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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: OLDER WORKERS (89%); BABY BOOMERS (87%); SHAREHOLDERS (77%); LABOR DEPARTMENTS (72%); CORPORATE WRONGDOING (72%); STATISTICS (69%); LABOR SECTOR PERFORMANCE (64%); FINANCIAL RESULTS (52%); BUSINESS EDUCATION (77%) ORGANIZATION: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY (56%) GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (71%) CALIFORNIA, USA (71%) UNITED STATES (71%) LOAD-DATE: January 19, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTO PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1170 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Genetic Bank Raises Issues of Practicality and Privacy BYLINE: By AL BAKER SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1158 words Simple cotton swabs would be rubbed inside the mouths of suspects. The collected human cheek cells would then be mined for DNA strands. And those samples would be put together as potential evidence in prosecutions. But those few elemental steps -- to be taken by city police officers -- would represent a vast expansion of the tools available for solving criminal cases under a proposal laid out by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Thursday in his annual State of the City address. Virtually all suspects would have samples of their DNA taken. The concept leaps far beyond current practice, which is collecting DNA just from those convicted of all felonies and some misdemeanors. Mr. Bloomberg also challenged scientists to invent a portable, suitcase-size device to allow the Police Department to analyze DNA more quickly and thoroughly at the scene of a crime. He said he would be willing to pay a ''six-figure prize'' -- as much as $999,999 -- to whoever invents the device. A day after the mayor's speech, however, important questions about the plans hung in the air, even among supporters. Among them: With 375,659 felony and misdemeanor arrests last year, how realistic would it be to test the DNA of everyone charged with a crime? What are the costs and hurdles for implementing a program like this? How quickly can a police force of tens of thousands of officers be trained? Another question is how likely Mr. Bloomberg's DNA testing proposal is to pass in Albany, especially among divided state legislators who are up for re-election this year and who blocked approval for expanding genetic fingerprinting for those convicted of felonies and some misdemeanors for several years before approving it. A move by Gov. Eliot Spitzer to expand the DNA database -- not nearly as radically as Mr. Bloomberg wants to -- died on the vine last year in the state Capitol. The Republican-led Senate passed it; the Democrat-led Assembly passed a different measure. Still, the importance of DNA testing resounds in law enforcement. It was discussed on Thursday at the state District Attorney's Association's board of directors meeting, said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney. Those prosecutors embrace the notion of expanding genetic testing, he said, because ''too many'' violent people ''all too often escape identification and remain free.'' At the same time, Mr. Brown says that he and his colleagues see the challenges and quandaries raised by Mr. Bloomberg's proposal -- and heed them. ''We recognize the fact that there are these kinds of issues, such as the impact on the DNA labs, the costs, the sealing of case files in the event of a dismissal of the charges, and the training issues and all of the civil liberties issues,'' Mr. Brown said. ''Those are questions that have to be answered, and we recognize that fact, but we would like to move in the direction of getting DNA for all arrests, much the way we do with fingerprints.'' As a practical matter, Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a group that monitors crime and police policies, said that administering a DNA test was the easy part. ''It is, in fact, the easiest biological sample to take,'' Mr. Aborn said. ''You literally take a cotton swab and rub it inside the cheek.'' More complicated, and potentially time consuming, is building up the kind of expertise and infrastructure to collect and store the DNA, and to train people in laboratories in the correct handling of this potential evidence. John Feinblatt, New York City's criminal justice coordinator, said that ''very little training'' was needed for police officers to learn to do the swabbing; it takes 30 minutes and is more about completing paperwork than taking the swab. He said the training would be carried out at the Police Academy or during in-service training. Currently, the Police Department takes about 350 swabs a month, so a base of knowledge exists. At the state police crime laboratory in Albany, where the samples would be sent, a ''huge statewide apparatus'' is in place that has been managing incremental increases in the DNA caseload over the years, he said. In terms of cost, Mr. Feinblatt said the program would probably cost about $7 million annually, with kits priced at $4 each. But he said that the costs were negligible. ''When you think about the potential for preventing crime, it is hard to put a dollar figure on preventing homicides and rapes and robberies and burglaries, which are the kinds of cases most commonly where you find DNA evidence,'' Mr. Feinblatt said. Chauncey Parker, who was the director of criminal justice services under Gov. George E. Pataki, said an expansion of the DNA database would require more resources for equipment and personnel. But, he said, the database is capable of expansion. ''It's not like you need to invent the iPod; you are just making more of them,'' said Mr. Parker, who is director of the New York/New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federally financed crime-fighting program. ''This is no more complicated; it is just scaling it up.'' However, officials at the New York Civil Liberties Union said that privacy issues aside, the mayor's proposal would require turning the collection and analysis of DNA samples into a mass-production operation. That, said Donna Lieberman, the group's executive director, would be an invitation to error, inefficiency and fraud. ''By massively expanding the database to include misdemeanors, what you do is overwhelm the system with samples that inevitably slow down the process of investigating,'' said Robert Perry, the group's legislative director. ''This is not as simple and clear a process as it is sometimes presented.'' Ms. Lieberman said DNA analysis is a precise science, and its precision ''depends on a whole host of human input, which can go awry at any step in the process.'' Mr. Feinblatt stressed that once the DNA was collected, it would be treated the way fingerprints are treated now. ''If somebody is found not guilty, what happens to the fingerprint?'' he said. ''The person can have a choice of having it destroyed or returned to them, and we would treat DNA the exact same way.'' For as many questions as they raised, several people in and out of law enforcement praised the concept of the proposals, discounting criticism the ideas have drawn from privacy advocates and others. ''I think it is literally the 21st century fingerprint,'' Mr. Aborn said. ''And we should treat DNA samples the same way we treat fingerprints.'' As for the plan to offer up to the six-figure prize to any entrepreneur who can build a device to instantly analyze evidence, like blood, at a crime scene, Mr. Feinblatt said the administration was trying to encourage scientists' creative potential. ''We know that science is working hard on this issue,'' he said. ''By creating this prize, we are trying to push it over the finish line.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1171 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Google's Searches Now Include Ways to Make a Better World BYLINE: By HARRIET RUBIN SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1431 words Google announced a plan on Thursday that begins to fulfill the pledge it made to investors when it went public nearly four years ago to reserve 1 percent of its profit and equity to ''make the world a better place.'' The beneficiaries of Google's money range from groups that are fighting disease to those developing a commercial plug-in car. The company's philanthropy -- Google.org, or DotOrg as Googlers call it -- will spend up to $175 million in its first round of grants and investments over the next three years, Google officials said. While it is like other companies' foundations in making grants, it will also be untraditional in making for-profit investments, encouraging Google employees to participate directly and lobbying public officials for changes in policies, company officials said. Google may be one of America's 10 richest corporations as measured by market value, but its budget for philanthropy is minuscule compared with the $70 billion of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Still, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, expressed a hope back in 2004 that ''someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact.'' What it lacks in size, though, Google.org may make up in cachet. Larry Brilliant, a medical doctor who took on the role of director of Google.org 18 months ago, said he could not even begin to count how many spending proposals he had seen. ''There are 6.5 billion people in the world,'' Dr. Brilliant said in a recent interview, ''and in the last 18 months I've met 6.4 billion, all of whom want, if not some of our money, then some of the Google pixie dust.'' Dr. Brilliant, who moved to an ashram in northern India in the 1970s and went on to play a major role in eradicating smallpox in the country, likened his moral quandary in figuring out how to spend Google.org's money to that faced by a saint wandering the streets of Benares. ''There are 500 steps between the road and the Ganges,'' he said. ''On every step are beggars, lepers, people who have no arms or legs, people literally starving. The saint has a couple of rupees; how does a good and honorable person make a resource allocation decision? Do you weigh a hand that's missing more than a leg? Someone who's starving versus a sick child? In a much less dramatic way, that's what the last 18 months have been for us.'' DotOrg has focused on what it can do ''uniquely,'' said Sheryl Sandberg, vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, who, like all employees, is permitted to spend 20 percent of her time at the foundation or in other charitable ventures. ''If you do things other people could do, you're not adding value.'' In contrast to DotOrg's close tie to DotCom, employees of Microsoft have made Mr. Gates wealthy but have no official influence in how the Gates Foundation money is spent. The only urgency imposed on the foundation is how soon it can live up to the expectations. ''Building a new ecosystem is not an overnight phenomenon,'' Dr. Brilliant said. ''Here at Google if you have a project, you press Send. We won't work that quickly.'' But for all the enthusiasm for the new organization, there are critics. ''It's wonderful that this company is devoting massive resources to fixing big world problems, but they are taking an engineer's perspective to them,'' said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar at the University of Virginia. ''Machines and software are not always the answer. Global problems arise from how humans have undervalued each other and miscommunicated with each other.'' He pointed to Google.org's decision not to take a step like financing scholarships for girls in India who have not had access to education. ''That's what is so naive about Google.org's approach,'' he said. ''If you can educate a thousand girls in one state in India, you've already made a bigger difference than 99 percent of the human beings on earth because every one of those of girls can make a difference.'' The process of determining what to finance was not easy, said Jacquelline Fuller, the head of advocacy at Google.org. Beginning in the spring of 2007, ''the 20 team members had 20 ideas.'' Team members, she said, ''debated, cried and held hands as we tried to determine what kind of difference we could make.'' It took them almost a year to winnow down the list. Although it was just announcing its initiatives on Thursday, Google.org has already begun to give away some of its money. That is the case with grants for the first of its initiatives -- what the philanthropy calls ''predict and prevent.'' This effort focuses on strengthening early warning systems in countries around the world to detect a disease before it becomes pandemic, or a drought before it becomes a famine. To attain that, DotOrg has made a grant of $5 million to a nonprofit group that Dr. Brilliant helped to set up, though it is independent from DotOrg. Called Instedd, for Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, the group seeks to improve data and communication networks. An additional $2.5 million has been awarded to the Global Health and Security Initiative to respond to biological threats in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and China's Yunnan Province. ''In recent years,'' Dr. Brilliant said, ''39 new communicable diseases with a potential to become pandemic have jumped species,'' including SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome; monkey pox and bird flu. ''What if we could have been there when the H.I.V. moved from animal to chimp to human and could have averted that risk?'' he asked. ''To prevent or abort or slow a pandemic saves tens of millions of lives.'' The second initiative, called ''the missing middle,'' refers to the missing middle class in Africa and South Asia and the missing middle level of financing between microcredits and hedge funds. Microcredit funds currently provide families with three or four or five days of livelihood, Dr. Brilliant said. ''No country,'' he said, ''has ever emerged from poverty because of microcredit. Jobs make that possible. China did it with manufacturing, India did it with outsourced call centers.'' To that end, DotOrg has awarded $3 million to TechnoServe to find worthy entrepreneurs and help them build credit records and get access to larger markets. The third initiative, ''information for all,'' is aimed at helping developing countries provide better government services by making information available on their efforts to improve health care, roads and electrification. ''India has promised health care, work, and transparency throughout,'' Dr. Brilliant said. ''Yet it's hard to do something like this on the scale that India is trying to do, to let people know what their entitlement is.'' DotOrg has awarded $2 million to support the Annual Status of Education report in India to assess the quality of education; $765,000 to create a Budget Information Service to improve district-level planning, and $660,000 to build communities of researchers and policy makers to deliver information. DotOrg decided to finance literacy information because, said Lant Pritchett, a DotOrg adviser who teaches economic development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, ''We're looking for things where Google could have a transformative impact. Ideas, flexibility, entrepreneurship are better than just cash on the table.'' Google.org's fourth initiative supports the development of renewable energy sources that are cleaner and cheaper than coal. DotOrg has invested $10 million in eSolar, a company in Pasadena, Calif., that specializes in solar thermal power. The philanthropy is also working to accelerate the commercialization of plug-in vehicles. Google, whose own computers and customers use plenty of energy, ''does not want to be part of the problem; we want to be part of the solution,'' Dr. Brilliant said. ''We're not trying to bring returns to Google,'' Dr. Brilliant said. ''Profits are vital to businesses that will support the missions.'' Mark Dowie, author of the book ''American Foundations,'' said DotOrg is part of ''a new mode of philanthropy that is very similar to venture capitalism, holding those they fund responsible in ways never seen before.'' The danger, he said, ''is that a lot of philanthropic work is not quantifiable. How do you qualify arts grant making, for example.'' Still, he added, ''what would be worse is for Google not to give away its money, but to hoard it.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1172 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final A Weekend Home That's Straight Out of a Dream BYLINE: By STEVE BAILEY SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Escapes; AWAY; Pg. 3 LENGTH: 1345 words JAMES WOODYARD has no problem starting small. ''I rented a bedroom in the Hamptons in 2001,'' he said. ''That gave me the idea of having a second home.'' So, Mr. Woodyard, who built his own technology business from scratch, moved up in 2002 from that modest start on Long Island to a striking modernist waterfront home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, less than two hours from his home in Washington. The quiet Eastern Shore may seem a poor substitute for the boldface-name buzz of the Hamptons, especially for an energetic entrepreneur like Mr. Woodyard. In fact, he admits, many weekends on the shore are spent relaxing in front of the TV or simply enjoying nature. But there's a steady stream of family and friends, the beauty of Chesapeake Bay and the thrill of having nabbed the modern house, which was built as the HGTV Dream Home for 2002. Only the top of his house can be seen from the road, the peaks of its distinctive triple gables shining silver in the sun. You head toward it on a long, winding gravel driveway flanked by high grasses and brush that hide deer, rabbits and red foxes, any of which is likely to jump in front of your car. With no lawn, the house seems to bob in a sea of tall, waving grasses that almost obscure views of the Chesapeake Bay. Mr. Woodyard, 42, is the founder of the Telecommunications Development Corporation, a technology consulting company based in Washington. Clients have included Verizon, Amtrak and municipalities like the District of Columbia. It is a relatively small company, with about 55 employees, but it represents a success story that began when the young James Woodyard, growing up in Philadelphia, had a snow-shoveling operation. Later, at 18, he started a car-brokering business in which he would help individuals sell their cars. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in marketing, he worked for financial and telecommunications companies before starting his business, originally reselling long-distance services and working out of his condo in the Georgetown section of Washington. ''I wanted to be in D.C.,'' said Mr. Woodyard, who is black, ''because I did a study and found that of the 100 largest black-owned companies in the U.S., 25 percent were in the Washington area.'' Eventually he turned to the business of training people to use voice mail and other telephone features, later adding computer training. The business outgrew the condo and so did Mr. Woodyard. His primary residence now is a 1911 brick town house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, redone with a contemporary interior. These days he's able to leave the capital behind for his near-weekly escape to the Eastern Shore. It's where he can relax and kick back or crank up his motorboat and get out on the water. It's also where his family frequently gathers. ''There's a lot of relaxing; we watch DVDs, a lot of music DVDs,'' he said, sitting in his living room, candles flickering, with his girlfriend, Khadeja Salley, also an entrepreneur. After working as a fragrance specialist for several beauty products companies, she has recently moved from Los Angeles to Washington and started her own beauty marketing and consulting firm, Bella Solutions. On some weekends friends are along. ''Basically, we bring the fun with us,'' he said. The house is in a quiet rural community called Sherwood, nine miles from St. Michaels, a better-known town but still one where it's difficult to find anything to eat after 9 p.m. and where Christmas decorations and duck decoys are sold year-round but a pair of Diesel jeans cannot be found. Mr. Woodyard, however, is more interested in history than in shopping. He and Ms. Salley are exploring ways to create a scholarship fund or some other memorial to draw new attention to the life of Frederick Douglass, the slave from the area who became a leader of the abolitionist movement. ''There are certainly people here who could use scholarships,'' Ms. Salley said. And, Mr. Woodyard added, ''There's a lot of money here.'' The St. Michaels area and Talbot County have long been second-home and weekend destinations for the elite of Baltimore and Washington. ''We ought to be able to raise money to do something,'' he said. The history of slavery is a reminder that Maryland, and especially the Eastern Shore, is in the South. But when he wants, Mr. Woodyard can enjoy something approaching a Hamptons experience. ''It's not the Hamptons, not with everything closing at 9, but it's gotten a lot more like the Hamptons recently,'' he said, ''with higher-profile people and more private planes at the airport.'' And his property might remind someone of the dunes of the East End of Long Island: nine acres of artfully placed native grasses like panicum and schizachyrium and meadow plants like rudbeckia and asters. A stone path connects a deck off his bedroom with two Adirondack chairs at a small sandy beach on Chesapeake Bay. Another deck, off the dining area, has a pool, the most significant addition Mr. Woodyard has made to the property. Finding the house was a stroke of luck. After spending the summer of 2001 in East Hampton, five hours from Washington, Mr. Woodyard started looking for a getaway closer to home. He told his real estate broker that he was looking for a house ''with a beachy feel, more contemporary'' than the Georgian manors and neo-traditional farmhouses that dot the area. That pretty much summed up the HGTV Dream Home, which was being promoted nationally on the HGTV cable channel in a long buildup to a drawing in which someone would win it. The house, a 2,800-square-foot structure whose gable roofs and white clapboard siding enclose a modernist interior, was won by a man from Midland, Tex., who kept the SUV that came with it but had no intention of keeping the house. The broker arranged a quick purchase before it was listed. Mr. Woodyard bought it, furnishings and all, for $1.3 million, within minutes of the winner's getting the title. ''Lots of people have told me they entered the contest to win my house,'' he said. BUT the winners are Mr. Woodyard's family and friends who get to enjoy the house. His father, a retired electrician, and his mother, a retired teacher's aide, and other family members join him for Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays and other special days. ''My whole family -- aunts, parents, everybody -- uses the house,'' he said. The main house is divided into three sections, each with a fireplace to keep things cozy: the master suite with a guest room above it, a living room with a vaulted ceiling, and a kitchen-dining-sitting room with an office loft. Another guest suite, above a carport, is often used by Mr. Woodyard's business partner and his wife, Roger and April Richmond, and is even decorated with a framed photo of the Richmonds. ''One of the things I like about the house,'' Mr. Woodyard said, ''is that it has lots of features similar to my house in Washington, like concrete countertops.'' There are also custom-made concrete floor tiles along with stained pine floors. The bathroom showers have concrete walls. (The architect for the Dream Home, Suman Sorg, and its landscape architect, James van Sweden, have weekend houses just down the road.) In fact, the Dream Home suits Mr. Woodyard so well that, besides the pool, he has made very few changes. He installed a gas fire pit on an expanded deck by the pool, and he has replaced some of the art chosen by HGTV's designer with Romare Bearden originals and a large Josephine Baker poster. ''G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time),'' the oversize 75-pound bookon Muhammad Ali, has replaced HGTV knickknacks on the coffee table. Mr. Woodyard noted that the very traditional furniture that came with the house is a poor match for the modern architecture. ''Someday, I'm going to redecorate the whole house in one fell swoop,'' he said, ''and I'll have a big HGTV yard sale.'' That could be a fundraiser for his Douglass project, held at the house that he and Ms. Salley call Sueno, the Spanish word for dream. Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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