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2) The Economist: Anti-social behavior [Un retour sur les fameuses ASBO, les ordonnances britanniques contre les incivilités.]
http://www.economist.com
Anti-social behaviour

Enemies of the state?
Feb 3rd 2005 | SHEFFIELD

People worry more about anti-social behaviour, but that's not necessarily because there's more of it about

THE trouble began in Meersbrook, a district of the poor northern town of Sheffield, in the autumn of 2003. At first it was just a group of teenagers loitering outside a shop on the corner of Valley Road and Brooklyn Road. But their numbers grew, swelled by an unruly family that had recently moved in nearby. Walls were soon covered with graffiti, fireworks were let off in the street and drug dealers began to tout for customers. “For Sale” signs appeared on local houses. A neighbourhood that had never been particularly cohesive seemed about to fall apart.

Then, last August, the police secured a “dispersal order”, which enabled them to break up groups of loiterers and return under-16s to their homes. They also asked six local people to sign contracts promising not to misbehave. The contracts have no legal force, but seem to have worked. The graffiti have gone, the gang is smaller and better mannered and, as Steve Kidder, a local shopkeeper, puts it, “we're gradually getting back to where we were.”

Until recently, Sheffield's police would probably not have devoted so much energy to solving a neighbourhood problem. Their priorities—determined largely by the Home Office, 140 miles away in London—were tackling burglars, car thieves and other criminals who could be locked up for a satisfyingly long time. But priorities have changed and resources been redirected. Eighteen months ago, the local sergeant, Alan Boyle, had four officers to deploy in the area. He will soon have 20.

The change is a response to demand, partly from local people and partly from the government, for action against the kind of petty irritations collectively described as anti-social behaviour. Five years ago, the concept was almost unknown. These days, it is one of the most prominent issues in local and national politics and in the British press (see chart).

That is probably not because there is more of it about. Vandalism (the closest proxy for it in the statistics) has declined since the mid-1990s along with most other crimes. Rather, says Louise Casey, director of the government's anti-social-behaviour unit, public concern has migrated from old-fashioned things like burglary and car theft to petty incivilities. “As crime has fallen, it has opened up some spare capacity to worry about litter, graffiti and abandoned cars.”

The other reason more attention is paid to anti-social behaviour is that there are more tools for dealing with it. Most powerful of these is the anti-social behaviour order (ASBO)—a civil order, lasting for a minimum of two years, that can be used severely to restrict a person's liberties. In September 2003, a mentally unstable drunk, Paul Booker, was barred from doing anything “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress” to anybody in Sheffield, or from using any bus, tram or train in South Yorkshire. Perhaps not surprisingly, he soon broke the order and was jailed.

In Sheffield, ASBOs are generally sought only after milder techniques have failed to change a person's behaviour. Just 49 have been handed out since 1999—one to a Meersbrook resident. That contrasts with other northern cities such as Manchester, where 20 orders are being handed out every month. There, according to Martin Lee, head of the council's nuisance strategy group, ASBOs are frequently used as an option of first resort, even for petty troublemakers. “If one person says ‘I was intimidated while using a cash machine,' then we're in.”

Manchester has used ASBOs against both minor indiscretions and serious crimes. Last year, it secured an order preventing four gang members from wearing body armour or riding pedal cycles. Such a move has two advantages over prosecuting people for criminal offences: it is easier to prove a breach, and the resulting sentence is likely to be tougher. In 2003, a prolific Cardiff shoplifter was caught stealing from two shops. For one of his crimes, he was sentenced to a month's detention—a standard tariff for a persistent offender. In entering the second shop, however, he breached the terms of an ASBO. For that, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The government approves of Manchester's war on incivility. David Blunkett, the former home secretary, viewed the number of ASBOs handed out as a vital measure of police performance; he also affirmed that they should not necessarily be regarded as a weapon of last resort. But is the tough approach the better one?

It is not yet known how many people stick to the terms of their order. Of the 855 ASBOs handed out in England and Wales between June 2000 and December 2002, just over a third—305—were breached in the same period. Not bad; but, since the minimum duration of an ASBO is two years, the proportion ultimately flouted will almost certainly be higher.

A more important test is what happens when the forces of law and order are deployed away from areas like Meersbrook, as eventually they must be. If the Home Office's predictions turn out to be right, locals will gain the confidence to deal with petty nuisances themselves. If, on the other hand, they come to believe that the only remedy for incivility lies in the police and the courts, they are likely to remain cowed.

So far, the drive against anti-social behaviour has encouraged some neighbourly behaviour. It has also given free rein to prejudices and suspicions. As Neil Pilkington, the chief solicitor of Salford City Council, puts it: “There are people in every community who believe that if you're under 18 and breathing, you ought to be on an ASBO.”

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4) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Two inventions [Un casse-tête. Quelles sont ces deux inventions apparamment si différentes qui assurent la même fonction ?]
http://www.cartalk.com

This week's puzzler is historical in nature. Here it is: I'm thinking of two inventions from long ago. One of them has thousands of moving parts. The other has one part, and it doesn't move. They both do the same thing.

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7) The Economist: The second amendment [Aux Etats Unis il est de plus en plus difficile pour un employeur d'interdire à son personnel le port d'armes.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3749922

The second amendment: Loaded debate
Mar 10th 2005 | NEW YORK

Guns in the office are perhaps a bad idea. But what about the car park?

IN MISSISSIPPI, the law is clear. If businesses want to keep concealed weapons off their property, they must put up a sign stating that “Carrying of a pistol or revolver is prohibited”. Vistors must also be able to read the sign from 10 feet away. If they can't, they can bring their guns in.

Other states also allow companies to ban guns from their premises. But what about car parks? Lawmakers in Oklahoma are feeling anxious. Banning guns in the office, they say, is all very well. But what about the poor fellows who want to go hunting straight after work?

Last year the state passed a law requiring companies to allow employees to keep guns in their cars, as long as the weapons were locked in the vehicle. Several employers challenged the law as bad for workplace safety. Enforcement has been suspended while the courts decide. For good measure, the Oklahoma legislature is now trying to pass a law that would exempt companies from liability if a gun locked in the car goes off (oops) on their property.

The debate is less frivolous than it sounds. Last month a newly fired employee of International Paper in Michigan apparently stormed back to his car, fetched his gun, and is now charged with murder. There are dozens of workplace shootings each year, sometimes with weapons retrieved from cars. Essentially, the second-amendment right to bear arms clashes with employers' rights to keep the workplace safe.

Gun nuts despise workplace bans. Erich Pratt, of Gun Owners of America, thinks people should boycott businesses that post no-gun signs—and that the signs merely make the businesses targets, anyway. Some second-amendment enthusiasts even argue that employers could be liable for banning guns in the workplace. What if there is a shootout and a worker, dutifully obeying company rules, cannot defend himself? Nonsense, scoff workplace-safety experts (not to mention insurance companies).

The brouhaha is unlikely to die down, especially in the 35 states that allow people to carry concealed weapons. Utah's Supreme Court only recently ruled that, despite a law allowing licence-holders to carry concealed weapons “without restriction”, employers can still ban guns at work. Now other fronts are opening up. Should guns be allowed on public university campuses? Or in restaurants? (Lawmakers in Georgia are circulating a bill to allow them there, in case the food's unsatisfactory.)

The entire debate may be moot, of course. Some people will do as they please, since in practice employers rarely rummage through workers' gear, or their locked cars. Just don't go out hunting with the boss straight after work

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8) National Public Radio: Benjamin Franklin and Daylight Saving Time [Extrait d'un livre sur l'heure d'été sur le rôle de précurseur de l'inventeur de homme d'état américain Benjamin Franklin.]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4572036
Introduction: Benjamin Franklin Is Awakened Early

"And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night"

-- Thomas Moore, "The Young May Moon"

Benjamin Franklin conceived of it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it, and, more recently, the United States fought an energy crisis with it. For several months each year, for better or worse, it affects vast numbers of people throughout the world. And for one hundred years it has been a subject of recurring controversy in the United States, Britain, and dozens of other countries. But to trace the beginnings of daylight saving time, we must look first to Paris.

Benjamin Franklin was astonished.

"An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning," he wrote in a whimsical letter to the Journal de Paris, "when I was surprised to find my room filled with light. I imagined at first that a number of lamps had been brought into the room; but rubbing my eyes I perceived the light came in at the windows." The year was 1784, and the seventy- eight-year-old Franklin -- statesman, author, and scientist -- was living in Paris while serving as the American minister to France. His attendant had forgotten to close the shutters the previous evening, and when Franklin saw the sunlight streaming through his windows, he checked his watch. It was just six o'clock in the morning.

"Still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early," Franklin continued, "I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for the sun's rising on that day. [Those] who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of its rising so early; and especially when I assure them that it gives light as soon as it rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result."

Franklin's "discovery" led to "several serious and important reflections." He realized that had he risen at noon as usual, he would have slept through six hours of sunlight. In exchange, he would have been up six additional hours that evening by candlelight. Since candlelight was much more expensive than sunlight, Franklin's "love of economy" induced him to "muster up what little arithmetic" he had mastered to calculate how much the city of Paris could save by using sunshine instead of candles.

For the six months between March 20 and September 20, Franklin estimated that on average Parisians would sleep seven hours after sunrise, and therefore could save seven hours of candlelight if they rose with the sun. Thus, he computed:

Number of nights from March 20 to September 20: 183

Hours each night when candles are burned: 7

Total hours (183 x 7): 1,281

Families in Paris: 100,000

Total hours in Paris spent by candlelight: 128,100,000

Total weight of candles consumed, at half a
pound of wax and tallow per hour: 64,050,000 pounds

Total cost, at 30 sols per pound: 96,075,000 livres tournois

Ninety-six million livres tournois is the equivalent of about $200 million today -- "an immense sum that the city of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles!" Moreover, Franklin added, "You may observe that I have calculated upon only one half of the year, and much may be saved in the other, though the days are shorter. Besides, the immense stock of wax and tallow left unconsumed during the summer will probably make candles much cheaper for the ensuing winter."

Although Franklin wrote in what one historian termed "a happy combination of humor and prudent instruction," he had obviously given the subject much thought. In fact, the germ of his idea can be traced back many years. In 1757 he made a similar observation in London: "In the summer, when the days are long… in walking thro' the Strand and Fleet-street one morning at seven o'clock, I observ'd there was not one shop open, tho' it had been daylight and the sun up above three hours; the inhabitants of London chusing voluntarily to live much by candlelight, and sleep by sunshine, and yet often complain, a little absurdly, of the duty on candles and the high price of tallow."

Although Franklin quite intentionally overstated the total savings by assuming that all Parisians slept until noon, he was serious about the underlying principle. He concluded: "It is impossible that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smokey, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing."

To remedy this waste of both sunlight and candles, Franklin became the first proponent of government action to alter the hours of human activity to make the best use of daylight. Continuing in the whimsical yet practical vein of his letter to the Journal, he put forward a four-pronged "Economical Project":

1. Let a tax be laid… on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun.

2. Let… no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week.

3. Let guards be posted to stop all coaches, etc. in the streets after sunset…

4. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectively, and make them open their eyes to their true interest.

This prudent plan was certainly in keeping with the man who, in Poor Richard's Almanack, had written "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" (though obviously he had not always practiced what he preached). Fortunately for late-sleeping Parisians, Franklin's Economical Project was never put into effect.

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Euromail: What Germans can teach us about e-mail.
By Eric Weiner
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005, at 4:17 AM PT

North America and Europe are two continents divided by a common technology: e-mail. Techno-optimists assure us that e-mail—along with the Internet and satellite TV—make the world smaller. That may be true in a technical sense. I can send a message from my home in Miami to a German friend in Berlin and it will arrive almost instantly. But somewhere over the Atlantic, the messages get garbled. In fact, two distinct forms of e-mail have emerged: Euromail and Amerimail.

Amerimail is informal and chatty. It's likely to begin with a breezy "Hi" and end with a "Bye." The chances of Amerimail containing a smiley face or an "xoxo" are disturbingly high. We Americans are reluctant to dive into the meat of an e-mail; we feel compelled to first inform hapless recipients about our vacation on the Cape which was really excellent except the jellyfish were biting and the kids caught this nasty bug so we had to skip the whale watching trip but about that investors' meeting in New York. ... Amerimail is a bundle of contradictions: rambling and yet direct; deferential, yet arrogant. In other words, Amerimail is America.

Euromail is stiff and cold, often beginning with a formal "Dear Mr. X" and ending with a brusque "Sincerely." You won't find any mention of kids or the weather or jellyfish in Euromail. It's all business. It's also slow. Your correspondent might take days, even weeks, to answer a message. Euromail is also less confrontational in tone, rarely filled with the overt nastiness that characterizes American e-mail disagreements. In other words, Euromail is exactly like the Europeans themselves. (I am, of course, generalizing. German e-mail style is not exactly the same as Italian or Greek, but they have more in common with each other than they do with American mail.)

These are more than mere stylistic differences. Communication matters. Which model should the rest of the world adopt: Euromail or Amerimail?

A California-based e-mail consulting firm called People-onthego sheds some light on the e-mail divide. It recently asked about 100 executives on both sides of the Atlantic whether they noticed differences in e-mail styles. Most said yes. Here are a few of their observations:

"Americans tend to write (e-mails) exactly as they speak."

"Europeans are less obsessive about checking e-mail."

"In general, Americans are much more responsive to email—they respond faster and provide more information."

One respondent noted that Europeans tend to segregate their e-mail accounts. Rarely do they send personal messages on their business accounts, or vice versa. These differences can't be explained merely by differing comfort levels with technology. Other forms of electronic communication, such as SMS text messaging, are more popular in Europe than in the United States.

The fact is, Europeans and Americans approach e-mail in a fundamentally different way. Here is the key point: For Europeans, e-mail has replaced the business letter. For Americans, it has replaced the telephone. That's why we tend to unleash what e-mail consultant Tim Burress calls a "brain dump": unloading the content of our cerebral cortex onto the screen and hitting the send button. "It makes Europeans go ballistic," he says.

Susanne Khawand, a German high-tech executive, has been on the receiving end of American brain dumps, and she says it's not pretty. "I feel like saying, 'Why don't you just call me instead of writing five e-mails back and forth,' " she says. Americans are so overwhelmed by their bulging inboxes that "you can't rely on getting an answer. You don't even know if they read it." In Germany, she says, it might take a few days, or even weeks, for an answer, but one always arrives.

Maybe that's because, on average, Europeans receive fewer e-mails and spend less time tending their inboxes. An international survey of business owners in 24 countries (conducted by the accounting firm Grant Thornton) found that people in Greece and Russia spend the least amount of time dealing with e-mail every day: 48 minutes on average. Americans, by comparison, spend two hours per day, among the highest in the world. (Only Filipinos spend more time on e-mail, 2.1 hours.) The survey also found that European executives are skeptical of e-mail's ability to boost their bottom line.

It's not clear why European and American e-mail styles have evolved separately, but I suspect the reasons lie within deep cultural differences. Americans tend to be impulsive and crave instant gratification. So we send e-mails rapid-fire, and get antsy if we don't receive a reply quickly. Europeans tend to be more methodical and plodding. They send (and reply to) e-mails only after great deliberation.

For all their Continental fastidiousness, Europeans can be remarkably lax about e-mail security, says Bill Young, an executive vice president with the Strickland Group. Europeans are more likely to include trade secrets and business strategies in e-mails, he says, much to the frustration of their American colleagues. This is probably because identity theft—and other types of hacking—are much less of a problem in Europe than in the United States. Privacy laws are much stricter in Europe.

So, which is better: Euromail or Amerimail? Personally, I'm a convert—or a defector, if you prefer—to the former. I realize it's not popular these days to suggest we have anything to learn from Europeans, but I'm fed up with an inbox cluttered with rambling, barely cogent missives from friends and colleagues. If the alternative is a few stiffly written, politely worded bits of Euromail, then I say … bring it on.

Thanks to Pierre Khawand for research assistance.

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10) The Boston Globe: Harvard students want their snap, crackle and pop back [Les étudiants de l'université Harvard réclament le rétablissement des céréales de marque au restau U.]

http://www.boston.com

Harvard students want their snap, crackle, pop back

By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff | March 26, 2005

There are some things that even a $40,000-a-year Ivy League education can't buy. At Harvard, it's Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms.

Angry cereal fans are lashing out after Harvard University cleared its dining halls this school year of brand-name cereals, such as Fruit Loops and Cap'n Crunch, and swapped them for less expensive, apparently healthier options like Tootie Fruities and Colossal Crunch.

''I was shocked to see they had done this to our cereals," said Harvard senior Cameron Moccari, who last week launched the group ''Harvard Students for the Reimplementation of Brand-Named Cereals" on Thefacebook.com, a popular website that allows students to meet new friends or form study groups. ''They replaced all of the familiar cereals with ones that have weird names and don't taste good."

For Harvard sophomore Allison Kessler, it's annoying to pay more than $4,000 for a meal plan that scrimps on her favorite breakfast foods. Particularly since, Kessler, like many college students, eats cereal several times a day.

''I used to eat Lucky Charms for lunch and dinner," she said. ''The fake stuff gets real soggy, and I've just stopped eating cereal. This is not fair."

Harvard officials say student surveys showed an interest in healthier, organic products, and brand-name cereals have been slow to move in that direction. At the same time, the major cereal companies are raising prices about 8 percent to 10 percent per year, more than double the rate for natural and lesser-known cereals, according to Jami M. Snyder, a spokeswoman for Harvard University Dining Services. ''We have a responsibility to spend their dollars wisely," Snyder said.

Harvard has reduced its six-figure cereal budget by 25 percent this academic year since shelving most brand-name cereals, including Apple Jacks, Cheerios, and Frosted Flakes.

The breakfast shake-up occurs at a time when the cereal industry, which, despite popularity among college students, has watched sales steadily decline. Between 2002 and 2004, the top five cereal companies -- which make up about 86 percent of all brand-name cereal sales -- saw sales drop to about $5.2 billion from $5.5 billion, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago market research firm.

''It is disappointing for us to hear that any university would discontinue branded breakfast cereal," said Jamie Stein, a spokeswoman for Quaker Oats in Chicago. ''We expect the students to be even more disappointed."

The disgruntled cereal fans at Harvard have no organized protest plans -- yet -- besides submitting negative feedback cards emblazoned with the message: ''Bring Back Brand-Named Cereals." They say they were not responsible for a December break-in at a residential dining hall that left $1,000 in damages and cereal strewn across the floor.

Some Harvard students say the swap is the latest, and most annoying, in a series of dining-hall downgrades over the past few years. The annual clambake, which featured lobsters for every undergraduate, was dropped in 2002.

''While I am not a huge cereal fan -- and I would hardly choose Cocoa Puffs over lobster -- I would say that I am generally supportive of efforts to improve the quality of quotidian offerings," said Paul B. Davis, a sophomore representative on the Harvard University Dining Services Student Advisory Committee and self-described ''chief agitator" of the group, ''Harvard Coalition For the Return of Lobster Night."

During the academic year, Harvard charges students $4,286 a year for three meals a day, seven days a week. Harvard dining officials said this summer will mark the completion of a $34 million renovation project to upgrade all 12 residential dining halls, some of which had not been refurbished since the 1960s.

''It's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture in all the minutiae of cereal, lobster, and chicken breasts," Snyder said.

At this point, Harvard does not seem to be in the vanguard of a movement toward alternative cereals. Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops are still available at Ivy League sisters, including Columbia University and Dartmouth College. ''We wouldn't do that," said Larry Levitas, Columbia's director of dining services, which spends $65,000 annually on brand-name cereals from General Mills and Kellogg's. ''That's what the students expect. And that's what we use."

Students at state schools such as Framingham State College and the University of Massachusetts at Boston still get their Cheerios and Corn Pops.

Jeff Fernandez is still hoping that Harvard comes to its senses.

''I'm really upset about it," Fernandez said on Thursday after shunning the dining hall's Marshmallow Mateys -- the substitute for his Lucky Charms. The Harvard senior, known in the cereal group as Jeff ''Likes his Pebbles Really Fruity" Fernandez, said the new cereals get soggy quickly and taste like cardboard. ''It's frustrating when we're paying this much, and we can't get a decent cereal."

Still, there's at least one Harvard alum who sees the cereal switch as a ripe business opportunity. David Roth, founder of Cereality, has opened two ''cereal bars" near college campuses where pajama-clad staff offer dozens of brand-name cereals, toppings, and even cereal parfaits and smoothies.

Roth said he is capitalizing on college students' passion for brand cereals at the stores on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe and near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Cereality is planning to open a third store this year in Chicago. But Harvard Square is now on Roth's radar.

''There's a fierce brand loyalty with cereal," he said. ''Give people what they know and love. It's just something that nurtures and comforts them."

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11) The San Francisco Chronicle: Spring cleaning with eBay [Des entreprises viennent chez vous pour voir ce que vous pouvez vendre sur eBay.]

http://sfgate.com
Spring cleaning -- the eBay way
S.F. company makes house calls to sell your stuff online for you
- Pia Sarkar, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 26, 2005

One man's trash is another man's opportunity to cash in on it.

Or so go es the thinking behind FoundValue, a San Francisco company that sends specialists into people's homes to size up their belongings and auction them on eBay for a fee.

"Who doesn't have stuff they want to get rid of?" said Stella Kleiman, 36, who started FoundValue as a one-woman operation out of her Manhattan apartment in 2001.

Kleiman has since moved her operations to her native home of San Francisco, hiring a support staff of 10 people working out of an office in the city's South of Market. She has also established a network of 60 specialists in 17 states, including one in Alaska. FoundValue's gross merchandise sales have been growing by 50 percent each month in this year alone.

"We just expand it more and more," Kleiman said. "There's so much stuff that people want to sell."

With a record 1.4 billion listings in 2004 and 56.1 million active users on eBay, Kleiman saw a market ready to be tapped. She also recognized the tedium that some people might experience in having to photograph items, post them on the eBay Web site, type up descriptions, respond to bidder inquiries, process winning bids, then haul items off to the post office. So Kleiman established a service that took care of all of that.

"To sell on eBay is time consuming," she said. "People can do it, but so many start the process of selling and never finish. No one wants to stand in line at the post office."

According to eBay, there are 30,000 individual trading assistants worldwide who serve as intermediaries between buyers and sellers, including 62 in San Francisco. Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said FoundValue is the first business he has heard of that actually makes house calls.

"It seems like a promising model," Durzy said. "It's up to them to drum up their business."

Although eBay keeps a directory of trading assistants on its Web site for customers to peruse, the company maintains no other ties. "In terms of their relationships with their customers, that's their business," Durzy said.

The company does, however, benefit from trading assistants and a company like FoundValue because they draw more customers to the Internet auction Web site, and eBay makes a commission from each sale. "We are very much in favor of people selling on behalf of other people," Durzy said.

Kleiman said her company follows a similar business model to Avon and Mary Kay cosmetics in that specialists are not FoundValue employees but independent contractors.

Specialists working on behalf of FoundValue are required to have access to a computer and a digital camera and must also have a knack for salesmanship, because they are paid on commission and must find their own customers. They must also have a flexible schedule, which explains why many of the company's specialists are stay-at-home moms and retirees.

Working at home

"It's entirely a home-based business," Kleiman said. "The margins in this business are so small that it makes more sense for them to work at home."

FoundValue customers get to decide whether they want to establish an initial bidding price for the items they want to sell on eBay or start at $1 and let the market decide.

FoundValue takes a 35 percent cut on each sale under $250, 20 percent on the next $750 to $1,000, and 15 percent on any remaining amount above $1,000. EBay and PayPal also charge separate commissions for each sale. FoundValue specialists keep a portion of their commission, and the rest goes back to the company. Kleiman said that specialists can make $200 to $1,000 a week, depending on how aggressive they are.

Kim Dempster, 38, started working as a specialist for FoundValue in February and has had six customers so far. A mother of two and a part-time marketing consultant, Dempster said that her job at FoundValue gives her extra pocket money, which helped her fund a family trip to Mexico last month.

On a recent evening, Dempster stopped by Celine Teoh's apartment in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood to survey her belongings. She picked through shopping bags of cast-off clothing, some barely worn, others that still had their original price tags attached.

Teoh looked on anxiously as Dempster got down on her knees and sifted through the bags. "I've always meant to get rid of this stuff but never had the time," explained Teoh, 30, who has lived in the one-bedroom apartment since 2000.

Treasure hunt

Among Teoh's stash were Earl jeans, Donna Karan khaki pants, Three Dots cotton tank tops and an Yves Saint Laurent scarf. "I'm looking for brand names that I know," Dempster said.

Teoh pulled out a pair of hot-pink velour pants in hopes of impressing Dempster.

"How many times have you worn it?" Dempster asked her.

"Maybe five times," Teoh replied.

Dempster passed on the velour pants but hung on to other items she thought might sell, including two slinky evening gowns, a pair of black strappy shoes and some Gucci sunglasses.

Kleiman started out much the same way as Dempster when she created her business, learning over time which items could fetch a strong bid and which ones would flop.

These days, Kleiman can easily rattle off what sells (consumer electronics, designer accessories, musical instruments, sporting equipment) and what doesn't (clothing).

"(Clothing) is the one thing that everyone is trying to sell and that does not sell well," Kleiman said, unless the clothes are made by well-known designers.

Kleiman got her inspiration for FoundValue after she moved into her husband's apartment in Manhattan in 2001 and the couple had to consolidate their belongings. Kleiman's first sale was a wristwatch she found buried inside the side pocket of her husband's car for two years, which she auctioned on eBay for $150. Then she began selling his games and electronics. Soon, friends began inquiring if Kleiman could sell their stuff as well, and her business began to take off.

Dempster's ambitions are not as high as Kleiman's, but she is happy all the same. "As long as I can fit it into my routine, it's fun money," she said of her work for FoundValue. "I like the independence. It's sort of mindless. I can do it after the kids go to bed."

E-mail Pia Sarkar at psarkar@sfchronicle.com.
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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12) 365Gay: chigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays [Une nouvelle loi du Michigan permettra aux medecins de refuser certains traitements comme l'IVG et certains malades, comme les homosexuels, pour des raisons de moralité.]

http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/04/042204MichMed.htm

Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff

Posted: April 21, 2004 8:14 p.m. ET

(Lansing, Michigan) Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.

The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.

The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.

The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don't agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.

Three other three bills that could affect LGBT health care were also passed by the House Wednesday which would exempt a health insurer or health facility from providing or covering a health care procedure that violated ethical, moral or religious principles reflected in their bylaws or mission statement.

Opponents of the bills said they're worried they would allow providers to refuse service for any reason. For example, they said an emergency medical technicians could refuse to answer a call from the residence of gay couple because they don't approve of homosexuality.

Rep. Chris Kolb (D-Ann Arbor) the first openly gay legislator in Michigan, pointed out that while the legislation prohibits racial discrimination by health care providers, it doesn't ban discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation.

"Are you telling me that a health care provider can deny me medical treatment because of my sexual orientation? I hope not," he said.

"I think it's a terrible slippery slope upon which we embark," said Rep. Jack Minore (D-Flint) before voting against the bill.

Paul A. Long, vice president for public policy for the Michigan Catholic Conference, said the bills promote the constitutional right to religious freedom.

"Individual and institutional health care providers can and should maintain their mission and their services without compromising faith-based teaching," he said in a written statement.

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