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5 ) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Tree planting [Un casse-tête. Comment planter 10 arbres en 5 lignes de 4 ?]
http://www.cartalk.com

A gardener returns from work and is sitting at the kitchen table with his kids. The kids ask, "Did you work hard today, Daddy?" Dad says, "I did. I planted five rows of four trees each."

His little girl, wanting to show off her newfound skills with the multiplication tables, says, "You planted 20 trees, Daddy!" He says, "No, I'm sorry, you little twerp. That's wrong. I planted 10 trees." She responds, "That's impossible!"

The dad responds, "No, it isn't, and here's a hint: If you look at one of the math or history test papers that your teacher has returned to you recently, you're going to find the answer." The little girl sits there and thinks for a minute, and then she says, "I've got it!"

What did she find on her paper that gave her the answer?

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8) The Economist: Simplifying tax systems [Un taux unique d'imposition présente des avantages certains.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3860731

Simplifying tax systems: The case for flat taxes
Apr 14th 2005

Pioneered in eastern Europe, flat tax systems seem to work because they are simple

AN ARTFUL taxman, according to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, treasurer to Louis XIV, so plucks the goose as to obtain the most feathers for the least hissing. Such arts are lost in America. As the April 15th deadline for filing tax returns falls due, the hissing is as audible as ever. But Americans are not alone. New Zealand's tax code instils “anger, frustration, confusion and alienation” in the islands' businessmen, according to a 2001 report to ministers. Adam Smith spoke for many when he bemoaned the “unnecessary trouble, vexation, and oppression” the people suffer at the hands of the tax-gatherers.

The White House claims to be listening. Shortly after his election victory, President George Bush set up a panel to advise him on how to reform the tax system. A report is expected this summer. Judging by the remit he has given them, Mr Bush wants to iron out some of the kinks in the tax code that distort saving and deter work, while retaining tax breaks for charity and home-ownership. But he also wants to simplify the tax code for simplicity's sake.

The Americans are talking about it. Meanwhile in Europe, east of Vienna and as far afield as Russia and Georgia, they are actually doing it. In 1994, Estonia became the first country in Europe to introduce a so-called “flat tax”, replacing three tax rates on personal income, and another on corporate profits, with one uniform rate of 26%. Simplicity itself. At the stroke of a pen, this tiny Baltic nation transformed itself from backwater to bellwether, emulated by its neighbours and envied by conservatives in America who long to flatten their own country's taxes.

Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia's Baltic neighbours, promptly followed its example. In 2001, Russia too moved to a flat tax on personal income. Three years later, Slovakia imposed a uniform 19% rate on personal and corporate income, and set the same rate for its value-added tax (VAT) too, for the sake of symmetry rather than economic logic, it seems. In Poland, Civic Platform, a centre-right opposition party, wants to mirror Slovakia, only at the lower rate of 15%. In all, eight countries have now followed Estonia (see table).

Might America do the same? The tax system there has been debated for years. William Simon, America's treasury secretary under President Richard Nixon, wanted a system that looked “like someone designed it on purpose”. But the bewildering bulk and complexity of a modern tax code is not only the result of poor or malicious design.

Fairness is the chief reason why most countries have imposed multiple rates of tax. In Canada, Australia and the European Union, for example, staple foods, but not restaurant meals, are exempted from value-added tax. This is deemed fair because the poor spend a greater share of their income on unprepared food. It can lead to nonsense, however. Jeffrey Owens and Stuart Hamilton of the OECD point out that hot roast chicken is taxed, but cold roast chicken is not. “Does anyone expect tax administrators and business owners to have thermometers on hand when they do their tax calculations?” they ask, only half in jest.

In Luxembourg tax collectors work with no fewer than 17 different tax brackets, to ensure rich Luxemburghers pay a greater proportion of their income than their slightly less rich countrymen. The international trend, however, is away from such pointillism towards broader brushwork. Between 2000 and 2003, the OECD reports, seven of its members (including Luxembourg) cut the number of brackets, although Canada, Portugal and America all added one.

Fewer brackets are simpler to administer, but one bracket is simplest of all. Under a pure flat tax, the taxman takes the same cut from the last dollar you earn that he took from the first. The appeal to high earners is obvious. But the administrative elegance of such a system is not so immediately apparent. Because every dollar is taxed at the same rate, it does not matter to the tax collector how many dollars are going to whom. Thus, in principle, the taxman could simply withhold 20% of a company's payroll, without needing to know who was paid what. Add a second rate of tax, however, or a personal exemption, and the tax collector must find out how much money is going into each pay packet before he can be sure of collecting the right amount from the right person. In America, for example, the tax collector needs to tax the wage packets of 130m or more employees, rather than simply taxing the payrolls of 8m or so enterprises.

How much fairness is gained for all this extra complexity? Surprisingly little, suggest Messrs Owens and Hamilton. In New Zealand, for example, only the richest tenth of households pay much more under the country's progressive income tax than they would under a 25% flat tax (see chart). Most of the redistribution in New Zealand is carried out on the other side of the government's ledger, by spending more money on poor people.

To the layman, a flat tax simply means a single rate of income tax. But the connoisseur of the flat tax can distinguish several different varieties. In America the flat tax is associated with a proposal advanced by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka, two economists at the Hoover Institution. Their tax, which falls on businesses and households, and allows a personal exemption, is designed not to tax saving. It thus resembles a consumption tax, such as VAT, more than a traditional income tax, which is typically also levied on returns to saving, such as interest and dividends. Slovakia, which taxes profits firms make, but not the dividends they distribute, perhaps comes closest to this model.

Flat, not low

Nor are flat taxes synonymous with low taxes. Certainly, most countries have cut their tax rates as they have flattened them. In 1994, Ukraine's top rate reached the stratospheric level of 90%, before descending, in stages, to its current single rate of 13%. But Lithuania's 33% flat rate is too high for some American conservatives.

Nevertheless, Lithuania's example might make flat taxes more palatable to the social democrats of western Europe. Miguel Sebastián, an economic advisor to Spain's socialist government, has advocated (largely in vain to date) a flat tax of 30% on Spanish incomes. Last year, a panel of academics set up by Germany's finance ministry also proposed a 30% flat tax on all personal and corporate income.

Flat taxes differ in scope as well as height. Since 2001, Russia has imposed a single 13% tax rate on all personal income. But it has a different rate for corporate profits: 35% at the time of its 2001 reform. Slovakia's flat tax, by contrast, covers both personal income and corporate income, as well as VAT. Taxing pay packets and profits at the same rate discourages an obvious form of “tax arbitrage”. For example, it was reportedly quite common for Slovak salarymen to declare themselves self-employed, while continuing to work for the same company much as before. Their wages would then be taxed as profits. Not only that, their lunch could be counted as a business expense.

Unfortunately, Slovakia's fiscal purism is somewhat adulterated by a heavy payroll tax. The social-security contributions of employees and employers combined amounted to almost half of labour income in 2004. Since this burden falls on earnings from work, not from capital, it restores the incentive for Slovaks to convert one into the other, by declaring themselves self-employed subcontractors. It may also drive some economic activity into the shadows, where the social-security agency cannot find it.

At the time of its reform, Estonia also taxed labour and capital at the same rate. After 2000, however, it chose not to tax profits at all until they are distributed to shareholders as dividends. This gives companies an incentive to retain their earnings and reinvest them. Indeed, very little of the burden of taxation in Estonia falls on corporations directly: corporate taxes accounted for only 3.6% of total tax revenues in 2003.

Estonia's economy has grown impressively since its 1994 reform. Growth reached double digits in 1997, and has since settled at around 6% annually, after a slump at the turn of the century. Repealing its high tax rate on the rich did not erode the country's tax base as some might have feared. In 1993, general government revenues were 39.4% of GDP; in 2002, they were 39.6%. Estonia now plans to cut its flat tax from 26% to 20% by 2007.

But how much do Estonia's robust revenues owe to its flat income tax? Perhaps less than is frequently advertised. In 1993, the year before its reform, Estonia's multiple personal income taxes raised revenues amounting to 8.2% of GDP. In 2002, its flat income tax raised revenues worth just 7.2%. Indeed, the flat income tax that generated so much excitement abroad seems to be carrying less weight than Estonia's old-fashioned VAT, which raised 9.4% of GDP in revenues in 2002.

VAT is, of course, the flattest tax of all. It levies a uniform rate on the goods you buy, taking a constant cut of your money when it is spent as opposed to when it is earned. Estonia's VAT is also quite broad, leaving relatively few things out (hydropower and windpower were two curious exceptions). The same point could be made about Slovakia. At 19%, it has a relatively low rate of income and corporate taxes, but one of the highest rates of VAT in Europe. It may be this high rate of VAT, not the flattening of its other taxes, that sustains the government's revenues in the future.

Flat taxes on the steppes

The most remarkable turnaround in government revenues was recorded in Russia. Prior to its 2001 tax overhaul, the federal government's tax-raising powers were rapidly deserting it. Clifford Gaddy and William Gale of the Brookings Institution report that tax arrears amounted to 34% of collections in 1997. By 1998, federal revenues had fallen to just 12.4% of GDP, leaving the government unable to pay its creditors. Investigators appointed by the president revealed that Russia's biggest enterprises ignored 29% of their taxes and paid another 63% in kind, with goods and services the government might or might not want. In lieu of $80,000 in taxes, one company reportedly offered the government ten tonnes of toxic chemicals.

On January 1st 2001, Russia flattened and broadened its personal income taxes, collapsing 12%, 20% and 30% bands into a single, uniform 13% rate. The state also withheld taxes at source, identified taxpayers by number, and audited suspected tax-dodgers. Messrs Gaddy and Gale note that no tax system could hope to bring in much revenue without these rudimentary instruments of tax enforcement.

How did revenues respond? A year after the reform, the personal income tax was raising almost 26% more revenue in real terms. Some of this was due to the rebound in the economy: real wages grew by 12% that year, and the take from all taxes, flat or otherwise, consequently improved. But the surge of rubles encouraged by the flat tax was more sustained.

A careful study by two IMF economists, Anna Ivanova and Michael Keen, together with Alexander Klemm, of the Institute of Fiscal Studies in London, tries to unearth the causes of this pleasant fiscal surprise. They find little evidence that Russians, freed from the yoke of progressive taxation, suddenly started working much harder. This is perhaps not surprising, as Russia's reform actually raised personal income taxes for the many households that previously fell into the 12% bracket.

They did discover a conspicuous increase in compliance with the tax authorities, however. In the year before the flat tax, Russians in the two higher tax brackets reported only 52% of their income to the taxman. In 2001, after falling into the new, all-encompassing 13% bracket, these same households reported 68%.

Many advocates of the flat tax, particularly in America, argue that it sharpens the incentive to work. A progressive income tax, they claim, deters extra effort from society's best-paid (and therefore most productive) members. Russia's experience, however, suggests that the principal virtue of the flat tax is its simplicity. The government's revenues did not surge because Russians suddenly squared their shoulders and straightened their backs. Rather, Russia's tax system became easier to administer and easier to comply with.

America is not Russia. It has a functioning tax system, albeit a clumsy one, so has something to lose from uprooting its tax system and starting again. But the potential gains are not negligible. In a typical year, the IRS estimates that for every dollar it collects, another 19 or 20 cents is owed, but not paid. This shortfall amounted to between $312 billion and $353 billion in 2001. Small businesses fail to report about 30% of their earnings. Babysitters and gardeners fail to report 80%, says the IRS.

In part, the tax system is burdensome because people dodge it. Every loophole that is exploited must be plugged. Every blurry line that is crossed must be sharpened. But Messrs Owens and Hamilton worry that the tax-codifiers and the tax-dodgers are locked in a mutually destructive “arms race”. The code is made more complex, because of tax wheezes. More people then seek to avoid taxes. The best way to fight tax avoidance, then, is with simplicity.

As every American knows, their country was founded in the wake of a tax revolt. What most forget is that the so-called “Boston tea party”, a raid on the cargo of British ships in Boston harbour, was not provoked by a tax hike. The British had in fact scrapped duties on tea, cutting out commercial middlemen. It is not going too far, then, to suggest that the American Revolution was provoked by a simplifying tax reform. Mr Bush must hope his own reforms, should they ever see the light of day, will encounter less stiff resistance.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, was devised during its developers’ early attempts to digitize libraries. With the search business booming, Google has returned to its roots in an ambitious endeavor to digitize the world's books. The project, called Google Print, is beginning with the collections of four colleges and the New York Public Library, but Google is not stopping there, which is raising some eyebrows internationally. Leading the chorus of anxiety, predictably enough, was the president of the National Library of France, who fears a super search engine of the world's books controlled by an American company will inevitably exacerbate American cultural imperialism. Jean Noel Jeanneney's concerns prompted the European Commission to fund its own European digital library, and he joins us now from Paris. Jean Noel, welcome to the show.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Thank you for welcoming me.

BOB GARFIELD: When did you first learn of Google's plans, and what, what was your immediate reaction?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, reaction was satisfaction. It was obvious for me that it was one important step in the direction of what we all dream of, which is the possibility to give to a world audience access to huge parts of human culture.

BOB GARFIELD: But you clearly are no longer quite as sanguine about the plans. What is your principal objection?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: You must understand – I have nothing against it. I think Google is quite a precious invention, and we all use Google. But I think you in America know very well how dangerous it could be to have only this private-owned and American searching engine dominating all over the world. You are the country who has invented the Sherman Act against monopoly.

BOB GARFIELD: How does the storage of book pages – pages that ultimately will be accessible to anyone in Europe and elsewhere, how does that threaten France?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: It's a question of hierarchy. It's a question of page ranking. We believe that it will be quite normal to expect American libraries to organize that page ranking in a way which would be, of course, influenced by the American civilization. I didn't want this American mirror to be proposed all over the world to all the peoples. I wanted them to be able to choose and to make their own opinion, forgetting to – the different possibilities of the cultural look to, to the – our history and our actuality.

BOB GARFIELD: You're just suggesting that the tendency of Americans to look at American works will automatically relegate French authors and other non-American authors to a lower page rank, and thus become a kind of perpetual motion machine for over-emphasizing works most interesting to Americans.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: As you know, Google's algorithm is mysterious. We do not know it. It's a kind of industrial secret, like the way you create Coca-Cola. But what is clear, as far as normal Google is concerned, is that there is a tendency to go to sites which are already well-known.

BOB GARFIELD: Isn't it possible that the Google technology will actually be a force to defeat American cultural imperialism, because it will reflect the usage patterns of people worldwide?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: I know that the motto of Google is the ambition to "organize the information of the world." When you say you organize, you are not only a passive mirror. Google is bound to propose things as a kind of an enormous dictionary, with a coagulation of facts, facts and facts. Of course if you want to know what Lincoln said, you will probably find it easily. But if you want to think on the question of relationship between democracy and capitalism, for instance, then you need to have a thread; you need to be helped. You need to have an organized corpus. We don't want to have only bits of information, but to propose our own organization of the culture of the world. For instance, we have created and maintained the French cinema. We don't want to have dumping, to invade our screen, so we have protected ourselves. In the field of internet, it's not possible to have a defensive attitude, but it's possible to have an offensive attitude. I mean to go on and digitize ourselves and the whole world will be richer because of that type of competition.

BOB GARFIELD: Very well. Well, Jean Noel, thank you so much.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Jean Noel Jeanneney is president of the National Library of France. Susan Wojcicki is Google's director of product management, and she's spearheading Google Print. She says there is no most favored nations status when it comes to Google searches, so the nations of Europe have nothing to fear.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: We have a technology called Page Rank, and what Page Rank does is the page looks to see who links to that page, and so if a lot of pages have linked to a specific page, then we count that like a vote. It's a very democratic way of trying to understand what is important to our users, and so it's not Google coming in saying these are the most important pages. It's actually what the web has selected to be the important works. So different languages or different collections will link to their own material that they see most relevant for them, and so the net result is whatever is most relevant for an English-speaking audience would come up to the top, as opposed to whatever is most relevant for a French-speaking audience.

BOB GARFIELD: But is the use of Google so heavily influenced by American users and linkers at this stage as to defeat, at least in the beginning, the ultimate promise of Google's evenhandedness?

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Over 50 percent of Google's traffic is non-English traffic. And so, if Google were to do something in some way bias the results to be more English or more American, and that wasn't the right thing for our users, we would expect our users to go somewhere else to do their searches. In order to remain competitive, from a business standpoint, it makes sense for us to offer the right results to the users, regardless of what country or language they're in.

BOB GARFIELD: Google, the search engine, sustains itself by selling placements on search result pages to advertisers who have paid for their messages to come up based on certain key words.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Uh-huh.

BOB GARFIELD: What is the business model for Google and the books of the world?

SUSAN WOJCICKI: The business model for Google Print is exactly the same as our business model for our main search, and the goal of the program as well is that you're able to come to Google, you're able to type in any word, and we are able to present books that would be relevant to your search, and when you actually go to that book, and click on it, you can either find a library where you can find it, or you can actually find where you could purchase that book. And we would show advertising on the right hand side, just like we're doing today.

BOB GARFIELD: On the subject of business, I think one of the things that makes the French queasy is that so many pages from so many works from so many libraries around the world will be, in effect, owned – at least the, the digital images – will be owned by a for-profit American company.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Our focus and our passion is on making information available that otherwise would have been unavailable. I think what Google can bring to the table that will be valuable is Google can do this at scale. So no one has been able to digitize an entire collection. No one has been able to digitize in the Harvard volume range of 14 million volumes. We're bearing significant financial costs to do this, and we believe that it's the right thing for our users and for our search and for seekers of knowledge, so if there really is real concern about one company doing this, then I would expect that the market forces would come into play, and there would be another provider who would step in and do this.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Well, Susan, thanks very much.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Susan Wojcicki is Google's director of product management. She's spearheading Google Print, which is digitizing the libraries of the world.

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Human evolution: Homo economicus?
Apr 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Sound economics may lie at the heart of humanity's evolutionary success

SINCE the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, advocates of free trade and the division of labour, including this newspaper, have lauded the advantages of those economic principles. Until now, though, no one has suggested that they might be responsible for the very existence of humanity. But that is the thesis propounded by Jason Shogren, of the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues. For Dr Shogren is suggesting that trade and specialisation are the reasons Homo sapiens displaced previous members of the genus, such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), and emerged triumphant as the only species of humanity.

Neanderthal man has had a bad cultural rap over the years since the discovery of the first specimen in the Neander valley in Germany, in the mid-19th century. The “caveman” image of a stupid, grunting, hairy, thick-skulled parody of graceful modern humanity has stuck in the public consciousness. But current scholarship suggests Neanderthals were probably about as smart as modern humans, and also capable of speech. If they were hairy, strong and tough—which they were—that was an appropriate adaptation to the ice-age conditions in which they lived. So why did they become extinct?

Neanderthals existed perfectly successfully for 200,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived in their European homeland about 40,000 years ago, after a circuitous journey from Africa via central Asia. But 10,000 years later they were gone, so it seems likely that the arrival of modern man was the cause. The two species certainly occupied more or less the same ecological niche (hunting a wide range of animals, and gathering a similarly eclectic range of plant food), and would thus have been competitors.

Bartering for your life

One theory is that Homo sapiens had more sophisticated tools, which gave him an advantage in hunting or warfare. Another is that the modern human capacity for symbolic thinking (manifest at that time in the form of cave paintings and carved animal figurines) provided an edge. Symbolic thinking might have led to more sophisticated language and better co-operation. But according to Dr Shogren's paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens's dominance. It was a better economic system.

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade. The evidence suggests that such trade was going on even 40,000 years ago. Stone tools made of non-local materials, and sea-shell jewellery found far from the coast, are witnesses to long-distance exchanges. That Homo sapiens also practised division of labour and specialisation is suggested not only by the skilled nature of his craft work, but also by the fact that his dwellings had spaces apparently set aside for different uses.

To see if trade might be enough to account for the dominance of Homo sapiens, Dr Shogren and his colleagues created a computer model of population growth that attempts to capture the relevant variables for each species. These include fertility, mortality rates, hunting efficiency and the number of skilled and unskilled hunters in each group, as well as levels of skill in making objects such as weapons, and the ability to specialise and trade.

Initially, the researchers assumed that on average Neanderthals and modern humans had the same abilities for most of these attributes. They therefore set the values of those variables equal for both species. Only in the case of the trading and specialisation variables did they allow Homo sapiens an advantage: specifically, they assumed that the most efficient human hunters specialised in hunting, while bad hunters hung up their spears and made things such as clothes and tools instead. Hunters and craftsmen then traded with one another.

According to the model, this arrangement resulted in everyone getting more meat, which drove up fertility and thus increased the population. Since the supply of meat was finite, that left less for Neanderthals, and their population declined.

A computer model was probably not necessary to arrive at this conclusion. But what the model does suggest, which is not self-evident, is how rapidly such a decline might take place. Depending on the numbers plugged in, Neanderthals become extinct between 2,500 and 30,000 years after the two species begin competing—a range that nicely brackets reality. Moreover, in the model, the presence of a trading economy in the modern human population can result in the extermination of Neanderthals even if the latter are at an advantage in traditional biological attributes, such as hunting ability.

Of course, none of this proves absolutely that economics led to modern humanity inheriting the Earth. But it does raise the intriguing possibility that the dismal science is responsible for even more than Smith and Ricardo gave it credit.

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11) WLS TV: Packaging problem that plagued hot dog lovers solved [Un grand dilemme américain réglé : les saucisses sont conditionnées par 8 et les petits pains par 6. Un accord vient d'être conclu qui permettra de tomber juste en préparant ses hot-dogs.]
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/051705_ns_hot_dogs.html

Packaging problem that plagued hot dog lovers solved: Vienna and S. Rosen reach packaging agreement that eliminates waste
By Frank Mathie

May 17, 2005 — At one time or another all shoppers have faced the hot dog and hot dog bun dilemma. You either have to buy too many hot dogs or too few buns or you end up with extra buns and not enough dogs. But now dogs are dogs and buns are buns and finally the twain have met.

"Today we will fix a problem that just doesn't cut the mustard with the American public. Today every bun will have its dog."

Protesters gathered in front of the Thompson Center to bring attention to problem with buying hot dogs and hot dog buns. It seems you can never buy the same number of each. "Well you get too many buns for the number of hot dogs that you buy so you just have an odd number of buns at the end of your package of hot dogs," said Brady Luby, victim of buns and dogs dilemma.

Back in the old days you used to be able to go to the neighborhood bakery and buy, say, nine hot dog buns and then go to the butcher and buy nine hot dogs. Decades ago, supermarkets and packaging along came, creating a red hot crisis.

So that's why the makers of Vienna hot dogs and the bakers of S. Rosen buns signed a peace treaty and have ended this confusion that began at the dawn of supermarkets. "Bakers automatically started putting things in sixes and dozens. They've always worked in sixes and dozens," said Mark Marcucci, president of Alpha Baking Company.

"The meat people generally like one pound packages. Most jumbo packages come eight to a pound so somehow that one pound translated into eight hot dogs and that's where the industry has been," said Howard Eirinberg, president Vienna Beef Company.

It's estimated that millions of extra hot dog buns went unused every year. "Yeah, then you've got to feed them to the dogs," said one consumer.

Vienna and S. Rosen gave out free hot dogs to celebrate. One hot dog for every bun and nothing left over. Vienna will continue to package eight Franks and S. Rosen will now package eight buns to help eliminate the waste.

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12) The Denver Post/Sunday Style: Manhug! [Les hommes americains ne savent pas gérer les accolades.]
http://www.denverpost.com/style/ci_2740288/ci_2740289
sunday style
Manhug!: As men rub up against "The Embrace," confusion arises over when, where and how to do it
By Douglas Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer

The hug, long reserved for women, celebrating sports victories, and men from other countries, is muscling its way into everyday American Guydom. Stoic machismo still thrives, but at its heels yaps a touchier, Dr. Phil version of virility. Boundaries are eroding. Defenses are being scaled. The male hug is complicating everything.

Men accustomed to the automatic and dependable hand clasp accompanied with a brisk up-and-down pump at dinner parties and college reunions, now must preface their greetings or goodbyes with intricate and split-second calculations based on body language, length of friendship and other factors.

Do I shake or do I hug? Making the right choice matters. If one guy goes for the hug, but the other decides upon a handshake, they might collide. An excruciating dance will follow, as the poor lads work feverishly to determine what to do with their hands, their arms, their bodies. Memories of the previous disaster will haunt all following encounters. It's possible the fellows will even dread socializing, for fear of the paralyzing hug decision.

"It used to be a handshake. Now everyone wants to give the little bit extra," says Davis Cline, 43, sitting in the sun on the 16th Street Mall with a few of his fellow construction workers on a recent afternoon. As his colleagues "rated" the attractiveness of passing women, Cline said "there's a time and place" for the male hug. "I don't know you'd get in front of all of your construction buddies and give hugs," says the Lakewood resident. "Maybe we'd hit each other."

Whether to hug or hit sounds straightforward, but it's tricky, says Jason Tesauro, the author of "The Modern Gentleman," a guide to the protocols of maleness. Absent any formal rules about the matter, Tesauro says that "if you are in a casual scenario and you are greeting someone, I don't think a hug is out of place. It says you are an extroverted, demonstrative person." He hugs most of his male friends, he says, although he usually does not hug men upon meeting them for the first time. After that initial handshake, though, the hug could happen any time. "Saying goodbye is always safer," he says. "You've built up fellowship. It's the difference between a hello kiss on a first date and a good-night kiss."

There's more to the hug decision, however, than an embrace. The next question is: which hug? With Cline, "a handshake, a pat on the back, that's cool," he says. "But the full-fledged hug thing is out." So Cline opts for the ubiquitous handshake that has grown a back pat. Other men opt for the embrace, with one arm around the waist, and the other draped over a shoulder: back-clapping tends to accompany this hug.

Former Denver City Councilman Ed Thomas, a big hugger, says rules are few when it comes to the man-to-man embrace. Just don't take a hug too far, he warns. "If a hug becomes a mug, then you've got problems. You just have to know what that line is." A hug to Thomas is a "higher level of greeting," one he doesn't bestow upon other guys right away but will unleash with abandon at any point after introductions.

He's an unabashed, eager hugger, but he's no Norm Early, former Denver district attorney and now private businessman. Early is "the hug captain of the world," Thomas says. "When you get around that guy, he takes the cake. There's no two ways around it." Soon after becoming district attorney, Early recalls, "I remember when one cop said to another, 'You might as well go over and hug him because he's going to get you sooner or later."' Early advocates the full-on bear hug. He does not feel compelled to demonstrate his masculinity by slapping his partner's back mid-hug. He does not shrink from the male hug during introductions. "What often happens when you meet somebody the first time, the other people you already know, so you hug them, and then you say, 'I'm going to have to hug you too,"' he says. Otherwise, he says, if the new guy has his hand out, ready for a firm clench, "what I will normally do is say, 'Hey, I'm a hugger, not a shaker,' and basically take my hug."

Whether, and how, to hug or not falls along cultural lines too. One of them involves a handshake, a mutual tug inward, and a shoulder-bump. When Duke University professor of black popular culture Mark Anthony Neal is with men, he'll go right in for a certain kind of hug - as long as the other guy also is African-American. "If I was greeting a white guy, I would probably never go for the hug, it would always immediately be the handshake," says Neal, the author of the just-released book "New Black Man," about black masculinity in the 21st century. "In the case of black males, particularly around my age, 40, it's the hip-hop hug: a handshake, you pull yourselves together, and you bump."

The alternating approach - a handshake for a white guy, a hug for a black guy - is cultural, he says. "There are shared assumptions when I am greeting an African-American man ... there is a shared experience that connects us," he says. Hugging between African-American men, though common now, wasn't always so, Neal says. "For older African-American men, I would be more apt to handshake," he says. "I cannot imagine hugging my father."

At least two professors - Kory Floyd at Arizona State University and Mark Morman at Baylor University in Waco, Texas - have dedicated part of their careers to studying the male hug. The two often collaborate on research. Floyd, for example, has studied the forms and duration of hugs between men. Rarely do they last much longer than one second. As hugs extend to two seconds or more, men watching the huggers quickly begin assuming the embraces are romantic, instead of just friendly. Only men too engage in the combination handshake-hug, says Floyd. "It follows what we call an 'A-frame' configuration; the only body contact is the shoulders," he says. "Men often do it with their handshake in between them, so there is a physical barrier. The third thing is the aggressive patting on the back that comes along with it, which is a very combative gesture. It's a way for men to say, 'I have positive feelings for you, but let's show them in a way that is masculine and gender validating.' All of those things - distance, a barrier, the combative movement - are all stereotypically masculine ways of behaving."

Morman says male fear of hugging other men revolves around homophobia and family. Some straight guys worry that if they are seen hugging other men, they will be viewed as gay, he says. And for most men, he says, "fathers are the first role models we have for how to be men, and if Dad isn't hugging and kissing, chances are we aren't either."

While Morman agrees that hugging among American men is spreading, he says it always has occurred in certain contexts. The more "emotionally charged" the environment, he says, the more freedom men feel to hug one another. "If you are in the office, generally there is not a lot of emotion there," he says, and hugging remains taboo. But at a wedding or a funeral, or on a battlefield or basketball court, men for a long time have hugged without much hesitation. Watch ESPN for a few hours, and there's a fair chance you'll encounter lots of big men embracing, especially after a big play or a victory.

Hugging is OK in sports, Floyd says, because a sporting event is "a very gender-validating environment." On the court or the field, he says, "I'm not worried that my teammate will view (a hug) as a sexual type of behavior."

It doesn't take a touchdown to compel Tony Nalepa, 25, a Denver geophysicist with an Abe Lincoln beard, to embrace a buddy. "I'll hug my friends," he says, but his love of the hug doesn't extend to the office. "I certainly wouldn't hug my co-workers. I think they would get scared." To which Eric Mackey, 21, one of his office-mate lunch partners at an outdoor downtown table, let loose a mock sniffle and whimper, saying, "You'll hug your other friends, but not me." Nalepa's brother is "uncomfortable" with the hug, Nalepa says, "but I hug him anyway. It's more fun that way." Another lunch partner, Heath Robertson, 37, says he started hugging when he worked in South America, where people "thought I was strange because I didn't hug." Now, he says, "usually it's the handshake and the pat on the back deal," and it's reserved for family and close friends. He'll hug his martial-arts buddies, he says, "but usually we start grappling."

Robertson's experience in South America illustrates how hugging and handshaking have little to do with gender alone: Contact between males always is yoked to culture. In "high contact" cultures in southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, men will hug, hold hands, even kiss - "something most American men would consider a very intimate action," Floyd says. "In a lot of cultures, that kind of high contact - lots of touching, close personal space - isn't necessarily any more intimate than a handshake would be to us," he says.

America qualifies as a "medium-touch" culture, Floyd says, with some Northern European and Asian cultures - in Japan, for example, where people bow to one another instead of touching - registering as "low touch." In some places, everybody hugs, or everybody bows. In America, it's mixed. The handshake remains the standard greeting, but some guys hug with relish. Others recoil from outstretched male arms. Most men probably sit somewhere in between. It's when two on-the-fence huggers meet that it can get messy. Will either guy make the first move? If guys are OK with male hugging but still tentative, for fear of embarrassment, they should bury their worries, writes Michael Flocker, author of "The Metrosexual Guide to Style," in an e-mail.

"If, however, you do get caught going in for the hug and have second thoughts, don't panic," he says. "Just follow through, go for a quick pat on the back, and move on."

Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.

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13) CBC News: Ban on 'hoodies' sparks debate [Des commerces et centres commerciaux britanniques interdisent désormais l'entrée aux jeunes portant des casquettes et capuches.]
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/05/23/britain-hoodies050523.html
Ban on 'hoodies' sparks debate
Last Updated Mon, 23 May 2005 22:06:08 EDT
CBC News

LONDON - Several shop owners in Britain have banned youths wearing hoods and baseball hats in an effort to combat what they say is a growing problem with crime and intimidation of customers. Also fuelling the trend is a government campaign to tackle what has been referred to as the country's culture of disrespect. Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to make addressing the problem a priority during his third administration.

About a week ago, Britain's largest shopping complex, the Bluewater in Kent, banned hoodies – a term for the youths themselves or their hooded jackets and sweatshirts – to stop families from being intimidated by gangs. The centre says since then, the number of shoppers has risen by 22.6 per cent. "They're just hanging around in gangs," said one shop owner in Liverpool. "They've got nothing else to do, and it is really intimidating to people. I'm trying to stamp down on it."

But for many young people, wearing a hooded sweatshirt is just the latest trend. They say they don't want their clothes to automatically turn them into suspects. "I'm wearing a hood, and I'm not even a thief," said one teen in Liverpool in a CBC interview. "I'm wearing a hood because it's raining, but it doesn't mean I'm going to go in and rob that shop, does it?"

Several stores in the city have put up signs, saying clearly that hoodies are not welcome.

Some community workers say this whole stigma on young people is just going to isolate them even more, making problems with anti-social behaviour worse rather than better. "It's very controlling and frustrating for young people," said youth outreach worker Dhercoj Shamoo. "And they haven't even consulted young people themselves."

23 Nov 2004, 18:27 GMT - BNP Paribas [BNP.PA] has announced details of its plans to enter the Turkish banking market by buying a stake in TEB Mali Yatirimlar. The move offers the bank strong long-term growth prospects in an emerging market. It also further showcases BNP Paribas' acquisitory tendencies, which are built on the solid performance of its home business in France.

BNP Paribas has announced the acquisition of a 50% stake in TEB Mali Yatirimlar, the Colakoglu Group's holding company that has an 84.25% controlling stake in the TEB bank. The deal will cost BNP Paribas in the region of $217 million, subject to completion adjustments and an earn-out mechanism linked to the performance of TEB. The move follows BNP Paribas' announcement in July of its plans to explore a strategic partnership in the Turkish banking sector with the Colakoglu Group.

BNP Paribas perceives there to be a number of opportunities for synergies based primarily around exploiting BNP Paribas' product expertise and cross-selling know how.

The French bank's Turkish move comes on the back of a string of other international deals in 2004. BNP Paribas has been a key protagonist in a year that has seen a significant pickup in cross border financial services acquisitions.

The group has been very active in building up its European specialized financial services operations in leasing, real estate and consumer credit. This process has seen it undertake acquisitions via its BNP Paribas Lease Group, Aarval PHH, Cetelem and ATIS Real subsidiaries. It has also been busy in the US, completing two deals to acquire retail banking operations as well as the High Net Worth client base of Banque Sudameris in Miami.

Having built up a substantial war chest, BNP Paribas has clearly been able to leverage the financial strength of its domestic business to expand its geographic footprint. So far, its acquisitions have been selective and well priced. The Turkish move in particular gives the group access to stronger long-term growth prospects in an emerging market than it can realistically expect from its sizeable, but more mature, French business. BNP Paribas will also doubtless be keeping a close eye on Turkey's embryonic progress towards EU accession - if this process is successful, the TEB deal will look all the more shrewd.

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15) The Telegraph: MoD refused Asbo 'to beat down" peace protester [Le Ministère de la défense et la police britanniques se voient refuser une ordonnance 'anti-social behaviour order' destinée à faire partir une militante anti-guerre tenace. (Mais en imposant des conditions bizarres, à mon avis.]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/18/nasbo18.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/18/ixhome.html

MoD refused Asbo 'to beat down' peace protester
By Nigel Bunyan
(Filed: 18/05/2005)

The Ministry of Defence was criticised by a judge yesterday for trying to use an anti-social behaviour order to "beat down'' the legitimate protests of a peace campaigner.

District judge Roy Anderson said Lindis Percy had a right to demonstrate outside the American base at Menwith Hill, near Harrogate, North Yorks. He rejected a request - made jointly by the MoD police agency and North Yorkshire police - to have her kept away from the base by means of an Asbo.

Instead he ordered that the 63-year-old grandmother should be made the subject of an 8pm to 6am daily curfew and required to wear an electronic tag.

He had convicted her at an earlier trial of one count of obstructing the highway at Menwith Hill and four of obstructing a police officer.

Passing sentence at Harrogate magistrates' court, Judge Anderson said: "None of the incidents was accompanied by aggressive behaviour, abusive language or threats of violence.

''Mrs Percy has previous convictions but they all seem to relate to, and stem from, her activities as a peace campaigner. She may, in her relentless expression of her views, be thought by many to be a fanatic and, by some to be a crank. Nevertheless she is entitled to express these views unless she breaks the criminal law of this country.

''I am firmly of the view courts ought not to allow Asbos to be used as a club to beat down the expression of legitimate comment and the dissemination of views on matters of public concern."