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3) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Detective agency [Un casse-tête. Comment recruter un détective privé ?]
http://www.cartalk.com

Everyone remembers private investigator Paul Drake from Perry Mason--the Paul Drake Detective Agency. Well, many years ago Paul had to hire a new assistant. He had three candidates, so he decided to give them a little quiz. He said, "Look, guys, there's a crime that needs to be solved and there's a clue [indice] in one of the public libraries in Bakersfield, California. The clue is stuck inside a book, between pages 165 and 166. The book was written by two famous brothers about cars." And two of the guys jump up and run out the door. The third guy just sits there. Drake says, "You got the job." Why did he get the job? What did he know that the other two ding-a-lings didn't know?

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6 ) Fairfield Mirror: Substance-free floors take a hit from students [Des étages "sans substances" dans les résidences universitaires US ne font plus un tabac.
:)]
http://www.fairfieldmirror.com
Substance-free floors take a hit from some students
By Ashley Phan

A backlash appears to be developing at Fairfield toward substance-free floors. At Facebook.com, an "anti-substance free group" has popped up and includes students from all classes. Yet, most of the students have never lived on substance free floors.

Students who have lived on these floors find many advantages to the program. "I liked the sub-freeness of it," said Dwayne Franklin '06, a previous resident of a substance free floor. "It was clean and didn't smell every night. Sub-free is the way to be."

There are currently 120 students in the substance-free program on the third and fourth floors of Campion Hall. This year, there are not enough male students willing to participate in the program, so only one wing is substance free.

In previous years, housing has to turn away students who requested to live on the floor due to the amount of requests. "The substance-free floors typically are a great environment in which to live, with very little damage and late night disturbances," said Fran Koerting, director of residence life and housing. "A common misconception among those who do not live on the floor is that it is more studious or quiet; it often is one of the more social, interactive floors."

Students living on substance free floors are expected to abide by the substance free agreement which states they will not possess alcohol or tobacco products on the floor and will not return to the floor under the influence of alcohol, according to Koerting.

Kelly Sanders '07 lives directly below a sub-free floor in Campion Hall and thinks otherwise. "Although [sub-free students] seem quieter, I have occasionally seen several of them drinking at parties," she said.

Marsalis Paige '06 said that there were benefits to the sub-free floor. "The floor I live on now is really loud compared to my room in Regis when it was a sub-free floor," she said.

Ioanna Psaroudakis '07 empathizes with the students who choose to live on the sub-free floors. "Some students aren't interested in drinking," she said, " so it is good for them to be together and not feel pressured or deal with crazy drunkards."

Paige, who lived on a sub-free floor her freshman year, said it was like living on any other floor. "People still drank; the only difference was that if you got caught you got kicked off the floor," she said.

Residents who violate the agreement and do not live up to the expectations of the program will be moved off the substance free floor, according to Koerting. "I remember a kid that got caught drinking on our floor in Regis," said Paige, "It wasn't even a big deal, they just made him move off the floor."

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7) The Economist: French unemployment [Le chômage en France, dossier urgent mais difficilement traitable.]
http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3896305

French unemployment: Not working
Apr 21st 2005 | PARIS

Why France's unemployment is proving so intractable

IT IS early on a Friday, and the job-centre on the Rue Damrémont, on the northern fringes of Paris, is humming. Job-hunters browse offers pinned to the wall; others search on the internet. Massou, leafing through a folder of ads, has been looking for kitchen work—cleaning or dishwashing—for eight months. Previous jobs, as a security guard and at a printing works, were short-term only. “I've sent 20 CVs, but nobody has called me for an interview,” he says. Faker, 29, is also looking for restaurant work, but says most ads are for part-time or temporary jobs. Even for those, he has had no offers in two months. “When I ring, they say the job has gone.”

After dipping to 8.3% in 2001, unemployment in France has since been creeping relentlessly up. It hit 10.1% in January, well above the pre-enlargement EU average of 8.1%, and over twice Britain's 4.8%. For under 25s, unemployment is now over 22% (see chart). Worries about jobs, especially among the young, underlie much of the dislike of President Jacques Chirac's government, which faces a testing referendum on the draft EU constitution on May 29th. A new back-to-work plan is being implemented. But will it be enough?

The government has at least grasped the importance of the problem. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister, has promised to trim unemployment by 10%. Jean-Louis Borloo, minister for social cohesion and former mayor of the industrial town of Valenciennes, has pushed through a new law to revamp welfare and job schemes. Much of it is sensible and overdue. The public job-placement agency, ANPE, will face competition for the first time: at present, the private sector can offer only temping. New maisons de l'emploi (job-centres), loosely modelled on the British variety, will bring together recruitment, benefit and welfare services. By 2009, the number of apprenticeships will be increased by nearly 40%, to 500,000 a year. Over the next five years, a million people on welfare will be offered training and subsidised jobs. New fiscal incentives should help to create 500,000 domestic-service jobs over three years. The idea, says Mr Borloo, is to deal with labour-market “dysfunction”, and so reduce structural unemployment.

Implementing all this, however, is particularly complicated in France. The government does not run unemployment insurance. This job falls to Unedic, which is co-managed by employers and workers, who jointly set rules on entitlements, based on personal contributions. These are hugely generous: the top monthly allocation, dictated by previous pay, can be as high as €5,700 ($7,420), against £243 ($466) in Britain. Meanwhile the government finances welfare for those without insurance rights, as well as job-placement. The upshot is fragmented, and inefficient.

Getting the various agencies to work together is hard. Unedic and ANPE are currently squabbling over how to police benefit claims. Jean-Pierre Revoil, head of Unedic, told La Tribune this week that France had developed a “welfare culture” that needed tighter controls. In the new job-centres, it is unclear who will patrol the take-up of the new work schemes—or how tough they should be. “The system is voluntary,” says Mr Borloo, who argues that abuse is exaggerated. “We are not looking at suspension of benefits.”

Why does the government need such ambitious job schemes in the first place? Employment policies already cost €70 billion a year, yet they have done little to dent unemployment. Nor, Mr Raffarin has conceded, is it likely to shrink much before next year. The harsh answer is that the welfare system is not the real problem.

Economic growth in France is job-poor. In effect, the French pay a price for the protections—a high minimum wage, security from lay-offs, a short work-week—that those in permanent full-time work enjoy. In labour-intensive sectors, France has become highly automated, and many new jobs are temporary. A Unedic survey shows that around one-third of the jobs employers expect to create in 2005 will be short-term. This introduces flexibility, but it also creates a two-tier system: comfortable, sheltered jobs for some; precarious, temporary ones for others.

Young job-seekers tend most often to be excluded—hence their anxiety. Asked on television last week why Britain's unemployment was so much lower, Mr Chirac replied that its social rules would be “unacceptable” in France. In the Rue Damrémont, that falls flat: what is unacceptable is not being able to find a job.

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A French no would lead to a nasty period for the European Union

“THERE is no plan B” may be the most hackneyed phrase in the Brussels lexicon, trotted out whenever any EU scheme runs into trouble. But when it comes to the growing possibility that French voters will reject the new EU constitutional treaty in a referendum on May 29th, it rings true: there really is no plan B, or at least none that makes much sense.

Getting the constitution through was always going to be hard. It must be ratified by all 25 EU countries before it can come into force. But all the plan Bs so far have envisaged rejection by a small country, like Denmark, or a semi-detached one, such as Britain. A French non would be different. France was one of the six countries that got the European project going in the 1950s. Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, two Frenchmen, are seen as “founding fathers” of European unity; another, Jacques Delors, as the most successful European Commission president to date; yet another, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, chaired the convention that drafted the constitution. The French, unlike the British (or Danes), have adopted the single currency, the euro.

Despite all this, a string of opinion polls suggests that the no campaign is well ahead in France. President Jacques Chirac's intervention in the debate on April 14th, in a televised discussion with youngsters, has backfired, with the no vote gaining ground afterwards. A French rejection could also trigger a Dutch no in their referendum just three days later. Such a double blow would not only hit believers in “ever closer union”. It would also present some huge practical problems.

Faced with these, the new buzzword in Brussels is “de-dramatisation”: stay calm and stick together. The EU can keep functioning on the basis of its current rule-book, set out in the Nice treaty and its predecessors. Some may argue for pressing ahead with the ratification of the constitution (six EU countries have already passed it, with Greece doing so this week), in the hope that the document might yet be saved in some way. In the past, countries that rejected a treaty have been offered a few concessions and prevailed upon to vote again. But France is too big, and French objections to the constitution too large and inchoate, to be treated like this. Anyway, if the French could not get a constitution they liked from a convention that took place before EU expansion and was chaired by a former French president, it is hard to see how they could get a better one now.

If it were accepted that the constitution had been killed off, attention would turn to various clever technical fixes. Many of the constitution's provisions, such as a new EU diplomatic service, could be prised out of the document, and adopted by simple agreement between heads of state. Changes in the EU's voting system, or the abandonment of national vetoes over various EU policies, which clearly require changes to existing treaties, could then be put in a new slimmed-down document (“just one page”, says a Brussels optimist) and pushed through national parliaments, with no need for pesky referendums.

Legally, all this might be possible. But it would ignore the new and unpredictable political mood that would surely follow from a French no. Fed up with the economic and political consequences of EU enlargement, France might be tempted to push for a radical reorganisation of the EU around the original six members. A country that is into its fifth republic would have no fear of a second EU. But the difficulty with French day-dreams of this sort is that, after a referendum failure, Mr Chirac would be too enfeebled politically to launch any such initiative. And the Germans, France's indispensable partners, might anyway be disinclined to follow him.

France might instead lapse into a long-term obstructionism that would make Britain look like a model European. After the French National Assembly rejected the European Defence Community in 1954, it took almost four decades to revive the issue of defence co-operation. A backlash against more EU enlargement could also follow. Plans for membership talks with Turkey in October might be put on hold. Even Bulgaria and Romania, with which the EU has now signed accession treaties, might be victims: their membership still has to be ratified by France.

The other great French bugbear, during the referendum campaign, has been “ultra-liberalism” being pushed in Brussels. Anything that looked like further liberalisation—above all the hated “Bolkestein directive” freeing trade in services—would surely run into ferocious French opposition. EU budget negotiations would also be tougher, with France determined both to hang on to farm subsidies and to scrap the British budget rebate.

The project unravelled

In Brussels, the gloomy talk is of a “period of stagnation”, after a French no. That is the most plausible outcome, and few EU citizens would notice the difference. But there is a worse possibility: that the EU might begin to break down. National governments, many of them in serious economic difficulty, might be tempted to seize on the unpopularity of the EU and ignore inconvenient edicts from Brussels. This process is well established for the euro. Germany and France have persistently breached the rules on budget deficits; deficits in Greece, Italy and Portugal are all soaring. This unravelling of EU discipline over the euro might spread to other areas.

True believers might bemoan this trend, but they may have only themselves to blame. Eurosceptics have long predicted that deeper integration based on shallow popular support would spark a backlash. And not just Eurosceptics. A year before the constitutional convention met, Frits Bolkestein, then a European commissioner, commented that “it would be a risky business to work towards a federal Europe, since there is a good chance of failure and Europe might then end up on the road to disintegration as a kind of reaction.” Perhaps the French should have listened to Mr Bolkestein, after all.

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I'm a few minutes late for lunch at the Internet Archive, but they know what kept me. The view of San Francisco Bay outside the archive's digs at the Presidio is captivating even if you already live here. Just up the road, the Golden Gate Bridge rises, impossibly huge and unbelievably beautiful, to straddle the bay. (Check out the satellite photo if you're prepared to weep with envy.) The wraparound splendor inspires fanciful thought. No wonder Gene Roddenberry conjured the Starfleet Academy right where I'm standing.

Thanks to the ruthless hippies who run local politics, the Presidio's former Army barracks are filled by nonprofits rather than condos. Search-engine wiz and dot-com multimillionaire Brewster Kahle founded the archive here in 1996 with a dream as big as the bridge: He wanted to back up the Internet. There were only 50 million or so URLs back then, so the idea only seemed half-crazy. As the Web ballooned to more than 10 billion pages, the archive's main server farm—hidden across town in a data center beneath the city's other big bridge—grew to hold a half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages.

Kahle is less the Internet's crazy aunt—the tycoon who can't stand to throw anything away—than its evangelical librarian. "The history of digital materials in companies' hands is one of … loss," he tells me in a rushed meeting. Like it or not, the Web is the world's library now, and Kahle doesn't trust the guys who shelve the books. They're obsessed with posting new pages, not preserving old ones. Every day, Kahle laments, mounds of data get purged from the Web: government documents, personal sites, corporate communications, message boards, news reports that weren't printed on paper. For most surfers, once a page disappears from Google's cache it no longer exists.

Instead of creating another startup that crawls the Web to make money, Brewster used his millions to preserve as much knowledge as possible and—just as important—make it accessible to anyone who can get to a computer. The archive's Wayback Machine has captured only a fraction of the Internet's history, but it still holds 40 billion pages from 50 million sites. With a couple of clicks, you can revisit CNN's home page from the day the U.S. began bombing Iraq and learn that salon.com was once a hairdressers' site.

As a time-travel device, the Wayback Machine is far from perfect. Many sites blocked Kahle from crawling them—thanks for nothing, Hotwired—and lots of copyrighted material has been removed at the owner's request. You can search old nytimes.com front pages, for instance, but the articles themselves are locked up in the Times' paid archive. My biggest gripe is that there's no way to run a simple keyword search over all 40 billion pages. Instead, you have to type in a specific URL and a date range and then click through a list of preserved copies of that page. Maybe someday they'll add a search box, but serving queries on a Web cache five times the size of Google's would take lots more hardware than what they've got under the bridge.

The Internet Archive isn't just the Wayback Machine—the nonprofit's two dozen or so employees have filled an equal amount of disk space with uploaded film collections, presidential debates, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and news broadcasts from the Middle East. The archive is especially keen on books. They've scanned about 25,000 of them so far as part of the Million Book Project, a collaboration with Indian and Chinese agencies to create an online library in the place of bricks-and-mortar reading rooms.

I test out the books project by spending an afternoon searching, reading, and printing pages from old tomes like Dion Clayton's English Costume, a 1907 coffee-table book on Brit dandies through the ages. Some of the scans look like awkward, off-center Xeroxes, but other ones let you search inside, just like on Amazon.com, or cut and paste passages into your homework. You'd better spell-check that homework, though. When I copy a passage from Clayton's book that begins, "Here you see the coat," it comes out as, "Here $'ou see tlae coat."

In cost and complexity, scanning a million books is as big a challenge as hosting a million gigabytes (they designed custom servers to solve that problem). Cheap is the watchword for everything here. I sit in on a demo of a home-brew book scanner designed to cost a fraction of automated commercial models. It's a black-curtained box about 4 square feet, with two store-bought digital SLR cameras hung to point at the pages of a book cradled below. Software on a nearby workstation turns the photos into XML-enhanced files that go into a searchable, sharable database.

The final step in building the archive into a true global library: getting you to contribute. Ourmedia, a project launched two weeks ago, offers free, unlimited, permanent storage of your videos, photos, Word files, podcasts—anything that's not porn and not covered by someone else's copyright. The one catch: The files, stored on Internet Archive servers, will be freely available to anyone in the world.

Sure, you could store your files for free—and in private—in your Gmail account or share your photos on Flickr. But Kahle thinks you should trust him, not Internet companies that have a habit of disappearing along with their customers' data. Remember MP3.com? After convincing thousands of indie bands to create pages and upload music, the site's owners sold the company and the whole thing got trashed on short notice. Google may have a zillion dollars, a do-gooder management team, and a wide-open future, but the same was once true of Netscape.

An A-list of big-brain bloggers like Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold is supplying the ideas for Ourmedia, but Kahle's superfat server setup is what makes the whole thing possible. After a day at the archive, I have no doubts about his sincerity or his team's dedication. What I worry about is his $5 million budget—that's a lot closer to mine than to Google's. And I wonder who could replace Kahle's brains, drive, and connections if he gets hit by a Presidio bus. The archive has already outlasted both MP3.com and Netscape, though. Maybe that's because, unlike the other guys, Kahle planned on nonprofitability from the start.

Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software engineer and manager.

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"Senioritis" often appears toward the middle of the year, when many students have met graduation requirements and take largely electives.

In the past, "we thought high school has to be four years and college has to be four years," says Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and chairman of the National Governors Association. "These are notions that have to be revisited."

Some state proposals include financial incentives for early graduation and expanding "dual enrollment," in which students simultaneously earn high school and college credit. Some form of dual enrollment is available in 38 states; proposals include making credits transferable to more colleges and offering courses online. Other plans involve making high school curricula more rigorous or increasing graduation requirements. (Related story: Search for a 'senioritis' cure is on)

Governors cite a ripple effect: leaving high school early frees up classroom space, which reduces construction costs for new schools. Students save on tuition by taking college-level classes early, and states pay less to subsidize tuition at state universities. When students earn degrees sooner, campuses have space for others.

"The 12th grade is the biggest wasteland in America," says Charles Reed, chancellor of the California State University System, where he says half the students were unprepared in math or English because they didn't take rigorous classes as seniors.

"I think we will see more and more students finishing their primary education and moving to higher education more quickly after 11 or 11½ years, rather than waiting for the historic 12-year graduation cycle," says Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas. "Where we're heading is K-11 or 'K through F' — finish, whatever that is."

But critics say focusing on senior year alone is too narrow an approach. "You have to look at the whole four-year experience," says Gerald Tirozzi of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "You can't just suddenly attack senior year."

Among programs already in place:

• In Virginia, seniors can get up to one semester of industry-specific technical training tuition-free.

• In Texas, students in a pilot program at 10 high schools across the state can earn in five years a high school diploma and an associate's degree. Perry envisions that the state might pay first semester college tuition as an incentive for an early exit from high school. "Give them a semester for a semester," he says.

• In North Carolina, the state has increased graduation requirements in English and math. "What I'm trying to do is raise the level of expectations for our kids," says Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat.

Governors in Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Mississippi are also focusing on senior year. Mississippi legislators just rejected Gov. Haley Barbour's most recent proposals, but he is expected to pursue them further.

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11) Slate/Moneybox: Why big companies are selling their office buildings [Pourquoi les grandes entreprises se défont de leurs sièges sociaux.]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2117674/

moneybox Daily: commentary about business and finance.

Psst, Wanna Buy My Skyscraper?
Why big companies are selling their office buildings.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005, at 1:07 PM PT

Everybody knows that in this hot real-estate market, it's better to be an owner than a renter. But some of America's biggest companies are selling their trophy homes and becoming tenants. Earlier this month, both Metropolitan Life and Verizon announced they were selling their massive headquarters buildings in New York.

Do these longtime owners know something we don't about the health of Gotham's frothy real-estate market?

Prices for commercial real estate in Manhattan have been rising, just like prices for apartments. And, as with co-ops and condos, cash from around the world is chasing expensive commercial space in New York. But the sell-offs by these two savvy blue-chips (and several others) don't necessarily signal an impending top in commercial real-estate prices. Rather, they are testament to something rare in American business: the sublimation of corporate egos to the balance sheet. Big, showy homes and big, showy offices were accoutrements of the imperial CEO of the 1990s. The new, humbler, shareholder-friendly CEOs may focus less on owning trophy properties than on simply getting the best deal they can for office space.

Corporate headquarters buildings have been status symbols for decades. But today, CEOs can maintain many of the benefits of ownership without the downside. If a company rents enough space from some anonymous professional landlord like Hines, it can keep its name on the building and keep the massive, tangential load of a skyscraper off its balance sheet. In early April, Met Life agreed to sell the Met Life Building (formerly the Pan Am Building) for a whopping $1.72 billion, which allows the company to notch a $750 million gain. But Met Life will still keep space for top executives in the convenient building, and the building's name will remain the same.

Many large companies now find themselves in the same position that elderly homeowners do. An asset they bought and paid for a long time ago has appreciated massively. But maintenance is a nuisance, and the old pile may have outlived its usefulness now that the kids are grown. At a time when incomes are no longer growing rapidly, the home office can be a huge untapped source of cash. When McGraw-Hill, the publisher of Business Week, sold its 45 percent interest in the McGraw-Hill Building for $450 million in December 2003, it booked a pretax gain of $131 million and freed up cash to invest in the business. The company is staying put, and the building will continue to be known as the McGraw-Hill building.

Because mergers, restructurings, and acquisitions can rapidly change the space needs of even the most-established companies, renting can offer significant advantages over owning. It's easier to sublease unwanted space than to sell it. And as companies continually diversify and rationalize, they try to keep the smallest number of people possible at the downtown headquarters. Verizon, now embroiled in the MCI takeover battle, earlier this month sold 80 percent of its 41-story headquarters building in midtown Manhattan for $505 million. Verizon is relocating top brass to extra space it has in a building it owns in lower Manhattan.

Corporate property owners are also capitalizing on the continuing boom in residential real estate. One of the most powerful economic truths in New York today is that high-end apartments—not offices—are the most economically efficient use for buildings in every part of town. In March, Met Life sold its old headquarters building as well, for $918 million. (The 1 Madison Ave. building, which Met Life owned for nearly a century, once held the distinction of being the world's tallest.) Its new owner, S.L. Green, run by the lesser-known and much-richer brother of 2001 Democratic mayoral candidate Mark Green, plans to turn a portion of the Met Life complex into condos.

Of course, not everyone is selling. Empire-builder Barry Diller has commissioned Frank Gehry to build a new headquarters for Interactive Corp. in Chelsea. Hearst Corp., realizing a long-suspended dream, is building a cool new Norman Foster-designed tower on Broadway. And others are trading up. The New York Times Co. (one of my employers) is plowing a big chunk of the proceeds from selling its landmark headquarters on 43rd St. into a Renzo Piano showpiece around the corner. Bank of America, which last summer sold its 50 percent interest in the trophy Bank of America Center in San Francisco, is building a trophy tower in midtown Manhattan.

The decisions to construct these buildings were made a few years ago, before the new sales trend set in. And some savvy corporations that had planned to build are thinking twice about it, wondering if they can find a better use of cash than Manhattan real estate. Goldman Sachs, a firm regarded by many on Wall Street as the smartest of the smart money, last summer committed to build a new headquarters tower in lower Manhattan. But on April 5, the Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman wasn't going to build it after all. The same day, the Journal also reported that the investment bank had just snapped up a sleek corporate office tower in a different thriving business center—Shanghai.