USA TODAY articles from September 2003

USA TODAY archives from September 2003

Technology spurs fearless forecasts.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... According to the World Future Society, Bethesda, Md., here are the top 10 forecasts for 2003 and beyond: 1. Web-based control over transportation could eliminate drunk driving. Smart cars connected to public databases might automatically...

"Blended" families face obstacles.(Your Life)(family therapy important in learning how to deal with problems)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Two common mistakes can prevent success in blended families, argues Robert Billingham, associate professor of human development and family studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. The first is remarrying too soon after a death or divorce,...

Crumbling classrooms affect performance.(Your Life)(disrepair of US school facilities may relate to low academic achievement)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Of all the world's economies, the U.S. is ranked No. 1. Why, then, are American students ranked sixth internationally in academic achievement? It may have something to do with their schools' infrastructure. Since the 1930s, research has shown a...

Racial identity can boost academic performance.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... Minority youths get better grades in school it they connect their racial identity with academics. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, research shows. In three studies analyzing racial and cultural identity, Daphne Oyserman, an associate...

Blame doting parents for grad's joblessness.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... The biggest obstacle to landing a job for this year's class of an estimated 1,300,000 spring college graduates may be their parents. Despite the significant financial strain of funding a four-year college education, many parents choose to...

Resume reading done in a flash.(Your Life)(executive survey)(tips for improving resume writing)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... In the same amount of time it takes you to make your morning coffee, most prospective employers decide whether or not they want to interview you for a job, suggests a survey by Accountemps, a Menlo Park, Calif., temporary staffing service for...

As wives' income rises relocation declines.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... Greater income parity in married-couple households may be a leading factor behind the increasing reluctance to expand one's job search geographically, despite the fact that doing so greatly improves the chances of speedy reemployment. The...

Reality shows 'round the clock.(Your Life)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Americans are ready for reality television shows on a 24-hour basis, maintains telecommunications professor Dom Caristi of Ball State University, Muncie, Ind. Reality Central, a cable channel set to debut in 2004, will be a success because only...

Beware pitfalls of consolidating loans.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... With interest rates near rock bottom, many consumers are consolidating their higher interest loans, especially credit cards. Consolidation can be a good strategy, but could cost far more in interest charges and even bad credit if you're not...

Housing selection crucial for retirees.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... Choosing a suitable place to live during retirement not only has important lifestyle and health ramifications, it can result in a significant financial cost at a time when people commonly assume that their housing expenses will be declining,...

Correction.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... Multiple "measurement" errors--in translating from metric to "English" units--occurred in the article, "Are We on the Brink of a New Little Ice Age?," by Terrence M. Joyce and Lloyd Keigwin, in the May 2003 issue. On page 62, there are a pair...

Emergency care payments dropping.(Your Life)
September 1, 2003... Payments for emergency care have declined substantially in recent years, according to a study by the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Ill....

Sweating the small (and big) stuff.(Your Life)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... According to a poll conducted by the maker of Certain Dri Antiperspirant, millions of Americans sweat more than they would like to and are embarrassed by excessive perspiration. Making a presentation is the most-sweat-provoking situation, say...

The myths and truths of family abduction.(National Affairs)
September 1, 2003... THE VERY IDEA Of child abduction is met by parents in equal measures of fear and disbelief--it can't happen to us. The series of high-profile abductions of children in 2002 raised the country's awareness. The kids spanned the ages of two to 15...

Another round in the culture wars.(State Of The Nation)
September 1, 2003... In LAWRENCE V. TEXAS, THE SUPREME COURT case that overturned the Texas law criminalizing homosexual sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, asserted, "It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war,...

Vanishing youngsters: no easy answers.(Life in America)
September 1, 2003... THE Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984 defines a missing child as any individual under 18 years of age whose whereabouts are unknown to the youngster's caretaker. According to the Second National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted,...

Giving kids a fighting chance.(Education)
September 1, 2003... THE NAMES OF THE MISSING are as common as those of the children who live next door: Samantha Runnion, Polly Klaas, Jimmy Ryce, Daniel VanDam, Jennifer Short, Erica Pratt. As parents, we can't help but stop and feel an overwhelming mix of fear...

Congress should not repeal the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.(Law & Justice)
September 1, 2003... THE ENACTMENT of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) was a victory for accountants, securities firms, and the high-technology industry, who were frequent targets of securities fraud class actions. Subsequent events have...

It can't happen here.(Words & Images)
September 1, 2003... SUPPOSE YOU WOKE UP TOMORROW MORNING to find that the news media in America had become a complacent conduit for the government and big business interests, failing to challenge authority, and passing on information spun carefully by special...

Western investment can help conquer terrorism.(Economics)
September 1, 2003... THE ROOTS OF RADICALISM in the Middle East are as tangled as the tales of Scheherazade, but one particular branch of the tree that is feeding the terrorist mentality is the dismal state of the economy in the countries that are spawning the...

What you didn't know about the new tax law.(Economic Observer)
September 1, 2003... BY NOW, THE CASH REGISTERS should be ringing with Pres. Bush's advanced child tax rebate purchases--and you should be taking home more money because of the new tax law's lower rates. The latest revisions are replete with well-publicized...

Middle East peace plan looks to be a road map to nowhere.(Worldview)
September 1, 2003... ALTHOUGH SUICIDE bombings, military strikes, and other forms of violence are likely to continue spasmodically into the foreseeable future, there is good news out of the Middle East: Israel and the Palestinians are resuming their efforts to...

Policing the world for First Freedoms.(World Watcher)
September 1, 2003... LET'S PRETEND THAT THE U.S. AND GREAT BRITAIN invaded Iraq in order to rid the country of Saddam Hussein and bring in a government that we decided was "representative" of the people and granted freedom. We agree to cast aside all other...

Demonizing drugmakers: the political assault on the pharmaceutical industry.(Medicine & Health)
September 1, 2003... FEW SECTORS of the economy have provided more benefits to consumers than the pharmaceutical industry. Drugmakers have been vilified by patients and politicians alike, however, because of what they see as unreasonably high drug costs. Yet,...

From Picasso to Pollock: classics of modern art: highlighting the aesthetic vanguard from Cubism through Abstract Expressionism, this wide-ranging exhibition features works by some of the last century's most influential artists.(Museums Today)
September 1, 2003... FORMULATED by Pablo Picasso and his Parisian colleague, Georges Braque, Cubism offered new possibilities for rendering three-dimensional objects on the two-dimensional picture plane; images are fractured into myriad small facets and depicted as...

Edward Hopper's America: where past and present coexist uneasily.(Museums Today)
September 1, 2003... THE SON OF A SHOPKEEPER, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was born and raised in the small town of Nyack, N.Y., oil the banks of the Hudson River, north of New York City, The artist's affection for humble Main Streets likely stemmed from his childhood...

A land time forgot: the North American prints of Karl Bodmer; the collaboration of a German prince and a Swiss-born artist produced what is perhaps the most magnificent--and accurate--series of pictures depicting early America to be found anywhere.(USA Yesterday)
September 1, 2003... ONE OF THE MILESTONES of 19th-century publishing was "Travels in the Interior of North America 1832-1834," released between 1839 and 1844. The book, accompanied by a set of 81 prints, was a unique collaboration between a German prince,...

John Charles Fremont and the exploration of the American West.(USA Yesterday)(Biography)
September 1, 2003... ONE OF THE NEARLY forgotten men who helped make Manifest Destiny a reality in the 19th-century American West was John Charles Fremont. Throughout his time on Earth, he alternately was regarded as a hero and a goat. a braggart and a humble man....

The collateral psychological damage of war: the horrors of armed conflict and battle often leave lasting scars on the psyches of military personnel as well as the civilian population at large.(Psychology)
September 1, 2003... SOLDIERS, who minutes before were moving quickly across an arid portion of unoccupied land while attempting to avoid land mines and gunfire, now huddle together in a small trench. Fatigue envelops them, but sleep avoids its capture. An enemy...

A salute to the genius of director Leo McCarey.(Reel World)(Biography)
September 1, 2003... MY BOOK on Capraesque baseball films finally has been posted to the publisher, so it's on to the next project--a biography of movie director Leo McCarcy (1898-1969). While he is not a household name, this is one filmmaker who decidedly deserves...

Edward Weston: pictorialist pioneer.(Focus on America)
September 1, 2003... EDWARD WESTON pioneered a vision that revealed the stark essence f beauty in natural form. Setting aside the soft focus lenses and ideologies used by pictorialist photographers in the early part of the 20th century to romanticize or create...

Going back to Houston: like so many of America's sports-hungry cities, Houston, Tex., saw its longtime National Football League team move to another region of the country, only to have it replaced by another franchise.(Athletic Arena)
September 1, 2003... TEXAS has long been football crazy. After all, the Lone Star State was the sole locale in which the National Collegiate Athletic Association housed a major Division I league (the old Southwest Conference) featuring eight teams--Texas Tech,...

Green cathedrals II.(Sports Scene)(memories of sports stadiums in US and Canada)(Busch Memorial Stadium, Veteran's Stadium, RFK Stadium, and Olympic Stadium)
September 1, 2003... One of the banes of modern baseball--and of all present-day sports, for that matter--is the insistence by those in charge of the venue where a game is taking place to do everything possible to distract the fail from what is happening on the...

Blowin' in the wind.(What's New?)(Vornado Air Circulation Inc.'s household air circulators)
September 1, 2003... * In the movie "Father of the Bride," Spencer Tracy, in preparing to host a reception for his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor), is catching an earful from the professional wedding planner whom he's hired to gel the house ready for the big event (in...

Nickelodeon school days.(What's New?)(back to school supplies from JAKKS Pacific Inc.)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Summer's on the wane, and parents everywhere are chanting their favorite time-honored mantra: Back to school! For kids, especially the young ones, the return trip to academia doesn't have to be a drag, especially if they can learn the three R's...

Sesame remains super.(What's New?)(Sesame Place children's theme park in Langhorne, Pennsylvania)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Rituals are reassuring and comforting, especially for children. And in the case of our annual trek to Sesame Place in Langhorne, Pa., they aye exciting, too, including for the parents. We've been going to the nation's only theme park based on...

The rain in Spain.(What's New?)(umbrellas from Shaw Creations, Inc.)
September 1, 2003... Advances in electronics technology and computer wizardry, are, quite obviously, amazing. "The things they can do nowadays," as the saying goes. Yet, sometimes, it. is the simpler advances that bring beauty and artistry--and perhaps even...

Clean sweep.(What's New?)(World Kitchen Inc.'s Oxo Good Grips housewares)(resdesign of broom and dustpans)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * Those folks at World Kitchen Inc., Elmira, N.Y., are at it again, with another clever, ergonomically designed variation of a common household product for its Oxo Good Grips line. In this case, the humble broom and dustpan have undergone a...

Super sun protection.(What's New?)(Pop'n Play Portable Play Shade from Graco Children's Products Inc.)(UV protectant SunWise Swimwear from SunWise Products, Inc)
September 1, 2003... * Children, on average, get three times more sun exposure than adults, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. In fact, one blistering sunburn during childhood can double the risk of skin cancer later in life With physicians urging...

Lit up.(What's New?)
September 1, 2003... * Whether going back to school, enduring the daily office grind, or completing chores around the house, not much will get done if you can't see properly. Leave it to Zelco Industries, Inc., Mt. Vernon, N.Y., to come up with a series of products...

Shark eats dirt!(What's New?)(Bagless Stick Shark vacuum cleaner by Euro-Pro Corp.)
September 1, 2003... * Much to the regret of door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen, the massive machines of yesteryear have given way to a new breed of sleek devices that are lighter, more versatile, and outperform their stodgy older brothers and sisters. The...

Sounds perfect.(What's New?)(Receptor Radio)
September 1, 2003... * Every time we look at that little box, we can't believe it. Then we turn it on, and the results are even more impossible to reconcile. How can such deep, rich sound come out of such a small, unobtrusive unit? To be honest, what first...

Rock on.(What's New?)(Schoolhouse Rocker)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * There's something soothing about a rocking chair. Whether it's an infant being lullabied to sleep by a parent, or Grandpa spinning tales about younger and more energetic days, the rocker always seems to be the center of serenity. ...

Pop goes the hamper.(What's New?)(laundry hampers)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * Sure, the traditional laundry basket is a handy place to dump your dirty clothes into as they accumulate. Face it, though, it's kind of unsightly, cuts into your hands when you have to lift and carry it (especially if you've waited until the...

Wood repair made easy.(What's New?)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * If you have pride in your home, few things are as frustrating as scratches, chips, and assorted dings that mar the finish of wooden furniture. Wood filler can take care of minor damage, but using it requires sanding down the excess and then...

Rubbermaid for convenience.(What's New?)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... What Rubbermaid, Huntersville, N.C., has done for storage, it is in the process of doing for home improvement. Its target is the ever-expanding do-it-yourself market, the group whose top 10 projects include--at least according to the research...

Now here's the drill.(What's New?)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * With the possible exception of a hammer, it seems no one is using good-old-fashioned hand tools anymore. Once electricity became introduced to the equation, manual labor got a lot easier, the sole problem being that the job had to be...

Sitting and shopping.(What's New?)
September 1, 2003... * Some people love prowling through stores--antique shops, mass merchandisers, boutiques, department stores... it doesn't matter. Others shudder at the very prospect. The latter, however, are missing out on the thrill of the chase--finding...

No need to heed heat.(What's New?)(iSi North America's oven mitts)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... * If we told you someone was about to plunge his or her hands into boiling water, the flames from a grill, a pot full of spattering or oil or anything else with a temperature up to 500[degrees]F, you would probably assume was a scene from "Fear...

Hang 'em high.(What's New?)(pot racks)
September 1, 2003... * Once upon a time, many households had a pot and a pan that took Care of most of their cooking needs. After a while, more-specialized utensils began to fill specific needs, and kitchen cabinets started to fill up with stock pots, saute pans,...

Cooling pain with heat.(What's New?)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Muscle pain--whether from overexertion, athletic injuries, or just getting out of bed the wrong way--can be persistent and debilitating. One of the ways to soothe the aches while an analgesic is providing some relief is through judicious use of...

The American Dream: a Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... BY JIM CULLEN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2003, 214 PAGES, $25.00 Martin Luther King, Jr. was no the only American who had dream. Conceived through a collective dream of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the U.S. is nation of...

Universities in the Marketplace: the Commercialization of Higher Education.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... BY DEREK BOK PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 2003, 234 PAGES, $22.95 Already in 1905, Harvard University was paying its 26-year-old foot ball coach a salary equal to that of its president and twice that of its full professors. In Universities in...

Hollywood's White House: the American Presidency in Film and History.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... EDITED BY PETER C. ROLLINS AND JOHN E. O'CONNOR, THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 2008, 341 PAGES, $32.00 This well-written book, with contributions by both film critics and historians, is an interesting study of the real presidency and...

Museum memo.(Brief Article)(Calendar)
September 1, 2003... What's new in museums around the country? Among the more interesting exhibitions on view are: Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825, the New York Public Library, Oct. 3-Jan. 31, 2004. The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe end the Collecting...

Are younger people worse off than their parents?(Parting Thoughts)
September 1, 2003... IN THE ETERNAL WAR OF YOUTH VS. AGE, the complaint commonly heard is that in today's world, children never will be as ell off as their patents. The deck supposedly is stacked against them, as they are the first generation to start going...