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A D V E R T I S E M E N T

By JACQUES STEINBERG

WHAT’S THE KEY to success ? Short of becoming a reality

TV star, the answer is rote and, some would argue, rather uncon-scious: Earn a college degree.

The idea that four years of higher edu-cation will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life has been pounded into the heads of school-children, parents and educators around the world. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom.

Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 in the United States will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education.

For college students who ranked

among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.

That can be a lot of tuition to pay, without a degree to show for it.

A small but influential group of econo-

mists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop cred-ible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so.

Among those calling for such alter-natives are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University and Robert I. Lerman of American University and James E. Rosenbaum, an education pro-

It was designed in the 1950s as a high-flying spy in the sky, able to snoop on sensitive military installations far above the range of Soviet missiles. At least until 1960, when the Russians

figured out how to shoot one down, sparking an inter-national incident.

But despite its notoriety, the Lock-heed U2 remains a workhorse of American military reconnaissance.

Even in an age of satellite surveillance and unmanned drones, the ungainly, difficult-to-pilot jet fends off its date with the scrapheap by providing es-sential battlefield intelligence, The Times reported. Not bad for a plane de-signed with slide rules and pencils.

But like alligators and sharks, a timeless design can defy obsolescence, proving its worth against upstart com-petitors .

So never send a high-tech gizmo to do a dog’s job. Dogs outperform human technology at a wide range of tasks, in-cluding drug detection and bomb sniff-ing, and they even rival M.R.I. scan-

ners at detecting cancerous tumors.Recently, a mutt named Sable has

been sniffing out water pollution in Lansing, Michigan. If even a hint of raw sewage or detergent finds its way into the city’s water pipes, it won’t get by Sable. And he is far cheaper and faster than lab tests, some of which can cost up to $100,000, The Times reported.

Unfortunately, dogs won’t be needed to pinpoint subtle traces of oil on the threatened beaches of the Gulf of Mex-ico. The massive oil spill there is all too easy to locate. But again, low-tech solutions have become the main, if not necessarily the best, line of defense.

As The Times reported, when at-tempts to plug the leak with deep-sea robots and a hastily constructed con-crete dome failed, the oil industry was left with the same old booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants.

Judith Roos, a vice president of the Marine Spill Response Corporation, which is largely funded by big oil com-panies, said much of its equipment was bought in 1990. “The technology hasn’t changed much since then,” she said.

Another low-tech ingredient in containing the spill is hair, known for

its ability to sop up oil (as anyone who hasn’t shampooed in a while can at-test). As The Times reported, salons and pet groomers are donating tons of hair and fur while hosiery companies are contributing nylon stockings. Com-bined, they make a usable, if impro-vised containment boom.

Meanwhile, the more music technol-ogy progresses the more some cranky aficionados look back. But these musi-cal Luddites are right to argue that the vinyl copies of “Dark Side of the Moon” they played continuously back in the 1970s had a richer sound than the iTunes versions of the same songs.

As Joseph Plambeck wrote in The Times, “to many expert ears, com-pressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly vinyl .” Better-sounding digital music files will re-place MP3s someday. Until then, seri-ous music fans fetishize the artifacts of yesteryear, like turntables .

Jon Zimmer, a consultant for Stereo Exchange, a high-end audio store in Manhattan, told The Times that the ob-session with analog gear will continue so long as MP3s are still “sucking the life out of music.” KEVIN DELANEY

Low Tech Can Achieve Higher Success

Con tin ued on Page IV

III V VIWORLD TRENDS

New subway system makes India proud.

MONEY & BUSINESS

Bankruptcy fees add up to big money.

INTELLIGENCE: The benefits of engaging Iran, Page II.

CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

A growing number of educators and economists argue that career alternatives should be developed for students who are unlikely to succeed in obtaining a college degree.

Higher Learning, Without College

Not everyone graduates from college, and it may be a smart career move.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A revolutionary way to map Mayan ruins.

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010

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The Lopsided Costs Of Europe’s Bailout

Resisting an Herbicide

Europe’s leaders stared into the abyss and finally decided to act. The nearly $1 trillion bailout package, ar-ranged earlier this month , is intend-ed to head off Greece’s default and stop the crisis from dragging under other weak economies — Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy are all vul-nerable.

It was certainly the right thing to do. Coupled with the European Cen-tral Bank’s promise to buy bonds from stricken European countries, it arrested the financial turmoil — at least for now.

There is good reason to ques-tion whether even these steps will be enough. The strategy’s biggest weakness is that it assumes that badly hobbled countries, starting with Greece, can regain their abil-ity to service their debts by slashing their budget deficits.

These economies are already struggling; some are still caught in recession. Overly harsh budget cuts will make the situation worse — making it even harder for Greece, and others that request the bailout, to honor their debts.

Greece, which got its own bail-out of around $140 billion earlier this month , definitely overspent and must cut a budget deficit that has now reached 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product. The bailout plan negotiated with the European Union and the I.M.F. calls for Greece to reduce that deficit to less than 3 percent of G.D.P. by 2014 . At the same time, it is supposed to remain current on all of its debt service pay-ments. It is hard to see how that is

fiscally possible. Meanwhile, the banks that caused

much of this mess are getting all their money back. A more equitable approach would require the banks to pay at least part of the bill — writing down the debts of some European governments or extending their maturities into the future to allow battered European economies time to recover.

This lopsided distribution of costs is built upon a distorted narrative: profligate governments from Eu-rope’s less responsible nations spent beyond their means and now can’t repay their debt. Except for Greece, that is not what happened.

In 2007, before the financial crisis, Spain had a budget surplus of 2 per-cent of G.D.P. Ireland had a balanced budget. Portugal’s deficit of 2.6 per-cent was well within the euro area’s accepted limits. Today their budgets are all deep in the red because the global collapse slashed economic activity, boosted unemployment and required a large-scale government response.

We understand why European governments are not demanding that the banks share the burden. Rescheduling Greece’s debt, or that of other governments, could weaken the balance sheets of European banks and make financial markets more unstable.

That’s the reason the Obama ad-ministration went so light on Ameri-can banks. Still, Europe may not be able to solve its problems without bringing the bankers in to pay their share.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

A vast majority of soybeans and corn planted in this country, and in much of the world, are genetically engineered, and the technology is rapidly pushing its way into many more crops.

For farmers, the benefits are real — with these seeds they can spend less time plowing and culti-vating and can use more benign ag-ricultural chemicals to kill weeds. But according to a recent report from the National Research Coun-cil, there are also signs of trouble, chief among them the appearance in various parts of the country of herbicide-resistant weeds.

Such weeds could undermine the main purpose of genetically engineered crops: their ability to tolerate spraying with glyphosate, an environmentally benign herbi-cide marketed by Monsanto, one of the major producers of genetically engineered seeds, under the name Roundup. As ever, nature is finding its way around our defenses.

There were no glyphosate-resis-tant weeds when genetically en-gineered crops were introduced. A farmer could plant Monsanto’s seeds, spray with Roundup, kill the weeds and enjoy the harvest. Now there are many such weeds, and they are tenacious.

The trouble with genetically engineered seeds is the way this technology has forced farmers to rely almost exclusively on a single herbicide, and on an industrial scale. Herbicides are like antibiot-ics. Overuse them, and they become ineffective.

Losing glyphosate would be a se-rious setback. But now that Round-up-resistant weeds are coming into their own — fulfilling the early fears of many critics of genetically engineered seeds — it’s time to ac-knowledge one of the central con-clusions of the National Research Council report: farmers are simply planting too many acres of Roundup Ready crops.

The solution is more diverse crops and cultivation practices, and a wider array of seeds, including non-genetically engineered ones. The unpalatable alternative is the reintroduction of far less benign herbicides.

This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is fac-ing prosecution.

But look through these anti-estab-lishment theatrics to the deep struc-tures of political and economic power, and the surge of populism feels like it is obscuring the real story . From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rath-er than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters .

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal melt-down began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent’s govern-ing class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble “the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war,’’ in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout suc-ceeds, the E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced — and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further inte-gration and a more powerful elite.

This should be familiar to Ameri-cans. The panic of 2008 happened, in

part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for it to fail. But all we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the ex-pense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.

A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of national se-curity. After campaigning against the Bush administration’s foreign-policy overreach, President Obama has re-tained nearly all of the war powers that George Bush took up after Sep-tember 11.

Yes, some of the previous adminis-tration’s more sweeping claims have been repudiated. But the expansive powers to detain, interrogate and as-sassinate, claimed for the duration of an open-ended war — looks destined to endure for presidencies to come.

Many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one direc-tion. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unin-tended consequences, then you need

political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn’t stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuy-ers helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector … The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin’s mistakes created an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally you need Timo-thy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin’s protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you go-ing to trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritoc-racy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their author-ity, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the sys-tem even more complex and central-ized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the prom-ises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail’’ era. It’s the beginning.

ROSS DOUTHAT

The Great Consolidation

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

Learning to Trust a Bridge Over a DivideNEW YORK

The Brazilian-Turkish brokering of a deal to get most of Iran’s low-enriched uranium (L.E.U.) out of the country is important whether or not it is implemented. The reason is that it’s a portent of the emergent post-West-ern world. The day of the dominant Anglo-Saxon is not over yet, but it is in decline.

The United States reacted nega-tively, saying it had outlined an agree-ment to go ahead with a fourth round of sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council. But sanc-tions have failed in the past and the response raises the question of why an arrangement that seemed accept-able when negotiated by American diplomats last October no longer is.

The violence inflicted on its own people by the Iranian regime after the stolen election of June 12 last year has been unconscionable, but it remains true that isolation and confrontation only comfort hard-liners in Iran, who find axis-of-evil United States rheto-ric an easy foil. In the end, the more Iran can be drawn from its current pa-riah status, the better for the reform-ist forces there. They are young and hungry for contact with the world.

Turkey and Brazil are both emer-gent regional powers with expand-ing economic interests in Iran and growing diplomatic ambitions. Their involvement pleased the Iranian gov-ernment, which likes to posture as a leader of a new world order. The pos-turing is aggravating to the West but in this instance that does not matter if the core purpose can be achieved: creating a breathing space for dia-logue by removing the 3.5-percent uranium Iran has been producing in

centrifuges at Natanz.The deal largely reprises a United

States-negotiated accord that un-raveled last fall. The only significant difference is that Iran now has more L.E.U., with the result that the 1,200 kilograms to be taken to Turkey would represent a smaller proportion of the stockpile, although still more than half. I don’t think that matters a lot because Iran, if it honors the deal, is demonstrating a willingness to work with the international community and remove much of the L.E.U. needed to make the highly enriched uranium used in a bomb.

Given past Iranian duplicity and

brinkmanship, prudence is in or-der. But I sense in the intense initial Western skepticism a thinly veiled contempt for the efforts of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Brazil and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is misplaced. Precisely because Iran has much vested in its Turkish and Brazilian relations, it will be reluctant to make fools of the two leaders by reneging now.

President Barack Obama faces a delicate decision. His heart has al-ways been in rapprochement with Iran. He rightly sees that the 31-year-old American-Iranian impasse is outmoded and damaging. But fury

has been running high in the Con-gress, where representatives have been promising “crushing” and “crip-pling” sanctions against Tehran. A lot of United States effort has gone into lobbying at the U.N. Security Council to produce the agreement on a fourth round of sanctions by the five perma-nent, veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — plus Germany. Instead of saying that pressure has worked, in the form of the apparent Iranian read-iness to ship out the L.E.U., the Obama administration appears to have opted for a hard line. That was tried under the Bush administration and yielded nothing.

Iran has shown it is largely inured to sanctions. If they again fail to change Iranian behavior, Obama will face the question: what now? He knows Amer-ica and the West cannot afford a third war in a Muslim country.

So the Brazilian-Turkish deal is worth pursuing . Obama told the Unit-ed Nations last year that the United States was through with unilateral-ism but needed other nations to as-sume their responsibilities. “Those who used to chastise America for act-ing alone cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone,” he declared, adding that, “Together, we must build new co-alitions that bridge old divides — co-alitions of different faiths and creeds; of north and south, east, west, black, white and brown.”

New coalitions that bridge old di-vides? Sounds to me like Brazil and Turkey getting together to help Iran and the United States over the chasm that separates them. That in turn would offer the possibility of further-ing Middle East peace and global se-curity.

Turkey and Brazil open the possibility of rapprochement with Iran.

Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010 III

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEITH BEDFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The nearly completed Delhi Metro is clean, punctual and impeccably maintained.

High Hopes on a SubwayBy LYDIA POLGREEN

NEW DELHI — The trains arrive with a whisper. The doors slide open and a puff of refrigerated air confronts the city’s summertime miasma. A bell dings, the doors close and the train whisks its passengers to the next stop.

This sequence of events might seem utterly ordinary on train platforms in Berlin or Bangkok, Stockholm or Singa-pore. But here in the sweaty heart of India’s northernmost megacity, the runaway success of the city’s almost complete subway system, known as the Metro, is a feat bordering on miraculous, and it offers new hope that India’s perpetually decrepit urban infrastructure can be dragged into the 21st century.

The Delhi Metro manages to defy just about every stereotype of urban India. It is scrupulously clean, impeccably maintained and almost unfailingly punctu-al. Its cars are the latest models, complete with air-conditioning and even power outlets to let commuters charge their mobile phones and laptops. Its signal-

ing and other safety technology is first rate, and the system is among the best in the world, ur-ban transport experts say. De-spite cheap fares, less than 20 cents for the shortest ride and about 67 cents for the longest, the system manages to turn an operating profit.

In a country where govern-ment projects are chronically delayed and budgets are bust-ed, the Metro is on track to fin-ish its 190-kilometer network by fall, right on schedule and within its $6.55 billion budget.

“Metro’s performance has been outstanding,” said Pronab Sen, India’s chief statistician, whose government department keeps track of delays and cost

overruns. The Delhi Metro is perhaps

the most ambitious urban in-frastructure project since In-dia won its independence, and its progress has been closely watched in a country facing a looming urban disaster. Unlike China and other rapidly grow-ing developing countries, India remains predominantly rural.

But that is changing as mil-lions of impoverished villag-ers try to grab a slice of India’s rapid but unequally shared eco-nomic growth. India has done almost nothing to cope with the influx of villagers into the cities, much less plan for many more, analysts say.

A study published last month by the McKinsey Global Insti-tute estimated that by 2030, 590 million Indians would live in cit-ies and 70 percent of India’s new jobs would be in cities. India needs $1.2 trillion in infrastruc-ture to accommodate these new arrivals, the report concluded, including 7,403 kilometers of railways and subways, and real estate equivalent to the entire city of Chicago every year.

In the Metro, even the lowli-est employees’ ideas are taken seriously, said P. K. Pathak, who runs Metro’s training in-stitute.

When trainees at the insti-tute, which is packed with stu-dents to try to churn out enough employees to staff its new lines, suggested staggering lunch times in the cafeteria to ease

crowding, Mr. Pathak made the change that very day. “In the railway, change was very diffi-cult,” Mr. Pathak said. “In Met-ro, we are open to all ideas.”

No one appreciates the Metro more than riders. Pawan Shar-ma, a civil servant who com-mutes from the western suburb of Dwarka, was so impressed with the Metro that he signed up to be a volunteer monitor. With a blue badge affixed to his chest, he patrols the train cars for two hours in the morning and evening, looking for people breaking the rules. He receives no compensation, not even free Metro rides.

The Metro’s rules are strictly enforced. Spitting, a common habit of Northern Indian men, is forbidden. So is sitting on the floor, a habit from India’s often-squalid railways, where pas-sengers without tickets squat on the floor of overcrowded trains. Public urination, an-other unfortunate habit in a country where there are more cellphones than toilets, is off limits. Eating and drinking are forbidden, too.

Such rules chafe against the anything-goes chaos of urban life in India, Mr. Sharma said.

“People ask me, ‘Why are you bothering me?’ ” he said on a recent afternoon as he ca-joled a young rider to stand up, not squat on the floor. “But I tell them, ‘The government has given us this nice facility. Why do you want to spoil it?’ ”

By ROBERT F. WORTH

WAZZANI, Lebanon — The rocky green hills on the outskirts of this southern town form one of the most volatile borders in the world. Tensions have been particu-larly high ever since Israel accused Hezbollah of obtain-ing Scud missiles from Syria last month, and many Leba-nese say they believe it will not be long before war breaks out here again.

Yet it is here, just meters from Israeli border fences and military posts, that a flamboyant new resort is tak-ing shape along the Wazzani River, complete with three swimming pools, marble-floor chalets and a Moroc-can-style restaurant and bar. Israeli soldiers sometimes walk to the far side of the riv-er to stare in wonder as Syr-ian laborers hammer away at the fake waterfalls and stone walkways.

“A lot of people tell us we are crazy to put millions of dollars into this,” said Khalil Abdullah, the confident 58-year-old Lebanese entre-preneur who is building the Wazzani Fortress, as the re-sort is called. He waves away all talk of war, saying the resort will bring tourists and much-needed jobs.

The project illustrates the

strange duality of life here, as the Lebanese prepare both for war and for the possibility of a record-breaking tour-ist season. In a sense, it is nothing new: south Lebanon was occupied by Israel for 18 years, and summer always brings fears of a new clash.

But in recent months, a crescendo of tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and Hezbollah’s arsenal has led

many analysts to believe that a new regional war is inevita-ble, and that Lebanon will be its theater. The rising pres-sure for sanctions against Iran, and the possibility of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, are just some of the factors that could set off another war with Hez-bollah, the Shiite militant group that Iran helped create and continues to finance.

The leaders of both Israel and Hezbollah have made it clear that they believe their next conflict will be far more violent and decisive than any in the past. After the Israeli

president, Shimon Peres, accused Syria of arming Hez-bollah with Scud missiles, villagers in southern Leba-nese towns began stocking up on provisions, fearing the worst.

“I think this time Israel is determined to end the situa-tion for good,” said Jamal Ba-zzi, a mother of three in Bint Jbail, a town near the border that was largely destroyed in the 2006 summer war be-tween Israel and Hezbollah. “I have another house in Si-don, and I’ve stocked it with food, water and gas, so I’ll be ready if war breaks out.”

Yet many southerners re-main undaunted. Mr. Abdul-lah said he had been dream-ing of building a resort here for 15 years. A construction boom is under way across much of Lebanon, and last summer an estimated two million tourists visited the country.

Asked whether tourists might be anxious about the possibility of war, Mr. Abdul-lah laughed and said people were already clamoring to book the resort for events. The Wazzani Fortress will formally open in June, and will continue to expand, with a total of 60 rooms by the time it is finished next year, he said. “We are building a con-ference center too, and I hope one day we will host peace talks there,” he said.

WAZZANI JOURNAL

A Vista of War and Peace

A new resort rises at a crossroadsin Lebanon.

On schedule and on budget, the metro defies India’s chaos.

Pawan Sharma, a civil servant

who commutes from a western suburb, was so impressed with the Metro that

he signed up to be a volunteer

monitor, enforcing rules like no spitting

or sitting on the floor.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010

From Page I

By JULIE CRESWELL

RED BANK, New Jersey — In this town near the beach about 75 kilo-meters from Manhattan lurks a Wall Street giant.

Inside the offices of a tiny trading firm called Tradeworx, workers in their 20s and 30s quietly tend high-speed computers that typically buy and sell 80 million shares a day.

But on May 6, as the stock market began to plunge in the “flash crash,” someone here walked up to one of those computers and typed the com-mand HF STOP: sell everything, and shutdown.

Across America, several of Trade-worx’s counterparts did the same. In a blink, some of the most powerful players in the stock market today — high-frequency traders — went dark. The result sent chills through the fi-nancial world.

After the 1,000-point plunge in the stock market that day, the growing role of high-frequency traders in America’s financial markets is draw-ing new scrutiny.

These high-tech operators have become sort of a shadow Wall Street . Depending on whose estimates you

believe, high-frequency traders ac-count for 40 to 70 percent of all trading on every stock market in the United States. Some of the biggest players trade more than a billion shares a day.

These are short-term bets. Very short. The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Missouri, told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said.

But some in Washington wonder if ordinary investors will pay a price for this sort of lightning-quick trading. Unlike old-fashioned specialists on the New York Stock Exchange, who are obligated to stay in the market whether it is rising or falling, high-frequency traders can walk away at any time.

While market regulators are still trying to figure out what happened on May 6, the decision of high-frequency traders to withdraw from the market-place is under examination. Did their decision create a market vacuum that caused prices to plunge even faster?

Senator Edward E. Kaufman, Dem-

ocrat of Delaware, wants the Securi-ties and Exchange Commission to collect more information on high-fre-quency traders. “Whenever you have a lot of money, a lot of change, little or no transparency, and therefore, no regulation, you have the potential for a market disaster,” he said. “That’s

what we have in high-frequency trad-ing.”

Some high-frequency traders wel-come the closer scrutiny.

“We are not a no-regulation crowd,” said Richard Gorelick, a co-founder of the high-frequency trading firm RGM Advisors in Austin, Texas. “We

were all created by good regulation, the regulation that provided for more competition, more transparency and more fairness.”

But critics say the markets have be-come unfair to investors who cannot invest millions in high-tech comput-ers. The exchanges offer incentives, including rebates, which can add up to profits for high-volume traders as well.

“The market structure has mor-phed from one that was equitable and fair to one where those who get the greatest perks, who have the speed, have all of the advantages,” said Sal Arnuk, who runs an equity trading firm in New Jersey.

High-frequency traders insist that they provide the market with liquid-ity, thus enabling investors to trade easily.

“The benefits of the liquidity that we bring to the markets aren’t theo-retical,” said Cameron Smith, the general counsel for high-frequency trading firm Quantlab Financial in Houston. “If you can buy a security with the knowledge that you can re-sell it later, that creates a lot of confi-dence in the market.”

fessor at Northwestern Universty in Illinois. They would steer some stu-dents toward intensive, short-term vo-cational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.

While no country has a perfect model for such programs, Profes-sor Lerman pointed to a study of a German effort done last sum-mer by an intern from that country. She found that of those who passed the Abitur, the exam that allows some Germans to attend collegefor almost no tuition, 40 percent chose to go into apprenticeships in trades, accounting, sales management, and computers.

“Some of the people coming out of those apprenticeships are in more demand than college graduates,” he said, “because they’ve actually man-aged things in the workplace.”

Much of the training for certain positions, such as nurses’ aides, are feasible outside the college setting, Professor Vedder said. “It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for Col-lege Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”

Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typi-cally require a bachelor’s degree, ac-cording to the Bureau of Labor Statis-tics.

Among the top 10 growing job cat-egories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and post-secondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bach-elor’s degree.

Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bach-elor’s degrees . “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.

Professor Lerman, the economist at American University in Washington, D.C., said some high school gradu-ates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communi-cate in the workplace.

Still, by urging that some students

be directed away from four-year col-leges, academics like Professor Ler-man could be accused of lowering ex-pectations for some students. Some critics go further, suggesting that the approach amounts to educational redlining, since many of the students who drop out of college are black or non-white Hispanics.

Peggy Williams, a counselor at a high school in suburban New York City with a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic, understands the ar-gument for erring on the side of push-ing more students toward college.

“If we’re telling kids, ‘You can’t cut the mustard, you shouldn’t go to col-lege or university,’ then we’re short-changing them from experiencing an environment in which they might grow,” she said.

Morton Schapiro, an economist who is the president of Northwestern Uni-versity, warned against overlooking the intangible benefits of a college ex-perience for those who might not ap-

ply what they learned directly to their chosen work.

“It’s not just about the economic re-turn,” he said. “Some college, whether you complete it or not, contributes to aesthetic appreciation, better health and better voting behavior.”

Even those who experience a few years of college earn more money, on average, with less risk of unemploy-ment, than those who merely gradu-ate from high school, said Mr. Scha-piro.

“You get some return even if you don’t get the sheepskin,” he added.

LOURDES SEGADE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Most workers at a field in Huelva are foreigners because farmers worry Spaniards will not work as hard.

ROBERT STOLARIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Firms that specialize in high-frequency trades may put the ordinary investor at a disadvantage. The Tradeworx office in New Jersey.

Speedy New Titans of Trading Make Waves Far From Wall Street

For Some Careers, College May Not Be the Best Path

Spain’s Jobless Struggle to Return to the FarmBy SUZANNE DALEY

PUERTO SERRANO, Spain — During Spain’s construction boom, Antonio Rivera Romero happily traded long hours and backbreaking labor in the fields for the better-reg-ulated building trades, earning four times as much as a bricklayer. He took out a mortgage and enlarged his house on a quiet side street in this small city in southern Spain.

Now, with the construction jobs gone, Mr. Rivera is behind on his bank payments and eager to return to the farmwork he left behind.

But Spaniards have been largely shut out of those jobs. Those bent over rows of strawberries under plastic greenhouse sheeting or climbing ladders in the midday sun are now almost all foreigners: Ro-manians, Poles, Moroccans, many of them in Spain legally.

“The farmers here don’t want us,” Mr. Rivera said with a defeated shrug.

Local officials and union leaders say Mr. Rivera has it right. Farmers have been reluctant to take Span-ish workers back — unsure whether they will work as hard as the for-eigners who have been picking their crops, sometimes for a decade now.

So far, only 5 percent of the pickers this year are Spaniards, said Diego Cañamero, the head of one of Spain’s largest labor organizations, the Field Workers Union, or S.O.C. He said the union was working to keep tempers from flaring and to persuade farm-ers to employ local people again, but

with little success.“There is a sense of bewilder-

ment among the Spanish workers,” he said. “They say: Why do they let people come 5,000 miles, when we need the jobs?”

The unemployment rate in the An-dalusia region is now 27 percent, the highest in Spain except for the Ca-nary Islands.

Spaniards have always been resil-ient, helping out one another in hard economic times.

But these days entire families like that of Mr. Rivera and his wife, who have five working-age children — most at home — are jobless. Unem-ployment benefits go only so far, and

for those who have house or car pay-ments, not nearly far enough.

Mr. Rivera, 50, gets 420 euros a month, about $530. His mortgage takes up half of that, he said. His wife, Encarnación Román Casillas, 49, started going to the local soup kitchen.

“At first, I could not do it,” she said. “My sister-in-law went for me. But then we went together, and now I do what I have to do.” In addition to two hot meals, she is given a loaf of bread, a liter of milk and four con-tainers of yogurt.

Soon, the Riveras will borrow a car from a relative and go to France, where they expect to camp while picking beets, asparagus and arti-chokes, then grapes in the fall.

Mr. Rivera’s predicament is hard-ly unique. Mayors across Andalusia say local residents come to their of-fices all the time looking for work. Some do not want farmwork, saying it is too hard.

But many, says Emilio Vergara, mayor of Paterna del Campo, a small farming village outside Huelva, would gladly take it.

Together with three other nearby mayors, Mr. Vergara began an ef-fort to persuade farmers to hire local people. But, he says, of the 450 people who signed up from his village, none have been offered a job.

“I am concerned about a potential outburst of xenophobia, and hope that it can be avoided at all costs, be-cause Spain is traditionally a hospi-table country,” Mr. Vergara said.

LOURDES SEGADE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Abdoulaye Diallo of Senegal worked in Spain for six years. CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Some job skills are valued more highly than advanced education.

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010 V

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZand JULIE CRESWELL

More than $263,000 for photocop-ies in four months. Over $2,100 in limousine rides by one partner in one month. And $48 just to leave a message. Explanations for these charges? Priceless.

The lawyers, accountants and re-structuring experts overseeing the remains of Lehman Brothers have already racked up more than $730 million in fees and expenses, with no end in sight.

Anyone wondering why total fees doled out in the Lehman bankruptcy alone could easily touch the $1 billion mark merely has to look at the bills buried among the blizzard of court documents filed in the case.

They’re a guide to the continuing bankruptcy bonanza, a world where the meter is always running, some-times literally. In the months after Lehman’s collapse in September 2008, the New York law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges paid one car-ser-vice company alone more than $500 a day as limo drivers waited for meet-ings to break.

While most of corporate America may be just emerging from the Great Recession, bankruptcy specialists have spent the last two years enjoy-ing an unprecedented boom. Ten of the 20 largest corporate bankrupt-cies in recent decades have occurred over the last three years, according to BankruptcyData.com, with Lehman getting honors as the biggest corpo-rate failures in American history.

These megacases — Lehman, Gen-eral Motors, Chrysler and Washing-ton Mutual, to name a few — are or-ders of magnitude larger than most bankruptcies in the past, and their size and complexity have created a feeding frenzy of sorts for those

asked to sort them out. To date, Weil, the lead law firm representing Leh-man, has billed the Lehman estate for more than $164 million.

Analysts, lawyers and others involved in the larger bankruptcy boom say that some fees are legiti-mate and that others are, at a mini-mum, highly questionable.

“There’s clearly pressure on peo-ple to create more revenue,” says Robert White, a former bankruptcy partner at O’Melveny & Myers who retired in 2006 after practicing for 35 years. At one deposition he attended

last year, each law firm sent two or three lawyers when one would have sufficed. “They were just sitting there on their BlackBerrys and talk-ing to other people,” he said.

With first- and second-year asso-ciates charging more than $500 an hour in some of these bankruptcy cases, according to court records, that can amount to some pretty ex-pensive downtime.

At several firms, including Weil and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & Mc-Cloy, partners now charge $1,000 an hour or more for their bankruptcy services.

Analysts say these bounteous fees reduce the money left for creditors in the bankruptcy cases.

In the Lehman case, some unse-cured creditors, including bondhold-ers, banks and vendors, are likely

to get just 14.7 cents on the dollar for their claims, according to Lehman’s proposed reorganization plan. Nor will they get their money quickly. Some experts say they believe that the Lehman case could drag on for three to five more years.

Lawyers and restructuring pros who are picking up the pieces of com-panies swamped by the bankruptcy wave say that their fees are well de-served and that their services help make the bankruptcy process more efficient.

They say the pay is more than made up for by a tidier resolution of a financial debacle, or, as in G.M.’s case, the revivification of a wounded company.

“The legal skill we used to sell Lehman’s North American capital markets business to Barclays saved 10,000 jobs and preserved the busi-ness itself, capturing value that oth-erwise would have been lost,” said Harvey Miller, 77, a Weil partner who is considered the dean of the bank-ruptcy bar.

Many people in the industry agree that Lehman, in particular, is a huge case that tests even the most experi-enced lawyers.

“Lehman is a sufficiently compli-cated company that it would be safe to assume that if it weren’t for equally sophisticated professionals running the Chapter 11 case, that the creditors would essentially receive nothing,” says Stephen J. Lubben, a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey.

The court asked him to participate after concerns were raised in the news media about the soaring fees in the Lehman case. “In those situa-tions, it makes sense for sophisticat-ed professionals to handle the case,” Mr. Lubben said.

By HILARY STOUT

On a recent Saturday night, Michelle Obama walked into a staid Washington hotel ballroom wearing a striking red gown, and within minutes the fashion world was talking.

Tweets and e-mail messages went out from the myriad journalists and celebrities in the room for the annual White House Correspondents’ Asso-ciation dinner.

Prabal Gurung, the young designer who created the hand-draped, body-hugging, off-the-shoulder dress, was in New York, headed to a party in a taxi with a couple of friends when the con-gratulatory messages came rolling in. By the next day, traffic on his Web site had shot up. Then, he was hearing from stores that do not carry his lines but were now, suddenly, very interested.

Another fashion star is born? Or not? Because of Mrs. Obama, design-ers barely known outside the fashion world like Jason Wu have become known to the masses. But whether Mrs. Obama’s patronage translates into higher sales for the designers she wears regularly is still in question.

The disparity between the first lady’s affection and actual sales was underscored recently when one of the earliest designers associated with Mrs. Obama, Maria Pinto, announced that she was closing her business.

Some of the most memorable images of Mrs. Obama during the 2008 election season — addressing the Democratic National Convention in turquoise, bumping fists with her husband in a belted purple sheath after he secured the nomination, visiting the Bushes

at the White House in vivid red as the wife of the president-elect — involved Ms. Pinto’s creations.

Clearly some businesses have ben-efited from Mrs. Obama’s choices, es-pecially those not as expensive. J. Crew sales soared when Mrs. Obama noted during a TV interview that she was wearing a J. Crew sweater set.

But at the industry’s higher end, it’s harder to know which designers have gained financially .

There certainly have been some winners. Mr. Wu, the young designer who created the floating white gown that Mrs. Obama wore for the inaugu-ral balls, saw an immediate jump in business after the inauguration, and the growth has continued, said Rob-ert Burke, a fashion and luxury goods consultant who works with Mr. Wu’s

company. Even before she shined a spotlight on him, Mr. Wu was already carried by prime retailers like Berg-dorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. But since January 2009, the business has grown 40 per-cent each year, said Gustavo Rangel, Mr. Wu’s chief financial officer.

The first lady’s patronage “does translate into business,” Mr. Burke said. “It’s long been known that celeb-rities sell fashion. This takes the situa-tion to a whole other level.”

Laura Vinroot Poole, the owner of Capitol, a women’s luxury retail store in Charlotte, North Carolina, said Mrs. Obama’s propensity to mix mass labels like J. Crew with high-end designers had helped “democratize fashion.” But she added, “For me, it does not trans-late into sales at all.”

By JACK EWING

FRANKFURT — No other region suffered more grievous economic damage from the financial crisis last year than Eastern Europe, and a main cause was extensive borrowing in eu-ros and other foreign currencies.

When the currencies of countries like Hungary and Romania plunged last year, thousands of businesses and homeowners found themselves stuck with some of the most extreme vari-able-interest-rate loans on the planet.

Monthly payments soared, raising the threat of defaults and bank fail-ures that was averted only with a res-cue last year by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund — at a cost of 52 billion euros, or about $66 billion.

So it may come as a surprise that Austrian, Italian and other Western European banks that dominate the regional market are again offering Eastern Europeans the same credit that nearly derailed their economies a few months ago.

The revival of euro-based lending in countries that are not yet members of

the euro zone unsettles many econo-mists. But others say a ban on foreign-currency loans would be counter-productive, because it would cut off a source of capital crucial for growth.

Developing countries in Europe need to create conditions for local-currency lending to flourish, including low inflation, said Erik Berglof, chief economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “Regulation is part of the policy mix,” he said. “But if you do it when you’re still in recession, you can do more harm than good.”

For countries to start growing again, businesses and consumers need the same kind of credit that bit them in the first place. And bite them, it did. Gross domestic product in Hungary fell 6.3

percent last year, while in Romania it dropped 7.1 percent, in part because of the instability caused by foreign-currency lending.

Output in Latvia tumbled 18 percent after its leaders imposed severe auster-ity measures to avoid a currency deval-uation that would have been disastrous for foreign-currency borrowers.

Loan defaults rose, but not as much as feared. For example, nonperform-ing loans at Erste Bank grew to 8.5 percent in Eastern Europe at the end of March from 7.8 percent at the end of December. By comparison, bad loans in Erste Bank’s home country, Austria, fell to 6.3 percent, from 6.4 percent in that period.

Erste is the third-biggest lender in the region, after UniCredit, based in Milan, and Raiffeisen International, based in Vienna.

After the rescue, local currencies recovered much of their value, taking pressure off borrowers. Poland and the Czech Republic felt the stress of foreign-currency lending as well, Mr. Berglof said. But they weathered the crisis much better and have emerged

from recession. Yet for many borrowers, the benefits of a loan denominated in euros are still compelling.

Loans denomi-nated in the cur-rencies of Hungary or Romania carry much higher inter-est rates. The higher rates are a result of higher inflation than in Western Europe and imprudent fiscal policies by national governments.

In Hungary, pay-ments on a typical mortgage of 7.5 mil-lion forints, or about $34,000, would come to about 85,000 fo-rints a month. The average monthly salary in Hungary is about 200,000 forints.

A loan tied to euros would cost the equivalent of 76,000 forints, or more than 10 percent less, according to data from Erste Bank.

In Hungary, foreign-currency loans slipped to 63 percent of all loans at the end of 2009, from 68 percent in the first quarter of the year. But they still domi-nate.

The risk for holders of euro loans re-mains. If the local currency loses val-ue, payments rise accordingly. That is what happened last year; the Hungar-ian forint lost more than a quarter of its value against the euro from July 2008 to March 2009.

“Customers learned at their own cost that, yes, currencies can move,” said Laszlo Olah, president of the Hun-garian Venture Capital Association.

For Some, Bankruptcy Pays LucrativelyPHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

The first lady wore Maria Pinto at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, but that high-profile appearance failed to increase sales for the designer.

CHRIS CARLSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALINT PORNECZI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A labor office in Hungary, where the economy plunged last year.

At up to $1,000 an hour, the legal bill runs up quickly.

Risky Borrowing PersistsAcross Eastern Europe

Can Michelle Obama Create a Fashion Star on Her Own?

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010

25 feet

Laser Survey of a Maya CityA small aircraft flying back and forth above the ancient Maya city of Caracol, in Belize, used a laser to penetrate the dense forest canopy.

Viewed in three dimensions, the data revealed new ruins, causeways and agricultural terraces of the sprawling city. A detail of Caracol’s city center is shown here.

THE CAANA PYRAMID rises 43 meters above Caracol’s city center.

CAUSEWAYSNumerous constructed stone roads lead from the city center to more distant settlements.

TERRACESAgricultural terraces fed a peak population of more than 115,000.

PEERING THROUGH THE FOREST A lidar scan along a straight track (orange line, inset) shows reflections off the ground and different layers of foliage, revealing the cross-section of a pyramid-shaped structure. In this image the measured points are colored according to height, and are accurate to about six inches.

THE NEW YORK TIMES; IMAGES COURTESY OF CARACOL ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT

N

150 meters

Causewayto Puchituk

Top view

Source: Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase and John F. Weishampel, University of Central Florida

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

The ice caps of Antarctica are largely untouched, clean, and very cold.

This, it turns out, is the perfect combination for scientists who want to extract undamaged particles created billions of years ago in the early days of our solar system.

“The deep question is how was the solar system formed, and to do that what you want to have in the lab is materials that didn’t change in 4.5 billion years,” said Jean Du-prat, a scientist who researches nuclear and mass spectrometry at the University of Paris.

Dr. Duprat and his colleagues

drilled into the snow and in the cores they retrieved found two par-ticles, each 100th of a micron in size, that were exactly what they were looking for.

Because of the depth at which the materials were found, about 3.5 meters, they were able to estimate that they were deposited into the

Earth from 1955 to 1970. By study-ing the molecules and minerals in the particles, which, though tiny, each contain enough material to analyze, the researchers were able to determine that the sediments were formed in our solar system billions of years ago. Their results are published in the May 7 Journal of Science.

To determine the particles’ ori-gins, the scientists looked at their chemical makeup. They had larger amounts of carbon and deuterium, a form of hydrogen, than anything found on Earth, Dr. Duprat said.

Dr. Duprat and his colleagues further analyzed the chemical

makeup, and found that the compo-sitions of the particles were similar to remnants from comets, including Halley’s Comet.

The grains may be as old as the sun, he said.

Future research might reveal more about exactly how these par-ticles formed, and how they arrived on earth. But that will require more trips to the Concordia Research Station in Antarctica, and more samples.

“We’ve got very few of these par-ticles, and we need more of them,” Dr. Duprat said. “Each time you an-alyze such particles, you somehow use them. It’s destructive.”

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

For a quarter of a century, two ar-chaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to in-vestigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

Even the new remote-sensing tech-nologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar and multi-spectral surveys by air and from space could not “see” through the trees.

Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Ar-len F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cov-er and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.

In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archae-ologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 207

square kilometers, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hi-

eroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.”The Chases, who are professors

of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, had de-termined from earlier surveys that Caracol extended over a wide area in its heyday, between A.D. 550 and 900. From a ceremonial center of palaces and broad plazas, it stretched out to industrial zones and poor neighbor-hoods and beyond to suburbs of sub-stantial houses, markets and terraced fields and reservoirs.

This picture of urban sprawl led the Chases to estimate the city’s popula-

tion at its peak at more than 115,000. But some archaeologists doubted the evidence warranted such expansive interpretations.

“Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,” Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. “We know the size of the site, its boundar-ies, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terrac-ing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”

The Caracol survey was the first ap-plication of the advanced laser tech-nology on such a large archaeological site. Several journal articles describe the use of lidar in the vicinity of Stone-henge in England and elsewhere at an Iron Age fort and American plantation sites. Only last year, Sarah H. Parcak of the University of Alabama at Bir-mingham predicted, “Lidar imagery will have much to offer the archaeol-ogy of the rain forest regions.”

The Chases said they had been un-aware of Dr. Parcak’s assessment in her book “Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology” when they embarked on the Caracol survey. They acted on the recommendation of a Central Florida colleague, John F. Weishampel, a biol-ogist who had for years used airborne laser sensors to study forests and oth-er vegetation.

Dr. Weishampel arranged for the primary financing of the project from the little-known space archaeology

Rapidly Mapping Ancient Civilization

J. DUPRAT CSNSM-CNRS

Clean snow is pulled from a trench near the Concordia Research Station.

Lasers gather 25 years’ worth of archaeological data in just four days.

Antarctica shedslight on the birthof the solar system.

In Antarctica, Drilling for the Past’s Particles in Untouched Ice Caps

program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The flights were conducted by the National Sci-ence Foundation’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, operated by the University of Florida and the Uni-versity of California, Berkeley.

Other archaeologists, who were not involved in the research but were fa-miliar with the results, said the technol-ogy should be a boon to explorations, especially ones in the tropics, with its heavily overgrown vegetation, includ-ing pre-Columbian sites throughout Mexico and Central America. But they emphasized that it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.”

Jeremy A. Sabloff, a former direc-tor of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthro-pology and now president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said he wished he had had lidar when he was working in the Maya ruins at Sayil, in

Mexico. The new laser technology, he said, “would definitely have speeded up our mapping, given us more details and would have enabled us to refine our research questions and hypotheses much earlier in our field program than was possible in the 1980s.”

At first, Payson D. Sheets, a Univer-sity of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. Now, after examining the imagery from Caracol, Dr. Sheets said he planned to try lidar, with its improved technology, again. “I was stunned by the crisp precision and fine-grained resolution,” he said.

The Chases said the new research demonstrates how a large, sustainable agricultural society could thrive in a tropical environment and thus account for the robust Maya civilization in its classic period from A.D. 250 to 900.

“This will revolutionize the way we do settlement studies of the Maya,” Dr. Arlen Chase said on returning from this spring’s research at Caracol.

Repubblica NewYork

P E R S O N A L I T I E S

MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010 VII

By LARRY ROHTER

WASHINGTON — Among the courses Haile Gerima teaches at How-ard University in Washington, D.C., is one called “Film and Social Change.” But for Mr. Gerima, an Ethiopian di-rector and screenwriter who has lived here since the 1970s in what he calls self-exile, that subject is not just an academic concern: it is also what mo-tivates him to make films with African and African-American themes.

His latest, “Teza,” which means “Morning Dew” in the director’s na-tive Amharic, may be Mr. Gerima’s most autobiographical movie yet. It traces the anguished course of an idealistic young intellectual named Anberber from his origins in a small village through his years as a medical student in Europe; his return to Ethio-pia, where he ends up a casualty of the Marxist military revolution that over-threw Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974; and his exile to West Germany, where he became a victim of racism.

“I am from a generation that genu-

inely wanted a better society and to do something for poor and oppressed people, but which got blinded and lost and turned against its own human-ity to become the opposite of what we wanted to be,” Mr. Gerima, 64, said . “For me, this film is really about dis-placement, which is a theme that re-ally resonates within me.”

Sometimes that sense of dislocation

is literal in his movies, and sometimes it is metaphorical. In “Sankofa” (1993), a black American fashion model on a shoot in Africa is transported back to the 18th century and slavery on a West Indian plantation, while in “Ashes and Embers” (1982) Mr. Gerima explored

the disillusionment of African-Ameri-can veterans returning from the Viet-nam War to poverty and hopelessness.

Mr. Gerima first arrived in the United States in 1967 to study theater at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago; his Peace Corps teachers in Ethiopia had arranged for his admis-sion there. But he was not prepared for the politics of race in America, and initially felt estranged not just from the whites whose lawns and gardens he tended to support himself, but also from African-Americans.

“I had never been challenged the way African-Americans are in Amer-ica, and encountering racism shocked me to the point that I had nosebleeds,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be black American, I didn’t want to identify with their situation — I felt they were slaves and I was not. I didn’t believe they came from Africa; I felt they were a different species sprouted from the plantation. The intellectual distance was too great.”

Unhappy with the acting roles he

was offered — all the blacks “were just park benches and lamp posts” — Mr. Gerima transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he quickly won an acting award and de-veloped ties to the Pan-African black-power movement. He switched to film after being exposed to Latin American directors like Glauber Rocha, Fernan-do Solanas and Miguel Littín made him realize, he said, that his story was “equally as important and valid” as those he was accustomed to seeing in Hollywood productions.

Mr. Gerima first drew attention in the mid-1970s with “Harvest: 3000 Years,” about an Ethiopian peasant family struggling to survive under feudalism; it was filmed as Haile Se-lassie’s imperial rule was collapsing. But that film also led to the start of Mr. Gerima’s troubles with the Derg, the Communist military junta that re-placed Haile Selassie. The new regime would only allow him to make another movie in his homeland if he agreed to accept what they called their “jurisdic-

tion” over his work.“When they said that, I couldn’t wait

to take the plane out, because I knew my freedom was gone,” Mr. Gerima said.

He describes “Teza” as an impas-sioned but “imperfect” film.

“In ‘Teza,’ he really was able to cap-ture light and shade, the full majesty of the African landscape, which gives the film a tremendous strength and beau-ty,” said Françoise Pfaff, a Howard University colleague and the author of the book “Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers” (1988).

“It’s no longer starving Ethiopia,” she added. “It’s a story of displace-ment and loss that resonates univer-sally, and that also is a relief.”

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE KAHN/REUTERS

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

OSCAR HIDALGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

HAILE GERIMA

Ethiopia’s Struggle, Waged on Film

By LARRY ROHTER

Roberto Carlos has been so large a pop music presence for so long that when he first emerged he was nick-named “the Elvis Presley of Brazil” and once opened a show there for Bill Haley and His Comets. But 50 years, 120 million records and various sty-listic shifts later, he is more often de-scribed as “the Frank Sinatra of Latin America.”

No Latin American has sold more records than Roberto Carlos, whose current North American tour wraps up a year’s worth of events commemo-rating half a century as a recording artist. Ask him to explain the secret of his success, and the answer hints at his chameleon character and tastes.

“I listen to and like all kinds of mu-sic, from bossa nova to country, and every once in a while I’ll take a risk,” the singer, who turned 69 last month , said in a telephone interview from his home in Rio de Janeiro. “But rock ’n’ roll, that backbeat and that instrumen-tation, is always in my style, even if it’s smoothed out a bit.”

Born Roberto Carlos Braga in a small town in the interior of Brazil, he first performed on a local radio station at age 9. Inspired by Presley and Little Richard, he went to Rio as a teenager, singing and playing guitar for bands with names like the Sputniks until he managed to get a recording contract as a solo artist.

In that early stage, as leader of what became known as the Young Guard movement, Roberto Carlos had some of his biggest successes with cover versions of American rock ’n’ roll and pop hits like “Splish Splash,” “Road

Hog,” “Unchain My Heart,” “Alley-Oop” and “The Wanderer.”

But around 1965 he began to emerge as a songwriter with a talent for divin-ing what would appeal to the record-buying public, usually writing with a friend and band mate from his teenage years, Erasmo Carlos Esteves.

That partnership continues to this day and has produced more than 500 songs . Brazilian critics like to compare the duo to Lennon and McCartney .

“They don’t spend that much time together hanging out anymore, but there’s an almost perfect chemistry between them” when they write, said Paulo Cesar de Araújo, author of the biography “Roberto Carlos: In Detail.” “Erasmo is more hard edged, with rock ’n’ roll pulsing in his veins, while Rober-to tends to be softer, more romantic.”

In the mid-1960s Roberto Carlos started recording in Spanish as well as Portuguese, with an eye on the market in neighboring Argentina. As he evolved into a romantic crooner, his popularity skyrocketed and spread northward, all the way to Mexico, ri-valing that of Julio Iglesias.

Since the ’70s most of his most popu-lar compositions — like “Details,” “Beloved Lover” and “Breakfast” — have been romantic ballads . “Amigo,” another big hit, was a favorite of Pope John Paul II, something the singer found especially pleasing. “I am reli-gious, I am Catholic, I like messages,” he said.

Yet even when he is singing an up-beat tune, his voice is suffused with a certain melancholy. His life has not been easy: he lost part of a leg in a rail-way accident as a child; his son, Ro-berto Jr., is blind; and in 1999 his third wife, Maria Rita, whom he has called the love of his life and the inspiration for his most romantic songs, died of cancer at 38.

During the ’90s Roberto Carlos also fell victim to an obsessive-com-pulsive disorder. That prevented him from singing some of his biggest hits, which contain certain words that had become taboo to him, like “evil” and “lie,” and reinforced his onstage tics, like appearing against a blue back-ground and always wearing white.

But in 2004 he went public with his problem and announced that he was getting treatment. Perhaps as a result his performances have seemed rein-vigorated in recent years.

“I always felt comfortable on the stage and never thought that O.C.D. messed with me when I was up there,” he said when asked about the prob-lem. “It’s true there were some songs I didn’t sing at all and others where I’d avoid one word or another and have to find a substitute. But I’ve gone back to singing many of them, and I hope to sing them all.”

ROBERTO CARLOS

A Journey From Rocker to Crooner

By ERIC WILSON

Thierry Mugler may be the first de-signer whose success can be said to have increased in direct correlation to his desire to never again be seen.

After Clarins, the French fra-grance company that has owned his name since 1997, shuttered his futur-istic-power-babe fashion line in 2003 in the wake of huge losses, it seemed as if he had fallen off the face of the earth — only to return four years later as a completely transformed person, barely recognizable, having remade his body into a spectacle of muscle and tattoo with an extreme regimen of diet, exercise and what is apparently plastic surgery.

That was the intention, Mr. Mu-gler said, because he did not want to be recognized. “You don’t want to be reminded that you did this or you did that,” he said. “It is disturbing.”

Though his collections, which included exaggerated power suits, leather masks and robotic armor, were often dismissed as sexist fan-tasies in the 1980s, and though Mr. Mugler felt unappreciated by major magazine editors and critics, his im-pact has been surprisingly durable.

There has been a revival of his hard-edged, body-conscious and fu-turistic styles in recent runway fash-ion . His 1992 motorcycle bustier was the hit of the 2008 “Superheroes” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York, which inspired Beyoncé to seek him out to create the wardrobe for her concert tour last year.

“It was a sort of vindication,” Mr. Mugler said. “Before, they said I was only about sex shop.”

More telling of his influence is the consistent strength of his fragrance

business with Clarins. The block-buster scent Angel, introduced in 1992, and a second scent called Alien, from 2005, now generate close to $280 million in annual sales. A third is ex-pected to add $80 million in sales.

The new fragrance is called Wom-anity, which in broad terms is meant to evoke a metaphysical bond exist-ing among all of womankind. Mr. Mugler’s fragrances are typically polarizing — either you love them or hate them — as are his ideas .

Christophe de Lataillade, who has worked with Mr. Mugler for 23 years, first as his assistant during the go-go fashion years, now as the creative director of Thierry Mugler perfumes in Paris, is the person most likely to anticipate his desires, as well as his moods. “At times, I have seen him come back after some changes, and I was a bit puzzled,” Mr. de Latail-lade said. “But he just decided to be someone else. ”

When Mr. Mugler arrived in Par-is in the 1960s, he was a lithe ballet dancer . Today, at 61, he has muscles so bulging as to impede natural movement .

His metamorphosis was indeed a conscious decision, Mr. Mugler said. A hallmark of his style was to create the impression of wild animals on his runway, with women transformed in-to exotic birds and jungle cats. With-out that outlet to provoke, he began to change his own appearance.

“The reason I quit fashion was that I had had enough of spending my time always being on my knees, making other people look amazing and fabulous,” he said. “I used fash-ion to express myself as much as I could. But at some point, it was not enough.”

THIERRY MUGLER

Once a Designer, Now a Body in Motion

‘‘I listen to and like all kinds of music, from

bossa nova to country, and every once in a while

I’ll take a risk.’’

‘‘I am from a generation that genuinely wanted a better society . . . but

which got blinded.’’

‘‘You don’t want to be reminded

that youdid this or you did that. It is disturbing.’’

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, MAY 24, 2010

By KATE TAYLOR

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Su-san Blakney, a paintings conserva-tor from New York, scrambled up a mound of rubble left by the collapse of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral here, searching for small shards of the cathedral’s murals.

The cathedral is a cherished part of this country’s cultural heritage, and most of its murals were destroyed in the earthquake that struck here in January. Two from the north transept, though, one depicting the Last Supper and the other the baptism of Christ, remain largely intact.

“It looks like there are some chunks underneath here,” Ms. Blakney, 62, yelled to colleagues working with her earlier this month in an effort to save thousands of works of art damaged in the quake.

The rescue is being organized by the Smithsonian Institution, which is to open a center here in June where American conservators will work with Haitian staff members to repair torn paintings, shattered sculptures and other works pulled from the rub-ble of museums and churches.

Haitian artists and cultural profes-sionals have been conducting infor-mal salvage operations for the past four months. But the Americans are bringing conservation expertise — there are few if any professionally trained art conservators in Haiti — and special equipment, much of it paid

for by private money.The initiative, in its swiftness, its

close collaboration with a foreign government and its combination of private and government financing, represents a new model of American cultural diplomacy, one that organiz-ers believe stands in stark contrast to the apathy Americans were accused of exhibiting during the looting of Iraqi artistic treasures in 2003.

“Mistakes have been made in the past, in times of great tragedy or up-heaval, by not protecting and priori-tizing a country’s cultural heritage,” said Rachel Goslins, the executive director of the President’s Commit-tee on the Arts and the Humanities, which has been involved in finding money for the project. “I think this is a huge opportunity for us to say, ‘We get it.’ ”

The initial financing is coming from three federal agencies and the Broad-way League, the trade group for the-ater owners and producers. Smithso-

nian officials say the project will cost $2 million to $3 million over the next year and a half, after which the center is expected to be turned over to the Haitian government.

Ms. Blakney traveled here with two other conservators, a museum cura-tor, and a group of engineers and plan-ning experts from the Smithsonian. Their task was to assess precisely what kinds of damage the art had sus-tained . Based on that information, they will decide what equipment they, or whoever the Smithsonian ends up sending to work at the center, will need.

The American conservators will spend part of their time training Hai-tians in conservation, in preparation for turning the laboratory over to them.

The rescue operation came together largely because of the efforts of Corine Wegener, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a retired Army major who served in Iraq shortly after the looting of the Iraqi National Mu-seum, and Richard Kurin, the under secretary for history, art and culture at the Smithsonian.

Ms. Wegener, who also made the trip this month, said she had been horrified by what had happened at the Iraqi National Museum, where she worked as a liaison between staff members and American officials dur-ing her deployment.

“It was so disturbing for me as a mu-

seum professional to see the staff so completely in shock,” she said. “How would I feel if I came to work one day and found 15,000 objects had been looted?” She was determined not to see history repeat itself in Haiti, she said .

Some of the Haitian officials and cultural professionals with whom the group met were hearing about the planned conservation center for the first time, and they responded with relief .

The American aid is “fundamental for us,” said Patrick Vilaire, a sculp-tor who took the lead in saving the col-lections of several damaged libraries after the earthquake.

A few, however, expressed frustra-tion that aid had not come sooner and a worry that foreign experts were better at conducting visits and assess-ments than providing real, practical help. A meeting with Daniel Elie, the head of the government agency in charge of preserving Haiti’s national heritage, turned momentarily tense when his colleague and translator, Monique Rocourt, said she was fed up with hosting visiting advisers who came and did nothing.

“If I bring another team of experts to Jacmel,” she said, referring to a city seriously damaged in the quake, “we will look in front of the population like we’re just bringing foreigners to look at disasters. It’s cynical, but that’s what people will think.”

Rescuing Haiti’s Art From the Quake’s Rubble

An aid operation reflects lessons learned in Iraq.

By JOSEPH PLAMBECK

At the ripe age of 28, Jon Zimmer is sort of an old fogy. That is, he is ob-sessive about the sound quality of his music.

A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity and $10,000 loudspeakers.

But iPods and compressed comput-er files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says.

The last decade has brought an explosion in dazzling technological advances — including enhancements in surround sound, high-definition television and 3-D — that have trans-formed the fan’s experience. There are improvements in the quality of media everywhere — except in music.

In many ways, the quality of what people hear has taken a step back. To

many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl.

In one way, the music business has been the victim of its own technologi-cal success: the ease of loading songs onto a computer or an iPod has meant that a generation of fans has happily traded fidelity for portability and convenience. This is the obstacle the industry faces in any effort to create higher-quality — and more expen-sive — ways of listening.

“If people are interested in getting a better sound, there are many ways

to do it,” Mr. Zimmer said. “But many people don’t even know that they might be interested.”

Take Thomas Pinales, a 22-year-old from Spanish Harlem . He listens to his music on his Apple iPod , and while he wouldn’t mind upgrading, he is not convinced that it would be worth the cost. “My ears aren’t fine tuned,” he said. “I don’t know if I could really tell the difference.”

In fact, among younger listeners, lower-quality sound might actually be preferred. Jonathan Berger, a pro-fessor of music at Stanford Universi-ty, said he had conducted an informal study among his students and found that an increasing number preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings.

“I think our human ears are fickle. What’s considered good or bad sound changes over time,” Mr. Berger said. “Abnormality can become a fea-ture.”

In Age of Mobile Music, Sound Quality Falls

In 1936, a glamour girl named Cynthia became a minor toast of the town. She went around with a guy named Lester, who took her to all the showoff places in New York — the opera, El Morocco — and the next year she made the cover of Life. Cyn-thia would get fan mail, but if anyone

ever got a reply, it was guaranteed to come from Lester.

That’s because Cyn-thia was a mannequin, the work of Lester Ga-ba. Saks Fifth Avenue had wanted a lifelike

mannequin, and Lester, a soap sculp-tor of untapped skills (he later be-came a columnist for Women’s Wear Daily), needed little encouragement.

In 1953, Lester thought his hol-low lady should have a TV show. He spent $10,000 to have her jaw wired so she could say witty things, and he hid the cables in the back of her Dior dress. But it was no good, he told Gay Talese, in The New York Times, some years afterward. “Cynthia never made any sense,” he said.

Why does this sound so familiar? The mannequin hair, sleek and heavy-falling, and lipsticked smiles that meet every parade and homicide with the same frozen interest, are par for the course on television news.

One evening a few weeks ago a friend driving past Saks looked and said, “I wonder what mannequins tell us about who we are.”

At their best they tell us how we stand and carry our bodies; whether we want to be tall, willowy, athletic, busty, Amazonian, and if we need to pay attention to our arches. But even at their worst — headless, colorless, listless — a mannequin tells us some-thing about ourselves.

Twenty or 30 years ago, it was relatively easy to walk down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and see dif-ferences in mannequins, differences not only in color and ethnic charac-teristics but also attitude and even emotion, which were conveyed by the novelty of the displays and, of course, the fashion.

Nowadays, though, with few excep-tions, the great avenue provides a window into limited resources and eroded convictions. By using the generic-looking mannequins, stores seem to want to erase the issue of race and ethnic identity, as much as blogs now serve to highlight these distinctions.

“A lot of stores just avoid that issue by spraying everything gloss white and not putting any features on the mannequin,” said Michael Stew-ard, the executive vice president of Rootstein, a top specialist in realistic mannequins based in New York and London. “They don’t want to make a mistake.”

Similarly, he said, a designer client will spend $50,000 a day for a model for an advertising shoot but will fret over the choice of mannequin until finally saying, “Oh, just make it head-less.”

MAGGIE STEBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, a renowned mural depicting the Last Supper, detail at left, largely survived the January earthquake. Experts from the United States are helping Haiti conserve and repair works of art damaged in the quake.

EVAN SUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Our Mannequins,

Ourselves

JOSHUA BRIGHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In recorded music, portability may actually trump fidelity.

Generic mannequins have become the rule. Julio Gomez, director of windows for Saks.

An iPod is not for audiophiles, but fans may not care.

CATHYHORYNESSAY

Repubblica NewYork