motherhood, meant leaving undone a lot of things I might have wanted to do,'' she says. ''There were books I wished I had read, courses I wished I had taken, community service I wished I had done, places I wished I had seen, friends I wished I had made -- but time constraints made this impossible.'' Her daughter, she says, ''is not as ambitious as I was. I think she saw the trade-offs that I made as ones she might not be prepared to make herself. She is looking for more balance in her life.''

Other members of that generation seem to feel the same way, Tilghman says. She and I had dinner one night in a dining room of Prospect House, where university presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, used to live. We were joined there by Gutmann and Slaughter. Pointing at them, Tilghman said, ''I think that for every one person who looks at an Amy or an Ann-Marie and says, 'I want to be like her,' there are three who say, 'I want to be anything but her.'''

Tilghman is now a leader. In that role she wonders how to educate women to enter this shades-of-gray world and how to create an environment for her own staff that encourages a balanced life. But Tilghman is also a scientist, and she suspects that policies and committees, while crucially important, cannot change everything. And she wonders whether evolution has done both men and women a disservice.

''My fantasy is a world where there are two kinds of people -- ones who like to stay home and care for children and ones who like to go out and have a career,'' she says. ''In this fantasy, one of these kinds can only marry the other.'' But the way it seems to work now is that ambitious women seem to be attracted to ambitious men. Then when they have children together, ''someone has to become less ambitious.'' And right now, it tends to be the woman who makes that choice.

Sarah McArthur Amsbary of the Atlanta group leads a much-examined life. Back in college, she says, she gave no thought to melding life and work, but now, ''I think about it almost constantly.''

And what she has concluded, after all this thinking, is that the exodus of professional women from the workplace isn't really about motherhood at all. It is really about work. ''There's a misconception that it's mostly a pull toward motherhood and her precious baby that drives a woman to quit her job, or apparently, her entire career,'' she says. ''Not that the precious baby doesn't magnetize many of us. Mine certainly did. As often as not, though, a woman would have loved to maintain some version of a career, but that job wasn't cutting it anymore. Among women I know, quitting is driven as much from the job-dissatisfaction side as from the pull-to-motherhood side.''

She compares all this to a romance gone sour. ''Timing one's quitting to coincide with a baby is like timing a breakup to coincide with graduation,'' she says. ''It's just a whole lot easier than breaking up in the middle of senior year.''

That is the gift biology gives women, she says. It provides pauses, in the form of pregnancy and childbirth, that men do not have. And as the workplace becomes more stressful and all-consuming, the exit door is more attractive. ''Women get to look around every few years and say, 'Is this still what I want to be doing?''' she says. ''Maybe they have higher standards for job satisfaction because there is always the option of being their child's primary caregiver. When a man gets that dissatisfied with his job, he has to stick it out.''

This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of job-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.

Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.

Looked at that way, this is not the failure of a revolution, but the start of a new one. It is about a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all.

Why don't women run the world?

''In a way,'' Amsbary says, ''we really do.''

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer for the magazine. She is the author of ''Life's Work.''

A Match Made in Heaven

A Match Made in Heaven, if You Have Enough Yuan
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/international/asia/23WEDD.html

GUIYANG, China — Zhang Jin's wedding this summer turned out to be even better than she could have hoped for. The S320 Mercedes-Benz escort. The banquet for 300 friends, relatives and business associates at the best seafood restaurant — and, as an unexpected bonus, the splashy backdrop of a nearby skyscraper crowned by a miniature rooftop replica of the Eiffel Tower.

"We're so relieved and happy," beamed Ms. Zhang, a 34-year-old real estate executive, who spent an astronomical figure here, $10,000, for the whole gorgeous package. "I don't know what I would have done without them."

She was not referring to her parents, in-laws or friends. Instead, she was talking about a popular new phenomenon for middle-class newlyweds here: a one-stop wedding shopping center that takes care of the photos, the makeup, the flowers, the catering and just about everything else.

Less than a generation ago, most weddings in China were private and low-key, more city hall than banquet hall. Most couples wore everyday clothes, dined modestly in their own homes and resisted any flair, fretful that the authorities could accuse them of being ostentatious, wasteful or politically bankrupt.

These days, though, more people in China dream of spectacular and highly personal ceremonies. But because so few people have any experience with events of this kind, thousands of families have gladly ceded personal control over the biggest day in their lives to one-stop wedding centers.

Such centers first popped up a few years ago in Beijing and Shanghai. Less than two years ago, the idea also took root here in Guizhou Province, the country's poorest, creating even more of an obvious status divide between the privileged and the masses.

At the heart of this new cottage industry is the place that started it all in downtown Guiyang: Jia Ou Tian Cheng, or Match Made in Heaven.

Spanning three floors, the business is the brainchild of Wang Jun, a 27-year-old entrepreneur. He grew up here, then got the idea after living in Shanghai for a few years, and founding a successful cosmetics business.

The place has the feel of a small indoor bazaar. In one room, a couple could be talking about making a personalized video. In the next, a bride could be trying on gowns. Elsewhere, a groom might try on some suits, or get a haircut, or simply absorb some friendly advice on wedding style.

Mr. Wang is a dynamo. He is always on the phone, always cutting deals with hotels and other businesses. Soon, he says, he will add honeymoon planning to the options.

Most couples are young urban professionals who typically spend anywhere from $250 to $2,500 on their package — a huge sum, given that Guizhou's per capita income in 2000 was only $290, compared with $3,750 for Shanghai. But Mr. Wang says that his business has also accommodated older couples who want to "make up for the ceremony they never had."

Mr. Wang has relied on word-of-mouth, as well as a distinctive red suitcase, emblazoned with the corporate logo, in which his clients carry the gown and other accouterments. His staff of 20 can barely keep up with demand, making arrangements for about 20 couples a week now, and staying open 365 days a year.

Mr. Wang's success has spawned imitators in this city of three million, which has modernized with breathtaking speed in just the last couple of years, as it tries to improve its image as a den of drugs, prostitution and abject poverty. He says he welcomes the competition.

"A lot of people need help, and the client is the most important person," he said.

On a recent day, Match Made in Heaven was filled with women who were sampling a few wedding gowns and asking questions about the appropriate hotel or restaurant for their receptions.

Ms. Zhang was getting her hair and makeup done, just hours before the big event, under the watchful eye of her classmate and close friend, Cai Ling. Ms. Zhang had heard about Match Made in Heaven through friends. She was determined to make her wedding to Long Jian, a 38-year-old casino executive who works in Macao, very special.

"It's more expensive to do it like this," she said, "but more convenient, because everyone is too busy."

A few hours later, her hair perfectly curled, and her gown in good shape, Ms. Zhang was all smiles at the reception at the Guizhoulou restaurant, as the guests began to roll in. Many women wore imported clothes and stilettos. Some had gotten elaborate pedicures, too.

For each male guest, Mr. Long would pull out a an expensive Zhonghua cigarette. Ms. Zhang would pull out a lighter — and the guest would pull out a red envelope of "lucky money," and hand it over to a member of the wedding party.

It was important, Ms. Zhang said, that everything be the best that money could buy. Then, she switched to English to emphasize the point: "No.1, not No. 2!"

Marketing Neuroscience

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex
By CLIVE THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26BRAINS.html

When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.

Measuring brand influence might seem like an unusual activity for a neuroscientist, but Montague is just one of a growing breed of researchers who are applying the methods of the neurology lab to the questions of the advertising world. Some of these researchers, like Montague, are purely academic in focus, studying the consumer mind out of intellectual curiosity, with no corporate support. Increasingly, though, there are others -- like several of the researchers at the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School -- who work as full-fledged ''neuromarketers,'' conducting brain research with the help of corporate financing and sharing their results with their sponsors. This summer, when it opened its doors for business, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences in Atlanta became the first neuromarketing firm to boast a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. (The client's identity is currently a secret.) The institute will scan the brains of a representative sample of its client's prospective customers, assess their reactions to the company's products and advertising and tweak the corporate image accordingly.

Not long ago, M.R.I. machines were used solely for medical purposes, like diagnosing strokes or discovering tumors. But neuroscience has reached a sort of cocky adolescence; it has become routine to read about researchers tackling every subject under the sun, placing test subjects in M.R.I. machines and analyzing their brain activity as they do everything from making moral choices to praying to appreciating beauty. Paul C. Lauterbur, a chemist who shared this year's Nobel Prize in medicine for his contribution in the early 70's to the invention of the M.R.I. machine, notes how novel the uses of his invention have become. ''Things are getting a lot more subtle than we'd ever thought,'' he says. It seems only natural that the commercial world has finally caught on. ''You don't have to be a genius to say, 'My God, if you combine making the can red with making it less sweet, you can measure this in a scanner and see the result,''' Montague says. ''If I were Pepsi, I'd go in there and I'd start scanning people.''

The neuroscience wing at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta is the epicenter of the neuromarketing world. Like most medical wards, it is filled with an air of quiet, antiseptic tension. On a recent visit, in the hallway outside an M.R.I. room, a patient milled around in a light blue paper gown. A doctor on a bench flipped through a clipboard and talked in soothing tones to a man in glasses, a young woman anxiously clutching his arm.

It was not a place where you would expect to encounter slick marketing research. And when Justine Meaux, a research scientist for the BrightHouse Institute, came out to greet me, she did seem strangely out of place. Clicking along in strappy sandals, with a tight sleeveless top and purple toenail polish, she looked more like a chic TV producer than a neuroscientist, which she is. Her specialty, as she explained, is ''the neural dynamics of the perception and production of rhythmic sensorimotor patterns'' -- though these days she spends her professional life thinking about shopping. ''I'm really getting into reading all this business stuff now, learning about campaigns, branding,'' she said, leading me down the hallway to the M.R.I. chamber that the Institute uses. Three years ago, after earning her Ph.D., she decided she wanted to apply brain scanning to everyday problems and was intrigued by marketing as a ''practical application of psychology,'' as she put it. She told me that she admired the ''Intel Inside'' advertising campaign, with its TV spots showing dancing men in body suits. ''Intel actually branded the inside of a computer,'' she marveled. ''They took the most abstract thing you can imagine and figured out a way to make people identify with it.''

When we reached the M.R.I. control room, Clint Kilts, the scientific director of the BrightHouse Institute, was fiddling away at a computer keyboard. A professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, Kilts began working with Meaux in 2001. Meaux had learned that Kilts and a group of marketers were founding the BrightHouse Institute, and she joined their team, becoming perhaps the world's first full-time neuromarketer. Kilts is confident that there will soon be room for other full-time careers in neuromarketing. ''You will actually see this being part of the decision-making process, up and down the company,'' he predicted. ''You are going to see more large companies that will have neuroscience divisions.''

The BrightHouse Institute's techniques are based, in part, on an experiment that Kilts conducted earlier this year. He gathered a group of test subjects and asked them to look at a series of commercial products, rating how strongly they liked or disliked them. Then, while scanning their brains in an M.R.I. machine, he showed them pictures of the products again. When Kilts looked at the images of their brains, he was struck by one particular result: whenever a subject saw a product he had identified as one he truly loved -- something that might prompt him to say, ''That's just so me!'' -- his brain would show increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Kilts was excited, for he knew that this region of the brain is commonly associated with our sense of self. Patients with damage in this area of the brain, for instance, often undergo drastic changes in personality; in one famous case, a mild-mannered 19th-century railworker named Phineas Gage abruptly became belligerent after an accident that destroyed his medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, M.R.I. studies have found increased activity in this region when people are asked if adjectives like ''trustworthy'' or ''courageous'' apply to them. When the medial prefrontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner, with what sort of person you are. If it fires when you see a particular product, Kilts argues, it's most likely to be because the product clicks with your self-image.

This result provided the BrightHouse Institute with an elegant tool for testing marketing campaigns and brands. An immediate, intuitive bond between consumer and product is one that every company dreams of making. ''If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger gestalt of who you self-attribute as,'' Kilts said, using psychology-speak. ''You're a Chevy guy.'' With the help of neuromarketers, he claims, companies can now know with certainty whether their products are making that special connection.

To demonstrate their technique, Kilts and Meaux offered to stick my head in the M.R.I. machine. They laid me down headfirst in the coffinlike cylinder and scurried out to the observation room. ''Here's what I want you to do,'' Meaux said, her voice crackling over an intercom. ''I'm going to show you a bunch of images of products and activities -- and I want you to picture yourself using them. Don't think about whether you like them or not. Just put yourself in the scene.''

I peered up into a mirror positioned over my head, and she began flashing pictures. There were images of a Hummer, a mountain bike, a can of Pepsi. Then a Lincoln Navigator, Martha Stewart, a game of basketball and dozens more snapshots of everyday consumption. I imagined piloting the Hummer off-road, playing a game of pickup basketball, swigging the Pepsi. (I was less sure what to do with Martha Stewart.)

After about 15 minutes, Kilts pulled me out, and I joined him at a bank of computers. ''Look here,'' he said, pointing to a screen that showed an image of a brain in cross sections. He pointed to a bright yellow spot on the right side, in the somatosensory cortex, an area that shows activity when you emulate sensory experience -- as when I imagined what it would be like to drive a Hummer. If a marketer finds that his product is producing a response in this region of the brain, he can conclude that he has not made the immediate, instinctive sell: even if a consumer has a positive attitude toward the product, if he has to mentally ''try it out,'' he isn't instantly identifying with it.

Kilts stabbed his finger at another glowing yellow dot near the top of the brain. It was the magic spot -- the medial prefrontal cortex. If that area is firing, a consumer isn't deliberating, he said: he's itching to buy. ''At that point, it's intuitive. You say: 'I'm going to do it. I want it.' ''

he consuming public has long had an uneasy feeling about scientists who dabble in marketing. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote ''The Hidden Persuaders,'' a book about marketing that featured harsh criticism of ''psychology professors turned merchandisers.'' Marketers, Packard worried, were using the resources of the social sciences to understand consumers' irrational and emotional urges -- the better to trick them into increased product consumption. In rabble-rousing prose, Packard warned about subliminal advertising and cited a famous (though, it turned out, bogus) study about a movie theater that inserted into a film several split-second frames urging patrons to drink Coke.

In truth, marketers only wish they had that much control. If anything, corporations tend to look slightly askance at their admen, because there's not much convincing evidence that advertising works as well as promised. John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th century, famously quipped that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but that he didn't know which half. In their quest for a more respectable methodology -- or perhaps more important, the appearance of one -- admen have plundered one scientific technique after another. Demographic studies have profiled customers by analyzing their age, race or neighborhood; telephone surveys have queried semi-randomly selected strangers to see how the public at large viewed a company's product.

Advertising's main tool, of course, has been the focus group, a classic technique of social science. Marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds. Joey Reiman is the C.E.O. of BrightHouse, an Atlanta marketing firm, and a founding partner in the BrightHouse Institute; over years of producing marketing concepts for companies like Coca-Cola and Red Lobster, he has come to the conclusion that focus groups are ultimately less about gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete justifications for a hugely expensive ad campaign. ''The sad fact is, people tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think,'' he says. ''Sometimes there's a focus-group bully, a loudmouth who's so insistent about his opinion that it influences everyone else. This is not a science; it's a circus.''

In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. ''Let's say I show you Playboy,'' Kilts says, ''and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it.''

Other neuromarketers have demonstrated that we react to products in ways that we may not be entirely conscious of. This year, for instance, scientists working with DaimlerChrysler scanned the brains of a number of men as they looked at pictures of cars and rated them for attractiveness. The scientists found that the most popular vehicles -- the Porsche- and Ferrari-style sports cars -- triggered activity in a section of the brain called the fusiform face area, which governs facial recognition. ''They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars,'' says Henrik Walter, a psychiatrist at the University of Ulm in Germany who ran the study. ''The lights of the cars look a little like eyes.''

Neuromarketing may also be able to suss out the distinction between advertisements that people merely like and those that are actually effective -- a difference that can be hard to detect from a focus group. A neuromarketing study in Australia, for instance, demonstrated that supershort, MTV-style jump cuts -- indeed, any scenes shorter than two seconds -- aren't as likely to enter the long-term memory of viewers, however bracing or aesthetically pleasing they may be.

Still, many scientists are skeptical of neuromarketing. The brain, critics point out, is still mostly an enigma; just because we can see neurons firing doesn't mean we always know what the mind is doing. For all their admirable successes, neuroscientists do not yet have an agreed-upon map of the brain. ''I keep joking that I could do this Gucci shoes study, where I'd show people shoes I think are beautiful, and see whether women like them,'' says Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology at New York University. ''And I'll see activity in the brain. I definitely will. But it's not like I've found 'the shoe center of the brain.''' James Twitchell, a professor of advertising at the University of Florida, wonders whether neuromarketing isn't just the next stage of scientific pretense on the part of the advertising industry. ''Remember, you have to ask the client for millions, millions of dollars,'' he says. ''So you have to say: 'Trust me. We have data. We've done these neurotests. Go with us, we know what we're doing.''' Twitchell recently attended an advertising conference where a marketer discussed neuromarketing. The entire room sat in awe as the speaker suggested that neuroscience will finally crack open the mind of the shopper. ''A lot of it is just garbage,'' he says, ''but the garbage is so powerful.''

In response to his critics, Kilts plans to publish the BrightHouse research in an accredited academic journal. He insisted to me that his primary allegiance is to science; BrightHouse's techniques are ''business done in the science method,'' he said, ''not science done in the business method.'' And as he sat at his computer, calling up a 3-D picture of a brain, it was hard not to be struck, at the very least, by the seriousness of his passion. There, on the screen, was the medial prefrontal cortex, juggling our conscious thinking. There was the amygdala, governing our fears, buried deep in the brain. These are sights that he said still inspire in him feelings of wonder. ''When you sit down and you're watching -- for the first time in the history of mankind -- how we process complex primary emotions like anger, it's amazing,'' he said. ''You're like, there, look at that: that's anger, that's pleasure. When you see that roll off the workstation, you never look back.'' You just keep going, it seems, until you hit Madison Avenue.

Clive Thompson writes frequently about science and technology. His most recent article for the magazine was about the future of kitchen tools.

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.

The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution.

"It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing."

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at M.I.T., called the system an imaginative approach that reflected the problem-solving sensibility of engineering at the university. "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing," he said. The students' project shows "it doesn't have to be that way at all."

Mr. Winstein, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, described the result as "a new kind of library." He said he hoped it would be a legal alternative to file trading that infringes copyrights. "We certainly hope," he said, "that by having access to all this music immediately, on demand, any time you want, students would be less likely to break the law.'"

While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet.

So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less-restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission.

The university, like many educational institutions, already has blanket licenses for the seemingly old-fashioned analog transmission of music from the organizations that represent the performance rights, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or Ascap, the Broadcast Music Inc. or B.M.I., and Sesac, formerly the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers.

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

"It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Representatives of the recording industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, Ascap and B.M.I., either declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio.

M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students.

Mr. Winstein said that the equipment cost about $10,000, and the music, which was bought through a company that provides music on hard drives for the radio industry, for about $25,000. Mr. Winstein said they were making the software available to other colleges.

Students have been using a test version for months, and Mr. Winstein said the system was still evolving. The prototype, for example, shows the name of the person who is programming whatever 80-minute block of music is playing. Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman."

Mr. Winstein, who has a girlfriend, politely declined the offer, and said he realized that he might need to add a feature that would let users control the system anonymously.

Brazil Becomes a Cybercrime Lab

Brazil Becomes a Cybercrime Lab
By TONY SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27hack.html

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Oct. 26 - With a told-you-so grin, Marcos Flávio Assunção reads out four digits - an Internet banking password - that he has just intercepted as a reporter communicates via laptop with a bank's supposedly secure Web site.

"It wouldn't matter if you were on the other side of the world in Malaysia," said Mr. Assunção, a confident 22-year-old. "I could still steal your password."

While impressive, Mr. Assunção's hacking talents are hardly unique in Brazil, where organized crime is rife and laws to prevent digital crime are few and largely ineffective. The country is becoming a laboratory for cybercrime, with hackers - able to collaborate with relative impunity - specializing in identity and data theft, credit card fraud and piracy, as well as online vandalism.

"Most of us are hackers, not crackers; good guys just doing it for the challenge, not criminals," Mr. Assunção said. He insisted that he had never put his talents to criminal use, although he acknowledged that at age 14 he once took down an Internet service provider for a weekend after arguing with its owner.

Across the globe, hackers like to classify themselves as white hats (the good guys) or black hats (the bad guys), said one Brazilian expert, Alessio Fon Melozo, the editorial director of Digerati, which publishes a hacker magazine, H4ck3r: The Magazine of the Digital Underworld. "Here in Brazil, though, there are just various shades of gray," Mr. Melozo said.

Mr. Assunção has created a security software program for his employer, Defnet, a small Internet consultant in São Paulo.

The software uses a honey-pot system that can lure and monitor intruders in real time. It also uses techniques to foil "man in the middle" imposters who try to disguise their computers as those of banks or other secure sites. So far, Mr. Assunção has been unable to get an appointment with his target customers: security executives at major banks.

"They say they have their own security and prefer to turn a blind eye," he said. "But Brazilian hackers are known for our creativity. If things go on like this, there'll be no more bank holdups with guns. All robberies will be done over the Net."

For the last two years at least, Brazil has been the most active base for Internet ne'er-do-wells, according to mi2g Intelligence Unit, a digital risk consulting firm in London.

Last year, the world's 10 most active groups of Internet vandals and criminals were Brazilian, according to mi2g, and included syndicates with names like Breaking Your Security, Virtual Hell and Rooting Your Admin. So far this year, nearly 96,000 overt Internet attacks - ones that are reported, validated or witnessed - have been traced to Brazil. That was more than six times the number of attacks traced to the runner-up, Turkey, mi2g reported last month.

Already overburdened in their fight to contain violent crime in cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, police officials are finding it difficult to keep pace with hacker syndicates.

The 20 officers working for the electronic crime division of the São Paulo police catch about 40 cybercrooks a month. But those criminals account for but a fraction of the "notorious and ever increasing" number of cybercrimes in São Paulo, Brazil's economic capital, said Ronaldo Tossunian, the department's deputy commissioner.

The São Paulo department's effort is not helped by vague legislation dating back to 1988, well before most Brazilians had even heard of the Internet. Under that law, police officers cannot arrest a hacker merely for breaking into a site, or even distributing a software virus, unless they can prove the action resulted in the commission of a crime.

So even after police investigators identified an 18-year-old hacker in Rio de Janeiro, they had to track him for seven months and find evidence that he had actually stolen money from several credit card companies before they could pounce.

"We don't have the specific legislation for these crimes like they do in America and Europe," Mr. Tossunian said. "Just breaking in isn't enough to make an arrest, which means there's no deterrent."

In addition, analysts say many businesses, including banks, have been slow to grasp, or refuse to acknowledge, how serious the problem is. Banco Itaú, one of Brazil's largest private banks and the institution from whose site Mr. Assunção filched the password during his demonstration, declined to make someone available to comment.

Fabrício Martins, the chief security officer at Nexxy Capital Group, a top provider of Web sites for e-commerce companies, said, "Most businesses here don't take precautions until something bad happens that obliges them to take action."

Mr. Martins, for example, first reinforced Nexxy's security software after e-mail addresses of online clients were stolen two years ago. Now his is one of 20 software programs for credit card clearing approved by Visa International in Brazil.

Why are Brazil's hackers so strong and resourceful? Because they have little to fear legally, Mr. Assunção said, adding that hackers here are sociable and share more information than hackers in developed countries. "It's a cultural thing," he said. "I don't see American hackers as willing to share information among themselves."

Though the expense of owning a computer is prohibitive for most people in this country, where the average wage is less than $300 a month, getting information about hacking is simple. H4ck3r magazine, available at newsstands across the country, sells about 20,000 copies a month.

Mr. Melozo, the editorial director, rejects any suggestion that H4ck3r teaches Brazilians to commit cybercrime.

"It is a very fine line, I know," he said. "But what guides us is the principle of informing, educating our readers in a responsible way."

One Director to Be Paid Like a Top Movie Star

One Director to Be Paid Like a Top Movie Star
By ANNE THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/movies/28JACK.html

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 27 — When Universal Pictures ushered the "Lord of the Rings" auteur Peter Jackson and his team into Hollywood's elite 20/20 club — $20 million in guaranteed up-front salary against 20 percent of the gross receipts — the action underscored a major Hollywood shift: event-movie directors are becoming as valuable as stars like Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson.

Mr. Jackson, whose first two parts of the "Rings" trilogy grossed a total of $1.8 billion worldwide, suddenly jumped far ahead of his fellow A-list directors with his deal to produce and direct another remake of "King Kong." Mr. Jackson's take on the last two "Rings" films is roughly 10 percent of the gross, a person close to the production said. The third film is to open in December.

"As technology improves and effects become the stars, directors are cashing in just the way the actors did," the producer Jorge Saralegui said. "A lot of directors are going to feel, `I'm close,' like star writer-directors Bob Zemeckis and James Cameron, who can sell movies on their name."

The stakes have gotten very high, with moviegoers expecting more as the price of tickets continues to rise. Thus the producers and directors who take command of these unwieldy special-effects behemoths have become more valuable. Gifted writer-directors like Andy and Larry Wachowski (the "Matrix" trilogy) and Jonathan Mostow ("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines") spent hundreds of millions of studio dollars on their films, largely on expensive and often frighteningly unpredictable visual effects.

One studio chief said she was in a state of shock when she heard about Mr. Jackson's deal. "No director has ever made more than $12 million" on a single film, she said. "It's going to have unbelievable ramifications. It's insane."

But Mr. Jackson's agent, Ken Kamins, said the "King Kong" deal (shared by Mr. Jackson; his wife and writing and producing partner, Fran Walsh; and the writer and co-producer Phillippa Boyens) resulted from a "perfect storm" of circumstances that would never be repeated. Mary Parent, Universal's co-president, agreed.

"Peter is a unique talent," she said, "coupled with the fact that this deal involves three people, three sets of services over almost three years, compounded by the unique history of the project itself."

After the first two "Rings" movies reached their huge grosses and earned 19 Academy Award nominations and 6 Oscars, Mr. Jackson was sought after by seven studios, Mr. Kamins said. But Universal had one advantage over its rivals: the studio owned a 1996 "King Kong" script by Mr. Jackson and Ms. Walsh. But Mr. Jackson's hopes of remaking his favorite film were dashed, Mr. Kamin said. Universal executives said that the studio chairman at the time, Casey Silver, shelved the project just after Mr. Jackson's horror film "The Frighteners" bombed at the box office in 1996.

In July 2002, to reassure Mr. Jackson of their good intentions, Universal's chairman, Stacey Snider; Ms. Parent; and her co-president, Scott Stuber flew (watching the 1933 "King Kong") to New Zealand, where Mr. Jackson was working on "The Return of the King," the third and final "Rings" film.

Landing Mr. Jackson was not easy. He had been burned once, and in many ways his precedent-setting deal is less about establishing a gigantic salary benchmark, Mr. Kamins said, than it is an elaborate "kill fee" to protect Mr. Jackson from getting burned again, at a time when Universal was in the process of being sold. (General Electric eventually purchased the studio.)

Mr. Jackson will cover any costs over a budget of $150 million, and will not direct any other film before "King Kong," said the studio, which does not plan to share the gross receipts with expensive stars. "The star of the movie is the title and a story everyone has known for 70 years," Mr. Kamins said.

One studio chairman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the deal would have the same effect on movie budgets as Columbia's 1995 decision to pay Jim Carrey $20 million for "The Cable Guy." Almost immediately a long list of stars moved into the $20 million-20 percent club. Even a midrange star like Kurt Russell soon reached a career-high salary of $15 million. Today, studio executives say, top-end stars like Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford garner $25 million salaries. The more studios share their gross returns with stars, producers and directors, the tougher it is for the studios to reach a profit, many studio chiefs complain.

"It's hard enough to make interesting movies at a responsible price," Disney's president for production, Nina Jacobson, said. "Lord knows this deal doesn't make it any easier. At a certain point these movies collapse under their own weight, which is not good for anybody."`

At the top of the talent food chain, Hollywood executives say, are George Lucas, who turned his "Star Wars" millions into his own Bay Area movie studio, Lucasfilm, and the top effects house in the film business, Industrial Light and Magic; and Steven Spielberg, a partner in the DreamWorks film studio. Mr. Lucas writes, directs, produces, finances and owns his films; he releases them through 20th Century Fox's global distribution system. When Mr. Spielberg directs films for DreamWorks and other studios, several studio chiefs said, he collects 20 to 50 percent of the share of the gross returned to the studio by theaters.

Robert Zemeckis ("Forrest Gump," "Back to the Future") is said to be one of the few directors who earns more than a $10 million salary against 10 percent of the gross receipts. Because he is a veteran writer as well as a director with an ability to spin movie fantasies using special effects, Mr. Zemeckis landed 15 percent of the gross receipts for his coming "Polar Express," starring Tom Hanks, one executive close to the project said.

What Hollywood insiders once considered a luxurious deal now pales next to Mr. Jackson's. "The conversation is now changed on the starting point of negotiation with top-tier directors on franchise properties," said Chris McGurk, MGM's vice chairman and chief operating officer. The comforting news for studio executives is that few directors offer the tidy creative package that Peter Jackson does. "There aren't that many directors to whom studios would pay that kind of money," the producer Laura Ziskin said. "There aren't that many directors whose movies have stratospheric box office of $800 million to $900 million worldwide."

The directors whose prices could escalate include M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "Signs"), who writes and produces his movies; the Wachowskis, who write, produce and micromanage their special effects; and the "Harry Potter" producer-director Chris Columbus, who also writes. But what about an event-movie producer like Jerry Bruckheimer ("Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl"), who studio executives familiar with his deal said, gets 7.5 percent of the gross receipts? As he renegotiates his arrangement with Disney, he may now have an argument for demanding more. A lot more.

Calling In Late

Calling In Late
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/fashion/26CELL.html

ON Wednesday night, Schiller's Liquor Bar, the brightest new bauble on the Lower East Side, throbbed with diners, drinkers and loud music. Customers waiting for companions and tables stood pressed against the front doors, their faces reflecting the glow of the cellphones clutched to their cheeks.

One, Nick Goldin, looked particularly peeved. "He's late," he told his wife, Carrie, clamping his phone shut. "He's always late."

"We said 8," she said reassuringly. "It's only 8. He's not late yet."

"You give him a grace period?" Mr. Goldin shot back.

At 8:07 the phone buzzed. "Where are you?" Mr. Goldin demanded. "What?"

Two minutes later, in walked the tardy one, David Goldin, Nick's brother, looking utterly unrepentant. After all, he had called.

Restaurateurs, hairstylists and friends and family of the unpunctual have suspected it for several years. Now research is providing some evidence: as cellphones have become more prevalent, with more than half of Americans now wireless, so too has lateness. Phones have enabled more people to fall behind schedule, and have provided a new crutch for the chronically tardy.

"I don't know how my friends stayed my friends before I had a cellphone," David Goldin said.

Researchers who study the effect of cellphones on society talk of a nation living in "soft time" — a bubble in which expectations of where and when to meet shift constantly because people expect others to be constantly reachable. Eight-thirty is still 8 o'clock as long as your voice arrives on time — or even a few minutes after — to advise that you will not be wherever you are supposed to be at the appointed hour.

"We're seeing a swing toward people calling us three and four times to say, `We're going to be late,' " said Jimmy Bradley, the owner of three restaurants in Manhattan. "Instead of making a reservation and planning your day around it, it seems as though more and more people don't really plan anything."

James E. Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University, has studied the behavior of thousands of cellphone users in surveys, in focus groups and in observational research, and he argues in two recent books, "Perpetual Contact" and "Machines That Become Us," that the cellphone has changed the nature of time and relationships. "It has erased the meaning of late," he said. "Just by calling and changing the plan, you're able to change being late to being on time."

The Context-Based Research Group, a consulting firm in Baltimore made up mostly of anthropologists, surveyed 144 cellphone users in seven cities around the world in 2000 and again in 2002, asking them to document their lives in diaries and photographs. In the United States, the researchers looked at San Francisco and New York City, finding that some forms of bad cellphone etiquette had declined — in 2002, for example, people were less likely to share the dripping details of their personal lives with the 60 other riders on the bus. But they said that more people reported being late or being victimized by others who were, blaming cellphones for the behavior.

Arriving late for a dinner reservation is only the beginning. Career coaches say they now must explicitly instruct job applicants not to call ahead to say they will be late for an interview. Day care centers say parents who used to be on time regularly phone to say they will be late picking up their children, and psychotherapists report that more people are showing up late for appointments — wasting time at $3 a minute.

Phyllis F. Cohen, a psychoanalyst in New York, said one patient routinely calls from a cab to say she is 10 blocks away. She begins her therapy on the phone, but hangs up when she reaches the elevator for fear of being overheard. (As for the cabbies, Dr. Cohen said, "She's convinced they don't understand English.")

"It's the people who were chronically late before," Dr. Cohen said. "Now they have a way of easing the conscience a bit and getting some time in. I view it as simply another form of resistance that we didn't have before."

To some, the flexibility provided by cellphones has improved social relations and reduced the stresses of lives that are increasingly busy.

"It adds another layer of refinement to our coordination," said Leysia Palen, a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has studied behavior among new cellphone users. "You don't have to rely on the agreed-upon time from the day before, and you can give people information about why you're doing it. It allows for more fluidity, more forgiveness, because there's this explanation of why you're late."

Ken Li, who had arrived 15 minutes late — O.K., he admitted, it was 23 — to meet a friend at Schiller's on Wednesday, could only agree. "Before, you had to go to a spot and stay there all night," he said. "Now it's just like, `Hey, where are you?' It gives you the freedom to go bumping around."

He explained his lateness by saying he had to take a shower. "I could have gotten in the shower earlier," he said. "But it didn't seem urgent. And I'm calling her to tell her."

Indeed, when he finally discovered his friend, Charade Woo, waiting with her phone at the bar, she seemed unruffled. "He did the polite thing," she said.

To others, there is a distinct downside, what Dr. Katz of Rutgers calls "the unbearable tentativeness of being." Or, as Chase Taylor, a personal trainer, put it, "the `-ish' thing" — as in "Meet me at 6-ish."

"The window spreads open longer if you know you can call," said Mr. Taylor, who works at Equinox Fitness Clubs in New York. "If they didn't have a phone, they'd be more apt to just get there. It's nice that you're letting me know so I don't have to wait, but I'm still waiting anyway."

The extreme consequence of leaving everything to the last, wireless, minute is the dissolution of any plan at all.

Last New Year, Daryl Levinson and several friends decided to meet, but didn't specify an exact time. Instead they checked in periodically — after the first drink, after dinner, after the first party. "It was never quite convenient to meet, so we kept putting it off, until eventually it got to be too late," said Mr. Levinson, a law professor at New York University. "We just gave up and went home."

The investigators at Context-Based Research concluded that the United States has become more like Brazil, where time has been spongy for generations. (In Brazil, on the other hand, people who used to just arrive late now complain that they have to call and explain.)

"The cellphone is positioned as something making you more spontaneous, more efficient," said Robbie Blinkoff, the principal anthropologist at the firm. "If you turn that on its head, it's also about allowing you to be more lazy."

Carol Page, who is the founder of Cellmanners.com, a cellphone etiquette site, described an e-mail message she received from a 16-year-old boy whose mother had called him from her cellphone to say she would be late picking him up from soccer practice. Was there some emergency? A flat tire? No: she had stopped along the way to look at some pottery.

"It's become `Since I have a cellphone, I can dawdle more,' " Ms. Page said.

Dr. Katz said the subjects of his observations never considered themselves late if they called to alert the people they were meeting. "They say they are being more considerate of the other person by asking permission to be late," he said.

But ultimately, researchers say, being late is a way of exercising power.

"You think you're doing a good thing," Dr. Blinkoff said. "But in reality you're saying, `I'm more important than you — my time is more important than yours is.' There's this sense that if you're late, you must be really busy, and if you're really busy, you must be a really important person."

That can damage relationships. In a survey of 1,425 people nationwide by Dr. Katz in 2000, 14 percent said bad cellphone manners, including tardiness, had hurt a close relationship.

"It gnaws away at someone's self-esteem if they're being told they're the next-most-important thing to that bargain sweater," he said.

Slowly, people are fighting hard against soft time.

Some day care centers are beginning to charge steep fees when parents arrive late to claim their children. Restaurants are increasingly refusing to seat people who are waiting for stragglers, or not taking reservations at all. Most radically, perhaps, some people are announcing that they have thrown away their phones; their friends will simply have to make plans and stick to them.

"It was an excuse for people to be late," said Chris Ohanesian, a 40-year-old currency broker in Manhattan who finally tossed his cellphone out the window of his car while driving six months ago. "It's funny," he said, not looking amused, "Within the week I threw it out, people started showing up on time. I started showing up on time. Punctuality all of a sudden increased in my life."

The Botanic Gardens Children's Center in Cambridge, Mass., has noticed that fewer parents are running late this year, perhaps because the penalty for the first 15 minutes has risen to $25, from $10, and a charge of $40 for a half-hour has been imposed.

"My feeling is, if you can be here consistently at 10 past 6, you can be here consistently at 6," said Kathleen Parrish, the director.

Mr. Bradley, the New York restaurateur, decided not to take reservations when he opened his latest restaurant, Mermaid Inn, in the East Village, because so few people were honoring them.

"We saw it as a way to work through the trend, as opposed to being a victim of the trend," he said. So far, people seem to be filling the restaurant anyway.

As for Mr. Ohanesian, he eventually got a new cellphone. But only because his wife was pregnant. And he gave the number only to her and the doctors.

The baby? She arrived a week early.

The Zen of Alternate-Side Parking

The Zen of Alternate-Side Parking
By DAVID WALLIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/automobiles/26PARK.html

FORGET squeegee men, careering cabbies or vandals who scratch your car with a key to ruin a perfect paint job. First prize for most persistent annoyance among New York City drivers usually goes to alternate-side-of-the-street parking.

Since 1950, the regulation, which prohibits parking on the side of the street scheduled for cleaning, has forced urban drivers to:

Vacate a perfectly good parking spot at, say, 11 a.m. on the north side of the street or face a $55 fine.

Seek temporary refuge at a meter or in a lane of double-parked cars on the opposite side of the street, awaiting the chance to reclaim a spot once the street sweepers brush by.

Remain with your car until, say, 2 p.m., or whenever the no-parking period expires, or risk a summons from a by-the-book officer.

But one New Yorker's annoyance is another's pleasure. An informal survey of Manhattan drivers on a recent morning turned up a number who said they welcomed the bustle-free period (of one and a half to three hours) required for the ritual of moving their cars from side to side. Like the hero of Calvin Trillin's parking novel, "Tepper Isn't Going Out," they see the quest for a free legal space as an opportunity for fulfillment of one sort or another.

(Tepper became a behind-the-wheel sage. Mr. Trillin, a veteran of many alternate-side campaigns - in the early days of the law, he said, "it was like being in the Marines compared now to some sort of cushy National Guard unit" - no longer parks on the street, but he said in a telephone interview that if he did, he would use the time to learn a language, probably Arabic.)

Plenty of motorists read, enjoy an undisturbed smoke or sleep - a reporter recently witnessed a fellow napping on 22nd Street in the darkness provided by a pup tent pitched inside his vehicle.

Taking a break from cleaning the windows of his gleaming Range Rover, Greg Lichman, who works in film production, admitted that he relished spending Tuesdays and Fridays from 9 to 10:30 a.m. kibitzing with parking pals on East 11th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place.

"It's semimedicinal," said Mr. Lichman, who chats about politics and autocratic meter maids with his "gang": Ricky, a doorman who works around the corner; a Puerto Rican woman whose name he forgets; and a Swiss guy with a German shepherd that is said to understand 200 commands.

"My wife tells me I talk too much, so when I go outside people aren't exposed to me too long so they don't think I talk too much," Mr. Lichman said. He said he and his friends enforced local parking etiquette, confronting "creeps" who try to cut into the line of cars by trailing behind street sweepers and sneaking into spots that offer a few days of free parking.

Sheri Bruder, a Web site designer in Chelsea, extols alternate-side parking - not for the potential social opportunities, but for the privacy. The seclusion of her silver Subaru Forester allows Ms. Bruder to nurse her baby daughter, Libby, while her husband looks after the couple's 2-year-old son at home. "People don't pay that much attention when you're in your car," she said, gently placing Libby into her stroller. "I get time to myself, and I'm up anyway."

On West 12th Street near Fifth Avenue, the renowned jazz guitarist Jim Hall recalled composing "Down From Antigua" in his 1987 Subaru. "You can hear stuff in your head," said Mr. Hall, who also transcribes music during parking sessions. Not every driver tries to be productive while parking. For Hillary Morehouse, moving her white Chrysler PT Cruiser to either side of West 22nd Street is a trip to the movies. She cranks up the air-conditioning, plugs her Apple iBook into the car's lighter and watches DVD's. Ms. Morehouse, a location scout for films, gave a thumbs up to "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" and was looking forward to "Adaptation."

This generally keeps her content. But occasionally, the quest for a space proves maddening, she said. She begins to think the unthinkable.

"New Jersey, over there in the black car," she said, pointing at an S.U.V. with New Jersey plates, "didn't know the drill and took up a space and a half. We had words. Then sanitation got in our business. It was a bad alternate-side parking day. I'm ready to call the garage on 20th Street and make a deal."