Adler was not foiled by a test administrator noticing that the person taking the test was not the person pictured on Adler’s driver’s license. Nor was he done in by the Educational Testing Service’s analysis of his test scores for irregularities. Instead, Adler was thwarted by the one factor he should have had the most control over: himself.

If they had just kept the scheme to themselves, only Adler and co-conspirator Donald Farmer (who took the test for Adler) would have known how easy it was to bypass one of ETS’s most stringent security protocols. Instead, Adler revealed his plan to classmates, and one of them apparently alerted ETS. This tip, coupled with a question from a college admissions officer about a discrepancy between Adler’s test results and grades, ultimately led ETS to challenge his scores.

The lesson of how easy it could have been to cheat on the SAT has not been lost on college-bound and scholarship-seeking students, who know that the stakes are enormous — and they extend beyond the obvious influence on whether a student gets into a particular college. For student-athletes, NCAA rules require a minimum SAT score of 700 in order to play collegiate sports. For other students, there are millions of dollars in academic scholarships on the line as well.

To be sure, few find it necessary to craft elaborate ruses like Adler’s, but some area high school students say they have discovered how to take advantage of ETS security loopholes without getting caught. There are, in short, many ways to cheat without really trying.

In their last years of high school, students come in contact with four types of ETS examinations: the SAT; the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), a scaled-down practice version of the SAT; the Achievements, which test mastery of specific subjects on a high school level; and the Advanced Placement (AP) exams, which test mastery of specific subjects on a college level.

One method of beating the system on SATs and PSATs is to confer during the break between the math and verbal sections. Then, test-takers can go to the bathroom or get something to eat. Often, anxious students will gather in the halls and compare answers. Although students are not permitted to work on an earlier section once time has been called, a single additional correct answer can result in a 20- to 30-point increase in a score. For many, the temptation proves too great.

"People go out into the halls during the break and talk about the answers," said Sidwell Friends School senior Peter Wallace. "They go back in, and when there is no proctor around, they make changes."

For the Achievement tests, the problem of comparing answers is even worse. The one-hour Achievements can be taken in a myriad of subjects, ranging from biology to modern Hebrew. During the testing period, students can take up to three tests in almost any order they choose. In between, there is also a break in which students may leave the test room.

Thus, it is possible for students to get answers to tests that they have yet to take.

"You could arrange with a friend . . . that if you were taking, say, two Achievements and you were going to screw up the math Achievement really badly, you could have your friend take his math Achievement first. Then, he could tell you about the problems," Sidwell senior Greg Humphreys said. "I have even heard of people writing down answer lists and trading during the break."

Probably the most common form of cheating is violating the time limits by quickly finishing sections where you’re strong and going back where you’re weak, says Sidwell senior Christian Hicks. Referring to the TSWE (Test of Standard Written English, one of six SAT sections), Hicks said, "Although I have never done it . . . you can complete the TSWE in 10 minutes and use the rest of the time to finish other sections. Nobody really cares about it, and it’s downright sensible to sacrifice your performance there and improve your performance on other parts of the test."

Some tactics are more innovative.

"I know one person who had one of those little electronic dictionaries and brought it into the test room," said Sidwell’s Wallace. "He must have hidden it in his coat."

Humphreys said, "On the physics AP, you are allowed to use any kind of calculator you want, including my calculator in which I can program every single physics formula, type pages of notes or type definitions of words. I can do whatever I want. The proctors are like ‘Now clear your calculator’s memory.’ What are they going to do, go around and check it?"

So it’s easy to cheat on the most important tests of high school? ETS Division Director for College Board Programs Irving Broudy says no. Existing security measures should prevent students from such methods of cheating, he said — if proctors enforce ETS rules.

"Two million students take the SAT every year. Less than two in a thousand cases are ever questioned in any way," Broudy said. "Most students — the huge majority — take the test seriously, are honest, and follow instructions."

Broudy also said, "When we have reason to believe that there is a problem of copying, we have a way of comparing wrong answers or comparing answers in general. If one finds a pattern of responses — especially wrong answers — then there’s an indicator that something improper may have occurred. So there are lots of built-in checks."

Broudy would not say, however, whether these checks were done at random, to all students’ answer sheets or only to those whose scores had been questioned.

"We prefer not to give out specific information on procedures that might essentially provide a means by which students might want to subvert them," he said.

With two million students being tested, Broudy added, "I wouldn’t be surprised if there were rare cases where problems occurred that might not be detected. But we think that overall, the system works, and works pretty well."

Among the cases that have apparently gone undetected are those of students comparing answers.

"I have not heard that one before, to tell you the truth — I mean the use of the break," said Broudy. "But part of my job — and our job in general — when we hear comments like this is to review them and look at them and if there is sufficient evidence to reconsider our procedures."

ETS President Gregory Anrig said, however, that current security measures are reasonable because cheating is not widespread.

"If there were widespread cheating on the SAT, then one would say, ‘Well, over time the effect of this would be that the correlation between SAT scores and freshman grades would change.’ The colleges regularly do validity studies to check that. In fact, the correlation has not changed over time," he said.

"I’m not denying that there’s cheating," Anrig added. "I do say that we have procedures in place to guard against cheating and we pursue them vigorously."

Charles Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University, also thinks current safeguards are adequate. "Given that . . . [cheating] can happen, there are a lot of ways that it can be identified through the admissions process. I don’t think that we would be particularly interested in them creating a Gestapo-like environment. I think that would be going overboard."

But available data — and the testimony of students themselves — paint a less optimistic picture. According to recent surveys done by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina Del Rey, Calif., three out of five high school students and one in three college students admitted to cheating at least once on an exam — though the survey does not single out the College Boards. As reported by The Washington Post’s Richard Morin, "American kids are lying, cheating and stealing in what some researchers fear are unprecedented numbers."

"I can tell you from experience at Churchill," said Churchill senior Ivan Snyder, "it’s all over the place. Not hard-core cheating, substituting, Larry Adler-type cheating, but going back in sections and talking about it during the break. Even when I took the exam, I heard people talking about the test, telling people what was coming up . . . . Both times I took the SAT, I saw it. I was sort of shocked because I thought, ‘You know, this is the SAT. This doesn’t happen.’"

Many scholarship competitions, such as the National Merit Scholarship Competition, rely heavily upon a student’s standardized test scores. In the National Merit competition, for instance, semifinalists are selected solely upon their PSAT scores. While they may not actually receive a scholarship from the competition, semifinalist status helps students in many other ways.

"That is a very valuable scholarship and is one of the most prestigious scholarships in the country," said Cinthia Schuman, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). "It opens up many doors — both financially and in terms of the schools that you can choose from — in terms of educational opportunities. The fact is that it is wrong to place so much emphasis on the PSAT, with all of its flaws. Students recognize that there is a game-like aura to the test because it doesn’t reflect the kind of skills they actually need in college, like reading, research and writing."

A National Merit Scholarship Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment, referring all questions about test security to ETS.

Because of standardized tests’ tremendous importance, some students argue that ETS should take a more active role in combating cheating. "What they should do is they should have two separate sheets, one for math and one for verbal, and pick up the verbal one in between breaks," suggested Sidwell senior Paul Hodgdon. "That way you can’t go back and change your answers. Or have more proctors, because Sidwell has two during the PSATs. For 100 people, that just doesn’t work."

Anrig warns, however, that while such measures might crack down on cheating, they would punish honest test-takers as well.

"I don’t believe you should treat all 1.6 million kids that take some form of the admission testing program as if they’re wrong-doers," Anrig said. "One could have procedures that would be sure to guard against any possible eventuality," he said, but that would mean treating the test-taker "not as a student who deserves to be treated properly, but as a prisoner in a correctional facility."

Bernard Noe, Sidwell’s Upper School principal, said, "If in fact — and there really is no hard evidence . . .cheating is widespread, that’s a sad statement about our students’ culture. It’s sad for the future that if you are willing to cheat on your SATs, you’re probably willing to cheat on your taxes or anything else that can be justified as beating the system. I hope to God that we are not teaching young values this way."

Now a growing number of "community" or "civic" computer networks are springing up around the country to tie local people together and hook them into the Internet for free.

Last week, Maryland’s planned state-wide "Sailor" system, which makes the Internet’s so-called gopher services available at no cost, began limited operation in the Baltimore area. Officials hope to start making it available in Washington’s Maryland suburbs in September.

Sailor also will offer subsidized rates — $ 100 per year — for full access to the Internet, which is used by an estimated 20 million people worldwide. Commercial Internet services often charge three times that.

Sailor will join a more established Washington area community network, CapAccess, which in a year and a half has attracted more than 9,000 users by offering electronic-mail connections, limited access to the Internet and other services.

Since 1986 when Case Western Reserve University launched the Cleveland FreeNet, community networks have sprung up in many North American cities. The goal is to foster local communications and make sure that the poor and public service groups aren’t priced out of the electronic future.

They are free in the sense that public television is. People can sign up for nothing, but once aboard they are typically urged to donate money or time. Some services, such as Maryland’s Sailor, receive tax dollars.

"The whole idea of a civic network is new to everybody, including those who think they understand what it means," said Mark Bolgiano, a Greater Washington Board of Trade vice president who is studying a partnership with CapAccess.

"The number of people among our members who know what Internet is is still pretty low," he said. "CapAccess is even harder to understand."

Any area resident with a computer, modem device and communications software can reach CapAccess with a local telephone call. The number is 202-785-1523. Newcomers can log in under the name "guest", using "visitor" as the password.

People who already have Internet connections can reach CapAccess by using the telnet command to reach the address cap.gwu.edu.

Based at George Washington University, the service is geared toward helping users new to "the Net" get up to speed quickly. Instead of grappling with confusing typed commands, they can move around the service by picking numbered options from a menu or by typing shortcuts, such as "go post" to read e-mail.

There are on-line guides to appropriate Net conduct — dubbed "netiquette" — and other hints, such as how to select a good password. For users who would prefer face-to-face help, volunteers conduct free weekend training sessions.

CapAccess has targeted local schools, libraries, governments and social service groups by letting them use the service to promote their activities and collaborate with similar groups. Volunteers will help any such group post information or set up on-line "discussion groups" in which people carry on electronic dialogues.

Arlington County, for instance, has put a government information center on the system. The Montgomery County Public Library put its card catalogue on-line, and the Kennedy Center added performance schedules.

Several local schools put PTA minutes on-line and some churches have started posting sermons. Virginia Sen. Charles S. Robb set up a "virtual office," believed to be the first of its kind, which allows constituents to skim his voting record and official policy statements.

"It’s a good forum for people to look at what Senator Robb has been saying and doing," said Matt McGowan, Robb’s office manager.

The CapAccess experiment has created "new cross-community connections" between governments and community service groups, said CapAccess Executive Director Taylor Walsh.

"If there’s an information resource in Montgomery County that helps people who are homeless, there’s no reason for Arlington or Prince George’s to replicate that database and pay for its implementation if they can get access to it through the network," he said. "We’re already beginning to see that kind of thing happening."

Unlike many computer services, which tend to be used overwhelmingly by white males, the CapAccess user base is a fairly representative sampling of the region. At a recent membership meeting, half of the people attending were women, and almost a third were black. Overall, about 35 percent of CapAccess users are female, Walsh said. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of CompuServe and America Online users are women.

To provide true public access to the system, CapAccess has started a "recycling" campaign to refurbish old computers from corporations and governments and redistribute them to libraries, schools and community centers across the region.

"We need to put access points in the hands of the disadvantaged so [CapAccess] can be a tool for the many, not the few," said attorney Jack Young, a CapAccess volunteer.

Funded initially by grants from the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Projects with technical assistance from George Washington University, CapAccess now relies entirely on donations and volunteers such as Young to cover its $ 300,000 in annual costs.

This collaboration could serve as a model for national networks, users say.

"We are doing exactly what the government wants to do," said the Rev. Fred Williams, a board member. "Our ‘family’ is building a better community through technology. What we’re doing is replicable and exportable throughout the whole country."

You can’t call him at Esquire magazine, though. He doesn’t work there and never has, according to the company. Try some of his other 17 e-mail addresses, including "hertz.com" and "trump.com," and you’ll get the same result. He doesn’t work for those companies either, spokesmen said.

But Cashel does own the words they might want to use in their cyberspace addresses.

Cashel — a Kalorama resident who works at the government-funded Eurasia Foundation here — declined to be interviewed for this article. He is among a growing number of people and companies that have registered hundreds of Internet addresses mimicking some of corporate America’s most fiercely guarded trademarks.

Only with an address can a company send and receive e-mail on "the Net." Just as street signs provide directions to buildings, Internet addresses direct information to the right individual. If your name is Mike and you work at XYZ Corp., your Internet address might be mike@xyz.com. Unless, of course, somebody else had already registered @xyz.com. Then you would have to be mike@elsewhere.com.

The unique addresses are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis by an administrative body called InterNIC. Anyone can register any address for free. The only restrictions are Internet naming guidelines, which limit the number of characters and require that a descriptive suffix be included. All business addresses, for instance, must include the suffix ".com," short for "commercial."

The rush by Cashel and others to register potentially valuable names may cost businesses millions. As more companies venture on-line, they may find their name of choice already has been registered by a speculator, a competitor, an employee or even a company in a different industry with a similar name. At stake is corporate identity in the information age.

Companies whose potential names have been registered by others will have three choices: Pick another name, buy the rights to the original one or sue.

"There are big corporate names being registered, and it appears that it is individuals and not companies who are responsible," said Mike Walsh, the president of Internet Info, a Falls Church market research firm that tracks corporate use of the Net.

Already, 17,000 ".com" names have been registered, and that number may swell to 50,000 a year from now, Walsh said.

A search of InterNIC’s public registry of names reveals several Fortune 500 companies whose names or products have been registered by someone else. Besides Cashel’s names, already taken are "coke.com," "startrek.com," "nasdaq.com," "cosmo.com" and "windows.com." Some companies have reserved scores of addresses that might be valuable someday, such as "pizza.com," "sex.com," "god.com" and "money.com."

Spokesmen for Hertz Corp., the Nasdaq stock market, Viacom Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and other companies and organizations contacted said they were unaware that the names had been registered. Several said the companies would investigate possible legal action to claim the names.

Like many legal issues in cyberspace, there is no clear precedent on whether traditional trademark law protection extends to Internet addresses.

"Addresses are problematic. The trademarks statute forbids the registration of geographic addresses, but computer addresses may not fall within those limitations," said Lynne Beresford, the trademark legal administrator at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

"It’s very much like getting a vanity plate," said Jonathan Groves, manager of information services at the Internet Co., a Cambridge, Mass., Internet provider that registered the Nasdaq and Windows addresses for clients.

Several intellectual property and trademark lawyers said that companies whose names are taken may have pretty strong cases.

"Trademark rights are based upon use. If you make any other use of a name that could confuse the public, that’s trademark infringement," said John Hornick, an attorney who specializes in such matters.

"If you take an Internet address, you’re saying, ‘I’m going to take someone else’s name and register it,’ " he said. "You can certainly argue that might confuse the public, and could probably sue and win."

Merely registering a company’s name could prompt legal action, said Bruce Teller, outside counsel for the International Trademark Association. While not trademark infringement, registering a name could be considered trademark dilution because the commercial value in a name is diminished, he said.

Two cases are in the courts. In one, the MTV cable channel is suing Adam Curry, a former MTV host, over his use of the address "mtv.com." Curry originally offered to set up the address for MTV, but the network declined.

With MTV’s knowledge, Curry registered the name for himself and helped the network incorporate it into MTV programming. Only after Curry tried to stage an on-air resignation in April did MTV file suit to claim the name.

While the matter is in litigation, Curry has agreed to direct to another site users who try to address mtv.com.

Lawyers said the case probably will focus on MTV’s initial decision not to register the name, and not on trademark issues.

In the other case, the Princeton Review test preparation company registered the address "kaplan.com" in reference to its largest competitor, the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center. Although Princeton Review President John Katzman says the registration was a joke, the company activated the address with on-line advertisements for Princeton Review.

Kaplan, which is a unit of The Washington Post Co., filed suit. Kaplan President Jonathan Glayer said the company has since registered "about 20" variations on the Kaplan name and its products. The two companies have agreed to arbitration later in the year; in the meantime, Princeton Review has deactivated kaplan.com.

Princeton Review’s "joke" was certainly an expensive one. Katzman estimates his legal bills will run between $ 10,000 and $ 20,000.

Undeterred, he says he may have another joke in store for Kaplan. He’s considering registering the address "kraplan.com" and promoting it instead.

To avoid ending up in Kaplan’s position, companies can take preventive measures. Katzman himself urges, "Everybody should go out and register their company’s domain name right now."

Other suggestions from lawyers include trademarking an un-stylized company logo — because Internet addresses are plain text, a company’s stylized logo may not be admissible in an infringement case — and collecting evidence that a similar name causes public confusion. Misdelivered e-mail might be one way of documentation, attorney Hornick said.

Most of all, companies should not count on Internet providers to protect a name when someone else tries to register it — because most won’t.

"We can’t act as an arbiter," Internet Co. President Robert Raisch explains. "We would be placed in a position of qualifying every domain name for every country around the world."

Rose, a 34-year-old homeless man, will appear in court today on armed robbery charges. Police say Rose took $19.31 from a Raleigh lawyer at a South Blount Street gas station on the night of May 24.

The weapon?

Not a gun. Not a knife. Not even a broken beer bottle.

Out of either extraordinary gumption or extraordinary stupidity, Rose is alleged to have sneaked behind the 65-year-old man and held him up with a beige office stapler.

The tactic ultimately failed when an off-duty Highway Patrol officer who happened to be filling his own tank chased Rose down. Rose now faces charges for "robbery with a dangerous weapon."

That’s what you get for committing a crime with office supplies.

It happens more often than you might think. A surprising amount of crime is committed each year with office supplies. And as in Rose’s case, not just the white-collar variety either.

Across the nation, staplers have been used in at least one murder, one attempted murder, three armed robberies, a police beating of a suspect and a prison uprising since 1981.

They have also been used at least once in self-defense. A Pittsburgh woman foiled a robber at her dry-cleaning store in 1988 by repeatedly beating him over the head with a stapler.

In many respects, office supplies are the perfect tools of crime. There are no licenses required and no waiting periods. They’re readily available and nearly impossible to trace. Office supplies are cheap and, in many cases, free: Everything you need is probably available at your workplace. And there are so many different office supplies for criminals to choose from.

The cliched weapon is the letter opener, of course. When it comes to crime, letter openers are pretty flexible; you can use them to slash, slice, maim or murder. Maybe that’s what accounts for their use in at least five attacks nationally since 1989. Two were robberies, the other three disputes among business partners whose deals had gone sour. One was fatal.

A less-conventional criminal murdered the mayor of Clearwater, Fla., in 1989 by strangling him and then hitting him over the head with a hole punch. The suspect’s attorney explained that his client had downed two pitchers of beer and two glasses of wine the night of the murder. But when the case came to court, the jury decided his punch-drunk defense was, well, full of holes. It recommended a life sentence.

But the up-and-coming criminal office supply is the stapler. Unlike the others, it can be used as a blunt object close up or fired from a distance. Staplers are easy to conceal and, with the wide variety of colors available, easy to accessorize. Criminals, you just don’t have to clash any more.

Staplers clearly have a versatility that other office supplies lack. Maybe that’s why they are used more often in crimes than letter openers, hole punches or any other office supply.

In a January plea bargain agreement, Baton Rouge, La., prosecutors dropped armed robbery charges against 35-year-old Gerald James Joubert for robbing a hotel by holding a stapler to an employee’s neck. In return, he pleaded guilty to robbing a motel and an inn of a combined $428 by putting his finger in his pocket and pretending to have a gun. Joubert claimed he needed the money to pay a court-ordered fine for a previous drug conviction.

A Dallas 18-year-old was convicted in 1993 on charges that he murdered his grandmother with a stapler, a steering wheel "club" security device and a bottle of hot sauce. The motive? He wanted his grandmother’s Cadillac and feared he had been left out of her will.

In New York City, which GQ magazine suggests the Triangle emulate, government agencies have had orders not to leave staplers on desks or countertops for fear that angry citizens might use them to attack bureaucrats.

Well, we’re doing our best to catch up. Just think of Rose’s alleged attack as an act of civic pride.

"Here it is. I want it," the 3-year-old girl announced in delight.

"Maybe we’ll get it when it is closer to your birthday," her father said.

"But I want it now!" insisted Sarah, who will turn 4 on Friday, the same day that "Pocahontas," Walt Disney’s latest animated movie, opens nationwide.

Like Sarah, children across the Triangle have discovered the Pocahontas merchandise that has been flowing into stores since the beginning of this month. Like David Chappell, weary parents have discovered how hard it is to withstand movie studios’ big-budget marketing campaigns as their children clamor for the Next Big Thing.

This summer, parents will have a particularly difficult time as Disney’s "Pocahontas" and Warner Bros.’ "Batman Forever" compete for their children’s hearts, minds and purchasing power.

The studios have thrown the full brunt of their marketing muscle behind the movies. Both are hawking merchandise through their in-house stores. Warner Bros. signed up McDonald’s for a "Batman Forever" promotion; Disney has a similar arrangement with Burger King.

While Batman merchandise is targeted primarily at boys and Pocahontas at girls, the two are competing for shelf and display space at toy stores, book stores, department stores and music stores.

In connection with "Batman Forever," which opened June 16, toy companies are selling five different lines of Batman action figures. For those of you keeping score at home, there’s "Batman Forever," "Batman" the animated series, "Batman Returns," "Legends of Batman" and "Mask of the Phantasm" from the animated movie.

From the new "Batman Forever" line alone, there’s "Manta Ray Batman," "Night Hunter Batman," "Transforming Bruce Wayne Batman," and… well, you get the idea. You can also buy the Batmobile, the Batcopter, the Batcycle and the Batplane. As always, kids are encouraged to collect them all.

The action figures start at $5.99; figures with vehicles at $14.99.

But while Batman may be forever, Pocahontas is a girl’s best friend.

If you thought your child’s craving for "Lion King" paraphernalia was bad, brace yourself. You haven’t seen anything yet. Here’s a small sample of what’s already in stores:

Pocahontas storybooks, songbooks, coloring books, coffee table books. Posters for kids to color and posters that have already been colored. Rubber stamp kits, sand art kits, stationary kits. Dresses, jackets, bracelets, backpacks. Necklaces, nightgowns, mugs and moccasins. The items range in price from a few dollars to $28.

The priciest Pocahontas item is a $248 pigskin leather jacket for adults at The Disney Store. But the hottest-selling is the $16.99 "Sun Colors Pocahontas" doll, which some stores say they have had trouble keeping in stock.

"I’m carrying similar stuff to what I did for ‘Lion King,’ " said Katherine Glascock, the manager of Toy Terminal in Raleigh. "If that’s any forecast, the Pocahontas mugs, stamps and stuffed animals will be real popular."

Their popularity will be no accident. Friday’s opening is the culmination of Disney’s carefully crafted marketing campaign.

Two weekends ago, Disney held a free "Pocahontas" premiere for 100,000 people in New York City’s Central Park. The company has also dispatched Pocahontas animators and an interactive exhibit on a 24-city tour. Disney Stores crank out songs from the soundtrack several times an hour. In addition, every copy of the "Lion King" video included a "Pocahontas" preview.

"Everybody in the world probably has the ‘Lion King’ video," said John Lamiell, a self-described Disney-ite from Sacramento visiting the Triangle. Yes, he owns one of the 26 million copies of the "Lion King" sold so far.

Since last year Disney has aggressively licensed rights to produce Pocahontas merchandise. Burger King alone will distribute 55 million Pocahontas figurines. Stores of all kinds have set up Pocahontas displays, all hoping for a piece of the Disney marketing magic.

"I think it’s great that kids have this to look forward to," David Chappell said. "What I don’t appreciate is how a lot of stores put these advertising displays out in the open, at kid level."

Analysts say Disney could make between $700 million and $900 million in profits from the movie.

Disney has done its marketing so well that other toy companies are seeking to cash in on the Pocahontas craze too.

There’s "Li’l Indian Princess," a palm-sized doll. Or the larger "Native American Doll." Or the "Native American Princess Play Wear Dress and Fun Set," which includes barrette, bracelet and shoulder pouch.

Even Mattel, one of the largest producers of Pocahontas toys, is cross marketing. Prominently displayed in some Triangle stores is its "Native American Barbie." For a mere $149.99, you can purchase a version of the doll that’s almost as tall as your child.

At least that’s an easy one for a parent to say no to. Birthday parties are much harder. Just ask David Chappell whether Sarah will have a Pocahontas birthday party. He pauses and then smiles.

"Probably," he admitted.

But while they’re lowering their prices, some Triangle store owners aren’t even sure whether they will survive the competition.

Consumer electronics chain Best Buy opened its first Triangle store in Raleigh’s Pleasant Valley

Promenade on June 16 and will open its second in Durham’s New Hope Commons in October. It will sell CDs at or below cost as a way of luring shoppers into its store. Circuit City will match the promotion, as it has in other markets where the two compete.

The archrivals hope that a discount of a few dollars on CDs will lure customers and spur sales of stereos, televisions and VCRs.

Consumers across the Triangle are already seeing a savings of about $3 a disc at the electronics chains and at some record stores that are slashing prices to stay competitive.

Nationally, while chains like Sam Goody/Musicland and Blockbuster Music have survived the Best Buy blow, the competition has claimed a number of casualties among regional chains and independent stores.

"It’s big business putting little business out of business," said Don Kulak, executive director of the Independent Music Retailers Association.

In markets where it competes with Circuit City, Best Buy is charging $10.99 for new releases and best-sellers and no more than $12.99 on most other CDs, according to a Billboard magazine survey.

Even before the Minneapolis-based Best Buy opened its Raleigh store, Triangle stores had started to react.

The Schoolkids Records chain in Raleigh and Cary lowered prices on its top 25 best-selling albums to $10.99 about two months ago. Current titles at that price include Hootie and the Blowfish’s "Cracked Rear View," "Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin," and Fugazi’s "Big Red Medicine."

"We would have sold the same titles for $13.99 before," said John Hornaday, manager of the Hillsborough Street store. "That was kind of brought on by Best Buy."

At Durham’s CD Superstore, manager Jeff Hill says his store will match or beat Best Buy’s prices for its discount savings club members. But he expects shoppers who are already in the club to stay in it.

"I just don’t see it affecting us too much because we already have a clientele," Hill said. "We beat the mall prices already."

While managers at other area stores said they were still

discussing an appropriate response, awaiting word from a corporate parent or unaware of Best Buy’s prices, most said their stores’ selection, service and

distance from Best Buy would determine how much they are affected.

"I’m quite sure I’m going to lose customers but I’ll gain some too," said Ronald Winslow, manager of Willies Records and Tapes in Raleigh, who is counting on his store’s strength in harder-to-find music. "We’re more into urban music than they are. I welcome the competition."

Waves Music in the Cary Towne Center has no plans to change

its prices, even though they are $2 to $3 higher than Best Buy’s, assistant manager Craig Hilton said.

"We’re in the mall here, and we get a different crowd then they do," Hilton said. "It was a big deal at first, but we’re not really worried about it."

Jack Campbell, owner of Poindexter’s Records in Durham, said he will not change his prices but will count on his special selection of independent rock to counter the competition. He says the Triangle’s more traditional record stores will duke it out with Best Buy.

"It’s really going to affect CD Superstore, Camelot, Blockbuster and the other mass merchandisers," Campbell says. "We really cater to a different customer.

We try to concentrate on carrying labels that no one else carries."

At $10.99 a CD, he says, "I know enough about the music business that for CD Superstore and Blockbuster Music, it’s not enough profit to keep going."

For those mass merchandisers, there is not much room to maneuver. The price you pay for your favorite disc is largely determined by six major distributors that supply almost all CDs sold across the country. Owned by or affiliated with major record labels, distributors sell CDs to retailers for about $10.75 and typically suggest that stores sell them for about $18.

Since Best Buy started cutting prices in 1989, profit margins have been too narrow for some retailers in other cities who have tried to compete.

The competition from Best Buy’s first North Carolina store in Charlotte was enough to force independent store Sounds Familiar into bankruptcy last year.

Last month the CD discount war claimed its largest casualty yet in Kemp Mill Music, a 25-store chain based in the Washington, D.C., area, which declared bankruptcy.

"It’s the dark side of capitalism," said Leslie Robbins, manager of Raleigh’s Nice Price Books. "It’s great to have cheap CDs but it [hurts] independent stores. I hope it will make people realize it’s worth that extra $2 to shop at those stores."

Medical insiders say the problem has existed for years, but the doctors’ admission at the American Medical Association convention in Chicago is still hard to believe.

Reminding doctors to wash their hands should be like reminding lawyers to bill their clients. A no-brainer. If they can’t master basic hand washing, then they probably didn’t get much else out of medical school.

After all, experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Mayo Clinic call hand washing the single most important way to stop infectious diseases from spreading.

But the "Ten Dirty Digits" resolution the AMA adopted June 22 says doctors simply aren’t washing their hands between patients. There’s only a 14 to 59 percent hand washing rate among doctors and a 25 to 45 percent rate among nurses. The resolution suggests the problem is so serious that cameras should be installed in hospital wards to check.

Doctors are not just derelict in their hand washing at hospitals. During a 1993 convention of the Infectious Diseases Society of America - doctors and other specialists who study germs and the transmission of disease - medical students staked out restrooms to see whether those who knew all the reasons to wash their hands actually did. Of the 493 experts they counted, only 56 percent of men, and 87 percent of women, washed up before walking out.

"This isn’t a new problem," said Theresa Klimko, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the state Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. "These kinds of studies have been going on for several years."

One hundred forty eight years, to be exact. In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss reported that doctors who washed their hands spread fewer germs. His colleagues responded by declaring Semmelweiss insane and committing him to an asylum for the remainder of his life.

The current hand-wringing over hand-washing comes on the heels of a 1994 study suggesting that as many as 1 in 20 hospital patients is infected by doctors or nurses who fail to wash their hands.

Doctors also say that rubber gloves are no substitute for a good scrub.

"As gloves are used, especially around teeth and body cavities, it’s hard on the thin latex, and tiny holes can develop," said Dr. James Crawford, a microbiologist and infection control coordinator for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Dentistry.

Before gloves, dentists had to wash up to 60 times a day, he said. And those weren’t flick-on-the-faucet-and-twirl-your-hands-around-for-a-few-seconds washes. Those were 60 thorough washes.

"A thorough wash, if you lather and rinse twice, takes about 15 seconds to accomplish what you’re going to accomplish," Crawford explained. "To do anything more, you would need to wash for 30 seconds to a minute."

At 15 seconds per wash, that works out to 65 hours of hand washing per year.

Doctors aren’t the only ones who aren’t scrubbing up when they should.

As the head of the state Department of Environmental Health’s Food, Lodging and Institutional Sanitation branch, Susan Grayson makes her living making sure that food professionals, day care workers and others required by law to wash their hands actually do.

"I’m one of those strange people who goes into ladies rooms to watch if people wash their hands," she said. "From personal observation, I can tell you only 50 percent of women wash their hands."

While many of the people required by law to wash their hands fall under Grayson’s jurisdiction, others are forced to wash by higher authorities.

In Judaism, for instance, observant Jews must ritually wash their hands upon waking up, leaving a bathroom, before praying, before eating meals and sometimes even before preparing them, says Rabbi Pinchas Herman of Raleigh’s Congregation Sha’Arei Israel-Lubavitch. "Our custom is to pour water three times on the left hand and three times on the right hand," Herman explained. "Some do it twice, some do it once. There are different customs."

So how frequently does the rabbi wash his hands?

"Well, it depends on how often I go to the bathroom," Herman said, laughing. He says he probably washes 10 times a day.

And, he says, because ritual hand washing is done for spiritual and not hygienic reasons, hands must be clean before they’re washed. Which means washing twice.

Then there are the people who have to wash their hands not because of any law but because they simply can’t stop.

People suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder often have an abnormal fear of contamination that leads to constant hand washing, says clinical psychologist Dr. Mark Lefebvre, who sees two to three patients per week for compulsive hand washing.

"It’s common that people are afraid of contamination not because it would hurt them but because they might inadvertently hurt someone else," he said. "They hit upon hand washing as a way of alleviating that anxiety of contamination. A vicious cycle is set up."

The disorder can be treated with medications such as Prozac and behavior modification therapy. Treatment usually takes 10 sessions, Lefebvre said.

Unfortunately, the treatment might not work in reverse. Which means those who suffer from lapses in their hand washing hygiene will just have to remember to wash on their own. Or maybe they could take the AMA’s advice and do what the doctors ordered.

Then we could all wash our hands of this matter.

Hands act as carriers for germs, which flourish thanks to their warmth, moisture and oils. While you generally can’t get sick simply from having germs on your hands, you can whenever you touch those hands to your mouth, eyes or nose.

"Hate your boss?" asks Susan Grayson, head of the state Department of Environmental Health’s Food, Lodging and Institutional Sanitation branch. "Get a bad cold, cough in your hand and shake his. You can pass lots of germs along like that."

Experts recommend that you wash your hands for at least 20 to 30 seconds whenever you come into contact with something that could have been contaminated by germs, human or animal feces, urine and hazardous materials.

"The most important thing is to do a thorough job," Grayson says. "Be sure to get in between the fingers, around the cuticles and under your nails. And don’t forget your wrists."

You should wash your hands whenever you do the following:

Prepare food.

Clean bathrooms or mop the floor.

Feed your pets or clean their cages.

Blow your nose.

Change a diaper.

Touch lead paint.

Use a public restroom (Remember that faucet handles in the restrooms can get germs on them, too. And if others don’t wash their hands, everything from doorknobs to bowls of mints may be contaminated.).

Decades ago and thousands of miles away, Sgt. Chuck Boyd flew the UH-1 over the jungles of Vietnam for the Army. These days he flies over the woods and forests of North Carolina for the Highway Patrol, searching for a very different enemy: marijuana.

During these summer months, the height of "drug season," Boyd and three other pilots will each spend roughly three days a week scouring the state for patches of marijuana that have been tucked away in the middle of corn fields, bean fields and just about anywhere else that water flows.

While aerial drug searches may seem to have little to do with patrolling highways, bureaucracies work in strange ways: The helicopters Boyd flies were given to the Highway Patrol. And the drug searches don’t cost North Carolina taxpayers a penny.

Because, in a curious way, they are North Carolina’s own peace dividend.

For 18 years, the Highway Patrol had a single helicopter, a blue-and-white Bell Jet Ranger that flew all the manhunts, all the high-speed chases, all the state fairs, all the stock car races and all the other events where 200,000 people or more were expected to take to the highways. Until 1986, the Highway Patrol even had to share the Jet Ranger with the state Department of Commerce.

But thanks to a great bureaucratic giveaway, it now has an entire fleet.

In the midst of base closings and budget cutbacks, the Pentagon decided it had too many helicopters. So in 1991 it decided to give away the ones it didn’t need anymore.

The surplus helicopters were awarded to law enforcement agencies across the country that promised to use them to fight drugs. The agencies were provided with federal grant money and permission to use the proceeds from the sale of drug dealers’ property to pay for the helicopters’ operation.

Over the past three years, the Highway Patrol got 10 working choppers, plus plenty of spare parts.

From as far away as Texas and from as close as Fort Bragg, the Highway Patrol assembled a new fleet of two UH-1 Hueys and eight OH-58s, the military version of its trusty old Jet Ranger. Two more UH-1s and another OH-58 were salvaged for parts.

The helicopters have been gradually repaired, refurbished and repainted. The machine guns and missiles were taken off. New landing skids, flight range-extenders and special radios that can reach any sheriff and police department in the state were added.

A flight team was culled from the Highway Patrol’s ranks to staff the additional flights.

The missions over Eastern North Carolina were given to Boyd, who had already been flying the Jet Ranger out of Raleigh. Another pilot, Sgt. Al Paterno, was chosen to fly the missions west of Greensboro from his base in Salisbury. During drug season, two part-time pilots join them.

Last year, their first year with two full-time pilots, the patrol captured 1,911 pounds of marijuana.

On days he’s flying drug missions, Boyd arrives at 7:30 a.m. at the Department of Commerce’s heliport, where the Raleigh-based helicopters are stationed until construction on the Highway Patrol’s hangar is completed.

He fills out some paperwork, checks the weather and inspects the aircraft.

These choppers are military issue, and the amenities are sparse. There’s no autopilot, no padded seats, no soundproofing. It gets so loud during flights that the pilot and the passengers have to talk over an intercom to hear each other. Some helicopters still sport military green and U.S. Army insignias. Five of the OH-58s from Fort Bragg even flew in the Persian Gulf War.

What they may lack in luxury, they make up for in precision. In the hands of a skilled pilot, Boyd says, these helicopters can land in the same tracks they took off from.

As he walks around the helicopters, Boyd checks for fuel leaks, engine burns, "foreign matter" in the intakes, and any sign that the helicopter is not fit to fly. Boyd is on call 24 hours a day, so the helicopters must always be ready.

He points to the Huey to demonstrate. It’s fully fueled. On the passenger’s seat rests his form-fitting, white flight helmet; his radio headset is nestled inside. The keys are in the ignition. From the time a call comes in, he can be in the air in less than two minutes.

When Boyd completes his inspection, he’s ready for takeoff. He’s usually in the air by 9.

He claims not to have a favorite helicopter, and when a mechanic asks on a recent day, "Which one you gonna run?" he selects the Jet Ranger.

As the mechanic lowers the hangar door, Boyd straps in and slips his flight helmet over his short crop of graying hair. He punches a few buttons along the console, flicks some switches along the ceiling.

"Clear!" he barks as he starts the rotors.

The helicopter begins to rock back and forth, with the rotors spinning so fast that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The scent of burning fuel wafts through the cabin.

Takeoff is soft. The nose dips and the helicopter accelerates upward across Tryon Road, soaring over the barbed wire fence, past the trees and emerging in the clear sky above the Highway Patrol’s training center. The engine’s whine and the rotors’ steady thumping are quickly forgotten.

"This is a helicopter," Boyd announces over the intercom.

The search for marijuana has begun.

Marijuana. Pot. Weed. Grass.

No matter what you call it, the Highway Patrol sure finds a lot of it. Over $1 million worth of plants this year alone, says Col. Robert Barefoot, the head of the Highway Patrol. Last year the Highway Patrol captured 11.1 percent of all marijuana seized in North Carolina - more than doubling the 5 percent it captured five years ago.

In his office on the second floor of the Archdale Building in downtown Raleigh, Barefoot has a framed photograph of the Huey, with $12,000 worth of marijuana draped over the tail.

When asked about the picture, he calls the helicopter "beautiful" and speaks about the machine in much the same way a fawning father would about a son or a daughter.

And why not? He has largely overseen the formation of the helicopter fleet. He hopes to eventually have enough helicopters deployed so that the Highway Patrol can reach any part of the state in less than 45 minutes.

For Barefoot, the decision to accept the helicopters was not a difficult one.

There was the cost, for one thing. While non-drug missions in the helicopters are paid for out of the Highway Patrol’s budget, just as they were when the patrol had only the Jet Ranger, the drug flights are essentially free.

"We have all these helicopters in operation at zero cost. Not a penny," he says. "We take great pride in that."

Then there are the other benefits.

Helicopters are used in searches for missing children, Alzheimer’s patients and fugitives.

They dramatically simplify high-speed highway pursuits. No automobile can outrun a Huey cruising at its top speed of 140 mph.

They ease the pressure on the National Guard, which also maintains a helicopter squad to assist in drug busts, such as the two in Durham County last week.

They improve the Highway Patrol’s relationship with sheriffs and police departments, who get to share in the glory of helicopter-led arrests.

But most importantly, they terrify North Carolina’s criminals.

"When they see this helicopter overhead, they are afraid to come out. They hunker down," Barefoot says.

"And if they do, we catch them."

The Jet Ranger has reached a cruising altitude of 300 feet and a speed of 20 to 30 mph. As Boyd turns it in a lazy loop around downtown Raleigh, you can see the depth markings on pools, the words on highway signs, the "street people’s" cabin in the woods of Tryon Hills.

From this height, a trained pilot can spot a single marijuana plant standing 14 inches or higher. The green of marijuana is a fairly distinct color. If you know what you’re looking for, that is.

Boyd has seen plants as tall as 20 feet and found fields of thousands of plants. He doesn’t like to talk about past drug busts though. Nor does Sgt. Paterno, the other full-time pilot.

Paterno explains that he’s often harassed by those he busts. Bragging about his adventures would just make it worse.

He’s already gotten so many nasty calls at home that he’s had to change his number. Someone damaged his car’s paint job with a key. Bags of trash have been thrown into his yard. His mail box has been blown up repeatedly.

It takes a certain resiliency to be a helicopter pilot.

Like the helicopters he flies, Boyd spent considerable time in the military before joining the Highway Patrol.

When the Vietnam War broke out, Boyd enlisted in the Army and signed up for the Warrant Officer Flight Program. It was the only way he could fly in the war without a college degree.

Boyd flew Hueys and other helicopters during two tours of duty in Vietnam and served as a flight instructor at the Army’s helicopter school in between.

When his enlistment in the Army was up in 1971, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had served on the Highway Patrol for 39 years and had retired the previous year.

Boyd spent the first 15 years working the road, the last nine in the air. Although he had occasionally flown Hueys in the National Guard, he never expected to fly them day in and day out again.

"It was like putting on an old glove. It felt like I had never been out of it," he said. "Once you get enough flight time, the aircraft becomes part of you."

And he gets plenty of flight time. He searches for drugs for six to eight hours a day, stopping every two hours to refuel. He has a computer on board that uses satellites to calculate his position and then gives him a list of the 15 closest airports.

He pays for the fuel with credit cards.

In a clump of woods between the Farmers Market and N.C. State’s Centennial Campus, Boyd spots a few plants of marijuana, hidden by some trees. He pulls the Jet Ranger into a tight circle, craning for a better look.

Like most of his finds, it appears to be a personal stash.

"This is what flying for marijuana is about," Boyd says. "You can find it anywhere, the middle of town, someone’s back yard. Just about everywhere I go, I’m looking at the ground."

When he spots marijuana, he punches a button on his computer that records the coordinates. Sometimes, if there’s a place to land, he or another patrolman will go down and retrieve the marijuana. If there’s not, like today, he will call the land owner and have it destroyed. If they find a lot, planning for a bust begins.

"No one plants it on their own land," he explains. "They always go on someone else’s land and plant it."

Boyd circles a few more times, trying to discern a path in the trees that leads to the marijuana. He can’t make one out. He decides to return home.

When he sets the helicopter down, Boyd indeed lands within five inches of the tracks he had taken off from. He could have landed in the tracks, he insists, but chose not to.

"I meant to do that," he says. "Otherwise, it kills the grass.

From the moment the baseball leaves the pitcher’s hand, its red stitches spinning frantically, until gravity slams it down with a thump into the glove of the catcher kneeling before him, Shaw watches it.

In a split second, he’ll decide whether the ball came in too high, too low, too far to the inside or too far to the outside to be a strike.

At the same time, Shaw eyes the runner on third, watching to see if he’ll take one step too many toward home plate. If the runner goes, Shaw will make that call, too. Safe or out.

For Shaw, calling bases and balls is all in a night’s work. He’s an umpire for the Raleigh Parks and Recreation Department’s summer youth leagues.

But unlike most of his colleagues, Shaw’s barely older than the kids playing. He’s a 21-year-old college student. And umpiring is his summer job.

This night he’s working a tournament game between all-star teams from Raleigh and Cary. He’s dressed in his uniform of a light blue shirt, gray slacks and black shoes, just like the umpires in the major leagues. Because he’s behind the plate, he wears a chest protector under his shirt, a face mask and a black baseball cap worn backward.

At first, the game looked like it would be competitive. But Raleigh has been on a tear since the second inning and is threatening to run away with the game. If at any point the Raleigh team can score 10 more runs than Cary, the game ends.

Raleigh’s ahead 12-3. One run to go. The bases are loaded.

Shaw scrubs at the plate with his foot, trying to clear away the dirt that has accumulated. Sweat streams steadily down his face and dust swirls around his feet. He points to the mound, his signal for the pitcher to throw. Then he crouches behind the catcher, kneeling on his left knee and waiting for the pitch.

It’s a familiar feeling, this waiting. He’s spent three summers as an umpire waiting for pitches. And a lifetime before that.

Shaw’s father played catcher for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So Shaw played catcher too, first in the Parks and Rec youth leagues and later for the Broughton High School squad.

He would have played at Appalachian State University, where he will be a senior this fall, but he cut a 2-inch

gash in his catching hand on his grandmother’s tobacco farm the summer before his freshman year. The wound healed, but when he tried to play ball, it ripped back open.

Because he couldn’t bear to be away from the game, he turned to umpiring.

He took a class in sports officiating and worked some intramural games at Appalachian State. When he came home, he sought summer employment as an umpire. He was young, but Parks and Rec agreed to give him a shot. Three summers later, Shaw still spends many of his evenings on Raleigh playing fields.

"It started as a summer job, and now I just do it because I love it," he said.

He prefers to work games like this one, a Pony League game, because the level of play is so high. In games with older kids, the 14- to 18-year-olds, he can feel the heat of a pitcher’s fastball and have "at least a little fear for my life" if the catcher doesn’t catch the pitch. Younger kids, he says, "can barely get the ball over the plate."

While the older players have trouble getting the ball over the plate, too - pitchers from both Raleigh and Cary have sent pitches soaring above his head several times - they also throw some of their pitches very fast and very much on target. Shaw has called quite a few batters out on strikes tonight.

But being an umpire is more than just calling balls and strikes.

When a new catcher enters the game, Shaw checks to see that he’s wearing all the necessary safety equipment.

"Do you have your cup?" he asks, a little too loudly.

The catcher nods, and the crowd laughs. Shaw turns and deadpans, "Gotta make sure."

In between innings, Shaw talks with the players and sometimes offers advice. Even the older players have lots to learn, and when he can, Shaw tries to help them improve their games. "Especially the catchers," Shaw says.

He’ll show a catcher how to properly send his signals and help him with his throws. Shaw thinks he might want to try coaching one of these days.

These are the things he loves about umpiring. It’s having to deal with the people off the field that he hates.

Kids get angry at you, coaches get angry at you, and, worst of all, parents get angry at you.

"It’s the parents that give us the most trouble," Shaw said. "They rant and rave when their kids get a bad call."

The parents of the Cary team certainly have given him trouble. As the Cary team’s chances on the field dwindle, its fans have increased their heckling of Shaw.

"He just ain’t going to call a strike," screams one parent.

"We should show him the rulebook, show him where the strike zone is," a coach mutters, watching his team collapse.

Sometimes the spectators move beyond muttering and into violence. Trouble can erupt quickly.

At a game Shaw was working a few weeks back, one team’s shortstop was intentionally walked. As the shortstop made his way around the bases, he said something to the other team’s coach. The coach responded in kind. And before Shaw knew what was happening, the shortstop’s father had grabbed a baseball bat, run onto the field and attacked the coach.

"You gotta relax. You gotta relax," Shaw kept telling the father as he broke up the fight. "You don’t need to do this."

While fights don’t happen often, they can be quite serious. During a game in Chapel Hill last year, a coach attacked an umpire, beating him up so badly that the umpire’s chiropractor compared his injuries to those from a 75 mph head-on car crash.

Parents who are out of control on the field set bad examples for the kids who are playing, Shaw says. He makes it his job to keep that from happening.

"As an umpire, you’ve got to take control," he says simply.

Shaw does not take challenges to his authority lightly.

"People need to realize that if you make the umpire mad, no matter how impartial he is supposed to be, you can’t win," Shaw said.

In his three summers of umpiring, Shaw says he’s made only one mistake that haunts him. He called a runner out on a force play when the fielder should have had to tag him. Shaw did run that play over, because he was clearly in error. But on judgment situations, he always sticks by his call.

"You cannot ever let them question your call," Shaw said. "If you do, they’ll eat you up."

He knows the rulebook inside and out from all his years as a player, so he’s pretty confident making rules-based calls. He does have one little problem, though.

"The only thing that really plagues me is that sometimes I forget the count," Shaw admits.

On the nights when he’s not calling a game, Shaw works as a shucker at the 42nd Street Oyster Bar. One day a man who had umpired games that Shaw had played in recognized him there.

"He told me that I should go to umpiring school," Shaw said.

He appreciates the advice but is unlikely to follow it. Although Shaw went through a stage where he thought he wanted to be a professional umpire, he’s wary of all the traveling they have to do. He may change his mind again, but for now, he’s just having a good time.

"When it stops being fun, I’ll quit. Just like [Michael] Jordan," Shaw said. "If it ever gets to the point where I’m saying, ‘I wish it will rain,’ I’ll stop."

So for now, umpiring is only a part-time job. And his full attention is focused on the three Raleigh baserunners and the Cary pitcher, who has already thrown three balls. Shaw points to the pitcher and then waits.

The pitcher winds up and throws.

The batter doesn’t swing and all eyes turn to Shaw, who makes the call.

It’s a ball. The pitcher has walked in the winning run.

The game is over.

Just another night on the job.

You’ve seen everything that’s playing at the movie theaters. There’s nothing good on TV. The clubs are too crowded, the bars too boring.

So you go bowling Friday night.

Over on lane four of the Western Lanes Bowling Center, Terence Harding and T.C. Thomas are preparing for the latest installment of a competition that’s been going on since 1986. The stakes are bragging rights and an occasional "beer frame." They come to the bowling alley about twice a month.

"All of the bowling alleys are full on Friday nights," Harding says. "This is probably the only one you can get into."

It’s 10 p.m., and about 40 people are still bowling on nine of the 24 lanes.

As the night advances, those with the youngest kids have departed. The only sounds in the alley are the satisfying thunk of ricocheting pins, the whirring of the automatic pin resetters and the occasional outburst at a bowling ball gone awry. There’s no wailing about the difficulty of fitting five fingers into three holes tonight.

Instead the alley is packed with twentysomethings, college students, teenagers, even a few families with older children. Most have stopped by after dinner, attracted by the alley’s location on Hillsborough Street, the cheap games and even cheaper beer, and the ready availability of lanes. There are no leagues at this time of night.

"We’ll usually go to a movie or a bar," Graham Donaldson, 27, says. "This is something different."

Bowling is a different way to spend a Friday night. But there’s a lot more going on here than just bowling.

Along one wall, a television shows children’s videotapes. Scattered throughout the alley are three pool tables, two pinball machines and seven video games. For the Nintendo generation who might find real bowling too, well, real, there’s even a video bowling game. It’s the one with the words "Bowling is Fun" in red and yellow letters. At the far end is the Cloud and Fire Express, also known as the C.A.F.E., a place for kids to hang out with no alcohol and no smoking allowed.

In the center of it all is Bill Goodwin, the self-described "Counter Man," who keeps an eye on the bustle. He collects fees, hands out score sheets (Western is one of the rare places where computerized scoring hasn’t taken over) and painstakingly explains the rules of bowling to a few foreign students. The change machine is broken and he’s kept busy supplying quarters for the game machines.

Goodwin works the late shift on Friday nights, from about 5 until midnight. He knows most of the regulars who come in the fall, but tonight he doesn’t see any familiar faces.

No, tonight the alley is full of people like 18-year-old Rama Moori and his friends.

"This is my first time bowling," Moori said. "And I’m leading!"

Bowl, baby, bowl.

Actually, there are few other sports where it’s possible to do so well your first time out.

There are 10 pins. One ball. Ten frames. Three hundred possible points.

Bowling is an ordinary person’s game. You don’t have to be an athlete to be good at it, although a little hand-eye coordination goes a long way.

It’s a sport unlikely to bring fame and even less likely to bring fortune. Quick, try to name a famous bowler. Hard, isn’t it?

The best-known bowlers are probably Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble who, when they weren’t hiding from Wilma and Betty at the Water Buffalo Lodge, spent their free time bowling.

For those of us who can’t manage a 90 mph fastball, dunk a basketball or throw a football in a perfect spiral, there’s something deeply satisfying about hurling a heavy object some 60 feet and watching the pins just scatter.

And there’s so much style involved.

Beginning bowlers tend to bowl in straight lines, with a sling-shot motion. But the more experienced bowlers, like Harding and Thomas, can make the ball hook and weave as they desire. It’s skill, not luck. And it shows.

Harding is brash, a showman. He’ll bowl, turn around with his arms outstretched, and smile impishly. Behind him, the ball crashes into the pins. Strike.

Thomas bowls strikes, too. But he is a graceful bowler, with a long looping motion. He bowls like he talks, with a quiet elegance. He’s Barney to Harding’s Fred.

But the best part of bowling isn’t even the bowling.

It’s the shoes.

There are precious few places where it’s acceptable, even encouraged, to wear shoes that don’t match. Short of moonlighting as a clown, bowling is probably the only chance you get to slip on such delightfully garish footwear. The red left shoe doesn’t come close to matching the tan right one and never will.

Sadly, the design of the shoes has less to do with freedom from fashion than it does with keeping the shoes from walking. So to speak.

"You’d be surprised, for college kids it’s a big hoot to walk out of here with rental shoes," Goodwin says.

The real sign of a serious bowler isn’t someone who brings his own ball. You can tell someone is in for the long run when he brings his own shoes.

Thomas has his own bowling shoes, but they haven’t done a lot to help his game, Harding teases.

Thomas does not protest. Instead he asks Harding, "How bad are you going to beat me tonight?"

Harding doesn’t answer. He just bowls.

Both are excellent bowlers and the strikes pile up. Harding finishes with 200, Thomas with 175. Harding has carried the night, as usual.

He wins at bowling and basketball and just about everything else. With one exception.

"Usually I win at horseshoes," Thomas says. "But he’s blessed with good luck."

It’s the shoes. It’s gotta be the shoes.

A coalition of long-distance telephone carriers has sent the popular board game to every member of Congress and to newspaper editors across the country in a last-minute lobbying effort.

Much more than Monopoly money is at stake. The long-distance carriers are trying to keep federal telecommunications reform legislation from passing "Go."

The reform bill had cleared the U.S. House Commerce Committee May 25 by a 38-5 vote, with the long-distance companies’ whole-hearted support. Then on July 13, they learned that House leaders slipped in a provision that would simplify the entrance of the seven regional Bell operating companies, commonly known as the Baby Bells, into the long-distance market.

Although President Clinton said Tuesday he would veto the legislation in its current form, a vote could come as early as today.

So the nation’s roughly 500 long-distance carriers scrambled to strike back.

The three largest carriers, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, each organized employee rallies around the country last week.

Last week, AT&T, which had been running advertisements in favor of the legislation, sent 3,000 employees to Washington on chartered buses and trains for a rally against the bill. It was the first political rally in the company’s 119-year history.

MCI organized a second round of rallies in Raleigh and eight other cities Tuesday. About 45 of MCI’s 1,000 Triangle employees braved the blistering midday heat to gather outside the office of Republican Rep. Fred Heineman in North Raleigh.

Heineman, who was targeted because he has not announced support for either side, probably will make up his mind today, spokeswoman Kay M. Ryon said.

"These bills are evolving, even as we speak," she said.

The legislation will provide substantive change to the regulatory framework that is still based on the 1934 Communications Act. The bill would deregulate much of the cable and phone industries.

For the Baby Bells, the bill represents a chance to enter the long-distance market while lowering costs and prices for consumers, BellSouth spokesman John Schneidawind said.

The bill also would allow long-distance carriers to enter the local phone market. The Baby Bells contend that the bill is fair because the long-distance companies can pick and choose the customers they serve while the Baby Bells are required to serve entire regions.

But it takes much longer to be able to compete locally than in long distance, said MCI senior policy adviser Liz Hogan.

Hence, the legislation’s label as the "Monopoly bill." And the mailing of the Monopoly board game.

The Baby Bells think it’s funny, but have no plans to respond in kind.

But it may become one of the most important tools in your kitchen.

Long before there was cyberspace or the information superhighway, computer makers had food fans in mind.

The makers of the first personal computers thought people would use them to store recipes. Very quickly, they found out otherwise: Pencil and paper did just fine for most folks.

But with the emergence of the Internet, the global link of computer networks, people have started talking about computers and cooking again.

Food lovers are flocking to the Internet. There are sites devoted to favorite foods, newsgroups to exchange restaurant reviews and recipes, and real-life meals shared by people who met online.

"This is the same thing as a cookbook or a neighborhood discussion group, just on a worldwide scale," says Eileen Kupstas of Chapel Hill, a fan of rec.food.

cooking, with recipes and tips.

While it’s impossible to tell just how many people use these resources, the number of users and the number of sites have grown exponentially in the past year.

Kate Heyhoe of Crestline, Calif., sensed the growing link between cooking and computers when she left the movie industry to start an on-line cooking magazine.

"Food and cooking have always been my true passion," she says. "We saw an opportunity on the Internet early on."

So she launched eGG: the electronic Gourmet Guide last December. The site features regular columns, interviews and recipes. Last month, it even had a live feed from the Aspen Food & Wine Festival. The site is aimed at the "dedicated amateur and the professional," she says.

Another site that has been around for a while, and is perhaps the most useful food site on the Internet, is the archives of the rec.food.recipes newsgroup. Hundreds of recipes that have been posted are listed by category. It includes everything from soup to nuts, plus a list of other food sites.

When recipes alone are not enough, there are a number of Internet sites that include information about preparing specific foods, like how to roll your own sushi.

"From the cooking groups, I certainly find a number of recipes and a number of ideas," Kupstas says. "I’m interested in food allergies, and it’s a good place to get and spread information about foods."

If you’ve wanted to learn how to cook like a French chef but can’t afford the air fare to Paris, try Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu’s site. It has a full week’s worth of menus, complete with pictures, translations and detailed cooking instructions, all from the famous cooking school.

While intended to whet your appetite for the "Le Cordon Bleu at Home" cookbook, the site has links within recipes to explain cooking techniques and provide definitions. With one click of your computer’s mouse, from the recipe for Pommes de Terre Sautees a Cru, you can read about the fine art of sauteing and then return to the recipe. It’s better than flipping through a cookbook - you’ll never lose your place.

If you get hungry while looking at those dishes but don’t feel like cooking, check out the databases for restaurants - from those that feature chiles in their dishes to those that accommodate cigar-smokers.

Dining Out on the Web and the rec.food.restaurants newsgroup are good places to start.

Because the Internet can be accessed from all over the world, people sometimes request restaurant recommendations for a foreign country and get replies within a few hours.

"The Internet is a great resource if you’re traveling," says Dilip Barman of Durham, president of the Triangle Vegetarian Society.

When an Australian recently asked, "OK, from somebody on the other side of the world, can you explain what barbecue is?" he probably had no idea what he was getting himself into. After all, there’s barbecue and then there’s that stuff they serve in Texas.

If you want Triangle restaurant reviews, check out the triangle.dining newsgroup.

The Triangle Vegetarian Society page also lists reviews of vegetarian cuisine and plans to put its newsletter online. Barman also has a list of vegetarian resources that’s quite popular.

"A lot of people know me from my home page," he says.

The newsgroups and mailing lists are good places to find people who share favorite foods. Group visits to restaurants and potluck dinners are frequently arranged online.

You can also shop for all sorts of specialty food over the Internet. Many stores have their catalogs online, and some allow you to place orders electronically.

If you’re a hot food fan, you’ll want to make your way to Lotsa Hotsa, a Ramona, Calif., company that sells products with names like Hellfire and Damnation Hot Sauce. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of this site.

"The Internet needs products that are unique, that you can’t go down the street and buy," says Jack Alexander, the president of Starving Artists, a company that suggested the idea to Lotsa Hotsa and later designed the site. "We’re big hot sauce connoisseurs ourselves."

In the same vein, there’s Wing Wan II, a Boca Raton, Fla., based restaurant that promises to ship Kosher chinese food anywhere in the world.

Or try Fromagerie Belchevre, a Quebec cheese maker. The cheese looks great, but loses something in the translation. The page boasts that "Fromagerie Belchevre is the home of high quality 100 percent goat’s cheese. All our cheese is made from fresh goat’s milk."

Before you wrap up, make one last stop at the Chocolate Lover’s Page, a site that will melt in your mouth, not in your mouse. It has links to Hershey’s Chocolate Town U.S.A, Godiva Online, and every other chocolate site imaginable.

On second thought, maybe you should start there. Who said dessert always has to come at the end of the meal?

One great thing about grazing among food sites (besides it being non-fattening) is that even if you never get Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu’s Feuilletes de Saumon aux Asperges (puff pastry shells with salmon and asparagus with a lemon butter sauce) just right, you can console yourself by seeing how it should look:

Virtually good enough to eat.

Some sites are lovingly crafted tributes to favorite foods that are rich in description but short on information. Others are simply online advertisements.

Keep in mind that the Internet is global and that most of the world measures their recipes on the metric system. Even the definition of a pint varies from country to country. So be careful when converting recipes.

Be wary of any online site that asks you to send your credit card number by e-mail. A savvy computer hacker can pick off your account number.

Also, don’t change your eating habits based solely on what you may read online. Having a computer, modem and opinion on eating doesn’t make someone an expert.

Mailing lists, essentially an ongoing conversation by electronic mail. You need to sign up for these, and messages are delivered directly to you via e-mail.

Newsgroups, the equivalent of a global bulletin board where anyone interested can post or read messages without registering.

Sites on the World Wide Web, which link Internet resources. The Web allows you to follow highlighted links to other resources .

Here are some sites that may whet your appetite. You can use searching tools like Yahoo and WebCrawler to find food resources elsewhere.

World Wide Web

• Chocolate Lover’s Page, a guide to all the cocoa-based sites online:
  http://www.iia.org/chocolate/
• Dilip Barman’s Vegetarian Resources:
  http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/vegetarian.html
• Dining Out on the Web, a searchable database of restaurants:
  http://www.ird.net/diningout.html
• eGG: the electronic Gourmet Guide, a cooking magazine:
  http://www.2way.com/food/egg/index.html
• Fromagerie Belchvre, a specialty cheese maker:
  http://www.roblyn.com/chevhome.htm
• Lotsa Hotsa, a site that sells spicy foods:
  http://www.nbn.com/starving_artists/lotsa-hotsa/
• Recipe Archives from rec.food.recipes, a listing of previously posted recipes:
  http://www.vuw.ac.nz/who/Amy.Gale/recipes/recipe-archive.html
• Restaurant Le Cordon Bleu, cooking tips from the restaurant at the famous French cooking school:
  http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/restaurant/restaurant.html
• Rolling Your Own Sushi, instructions on the art of Japanese cuisine:
  http://www.rain.org/~hutch/sushi.html
• The Triangle Vegetarian Society, reviews of vegetarian-friendly restaurants:
  http://www.trinet.com/tonc/tvspage.html
• WebCrawler:
  http://www.webcrawler.com
• Wing Wan II, a kosher Chinese restaurant in Boca Raton, Fla.:
  http://www.dive.com/wingwan/
• Yahoo:
  http://www.yahoo.com/

Entertainment/Food/Newsgroups

• triangle.dining
• rec.food.cooking
• rec.food.recipes
• rec.food.restaurants

The packaging of the buoyant water toy says it’s from Tennessee, but the Funnoodle is really made right here in the Triangle.

So are Nerf arrows, parts of Seeley mattresses, and even the protective padding at those playgrounds McDonald’s provides for french fry-fueled youngsters.

"Those are applications that many consumers in the Triangle use and don’t know that it’s made here," said Marc Noel, the president of Nomaco Inc., a low-profile, privately held company that makes thermoplastic foam products.

With 460 employees and annual revenue approaching $55 million, Nomaco has quietly carved out a specialty niche as a leader in the "foam profile" industry.

At its plants in Zebulon and Youngsville, Nomaco melts plastic pellets, mixes in additives and coloring, and forces the concoction through a shaping device called an extruder.

What emerges are foam gardening pads, stadium cushion seats, hair curlers, race car roll-cage pads, pipe insulation, tree wraps and packing materials.

And, of course, the Funnoodle.

For those of you without young, aquatic-minded kids, the Funnoodle is a foam cylinder six feet in length and three inches in diameter that can support up to 200 pounds in water.

Typically selling for $2.99, the Funnoodle is the top-ranked non-video toy this summer, according to the NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., market-research firm. And toy stores across the country are having trouble keeping it in stock.

"It’s one of those items that just took off," said Pam Kelly, a buyer for Toys ‘R’ Us. "It’s kind of like the pet rock thing. It’s a phenomenon."

But for all the hoopla surrounding the Funnoodle, none of it has filtered down to Nomaco.

In large part, that’s by choice. Nomaco’s name never appears on its products.

The company made a strategic decision in 1987 to stop selling products directly to the public. Instead, it concentrates on its technological advantages. So it signed alliances with companies like toy maker Kid Power in Brentwood, Tenn., to market and distribute products that Nomaco makes.

"When you’re so diversified, you cannot, or we cannot, distribute directly," Noel said. "That’s why our name does not appear on the product."

Unlike many distribution agreements, there’s also a fair amount of collaboration on product development between Nomaco and its partners.

"For a manufacturer, they are very market-oriented," Kid Power President Jamie O’Rourke said.

So far, the strategy seems to be working.

When Nomaco was wooed away from Ansonia, Conn., six years ago, the company started its North Carolina operations with 30 employees in Zebulon.

Since then, it has built its Youngsville plant and now employs 350 people in the Triangle. The company has another 110 employees and two plants in an Atlanta-based decorative products division.

Nomaco’s foam sells so fast that the inventory of its 85,000-square-foot warehouse in Zebulon turns over every two weeks.

And there aren’t many competitors on the horizon.

"We find ourselves more and more in a specialty niche," Noel said.

When Kid Power approached Nomaco about manufacturing the Funnoodle, the company had first researched the different foam producers.

"In North America, there are only 10 companies that could make one of them or a number of them," O’Rourke said. "But, in my opinion, Nomaco is the only one that could make them in the volume we needed."

Still, Kid Power originally split the order between Nomaco and Toronto-based Industrial Thermo Polymer Ltd.

But once production started, the company changed its mind.

"The difference between them was night and day," O’Rourke said. "We put all our eggs in Nomaco’s basket."

Not that Noel expected any less.

"Extrusion is our forte," he said.

Or it could be a treacherous and deadly landscape, swallowing up trailblazers and setting in motion costly financial flops.

Welcome to the world of cyberbusiness.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the Internet as companies in the Triangle rush to go on-line. But, so far, success stories are few and far between as companies tentatively explore the intricacies of Internet commerce.

In fact, many companies have found they are more likely to use the Internet to save money rather than to make money.

"I don’t know of many nontechnology companies that are doing much revenue through the Internet in the area right now," said Cliff Allen, who advises companies on their on-line efforts as president of the Allen Marketing Group in Raleigh.

In the extraordinarily brief commercial life of the Internet, the people who have made money are Internet access providers, World Wide Web page designers and the cottage industry of consultants and speakers.

That’s about to change.

As the Internet moves from the playground of scientists and hackers to a robust business community, this could be the year that real fortunes are made and lost on the Internet.

"More and more people are going to be sitting in their living rooms browsing the Net," said Sarah Gray Lamm, manager of the Home Team Properties Inc., a Chapel Hill real estate company that launched a Web site with property listings last month.

Like most aspects of Internet commerce, market research is an emerging field, and no figures are available for measuring Triangle business activity on the Internet. But total sales on the Internet worldwide from September through July were $118 million, according to a survey of more than 650 Web sites by ActivMedia, Inc., a Peterborough, N.H., research firm. That figure is expected to skyrocket for the next few years.

"There is a novelty feature to ordering flowers or nontechnology merchandise over the Net," Allen said. "But there’s also no competition."

If the Internet has been a rough-and-tumble world so far, a semblance of order is about to arrive, in the form of big business.

Visa and MasterCard have teamed up to develop secure transaction software to prevent hackers from picking off credit card numbers. Several banks are exploring creating cyberbanking divisions. Wall Street has started to pour capital into technology companies.

With these developments comes a new critical mass of users. All the major commercial on-line services have pledged to offer full access to the Web by the end of the year. The newest online service, the much-touted Microsoft Network, could add another 9 million users to the Internet’s estimated population of 30 million users worldwide.

While electronic mail addresses pop up routinely on business cards from Research Triangle Park, more nontechnology companies in the Triangle are now considering establishing a presence online.

"It’s those merchants that are trying to decide whether they need to be up or not," Allen said.

Those Triangle companies that have ventured on-line have found a variety of ways to integrate the Internet into traditional business strategies. And some of them have learned something that Internet business evangelists don’t share very often: Most companies on the Internet aren’t trying to make money - they’re trying to cut costs.

Web sites can save staff and processing time, mailing and printing costs, and even long-distance phone bills, especially for calls overseas.

For instance, American Airlines, which launched its site May 18, has placed flight schedules on-line and plans to allow frequent fliers to check account information by the end of the year.

Initially, the airline hopes to speed up the reservation process at its five reservation centers, including its 1,400-employee operation in Cary.

"The concept is really to reduce the cost of business as much as possible," said Joe Crawley, the site’s webmaster.

Far more important are American’s plans to offer electronic booking of flights early next year.

In an industry where commissions to travel agents are the third-highest cost after labor and fuel, electronic booking could increase the number of tickets issued directly by the airlines, now just 20 percent. One day electronic booking could supplant reservation centers and travel agencies entirely.

Not to be outdone, a number of travel agencies have taken to the Web as well. PCTravel, a service of Raleigh’s American Travel Corp., has perhaps the most sophisticated system. Consumers can search for the cheapest flight and can reserve and buy tickets. PCTravel expects to do $2 million worth of bookings per month for this year, said David Lea, American Travel vice president for marketing.

But a major problem for PCTravel and other Triangle companies that sell goods and services on-line has been the continuing concern over the security of information transmitted over the Internet.

Technological advances in security have been unable to dispel a public distrust fueled, in large part, by the February arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick in a North Raleigh apartment on charges of stealing 20,000 credit card numbers from the nation’s largest Internet access provider. PCTravel, the Durham Bulls and a number of Triangle businesses have turned to a new cyberbanking unit of First Union Corp. in Charlotte for help.

First Union is providing help for on-line transactions such as credit card verification and transaction security. The company also plans to tackle business-to-business transactions and soon will announce new cash management software that will enable corporate customers to check account information over the Internet.

"We want to be where our customers are," said Tom Kitrick, First Union vice president for strategic planning and Internet marketing. "What’s driving this industry is, how can businesses use the Internet to make their transactions easier?"

Another industry being driven by the Internet is marketing.

The Internet is a marketer’s dream tool. Precise files on individual users can be kept easily. The demographics are to die for. Web users are well off, with an average income of $69,000, and highly educated, with nearly 35 percent having completed college and almost 32 percent more earning an advanced degree, according to a University of Michigan-Georgia Tech study.

At WRAL-FM 101.5, a promotion to give away tickets to the movie "The Net" demonstrated just how powerful a marketing tool the Internet could be.

Listeners were asked to go to its Web site, leave a mailing address, and to fill out an optional survey. The station mentioned the offer on the air just three times in 30 hours.

"We were going to leave it up for a week, figuring we would get 20 responses," said Ned Attayek, an announcer who designed and maintains the page. "We put it up at Monday lunch and by Tuesday suppertime, the tickets were gone."

The station gave away 211 tickets and collected valuable demographic data in the process. And WRAL did it all without devoting staff time or hiring a marketing company to conduct the research.

"We were amazed. We’re trying to figure out how to make some money off this page," Attayek said. "It’s obvious that it’s an incredible marketing and promotion research tool."

It’s also an incredible tool for entrepreneurs like Gary Storr and two co-workers who launched a Web service called America’s Help Wanted to assist companies in their recruiting efforts a month ago. They expect to charge companies to post job openings and to buy resumes of qualified candidates from a searchable database.

"We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get to a point where we can support this on a full-time basis," Storr said.

Venture capitalists are quite interested in the activities of Storr and entrepreneurs like him.

Internet start-ups received $47 million in venture capital financing in the first quarter of this year, $5 million more than all of 1994, according to a study by Venture One, a San Francisco research company.

Venture capital investments in Internet-related companies are growing about three times as fast as biotech investments did in the late 1980s, said Venture One spokeswoman Caren Cadile.

But before entrepreneurs or established businesses order business cards to go with a new Web site, they should take the time to do some old-fashioned research by spending some time on-line, posting messages and answering questions, Allen cautioned.

"When you get an e-mail asking for your catalog, you’ve found a market. When you get e-mail asking for your Web site, then it’s time to get a Web site," Allen said. "It’s the simplest market research you can do."

He doesn’t have to worry about what his co-workers might think. Since July, he’s worked by himself, in an office above his garage.

When Jones agreed to leave his job at a Raleigh law firm to join a Columbia, S.C., company as vice president for business development, he insisted that he be allowed to remain in the Triangle.

"I didn’t want to move to Columbia," Jones says. "I can make an argument that, with the type of work I do, I’m more productive here than in an office with the distractions."

So he added a few phone lines to his garage and joined the burgeoning ranks of telecommuters, people who use technology to work from home or away from their traditional offices.

For employees, telecommuting offers the chance to bypass rush-hour traffic, to spend time with their families and to work at their own pace without managers hovering over them.

For employers, telecommuting cuts down on office overhead and costly corporate real estate.

Some 9.1 million employees worked at home during business hours for at least one day per month last year, up from 7.6 million the year before, according to FIND/SVP, an Ithaca, N.Y., research firm.

Work-at-home arrangements aren’t for everyone, employers and workplace consultants warn. An employee, of course, has to maintain a good supply of self-discipline. And for employers, telecommuting loses its appeal as a productivity booster if managers don’t trust home-workers or refuse to offer the necessary support to make it work.

Although the Triangle does not have the same traffic pressures inspiring telecommuting as cities like Los Angeles, it is slowly taking hold here nonetheless.

Some big employers such as IBM Corp. are giving increasing numbers of employees the chance to work at home. Computer retailers say their fastest-growing segment is the "soho," or small office/home office market. And even phone companies and office furniture retailers are beginning to capitalize on the trend.

Within a few months, GTE South, which has run local advertisements encouraging people to telecommute, will offer new service options for telecommuters, including connectivity, consulting and support. The local phone provider serves Durham and Research Triangle Park.

"GTE is trying to put together a complete package for working at home," says David Bryant, senior network engineer.

As part of the package, GTE will promote high-speed, high-capacity phone lines called ISDN, for integrated services digital network. One ISDN line can support two phone lines, making it ideal for home workers who want one line for voice and one line for a fax machine or modem. Prices range from $50 to $75 month, with a surcharge for data usage.

Triangle office supply stores say they are seeing more orders for home office equipment. Those computers, printers, and fax machines require furniture.

"We have more and more people coming in here saying they are working at home," says Angie Lebitz, showroom manager for Alfred Williams and Co., a Raleigh office supplier. "That’s been happening for at least the past year. We’ve noticed a significant increase."

A typical home office configuration might cost between $2,500 and $3,000, Lebitz said.

But employees who work at home don’t have to bear the full cost of a home office. Some Triangle companies are starting to pick up portions of the tab.

IBM Corp.’s Research Triangle Park operation now pays for phone lines for nearly half of its employees who do some sort of work at home, spokesman Jay Cadmus says.

For employees like Gary Brown, the company sometimes supplies computers, too.

Brown, who provides on-line customer support, has worked out of his home in Cary off and on for 10 years and full time since October.

What he may lose in office camaraderie, he says, he makes up for in productivity. "I’m relaxed, I’ve got music going," Brown says. "There’s no office chit-chat, no telephone ringing, no background noise. It allows you to write more politely.

Keep people in stitches. Laugh all the way to the bank.

No, she’s not a comedienne. She’s a seamstress. Evans owns Sew Well Learning Center & Manufacturing, a North Raleigh company that teaches people how to sew.

"Sewing is like typing," Evans said. "If you can type, you can get a job anywhere. If you can sew, you can always make money. People always need alterations."

So a year ago, she left her job working with mentally handicapped patients to try her hand at teaching sewing full time.

Evans rented office space on Wake Forest Road, bought a van, stockpiled sewing machines and purchased bolts and bolts of fabric.

By word of mouth and some innovative publicity, she signed up 33 students at $400 apiece for her 60-hour course. After a year of teaching classes six days a week, she’s finally starting to turn a profit.

Evans began by persuading fabric stores to display her brochures. In return, she refers her students to the stores.

"I keep people sewing and they keep people coming to my classes," she said.

She built up a mailing list from people who had seen her ads and called for sewing advice. She used her 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter to model her clothes at events.

"My kids are a very intricate part of this business," she said, laughing. "The pay’s cheap - an ice cream cone, a soda."

It’s no coincidence that her children are involved.

As a single mother, she’s found that sewing is one of the few ways for women to make a living while staying at home with their children. She’s working on a proposal for social service agencies to train mothers on welfare and put them into jobs sewing. So far, all her students have been women, usually 25 to 40 years old, many with children.

Evans says she customizes each class, so students learn what they want to learn. She takes students on field trips to wool mills and shows them how to buy fabric.

"I teach them how to make sewing cost-effective," Evans said.

She also teaches them how to make sewing profitable.

Evans uses the course’s graduates to do contract sewing for Triangle businesses.

"There aren’t that many manufacturers here. It’s a good industry to get into," she said. "I don’t think anyone is really filling that need for church groups and small organizations."

Because the students work out of their homes, she has lower costs. She has no minimum order and promises that no job is too small- Sew Well has made everything from day care workers’ smocks and nurses uniforms to doll dresses.

In part to gain her customers’ confidence, she makes just about everything she wears.

"Your business card is what you sew. Your advertisement is what you wear," she said.

With her business only a year old and already covering its expenses, she expects her manufacturing revenue to grow as more students complete her course.

She’s even thinking about expanding into other cities in a few years.

"I have visions of Sew Wells all over, not just in Raleigh," she said. "I feel fast growth.

Microsoft Windows 95, possibly the most heavily promoted computer product ever, officially went on sale throughout the Triangle at midnight.

The newest version of Microsoft’s highly successful operating system should make personal computers easier to set up and use. Windows 95 will include better audio and video capabilities, and offer easy access to the Internet through the Microsoft Network, the company’s new online service.

Seven to nine million copies are expected to be sold this week alone, according to market research firm Dataquest Inc. Another 20 million copies should be sold by the end of the year.

And those figures may be dwarfed next year. Concerned about possible bugs in the system, many users are expected to wait for a later version of Windows 95 before plunking down $90 for a copy. Also, sellers of computer systems and hardware are expected to see a sales spurt as users realize they need new, or at least upgraded, systems to run the new program.

But Microsoft isn’t leaving things to chance. It is spending $200 million on the launch, which has riveted the world’s attention. The purchase of the first copy — by a student in Auckland, New Zealand, seventeen hours before copies went on sale in the United States — drew extensive news coverage. More than 70,000 people are expected to attend launch events in 43 cities today. Microsoft paid a reported $4 million to license the rights to the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" for Windows 95 commercials.

Windows 95, like all operating systems, is the software that determines how files are stored and different programs interact. The Microsoft empire was built on MS-DOS, the operating system that became the industry standard when IBM selected it in 1981 for its first personal computer. The two partners went their separate ways in 1985 when Microsoft introduced the original version of Windows, while IBM bet on an operating system known as OS/2 as a successor to DOS.

Windows found a following, but sales of OS/2 have languished. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s personal computers now run Microsoft operating software.

OS/2 may not be the only casualty. For many months, Windows 95 was known to the computer world only by its code name, "Chicago." But it might have better been named "William Tell," for Windows 95 could be an Apple-killer.

Windows 95 is supposed to make your PC more like a Macintosh. And some industry experts predict it may put the Macintosh out of business. With new features like longer file names and "plug-and-play" technology, a PC for the first time approaches the ease of use that made Macintoshes famous — but at a far lower cost.

Retailers such as Egghead Software in Cary started selling the software as soon as their clocks struck — or, in this digital age, beeped — midnight.

Tim Brown, an automation specialist at the Wake County Public Safety department, has paid $10 at Babbages in Cary Towne Center to reserve his copy.

"I’ll probably go pick it up in the afternoon," he said. "When people ask me whether it’s worth it, at least I’ll have some firsthand experience."

Egghead opened at 11 p.m. Wednesday to give customers a chance to browse. Then at midnight, copies went on sale. With Microsoft’s estimated installation time of 45 to 60 minutes, Triangle computer users could have had the software up and running by 1 a.m.

"We’ve had midnight madness events before and had very good turnout," Egghead manager Joe Mauk said Wednesday. "I really expect the store will be bursting at the seams. There may even be a line to get in."

More than 500 people have reserved copies so far, Mauk said. He had his full staff of 14 on hand until a 2 a.m. close. He plans to reopen the store at 7 this morning and stay on the job until 10 p.m.

As part of the launch, Microsoft will throw an invitation-only bash today featuring an hour long satellite address by CEO Bill Gates that will be seen by several hundred Triangle business executives and software developers at the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center.

"For all the hype we’ve heard, this is a good chance to actually see it," said Doug Haynes, a spokesman for Centura Bank in Rocky Mount, which will demonstrate online banking services that it plans to offer with Microsoft.

Other publicity stunts are a little more … … well, innovative.

Passengers flying from RDU to London should be sure to keep close to their airplane’s windows. Microsoft has painted fields in England with the Windows 95 logo so that they are visible from the air.

Four thousand boxes of Cracker Jacks will be given away with Windows 95 prizes inside in Chicago. The mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, will "officially upgrade" the city to Windows 95 in a ceremony today. Microsoft will pay for the entire press run of the Times of London — which will contain a Windows advertisement on the front page — and will give it away free, the first time in the newspaper’s history.

In New York, the Empire State Building will be lit in Microsoft colors this evening. In Toronto, the city’s tallest building, the CN Tower, will boast a 300-foot high Windows 95 banner. In Poland, journalists will be taken down in submarines to show them what it’s like to live "in a world without Windows."

The launch has become so much of an international event that Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau issued a statement protesting delays in a special French Canadian version.

"We want to be there for the revolution," an aide told Bloomberg Business News. "And we want to be able to do it in our own language."

Until a few weeks ago, however, it wasn’t certain that the revolution would happen.

Microsoft first announced that the software would ship last year. As the company repeatedly pushed back the launch date, analysts began to wonder publicly whether the product was "vaporware," or software that is announced — usually to deter a competitor — but never reaches the market. An oft-repeated joke was that by the time it was ready, Windows 95 would have to be renamed Windows 96.

Then the Department of Justice threatened to intervene to stop distribution. Regulators were concerned that Microsoft had an unfair advantage in the online service market by making its online access available through Windows 95. The Microsoft Network is expected to draw 9 million users, almost triple the subscribers of CompuServe, the largest online service.

But the feds decided to not delay the rollout, and it came off on schedule. Although the anticipated reception has made Microsoft executives happy, it likely will make computer hardware manufacturers even happier.

To take advantage of the features, users will need more muscular computers than most of them now possess.

At least 39 percent of PC users will have to upgrade their computers to run Windows 95, according to a recent survey, and another 22 percent have barely enough power to enjoy its full benefits.

Virtually the only institution unimpressed with the hoopla was Wall Street. Microsoft stock closed at $97.875, down $1.438, in Nasdaq trading Wednesday.

In the fall of my junior year in high school, I took the standardized Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), which most colleges use to identify potential applicants. Check the box that authorizes the testing service to release your name and the colleges hit you with a flurry of brochures, videos, applications and scholarship offers.

What I didn’t know was that the Defense Department would seize upon the scores, too. Much like their academic counterparts, the armed services pore over those scores for potential recruits. And, for some reason, the Navy’s computer decided I was a potential recruit.

For the past four years, the Navy has spent considerable time, effort and taxpayer money courting me. Only I didn’t want to be courted.

The search-and-recruit mission began innocently enough, with brochures about various Navy programs. Did I know about ROTC? Had I considered the GI Bill? Were there any other acronyms they could explain for me?

The Army and Air Force each sent me mailings from time to time, but never with the same frequency or volume as the Navy. It was not unusual to receive several Navy mailings in the same week or even the same day. Sometimes it would be the same letter but on different colored paper.

Then the calls began.

I had come home from school one day when I received a recruiting call from a Marine sergeant. He had obviously misplaced his list of a few good men and was trying me instead.

"I’m calling to talk to you about joining the Marines," he began.

"Well, I’m really not interested, but thanks," I replied and started to hang up.

But my sergeant didn’t take rejection as well as the other salesmen who call our house.

"Why is that?" he wanted to know.

I tried to explain. I get seasick. I can’t swim very well. I’m a little uneasy about making a four-year commitment at this point in my life.

"Uh, that’s a six-year commitment, son," the sergeant interrupted.

Fine, six years. I told him how antsy I was about signing up for anything where they put you in jail if you leave without permission. One acronym the Navy didn’t need to explain to me was AWOL.

Then I casually mentioned I had other plans.

"What, you planning on going to college?" he demanded. From his change in tone, it was clearly what a wimp would do.

Well, yes, I was. And if I changed my mind, I was quite confident the Navy would still be there.

I listened to the sergeant’s pitch awhile longer. When he would not allow me to end the conversation gracefully, I hung up. At least he would take me off his list, I figured. But the calls, and the mailings, continued.

By June of my senior year, most colleges had stopped sending me materials. A few brochures and applications trickled in over the summer from recruiters hopeful that I would change my mind, but most colleges had already moved on to the new crop of high school seniors. Even the Army dropped its efforts a few months into my freshman year at college.

But not the Navy. Convinced I was playing hard-to-get, the mailings poured into my house. My parents would just stack them up on my bed when I came home for vacation. We would all have a good laugh, I would throw them out, and then I would go back to school.

When I came home for the summer, the mailings and the calls continued. After receiving three identical mailings on the same day last summer, I had enough. For the first time, I called the number on the brochure. I told the operator straight out: I wanted off.

It’s not a response they get very often at the Navy Recruiting Command’s Philadelphia district office.

"You want what?" the operator asked me. "Why would you ever want to do that?"

"I have no real plans to join the Navy any time soon," I explained. "And I know it takes a lot of resources to keep sending me this stuff. As a taxpayer, I just felt that maybe the resources could be put to better use."

She transferred me to someone. He transferred me to someone else. Finally, they promised they would remove me from their list and stop sending things to my house.

Happily, I hung up. No more calls. No more mailings. And I had saved the taxpayers money.

After all, multiply the postage the Navy spent on me by the roughly 2 million high school students who graduate each year. We’re not talking small change here. Cut back on these mailings and the Navy would be a lot closer to that new Seawolf submarine it’s been clamoring for.

When I returned to school in the fall, despite the district office’s promises, the recruiting efforts continued.

Last spring, I received a call from a Marine sergeant. My mother told him what she had told all the others: I was away at school and still had no plans to sign up. She later brought in some of the mail to show to someone at her office who happens to be married to a rear admiral. The co-worker passed it on to her husband, who passed it to one of his deputies.

In June, my mother received a three-paragraph notice from the deputy commander of the Navy Recruiting Command. The commander wrote that he had verified that my name had been removed from all mailing lists of "Department of Defense advertising organizations." He then apologized to her for "any inconvenience this matter may have caused you."

Although the letter was a single sheet of paper, he sent it in an 8 1/2 by 11 envelope. The cost to the taxpayers? Forty-three cents.

It’s curious that the letter should be sent to her and not to me. It’s even more curious that it’s her inconvenience that the Navy regrets. Either way, I just hope the deputy commander really was sincere. Because he’ll soon have a chance to prove he’s a man of his word.

My younger brother, whose grades are far better than mine, takes the PSAT this fall.

—-

As the White House leads a campaign to lower underage smoking rates by placing sweeping restrictions on cigarette advertising, giddy anti-smoking activists hope to stub out the tobacco industry’s on-line efforts before they can take root. But tobacco companies have started to claim their little acre of the Internet.

Nearly 37 percent of on-line Americans are under the age of 18, according to a study commissioned by HotWired, the on-line version of Wired magazine. That’s the same age group that President Clinton said on Aug. 10 he wants to keep the tobacco industry from reaching.

While his proposals would ban everything from color magazine advertisements to logos on product giveaways, on-line ads have been overlooked.

Four federal agencies say they are investigating the issue. But none is sure which agency has jurisdiction over on-line tobacco ads - or if any of them do. Rules and regulations written for a different time have not translated well to the Information Age. More importantly, the global nature of the Internet may render Washington’s regulatory actions worthless.

Although the tobacco companies insist they have no plans to advertise on the Internet, both Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds Tobacco, the nation’s two largest tobacco companies, have taken steps toward establishing an on-line presence. And computer records indicate that Philip Morris may be preparing an on-line site built around its Parliament cigarette brand.

"We’re concerned. So many kids are out there. And the federal agencies don’t seem to know how to regulate it," said Makani Themba, associate director of the Marin Institute, which monitors marketing by alcohol and tobacco industries. "They say they are committed to preventing youth access. They should not want to be on-line if there are so many kids on-line."

Philip Morris and RJR have staked claims to Internet addresses. The addresses, which are known as domain names, help the computers that make up the Internet guide electronic mail messages to the proper recipients and help World Wide Web surfers find the home pages they’re seeking.

Those addresses are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis by InterNIC, a Herndon, Va., non-profit agency.

Philip Morris has received five distinct domain names so far and RJR has received three, InterNIC records indicate. Both companies say the addresses were registered as a pre-emptive measure, to prevent critics or competitors from using the names, and not for on-line advertising.

"We haven’t even been discussing the idea of Internet advertising," RJR spokeswoman Peggy Carter said.

"What we have done is registered trademarks and other names not for offensive reasons but defensive ones," Philip Morris spokeswoman Karen Daragan said. "We have no current plans to use it for brand communications."

But unlike RJR, whose three names are variations on the letters RJR, Philip Morris has taken defensive measures one step further.

Four of its names are abbreviations and variations of Philip Morris. But the fifth address is parliament.com, a reference to its Parliament brand of cigarettes.

The first four are connected to the Internet through computers at UUNet Technologies Inc., a national Internet access provider, according to records filed with InterNIC by Philip Morris.

But the parliament.com address is connected through computers at Leo Burnett, Philip Morris’ longtime ad agency.

That leads industry watchers to suspect that Philip Morris plans to launch an on-line site around the Parliament brand.

"We know they’ve reserved space," Themba said. "I think they’re waiting to see if politically they can step out. We hope they don’t."

Daragan said that Philip Morris set up the records that way "because, to register for a name, you need a web site. Leo Burnett has one and we don’t."

But although there are many requirements to register domain names, having a web site is not one of them, according to InterNIC rules.

A possible Parliament site is in keeping with Philip Morris’ apparent corporate strategy for Internet use. The company’s Kraft Foods subsidiary recently reserved 133 domain names, including grapenuts.com and velveeta.com.

Parliament was Philip Morris’ seventh best-selling brand in the United States last year, with sales of 3.21 billion cigarettes, up from 2.99 billion in 1993.

An on-line Parliament site could feature special promotions and giveaways for Internet users, as well as traditional advertisements. Many companies have used Internet giveaways to collect demographic data on its customers.

An on-line site could be particularly valuable because of the Internet’s global reach. Both cigarette sales and Internet use are booming internationally.

The tobacco companies have long conceded the Internet to anti-smoking groups, which have turned it into a powerful lobbying and rallying tool. In fact, Philip Morris admits that it registered only the Parliament brand because site names using its other brands had already been picked off.

"The antis and others have taken the other brand names," Daragan said.

Also, all sorts of anti-smoking studies and documents are on-line, including more than 4,000 pages of leaked internal Brown & Williamson papers on nicotine research. More than 65,000 computer users have read the papers since a California court allowed the documents to go on-line July 1.

The tobacco companies admit they are considering using the Internet to try to rally their supporters. An on-line site could be used to post information and research, coordinate smokers’ rights groups and communicate with those interested in the industry.

But the companies may not be allowed to create an on-line presence.

The Clinton administration’s proposals, which could take effect as early as November if the tobacco industry fails in its efforts to block the regulations in court, could be construed to apply to on-line advertisements, industry watchers say.

"I imagine if there were on-line areas that have substantial underage use, they might be affected," said Kathy Mulvey, research director for INFACT, a corporate accountability activist group in Boston.

"So far, it’s been a low-tech debate," Tobacco Institute spokesman Tom Lauria said. "But I can’t imagine [Food and Drug Administration Commissioner] David Kessler overlooking any form of censorship."

But even the agencies that are supposed to be implementing the new regulations as well as existing ones are not sure whether they will apply to the Internet or whether they even have the authority to set them up that way.

Officials at the Federal Trade Commission referred calls about on-line advertising to the U.S. Department of Justice, which referred calls to the Federal Communications Commission, which referred questions back to Justice. At the White House, calls on the issue were directed to the Food and Drug Administration, where officials did not have an answer either. They referred calls back to the FTC.

While such exchanges are comical, they illustrate the real dilemma federal officials face in trying to enforce rules meant for television and print media in an on-line world.

While many sites like Netscape Communications Corp. already refuse on-line tobacco ads, and programs that allow parents to block certain material are available, some suggest that new legislation may be needed to prevent on-line tobacco ads from reaching minors.

But even an act of Congress would not be enough to thwart a tobacco company intent on advertising on-line.

The Internet is not really a network in the traditional sense, but a network of smaller networks. More than half of those networks are located outside the United States.

Because the physical locations of computers that direct information are inconsequential - borders are meaningless on the Internet - a site set up in another country can be available anywhere in the United States. For instance, a number of sites focused on gambling have been created overseas to circumvent government restrictions here, leading others to suggest that tobacco companies could do the same.

Or at least that’s what Dennis Buettner is hoping.

Buettner, a self-described "idea man" who lives in Severna Park, Md., and works as a network controller for NASA, reserved the addresses cigarette.com and cigarettes.com. He has written letters to every cigarette manufacturer offering to either rent the names to them or handle the on-line marketing himself.

"With the restrictions on tobacco advertising, people are going to be looking for different ways to market their products," Buettner said. "I figure if you have a good domain name, then people who want cigarettes will type it in.

"I read the articles about how they are planning to restrict tobacco advertising and thought, ‘How un-American.’ I don’t know much about the ads. But my thought is, what about freedom?"

Many high school and college students are flooded with recruitment mail from various branches of the armed forces. I am a senior at Swarthmore College (certainly as unlikely a launching pad for a career in the military as Yale) and despite the fact that my PSAT scores are nothing more than faded numbers in my academic past, I am still the recipient of this peculiar military version of junk mail. I lump it in with the credit-card offers, magazine-subscription solicitations and sweepstakes announcements that commonly litter the mailboxes of those my age.

Ugelow, it seems, is not so much concerned about the tax dollars spent on his recruitment as he is amused by the supposed naivete of the military. After all, Ugelow implies in a thinly veiled subtext, only cretins enlist in the armed services, and Ugelow is no lowbrow, having, as his accompanying biography mockingly explains, "two years remaining on his four-year commitment to Yale University."

If Ugelow wishes to engage in the elitist conception of the military as nothing more than a refuge for academic non-achievers, he should do so honestly and openly without falling back on the tired ploy of feigned civic concern.

Factory orders fell slightly because reduced demand for aircraft and defense goods offset moderate gains in other sectors, the Commerce Department reported. The April decline followed a revised 1.7% increase in March, previously reported as a 1.5% gain.

Analysts had predicted a greater decline in April after the Commerce Department announced last week that durable-goods orders, such as for major appliances and automobiles, fell 1.9% in April. But orders for nondurable goods rose 2% for the month, offsetting that result.

The downturn in durable-goods orders mostly reflects erratic month-to-month demand for civilian aircraft. Although auto sales rebounded in April following the General Motors Corp. auto-parts strike, overall orders for transportation goods dropped 12.8% after a 14.6% increase in March.

Excluding that sector, new orders for other items rose 1.9% in April. Those gains indicate a slowly rebounding manufacturing sector, said Robert Dederick, chief economist at Northern Trust Co. "The manufacturing sector has been the drag on the economy," he said. "That stage is really behind us."

Factory inventories were unchanged, and unfilled orders fell 0.2%. The completion of several months of inventory correction indicates continued short-term growth, analysts said.

"This picture is very, very consistent with an economy that was depressed by an inventory adjustment and is working its way out of it," said James Annable, the chief economist at First National Bank of Chicago. "But it will continue to be hampered into the second half of the year."

The industrial sector will continue to produce erratic results but is experiencing a general pickup in activity, said Richard D. Rippe, senior vice president and chief economist at Prudential Securities.

"Business is gradually improving," he said. "It’s not a picture of sharp or robust growth."

"We’re hot as fire down here," he drawls. "It’s not the best it’s ever been, but it’s pretty dang close."

Defying predictions, American consumers continue to open their wallets — and fuel economic growth. Economists say businesses let their inventories dwindle early this year and then were surprised by consumers’ resilience. But now, as they rush to restock their shelves, economic growth could pick up in the current quarter — with much of the spending coming from affluent Americans enjoying the dual benefits of rising incomes and gains in mutual-fund investments.

You can see evidence of economic growth in the cars streaming into Mr. Helfman’s dealership from Chrysler Corp.’s Sterling Heights plant, near Detroit. The plant recently added Saturdays to its production schedule "to keep up with demand," says Dick Entenmann, its manager. Even hotter is Chrysler’s minivan plant in nearby Windsor, Ontario, now up to three shifts and turning out 1,450 units a day. "The lights never go out around here," says manager Adrian Vido, though he has to allow half an hour between shifts for workers to get in and out of parking lots.

Chrysler’s growth is leading the industry at the moment; its May sales were up 17% from a year earlier. For the industry as a whole, auto sales by domestic producers rose 7% from May 1995. Chrysler economist Van Bussmann says the industry, long prone to boom-and-bust cycles, will rack up its third year of strong sales this year. "We haven’t had three years of back-to-back steady sales for at least 50 years," he says.

All this activity on Main Street, of course, is making Wall Street nervous. Bond-market experts fear that when the economy gets hot, inflation heats up, too. So, they are watching closely for any hints of excessive strength in the government’s employment report coming out Friday. Strong job growth, they fear, could lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in an effort to head off inflation, and fixed-income securities would suffer.

Right now, there is little evidence of strong growth fueling inflation. Materials costs are stable, and businesses say they have little pricing power. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to pass on higher prices," says Nolan Archibald, chief executive of Black & Decker Corp., the Towson, Md., toolmaker. With foreign competition intense, "you just have to absorb any price increases on the raw-material side."

Wage increases remain modest as well. In 26 states, unemployment is below 5% — a level that in the past has pushed wages higher. Yet even in those states, employers seem to find creative ways of hiring enough workers without raising wages. In Minnesota, with a 3.1% unemployment rate, for example, the Minneapolis bus authority cut its drivers’ minimum age to 19 from 21 to fill jobs. The first to be hired, 19-year-old Kari Kuntz, seems a little out of place among the burly men in the drivers’ lounge of the bus garage. She says most passengers don’t ask about her age, though some inquire about her long, purple-tinted hair.

William J. Hudson, chief executive of AMP Inc., a $5.5 billion maker of electronic components with 40 factories in the U.S., says he isn’t having any trouble filling jobs. He is raising wages by a moderate 3.5% this year, "but we are more than making up for that in higher productivity." Meanwhile, his prices are falling an average of 4% a year, largely because of foreign competition.

The Fed isn’t at all likely to raise interest rates at its July 3 meeting despite the bond market’s fears. In interviews, some Fed officials express concern about a first-quarter uptick in wages, but they note that that rise was offset by lower employee benefits. And they see scant other signs of strain in the economy; they note, for instance, few worrisome shortages of materials. One of Chairman Alan Greenspan’s favorite indicators, lead times for parts and materials deliveries, has been little changed for a few months, giving no hint of the bottlenecks that could force up inflation.

"We are in a strong quarter," a fact that will require the central bank to be especially vigilant for inflationary signs, says Fed Governor Janet Yellen. But she adds, "The underlying trend is for balanced growth" and expects the second half to slow a bit from the current pace.

For President Clinton, the economy could hardly be better; in some ways, it is in its best shape in a generation. Although a flare-up in inflation or surge in interest rates could change things quickly, the economy’s current resilience is helping fuel Mr. Clinton’s popularity in the opinion polls. The so-called misery index — the combination of inflation and unemployment that helped sink President Carter’s bid for re-election — is at its lowest level in decades. Inflation has stayed below 3% for more than three years, and unemployment below 6% for nearly two years. However, wage stagnation remains a serious and confounding problem for people who lack a college education.

What could go wrong? For one thing, the economy’s moderate strength isn’t uniform. California is finally emerging from a long slump, which lingered on well after the national recession lifted in 1991. But unemployment there remains at a painful 7.5%, second only to West Virginia’s. New York and New Jersey, too, are lagging behind in economic growth.

There’s also the possibility that inflation will pop up, forcing the Fed to act later this summer. A single strong quarter isn’t likely to cause policy makers to slam on the brakes; nor is it likely that a small rise in rates would sharply slow the economy. But if there are signs of an inflationary spike, the outlook could change.

And the stock market might drop. Economists think one explanation for the strength of housing and auto sales might be the "wealth effect": Households flush with gains on stocks or mutual funds are more likely to buy big-ticket items. But if those gains in wealth evaporate in a sudden slump in the market, it could affect consumer spending in a way that it never has before, says economist Henry Kaufman. A bigger slice of household assets is in the stock market now than before the 1987 crash; so, a plunge could hit consumer sentiment far harder. "There’s no precedent for this," Mr. Kaufman says.

But for now, it’s steady as she goes. "It’s not too hot, and it’s not too cold," Chrysler’s Mr. Bussmann says.

Mr. Bussmann’s favorite consumer-spending barometer is a measure of real disposable income per household — income after taxes and inflation, divided by the number of households. In March, disposable household income was 1.8% above a year earlier. "It’s been running in that range for a couple of years," he says. "Steady, sustained growth — nothing that would lead to a buying binge," but enough to keep people buying plenty of Chryslers.

The consumer’s strength is evident in government statistics that show overall consumer spending soared in the first quarter to a two-year high. Retailing, after suffering during the winter, is picking up, with high-end merchants doing especially well. At Neiman-Marcus Group Inc., for example, $1,000 suits are flying off the racks, says Kelly Patrick, a spokeswoman. Among even bigger-ticket items, luxury-yacht sales are booming: Kadey Krogen Yachts Inc., a Miami maker of boats that start at $350,000, says business is so good that its production is sold out for a year.

Even the limousine business is rolling along. "Compared to last year, our business is booming," says Ari Kazmi, manager of All City Limousine in Burlingame, Calif. But he says competition is fierce, keeping prices down. The wedding season is just getting under way, he says, and he has been booking more bachelor and bachelorette parties this year.

Consumers are snapping up outdoor products, despite bad weather in much of the country. Black & Decker’s Mr. Archibald reports strong sales for every product category in his outdoor division, led by the Hedge Hog, a cordless hedge trimmer. Cordless lawn mowers, which, at $350 or more, cost far more than conventional models, are roaring, he adds.

In manufacturing, a slow first quarter is giving way to hopes of a stronger year ahead. AMP’s Mr. Hudson says the economy "isn’t exactly ebullient, but it’s not sick." His company, which makes parts for scores of industries ranging from computers to cars, is budgeting for a stronger second half now that inventories, which were too big last year, are down and demand has steadied.

The rise in interest rates over the past three months may slow parts of the economy later this year, of course. But right now, housing sales are still showing unexpected strength. In the latest report, for April, new-home sales shot up 28% from the slow pace a year earlier. But many in the business say the second half will slow, reflecting higher mortgage rates, which now stand at 8.3%.

The slowing trend is clear in northern Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington. Its rolling hills are full of new homes for sale, mostly priced above $250,000. Rob Bolton, a salesman for Virginia-based Ryan Homes Inc., recalls that in some weeks earlier this year he would have one customer in the office and three more waiting to talk to him in the model home nearby. Now, things are starting to slow.

"Sales are pretty steady, but they are way down from February, March and April," he says. "It’s been a pretty successful year so far, but the amount of traffic I see up here is really directly affected by higher interest rates." Indeed, some large builders are beginning to talk about slippage in building contracts and even some outright cancellations.

Moreover, many Americans, in spite of the favorable macroeconomic trends, still feel discouraged by the stagnation of wages that affects many less-educated workers, and by continued corporate layoffs. "In the face of all this seemingly good news, a sense persists that something is fundamentally wrong," Mr. Greenspan said Wednesday at an economic conference on Cape Cod, Mass. "I refer to the pervasiveness of job insecurity in the context of an economic recovery that has been running for more than five years, inflation that has been contained, and a layoff rate that is historically quite low."

The Fed chairman also suggested Wednesday that this insecurity is rooted in a "rare, perhaps once-in-a-century event — a structural technological advance." The rapid changes in technology, he said, have created a world in which ideas and education are now the dominant element in creating economic value. This, in turn, can be threatening to people unready or unwilling to embrace it. "A new world is emerging," he said.

Republican Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, Democratic Rep. John LaFalce of New York and the husband of Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California each made at least $5,000 on hot IPOs since last year, sometimes by buying and selling the same day. The wives of two other Democratic congressmen — Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Peter Deutsch of Florida — invested in IPO stocks but still hold them.

All deny receiving special treatment from their brokers, who usually reserve IPO stocks for their best customers or other favored clients. The lawmakers reported the trades on annual financial disclosure statements released last week.

Initial public offerings are as close to a sure thing as the stock market offers for those who get in early on the right deals and sell on the same day because the price often rises sharply as soon as the stock begins trading. Several lawmakers in the past few years have sworn off such trades after news reports disclosed lawmakers" profits, including former Democratic House Speaker Thomas Foley and GOP Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York. They ceased trading in IPOs after critics suggested that their stock profits appeared to be, in effect, gifts from people with stakes in pending governmental matters who might want to curry their favor.

A recently released Securities and Exchange Commission report on Sen. D’Amato’s one-day $37,125 profit questioned the motives of his brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont Inc. of Lake Success, N.Y. Stratton at the time was the subject of a major SEC enforcement action.

Sen. Thompson had just opened his account with his Nashville broker at J.C. Bradford Co., when he took home a one-day profit of $7,700 on an investment of about $15,000 in IPO shares of Cybex Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., electronics maker.

Sen. Thompson’s press secretary, Alexandra Pratt, pointed out that the senator "had his share of gains and losses," including one trade in which he lost $3,000. The Tennessee Republican also authorized his broker, Paul "Buddy" Enoch, to discuss the matter on his behalf.

It was through Mr. Enoch that Sen. Thompson obtained the hot investment. The stock was "way oversubscribed," according to Cybex spokesman Stephen Thornton, meaning that most investors couldn’t buy shares before it went to market. Sen. Thompson didn’t report the profit on his financial disclosure form. When The Wall Street Journal questioned the apparent oversight last Friday, Mr. Thompson filed an amendment.

Mr. Enoch says he invested Mr. Thompson in another successful IPO this spring, Premier Technology. Sen. Thompson flipped 500 shares of that stock for a profit of about $3,300. Mr. Enoch says he gives many of his other clients access to initial public offerings. Sen. Thompson, he adds, happened to have a large sum of ready cash in his account when the two stocks went public.

Typically, hot IPOs go to wealthy investors. And despite his long and successful careers in law and acting, Sen. Thompson has relatively modest means. His federal financial disclosure form indicates that his net worth, excluding his home, is less than $615,000 and could be as low as $200,000. His brokerage account, which Mr. Enoch calls "medium size," appears to be worth considerably less than $100,000.

Mr. Enoch, however, said he spreads his IPO shares around to all of his clients. The senator "wasn’t treated differently than anyone else," he says. Mr. Enoch says Sen. Thompson came to him on someone else’s recommendation, but he doesn’t know whose.

Sen. Thompson has received campaign contributions from J.C. Bradford executives, including Mr. Enoch. In his 1994 campaign, 11 officials of the firm contributed a total of $6,100. Over the last two years, another $15,750 was given by Bradford officials. A Nashville-based lobbyist who counts the firm among his clients, Thomas Ingram, was a consultant to Sen. Thompson’s 1994 campaign.

The financial disclosures of the other members who traded in IPOs suggest fairly active and sophisticated trading. For example, Rep. Pelosi, one of Congress’s wealthier members, reported more trades in new stocks than any other member. All seven were listed in the name of her husband, San Francisco businessman Paul Pelosi. The trades included some of last year’s hottest IPOs, such as the Internet-related companies Netscape Communications Inc. and UUNet Technologies Inc.; both doubled in value within a day. Mr. Pelosi bought and sold between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of each within a day of the offering. He bought like amounts of stock in four other companies — Remedy Corp., Opal Inc., Legato Systems Inc. and Act Networks Inc. — right around the time of their initial offering and then sold within a month or two. He reported buying Vanguard Airlines stock around the time of its initial offering and still owned it at the end of the year.

Most if not all of Mr. Pelosi’s trades appear to have been profitable. Rep. Pelosi couldn’t be reached to comment.

Rep. LaFalce, the top Democrat on the House Small Business Committee, bought $15,000 worth of IPO stock in Healthplan Services Corp., which specializes in providing health-care administrative services to small companies. The company says there were five times as many orders for the stock as there were shares for sale. Rep. LaFalce reported making between $5,000 and $15,000 when he sold it three months later. Through a spokesman, the congressman says he is an active trader who was given access to the IPO through his broker, whom he declined to name.

The wives of Reps. Deutsch and Doggett invested at least $1,000 in Food Court Entertainment Networks Inc., and Schlotzksy’s Inc., respectively. Both say their brokers gave them access to the deals but treated them just as they do other clients.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s shutdown of ValuJet Airlines — less than six weeks after FAA officials had insisted that the airline was safe — has raised questions about the agency’s ability to ensure the safety of the U.S. airline industry. Those concerns led Tuesday to a major personnel shakeup at the agency, a tightening of inspection rules and a plea by Transportation Secretary Federico Pena for Congress to rewrite the agency’s historic mandate that requires it to promote as well as police the aviation industry.

"There should never be another question about the top priority of the FAA," Mr. Pena said at a news conference called to deflect criticism of the agency. His comments made it seem likely that the fallout from the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 into the Florida Everglades on May 11, killing all 110 people on board, could lead to a radical change in the way the FAA regulates the airline industry.

Mr. Pena and FAA Administrator David Hinson conceded that the agency failed to heed earlier indications of potential safety problems at the upstart, low-fare airline. Mr. Hinson acknowledged that the FAA didn’t adequately gauge ValuJet’s airworthiness, saying, "We bear some responsibilities in this case."

For one thing, Mr. Pena said that the agency didn’t adequately monitor the growing industry trend of having maintenance work done by independent contractors, known as outsourcing. FAA investigations concluded that the practice led to a litany of safety concerns at ValuJet. As a result, Mr. Hinson said the agency would boost its inspections of airlines that use outside contractors to conduct their maintenance operations.

The turmoil at the FAA also led to a high-level personnel shakeup. The agency’s top inspection official, Anthony J. Broderick, long-time FAA associate administrator for regulation and certification, submitted a letter to Mr. Hinson taking early retirement. In his letter, Mr. Broderick said the agency needed to repair its public image and he believed his departure could help accomplish that.

"The events of the past weeks mandate that you make major visible changes to improve the public confidence in the safety of our air transportation system and the quality of FAA oversight of the airlines. My leaving will provide you with the maximum amount of flexibility to make those changes," he wrote.

Mr. Pena’s call to rewrite the FAA’s basic mandate could bring even more changes. Since it was chartered in 1958, the agency, which is part of the Department of Transportation, has had the sometimes contradictory mission of ensuring safety as well as promoting air travel. Over the years, that dual mandate has prompted the FAA to oppose numerous safety recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board, concluding that the changes would be too costly for airlines and aircraft makers.

Critics say that conflict was illustrated vividly the day after the ValuJet crash when Messrs. Pena and Hinson stood before television cameras and attested to the airline’s safety. Mr. Pena said Tuesday he is urging Congress to change the FAA charter so that it has only one mission: regulating safety.

ValuJet said there was no evidence that maintenance was to blame for the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board suspects that oxygen canisters being carried illegally in the plane’s cargo hold may have caught fire minutes after takeoff from Miami International Airport. But its official report on the cause of the crash won’t be ready for months.

Meanwhile, the FAA appears to have been deeply divided over how tough to be on ValuJet. As late as last Thursday, FAA officials in Atlanta and three key investigators were negotiating with ValuJet chief executive Lewis Jordan to trim the airline’s fleet of aging aircraft so that the carrier could have better control over maintenance. At that point, there was no discussion of a shutdown, according to people involved with the talks.

Over the weekend, however, two officials from the FAA headquarters in Washington flew to Atlanta to review the inspection records. After a series of weekend meetings, the regulatory officials recommended that Mr. Hinson give ValuJet an ultimatum: Shut down voluntarily or be shut down.

At about 1:30 p.m. Monday, Messrs. Hinson and Pena met at the White House with Clinton administration officials, including chief of staff Leon Panetta and senior presidential adviser George Stephanopoulos, who had been sharply critical of their earlier public assurances that ValuJet was safe. A White House official said Clinton political advisers didn’t press the transportation officials to shut down the airline.

But about an hour after that meeting began, FAA officials in Atlanta presented the ultimatum to a stunned Mr. Jordan, according to people familiar with that meeting. ValuJet announced it would temporarily suspend flights but called the FAA’s action "grossly unfair" because it said it had been denied the opportunity to respond to the agency’s concerns.

The chain of events prompted a round of criticism of the FAA on Capitol Hill. Republican Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, blasted the FAA for its oversight of ValuJet safety, particularly because a string of internal agency documents chronicled problems at the carrier long before the crash.

Jeff Nelligan, a spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees the FAA, said it was "absolutely brazen" for Mr. Pena to blame the agency’s problems on its dual mandate. "This is passing the buck," Mr. Nelligan said. "They are scrambling over there and it’s apparent to all."

The FAA admits that its oversight capabilities haven’t kept pace with the explosive growth of new airlines in recent years. Mr. Pena has trumpeted the rise of low-cost carriers, including ValuJet, as a major victory for the Clinton administration and a boon for the flying public. Asked at a briefing about President Clinton’s expressed concern about the quality of the FAA’s safety oversight, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said, "The President wants to make sure we do everything, redouble and recheck everything, that it is absolutely the safest system on Earth."

In May, Apple Computer launched a multimillion-dollar marketing tie-in with Tom Cruise’s "Mission: Impossible." It featured Mr. Cruise in its TV and print ads, created a web site for the movie and even cosponsored its premiere.

Apple executives say they are pleased with the public reaction to their "brand-energizing" campaign. But techno-savvy moviegoers are baffled by the short shrift given Apple in the film.

It’s true that Mr. Cruise spends a fair amount of screen time hunched over an Apple PowerBook laptop. Yet neither Apple’s logo nor its familiar Macintosh interface appear on his computer. Mr. Cruise uses a clunky custom interface that requires him to type in commands rather than clicking on an icon. Thus, the Apple connection is lost on most moviegoers.

Worse, during a scene in which Mr. Cruise and his team are planning a break-in at the CIA, their computer expert insists the caper depends on obtaining "Thinking Machines laptops," with nary a mention of Apples. But Thinking Machines Corp. has never made laptops — or anything much smaller than supercomputers.

The mistakes — not to mention the perceived slight to Apple — provoked plenty of buzz on the Internet among Mac fanciers. "I don’t know what Apple was thinking when they agreed to letting this travesty of a movie use their products," griped one. "I think Apple got a raw deal," posted another.

Apple signed up as the movie’s sponsor too late to have any influence over the script. But it hasn’t fared much better since the movie’s release. Not long after announcing the tie-in, Apple had to recall thousands of defective PowerBooks. "The irony of this is that if you were sucked in by the web site and the commercials, you couldn’t even buy [a PowerBook] because there aren’t any in stores," says Geoff Duncan, an editor of the Mac newsletter TidBITS.

Meanwhile, because of design quirks in Apple’s "Mission: Impossible" web site (http://www.missionimpossible.com), some Mac computers have crashed when users visit. "Is an Intel machine required here?" sniped George McClelland of Roanoke, Va., after his Mac went down. "Is this a good ad for Apple?"

Since then, he has spent more than $500 on books about Libertarianism. He cleared his summer to work on a 21-chapter book about Christianity and Libertarianism. He joined the party and planned to drive nearly 26 hours to attend its presidential nominating convention that began July 4 in Washington.

"I’ve never met another Libertarian in my life," says Mr. Hobbs. "This convention will be the first time."

Young Mr. Hobbs is exactly the kind of person the "LP," as the political party refers to itself, is looking for. With its membership aging, the party is mounting its first concerted effort to recruit younger members.

For the first time since the LP was founded 25 years ago, the party’s presidential nominating convention is being held in July instead of over Labor Day, in part so college students can attend. The convention will feature a session entitled "Listen Up Generation X" and two days of special workshops on campus-organizing techniques for the first time as well. The party also has launched an innovative effort to use the Internet and talk radio to get its message out.

The campaign of Harry Browne, an investment adviser who is the likely LP presidential nominee, also has relied heavily on the Internet. Early on in his campaign, he set up a web site (http://www.rahul.net/browne/) that features his position papers and a chatty campaign diary. If he gets the nomination Saturday, he plans further efforts specifically aimed at young voters: "We’ll do everything we can to get onto MTV."

The Libertarian Party, founded on a platform of dismantling government functions not specifically authorized in the Constitution, currently has 15,600 dues-paying members and 125,000 registered voters. The party’s platform includes calls for repealing the income tax and ending government interference with gun control, drugs and abortion. The party expects to be on the presidential ballot in all 50 states for the third time and will field candidates in a majority of U.S. House races, which no third party has done since 1920. But while libertarian ideas seem to be increasingly popular, the party itself isn’t a major political force.

Unlike the two major parties, which have long relied upon campus organizations of Young Republicans and Young Democrats as sources for volunteer labor and organizing activities, the Libertarians have had trouble establishing permanent presences on college campuses. "You get a good vibrant group going and then the firecracker graduates," says Rick Tompkins, a former Arizona state party chairman who also is a candidate for the LP presidential nomination.

Libertarians say their emphasis on reducing the size of government debt that will fall to the next generation — and reducing the size of government in general — should appeal to young people. And the best avenue for reaching those people these days is the Internet. "Both the Democrats and Republicans are still caught up in building organizations and hierarchies on campus," LP National Chairman Steve Dasbach says. "The Internet provides a real means of linking college students together without having these hierarchical organizations on campus."

Since college students generally have free Internet access and high-speed connections, the Internet has already emerged as a key organizing tool on campus, students say.

"Through the Internet, I get to meet other young Libertarians," says Ed Hertzog, a 21-year-old political science major at Penn State University. "I’d put the Internet at the top of the list [of organizing tools.] Communication is the key in organizing a party."

"We have a very high percentage of Libertarians on the Internet. Recruiting on the Internet has been very successful for us," says David Fry, a 21-year-old business management major at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., who was scheduled to attend the convention as a delegate.

That’s exactly how Mr. Hobbs discovered the LP last September while researching presidential candidates on the Internet.

The Federal Aviation Administration forced the discount airline to cease operations indefinitely June 17. But early this week, about half of ValuJet’s fleet was still parked at airports in Atlanta and Washington, blocking gates and costing ValuJet money. At Atlanta’s Hartsfield International, one out of every eight domestic gates was filled with parked ValuJet planes, increasing congestion even as Atlanta prepares for Olympic-size traffic.

Three more jets were parked at Washington Dulles International. The rest have been sent to maintenance facilities in Lake City, Fla., and Macon, Ga., or to temporary storage at South Carolina’s Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport.

"We are continuing to explore our options," said ValuJet spokesman Gregg Kenyon, adding that other airlines have expressed "considerable" interest in buying or leasing ValuJet planes.

Airport parking for cars may seem costly, but it’s small change compared to parking a jet. ValuJet pays $9,500 a month for each gate at Dulles, says Charles Erhard, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority’s manager of finance and administration. ValuJet ended gate leases at three other airports Wednesday.

To cut down on parking bills, the airline always could send its fleet to special airplane parking lots in the Arizona desert. One jet can be stored at a field for as little as $350 a month, says Charles Simmons, vice president for operations at the Evergreen Air Center in Marana, Ariz. Indeed, it would be a homecoming of sorts for some of ValuJet’s planes — the airline kept down its start-up costs by buying older planes that other airlines had placed in long-term desert storage.

But ValuJet said Tuesday it hopes to get the FAA’s blessing to resume flying Aug. 1 with a smaller fleet of four to 15 planes. With over $200 million in cash on hand, ValuJet may be able to take its time deciding whether to sell, lease or store the rest.

Either way, the airports hope ValuJet finds someplace else to park. "We don’t know what their plans are" at Dulles airport, says Jonathan Gaffney, spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. "We could certainly use those gates."

The abortion pill cleared a major hurdle on Friday when an advisory panel recommended that the Food and Drug Administration approve the product. The FDA could approve RU-486, also known as mifepristone, for use in the U.S. by early fall.

Three weeks ago, the same FDA advisory panel ruled that certain combinations of existing birth-control pills could safely and effectively be used as "morning-after pills" to prevent pregnancy when taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse. Some antiabortion groups argue this process can amount to abortion.

Meanwhile, the combination of methotrexate, a cancer and arthritis drug, and misoprostol, an ulcer drug, also has been found to induce abortion. Richard Hausknecht, an obstetrician at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, revealed in the New England Journal of Medicine last summer that the combination caused abortions in 171 of 178 patients, with side effects similar to RU-486.

Since then, Dr. Hausknecht says he has been besieged by calls from American doctors interested in the method, although most physicians aren’t using the drug combination until larger clinical trials are completed.

Delivery of these new alternatives will depend largely on doctors because drug companies are reluctant to market abortion-inducing drugs amid fears of product liability and political controversy. Methotrexate, for example, is available from various drug companies, including American Home Products Corp.’s Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories unit, which also markets birth-control pills. But American Home isn’t going to market the drug for abortions.

An American Home spokeswoman says, "We do not market, promote or research methods for use in early termination of pregnancy," and the company doesn’t plan to do so. As for using birth-control pills as a morning-after remedy, she adds: "We do not now and have no plans to market any birth-control pill formula for postcoital use in the U.S. The risk of litigation is our primary concern."

Nevertheless, doctors are free to begin using the cancer drug and regular birth-control pills for abortions. That is because the FDA regulates only what drugs are allowed on the market and what companies can say about them; doctors are legally allowed to use approved drugs for unapproved purposes.

Dr. Hausknecht of Mount Sinai says a group of doctors eventually plan to submit an application for FDA approval of the use of methotrexate for abortion purposes. Usually, the FDA advisory panel takes requests for new uses from drug companies.

The Population Council, a nonprofit research group in New York, received American patent rights for RU-486 from Roussel Uclaf SA, the French unit of Hoechst AG of Germany that developed RU-486 and markets it in Europe. The group has spent $12 million on clinical trials for the new drug application. It has tapped a new nonprofit organization in Washington, Advances in Health Technology Inc., to coordinate distribution and manufacturing. The group will sell the drug directly to doctors and health organizations and also train them to use it.

Neither group will name the third-party manufacturer that will produce the drug, out of fear that it could face a boycott or violent protests. But both say the company has the capacity to produce an "ample" supply. The panel on Friday recommended that patients receive misoprostol in addition to RU-486; studies show that the two-step process is more effective than taking RU-486 alone.

The new choices could put doctors back in the abortion business after a steady decline. Amid rancorous and sometimes violent protests of antiabortion groups, the number of doctors willing to perform the procedure had dropped to fewer than 2,400 by 1992, down almost 20% from a decade before, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that favors abortion rights. Federal officials say that 1.3 million abortions were performed in 1993, down from a high of 1.4 million in 1990; abortions are believed to have continued declining since then.

But a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one-third of obstetricians who don’t perform abortions would prescribe mifepristone if it became available. "There is potential for considerable expansion," in the number of abortion providers, says James Trussell, who heads the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.

"American women are slowly getting more options," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood in New York. "It’s about time."

Antiabortion groups counter, however, that all three methods could increase the frequency of an emotionally and physically painful procedure when other measures, such as prevention and adoption, should be pursued. And some critics charge that RU-486 can cause life-threatening bleeding.

Doctors who conducted clinical trials of RU-486 admit that excessive bleeding is a rare complication of the abortion pill, but say that happens in less than 1 in 500 cases. They also note that hundreds of thousands of woman have taken it in France, England and Sweden for years with few major problems.

June’s decline partially unraveled the huge 4.2% jump in May orders. That gain was just one piece of economic data in the robustly healthy second quarter that caused financial markets to wonder if the economy was in danger of overheating.

But June’s report helped temper that fear a bit. Treasurys ended modestly higher Thursday, with the bellwether 30-year bond rising nearly 3/8 to yield 7.01%.

More than half of the June decline in orders for durable goods, or big-ticket items such as appliances and automobiles expected to last more than three years, came from a plunge in new aircraft bookings. That was partly offset by a 31.6% increase in defense orders. Stripping out the volatile defense and aircraft sectors, total new orders rose 1.3% in June.

Although the manufacturing sector has shown erratic results month-to-month during the second quarter, overall orders have grown faster than they did a year earlier. "The basic trend is that orders are increasing gradually, with bouncing along the way," said economist Richard Rippe of Prudential Securities.

While new orders fell in June, unfilled orders increased for the second month in a row, suggesting that manufacturing activity will continue to be solid as factories work to keep up with demand, analysts said.

Economist James Annable of First National Bank of Chicago said the report indicates that the economy has finally completed corrections for inventory rebuilding, the General Motors Corp. strike that hobbled auto production and brutal winter weather in the first quarter. "We’re getting a regression back to moderate growth," he said.

Analysts are closely watching for signs of a slowdown. In recent days, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has said policy makers will be monitoring even the smallest changes in the economy to gauge whether growth is easing. Moderation of growth would make it less likely that the Fed would raise interest rates at its meeting next month.

But the government’s durable-goods report tends to be "so erratic" that a June decline in orders alone probably won’t do much to convince the Fed of a slowdown, said David Orr, an economist at First Union Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. The Fed chief "says he needs persuasive evidence. This is not persuasive evidence," Mr. Orr said.

Next week’s economic data will be much more important to the Fed. That’s when the government releases its first estimate of second-quarter growth, the July employment report, and the quarterly cost-wage index.

Separately, the Labor Department said Thursday that first-time unemployment claims dropped by a surprising 45,000 to 322,000 last week. Although some of the decline may be due to auto manufacturers beginning production of 1997 models, the data may suggest an improved employment picture, analysts said.

The four-week moving average of jobless claims, considered to be a better barometer of labor-market health, fell by 8,000 to 352,000 claims.

The index’s rise was its fifth in a row, including a 0.3% gain in April and a 0.2% gain in May. Three consecutive increases usually signal that the economy is expanding.

"The economy is on the move again, but the speed of the expansion is uncertain," said Robert Dederick, chief economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago.

The index of leading indicators is intended to predict economic activity six to nine months ahead, but many economists say it more accurately reflects current economic conditions. While it is useful for forecasting whether the economy will grow or contract, the index doesn’t indicate the rate at which changes will occur.

For those reasons, analysts said, Monday’s report offered little to resolve their concern about whether the second quarter’s sizzling economic growth will continue in the second half. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned last month that the economy may be growing too quickly, leading to speculation that the Fed will raise interest rates at its monetary-policy meeting Aug. 20.

But reports of rising unemployment and declining wages released Friday strongly suggest that growth in the third quarter will be more moderate, analysts said.

The stable prices at the producer level offer a further sign that inflation is under control, analysts said. Bonds were up sharply on the news Friday, with the Treasury Department’s benchmark 30-year issue closing Friday at 100 23/32, up 23/32 point.

"It just doesn’t get much better than this," with declining inflation and strong real growth, said Chris Varvares, a forecaster at Macroeconomic Advisers L.L.C. in St. Louis. The producer price index, which tracks price fluctuations at the producer level, and the consumer price index, its retail-level counterpart that will be released Tuesday, help economists to measure inflation.

The report gives the Federal Reserve yet another reason not to raise interest rates at its Aug. 20 meeting, after data earlier this month indicated average wages and factory orders have fallen recently. Indeed, there were few hints of out-of-control growth in July wholesale prices. Energy prices, which have declined for three months in a row, fell 0.9%, though they were offset by a 0.2% increase in food prices. Automobile prices also fell 0.9%. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, producer prices rose 0.1%.

Not only were prices for finished goods unchanged, but those of intermediate materials that need further processing — such as flour, yarn and lumber — fell 0.3%, excluding food and energy. Similarly, prices for raw materials — like cotton and coal — fell 1.6%. Those drops indicate there is little inflation in the pipeline, analysts said. "If you’re looking at the crude prices, there doesn’t seem to be much pressure there at all," Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Scott Sager said. All figures were seasonally adjusted.

Teenage drug use has more than doubled since 1992, the Department of Health and Human Services said. Nearly 11% of 12-year-olds to 17-year-olds used drugs on a monthly basis last year, and that number has climbed steadily from a low of 5.3% in 1992.

While teenage drug use has increased, usage by older Americans has declined in the same period, and overall levels of drug use have remained flat, the reports said. An estimated 12.8 million Americans used illegal drugs last year, the same rate as in 1992.

At campaign stops Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole immediately sought to capitalize on the rise in teenage drug use, depicting the increase as the result of a lax Democratic White House.

"This is nothing short of a national tragedy," Mr. Dole told the Veterans of Foreign Wars annual convention in Louisville, Ky. He vowed "to make the drug war priority No. 1 once again" and said he would host a conference of drug-abuse experts at the White House "to find solutions to put us back on the course to absolute victory."

In response, White House press secretary Michael McCurry insisted the drug war remains a "high priority" with the president. Asked if Mr. Clinton bears some responsibility for the increase in drug use, as some Republicans have asserted, Mr. McCurry said drug experts first noted the upward trend in 1991, before Mr. Clinton’s election. "He understands that there’s more that needs to be done, which is what he has consistently been doing in his time here," Mr. McCurry said.

Tuesday’s political back-and-forth was the latest in a series of Republican attacks on the White House for granting security clearances to staffers who had recently tested positive for illegal drugs. Republican leaders leaked summaries of the reports well in advance of their release, attempting to score some last minute points with voters before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week.

The move comes after some Republicans suggested an announcement earlier this month that juvenile crime had dropped for the first time in nearly a decade had been timed to steal the spotlight from their convention last week in San Diego.

Aside from the rise in drug use by teenagers, Tuesday’s reports also revealed that marijuana usage increased sharply while cocaine and heroin-usage remained the same. An estimated 9.8 million Americans used marijuana in 1995, comprising 77% of illicit drug users.

Additionally, there were nearly 532,000 drug-related hospital emergency room visits last year, nearly the same rate as in 1994. Cocaine-related cases made up 27% of all hospital visits in 1995, while another 14% were heroin-related. Over half of the visits were made by people who had overdosed, the reports said.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act extends new protections to an estimated 25 million Americans in so-called "job lock," a situation in which employees don’t switch jobs for fear of losing coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions.

The legislation includes a phased-in 80% tax deduction for health-insurance premiums for the self-employed by 2006, up from the current 30%. It also allows for the creation of 750,000 medical savings accounts that, much like individual retirement accounts or 401(k) savings plans, would enable individuals to set aside tax-free contributions toward routine medical expenses. Most of the bill’s provisions will take effect July 1, 1997.

The legislation was jointly sponsored by Sens. Nancy Kassebaum (R., Kan.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) and enjoyed widespread support, passing the Senate unanimously and the House 421-2 earlier this month, and both parties sought to claim credit for it Wednesday.

"Today we declare a victory for millions of Americans and their families," President Clinton said. "No longer will you live in fear of losing your health insurance because of the state of your health."

"The American people should ask why it took President Clinton more than three years to support these common-sense reforms, which he previously threatened to veto," Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole said in a statement.

As the parties quibble over the credit, Democrats have done their utmost to reclaim the spotlight during this week’s convention interlude, using the White House as a backdrop to stage several elaborate ceremonies. For Mr. Clinton, this week’s bill signings for a higher minimum wage, health-insurance and welfare reforms and business tax breaks provide a high-profile way for him to seize attention and credit in the wake of the Republicans’ national convention, and in the buildup to his own party gathering next week in Chicago.

En route to the Democratic convention by train next week, the president will seek to keep the spotlight with daily announcements of new initiatives. He’s also expected to clear new restrictions on tobacco marketing Friday.

In particular, Mr. Clinton will propose a still-evolving initiative to help welfare recipients find work through a combination of tax and wage subsidies for employers who hire them. The aid would be coordinated with local governments, aides say.

In addition, the president is expected to pull one long-pending proposal from the White House shelf to permit homeowners to avoid capital-gains taxes on the sale of a primary residence. Under current law, capital-gains tax relief goes to those age 55 and over. In practice, removing the age limit wouldn’t have a major impact since many younger taxpayers sell a home then use the proceeds to buy a more expensive one, avoiding capital-gains taxes in that way.

The White House zeal to pitch new ideas, if minor ones, reflects the competition with Robert Dole now that the Republican presidential candidate has put forth an ambitious tax-cut program. Mr. Clinton’s political advisers would like bolder strokes, but his economic advisers for now have prevailed in limiting initiatives to ideas that have relatively little if any federal cost.

From January 1993 to December 1995, an estimated 8.4 million workers were displaced from their jobs, including 3.8 million long-term workers who had held their jobs for at least three years, the bureau said. Displaced workers are defined as people 20 years or older who have lost their jobs because their plant or company closed or moved, their positions or shifts were eliminated or there was insufficient work for them to do.

Of those 8.4 million workers, roughly six million had successfully found new work by February, when the survey was conducted. Some 16% of those workers remained unemployed, however, and 13% had stopped looking for new jobs and left the labor force. By comparison, 67% of workers in the bureau’s last worker-displacement survey, which was conducted in February 1994 and included the 1991 recession, were able to find new work, while 21% were unemployed.

In signs that the labor market has rebounded since then and that the effects of downsizing may have slowed, 618,000 fewer workers lost their jobs from 1993 to 1995 than in the 1994 survey, and displacement among long-term workers fell 15%.

"We’ve created about 10 million new jobs. It’s been a strong, strong labor market recovery," said economist Audrey Freedman, president of Audrey Freedman & Associates in New York.

Since 1993, 44% of displaced workers lost their jobs because of plant closings. Roughly 24% said there was insufficient work, while nearly a third said their jobs were eliminated. Over 56% said they didn’t receive advance notice that they were losing their jobs.

Nearly three out of 10 displaced workers came from the manufacturing sector. But downsizing took its toll among white-collar workers as well, said Joseph E. Stiglitz, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

"White-collar workers represent a much larger share of those displaced. The share of manufacturing, while large, continues to decline," he said.

But it remains easier for laid-off managers and other white-collar workers to find new work. Nearly 80% of managers were in new jobs by February, while only 64% of operators, fabricators and laborers had been rehired. In part that reflects the changing nature of the economy, but analysts have noted that it is easier for white-collar workers to find new jobs because of a greater number of outside contacts and a wider range of skills.

One worrisome trend that surfaced in the survey was that more than half of workers took new jobs that paid them less, including nearly a third who accepted a job that paid them 80% or less of what they previously had been earning. "The steady upward wage movement that was our wonderful future has stalled," Ms. Freedman said.

In a separate report Thursday, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 6,000 last week to 327,000. The four-week moving average, a closely watched barometer of labor-market trends, rose 1,500 to 314,000. The figures are adjusted for seasonal variations.

First of all, I can tell you a little bit about myself and our company. Unlike most Internet businesses, we are particularly unusual in that when we started this project, we had never expected to start a business. Our company was founded in November of 1995, while I was a junior at Yale University, and my partners were four classmates of mine at Yale and a classmate from high school who goes to Columbia University. My background is not that of a businessman or a computer person, but as a print journalist.

Over the last five summers I’ve written for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Raleigh News & Observer as a reporter and in other capacities, and have been covering the Internet for them since things started taking off.

Many of you may have seen some of my stories on things like domain name speculation, which was a few years ago when there were people who were out registering all sorts of domain names that were potentially [useful] for Fortune 500 companies. That story has been reprinted in a lot of places.

The question before us is really, if you’re going to build a business from content, how are the ways to do it? I think, while Student.Net may be a bit on the unusual side, there are a lot of things that we have learned over the past year that may be applicable to your business that you’re running now, or that you’re contemplating running.

For one thing, there is how our company was started. We were cash poor from the beginning. We relied heavily on sweat, sweat equity, and volunteers to contribute content. We had to expend that with a number of different business models before we really hit on the one that we’re using now.

We had originally started working on the site with the understanding that we were going to be working with a larger corporate partner, the News & Observer, which had been one of the newspapers I had worked with. But during a corporate acquisition, their new media division had to switch strategic focuses and we were one of the projects that were sort of cast off on our own. We talked to a lot of people about working with us and we were told, “It sounds like you guys have great ideas, but I mean, really, you’re six college students with no products, no revenues and no experience. Why don’t you come back to us when you have a site and you have a business.” That has been sort of model that we’ve been operating from for the last 16 months.

So when we started the site, we basically had three rules. The first was that our content should be useful and compelling. The second was that we didn’t want to duplicate content that exists offline, that college students would ordinarily be exposed to. Finally, we wanted to update the site frequently to encourage repeat visits. So our original content mix was a combination of daily stories that were written by college journalists around the country, and even from Canada, who were either looking to do something that they couldn’t accomplish in their traditional college newspapers or simply wanted the exposure of writing for a larger audience.

To differentiate ourselves from the typical college newspaper that focuses very much on the day-to-day administration of a university, we focused on stories that were useful or quirky or interesting, that students wouldn’t normally find.

A good example was our cover story, which still gets us a lot of hits today. It was a guide to brewing beer in your dorm room. Over the course of the year, we did everything from guides to cheap travel, we sent reporters to cover the New Hampshire primaries and had all sorts of interviews with interesting students and professors around the country who are doing things that you wouldn’t ordinarily hear about.

We also had a number of interactive features, and the one that has gotten us perhaps the most attention is a feature that we developed called “TV Search and Remind,” which was a searchable listing with a twist. It still is the only place on the Internet where you can search television listings for up to a month. You go and you type in [something] like “Seinfeld,” and it comes up with all the Seinfeld [shows] for the next month, with the plots and the times and the show channels. Next to each one of those shows is a button, and if you click the button at the bottom, there’s another button that says, “Send me e-mail before this show is on.” So you would get an e-mail the day before saying, “Student.Net just wants to remind you that this show is on at this time, and by the way, be sure to come back to Student.Net and check out what we are doing.”

It allowed us to both build a relationship with our users — it gave them a capability that was not possible in traditional media — and got us a tremendous amount of press attention. Actually, that from the “Only on the Internet” story. Three weeks after launching our site, with no publicity other than word of mouth, we have been written about in the Los Angeles Times.

So it can happen to you.

We had chosen our market as college students for two reasons, both because we knew the market from an editorial standpoint, being college students ourselves, and also because we saw that there was this vast demographic group that was online in numbers larger than any other. We knew that 98% of U.S. colleges have access to e-mail, most of them have direct connections from their rooms or some sort of high-speed, T-1-level access to a public computing cluster.

And unlike traditional markets, college students were able to use the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike people who are at work and have work to do, or who were at home and were fighting their kids for use of the computer and were connecting over very slow modems. That gave us an advantage that we had this audience that was already there, that was using the Internet and was desperate for quality content aimed at them.

But obviously, there’s some things from our market that won’t apply to what you all are doing, so I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps that we used to identify the right market.

First of all, I want to address the misconception that a lot of people have going into an Internet business: the Internet is not inherently a mass medium. There are a lot of people on the Internet, but it does not work the same way as broadcast journalism does or traditional print media, in that people are able to very selectively jump from source to source, and even using just basic HTML, combine the various elements any way they want.

Instead, it’s helpful to view the Internet as a collection of overlapping special interest groups.

By that I mean that even though people who come to our site are college students, they actually have all sorts of different interests and align themselves in ways different than just by their age or where they live. Particularly in the area of city guides, I would point out that a lot of people are approaching those as, you know, here are people who are defined by a local group. They are all people who live in a certain city, but people really view themselves as defined in a lot of ways. They may be parents, they may be programmers, they may be sports fans.

So it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re designing your site. People really are in various niche groups that overlap at certain points, so you want to design it so that it appeals to the largest number of overlapping groups.

It’s important to remember that you also need to be able to segment those groups as well. I would advise you to try to find niches that cannot be easily replicated off-line.

In our case, the Internet was a perfect medium, because if you want to reach college students today on a national campaign, you basically have two ways of doing it. You can buy an ad in every college newspaper in America, which is not cheap, or you can try and do on-campus promotions where people hand out mugs to get you to sign up for your credit cards. That is not cheap either. Even something like direct mail is notoriously unreliable for college students. And I would point out that just from an expense cost comparison, that to just rent a name off the direct mail list costs ten cents usually, while an Internet impression can be had for a lot less. So there was a market there that could not be reached using traditional means. Advertisers desperately wanted to reach them and this was the perfect way of doing it more efficiently and more economically.

Finally, I would encourage you to try and be a “category killer.” That is the term that is used to designate things like Home Depot or Toys R Us. How that applies to the Internet is that you need to decide what your core strength is, how you’re going to leverage that and do it really, really well. Today, advertisers are looking for bulk ads. It’s the question of who can drive the most traffic to my site.

But in the 21st century, people will not be looking quite as much for just traffic as much as demographics. The sites that succeed will be the sites that can deliver the narrowest level of audience specificity to advertisers for the most economical dollars. If a site is built today simply to attract eyeballs, that site is going to have a hard time competing three years from now when advertisers finally figure out how to measure audiences properly and get sophisticated about their buying.

It’s sort of amazing how much advertisers today are just willing to roll the dice on a site compared to the level of justification they demand for a traditional print advertisement.

There they want to see psychographics, readership surveys, market-level income and all sorts of things like that. Today, everybody is sort of feeling their way around. That’s going to change, particularly as users become more experienced in surfing the Web.

The sites that try to be all things to all people are going to have an immensely difficult time competing, because as users learn how to use bookmarks, and as they start to create their own personal Web pages with guides to the sites that they’re interested in, they will very quickly start moving to a perspective where they control the order that the information is presented and which features they go to. So, content aggregators are going to find it enormously difficult, I think.

The second thing that I need to address is the concept-of-the-community myth. Right now everyone from Steve Case to Howard Rheingold from Electronic Minds says that you need to create community around your site for it to be successful. Vast amounts of money have already been invested in such sites, and I guarantee you that there are a lot of people here who are working on business plans, probably for the very same thing. But communities are not the panacea that most people think they are. When you talk about electronic communities, we really need to ask ourselves, “What are we talking about?” The reality is, when we say “community,” we mean that they’re cheap. Our users create the content. We don’t have to update it. We don’t have to maintain it. It can be automated, and we can just serve the ads. This is the real chat room model. The problem with that is that it takes quality for people to build around.

Community just cannot created by providing people space. There has to be a reason for them to get together. I really believe that in a few years we’ll talk about the rush to build online communities much the same way as we talked about the planned communities of the 50s and 60s where people built these huge, enormous, very artificial communities that they really didn’t want to live in. Huge amounts of money were lost, and nobody really understood why at the time.

What we’ve learned from that is that there’s a reason our cities have evolved that way. People like shaping their environment, and it’s not something you can force. You have to ask yourself, on the online communities, with so many sites trying to create community, “How much community will exist when you can get it anywhere you go?” Sites that have been successful in creating community so far have been the sites that really have been around for a long time, things like The WELL. When there really wasn’t very much out there before, this was the way that people interacted. It was a chance to interact with people who are different than you and from all over the world, but now there are all these business plans for sites that are trying to create communities on local levels.

You have to ask, “Why is that any different than what I can get today in my city? Why do I need to interact with people from my city online?” Is there a compelling reason for people to do so? Some sites will succeed in this, but I have to believe that the vast majority will fail because it’s so dependent upon the users you attract, whether one of them wants to be a strong influence in the site and how much people want to participate. So from our perspective, as much as we would love to have community created among our users, from a business perspective, there are three concepts that are far more important to us.

First is what I call “self identity.” I want my users to be asking themselves, not necessarily consciously, but to be thinking about, “What does it mean about me that I use this Web site?” We already do that everyday for a lot of different topics, things like, “I drink this beer and I drink micro-brew, so that says something about me,” or, “I drive a certain car and that says something about me.” In the future, I think those brand extensions will carry over to Web sites, that people will use Yahoo over Excite because it says something about them. You need to be very conscious of what your site’s identity represents, so that it can carry over and translate to your users.

The second thing is credibility. It’s focusing on how you can build a relationship of trust with your users, because the sooner that people begin to feel that you are a peer of theirs, the more likely they are to come back and to visit and participate in your community. Finally, I’d encourage you to focus on personality. I think a lot of sites are really missing an opportunity to convey that there’s more behind them than just monolithic corporations. It’s a chance to show your users that the people who work on your Web site are real people with real problems and the same concerns and daily stresses that the users have, and for a chance to build a marketing relationship that has not existed before.

We have been very conscious in our site design to always sign things with our first names, to include pictures of our authors whenever possible and to encourage people to e-mail us personally. We respond. It’s been really quite successful, and I think I’ve developed a relationship with a lot more of our users than I ever would have from my print experience.

So how does this apply to a site that you are building? Since this is “21st Century Publishing Strategies,” I thought I’d list a few 21st century publishing tactics for you to use.

First of all, I would encourage you to design your content to leverage what I call “self-selecting affinity groups.” If you accept that your site is really visited by groups of overlapping, selfspecialized interest groups, it’s important to design your site today so that when the ad dollars are there, you can easily differentiate between them. I will give you two examples of how we did that.

First, we were very conscious, in the TV search-and-remind feature, to design the response pages with the results of your search, so that we could very easily target different ads to different television shows.

If an advertiser came to us and said that they wanted to reach viewers of Seinfeld and another advertiser wanted to reach Murder, She Wrote, it’s very easy for us to do that. People feel very passionately about their television shows and their regular viewing. We found tremendous success in the people who have said, “Hey, here’s how I just push one line of HTML, and it’s my Web page, to automatically search for my favorite television show. We get a lot of people exposed to us through their peers, who wouldn’t have ever encountered any of the marketing that we do.

Another example is a story that we ran — I’m still sort of surprised by the reaction it’s gotten — called “My Parents Are Undercover Square Dancers.” It was by one of our students who wrote about how his parents had long been passionate square dancing fans but didn’t really want people to know. That story has gotten more reprint requests than anything else we’ve written on the site in a year. We get a lot of requests from square dancing newsletters in various Web sites. “Can we reprint your story?” “Can we tell people about your site?” The obvious answer is yes, because peer recommendations are often one of the most powerful ways of communicating your message to other people.

It’s the “Hey, these folks are just like me” attitude, and the sites that do that well will be the sites that succeed.

Secondly, I would encourage you to allow users to shape their experience. You can do this in a number of ways. We’ve enabled users to customize their environment in terms of how various things are displayed. We tried to build features that had dynamic responses based upon the information supplied by the users. One of the features on the site is called “Yenta.” It’s the Student.Net Matchmaker. Based upon information that users supply, it matches other users up as potential dates. That’s the perfect example of users providing us with information that enhances the functionality of their visit to Student.Net, and provides us with the necessary information we need to customize the site and continue to design it so it’s most appropriate.

Finally, I’d encourage you to think about designing your production system for maximum flexibility. Building your site out of databases that can be easily customized using server-side includes for various templates and parsing your pages based upon the browser and location that users are coming from will vastly enhance the user’s experience at your site.

I would encourage you to extend your offline product, if you have one, by taking advantage of new technologies. If anyone followed the press coverage of the New York Times Web site launch, very few articles were written about how great it was that you could read all the New York Times online everyday, and almost all of them focused on the fact that you could do the crossword online. It’s that type of “gee whiz” feature that people really seem to gravitate to.

Also, if you think about newspapers, that in the early days of the Web, used to print these regular columns with a vast number of Web sites to check out in the URLs, they really missed an opportunity to build an “early mover” advantage for their Web sites. If newspapers had been smart and said, “Today’s sites are featured on this Web site, this page on our Web site, and gotten users in the habit of going to the newspaper Web site to check out various sites that they’d read about in the newspaper, I would seriously question whether Yahoo would ever have happened. So in terms of an opportunity lost, I think that’s been a tremendous one.

Next, I’d encourage you to create what I call a “force of habit through frequent updates.” Our site is designed so that when users supply information through a personal section we have on the page, they need to come back to the site to see whether they’ve gotten new messages or new matches. This is something that can really be applied to a lot of sites, that you want to get your users, for lack of a better word, “addicted” to your Web site to the point where they need it. They need to come back several times a day, and they’re exposed to the new content that you put out. Advertisers will demand sites that are designed to encourage repeat visits, because that will increase the effectiveness and the exposure that the advertisers’ ads receive.

Finally, I just thought I would talk about a few other sites that get it so far, and I would encourage you all to check them out. I’m not connected to the Internet for this presentation, but one of the surprising ones that most of you, I’m sure looking at this audience, has never checked out, is a site called “Video Game Spot,” which is a site all about new video games. It has a perfect model in that every day it posts new reviews of video games, new previews, information about price cuts and all sorts of other video-game-related information from user tips and pictures of the games. But they’ve done something that’s really interesting. They have a page for each video game where they allow users to review the games.

What you see is three options presented to you when you look at a video game page. The first is the “Video Game Spot Review.” You have the option of looking at a professionallyrated review. Then they have links to user written reviews so you can see what people who are like you might like, and what other users think of it. Then finally, they put the company information online, so it’s all the promotional material from the company. You really get all the different perspectives that can let you evaluate the various games, and it gives you a sense that if you felt strongly about a game, you could participate as well.

The other sites each have different elements of what I’ve been talking about. MacInTouch is a site that combines all sorts of information about Macs and software for Macs. It’s a digest form created by a few people who started doing it just on their own, and it’s been so successful that they’ve turned it into a business. They compiled links to all the other Mac information several times throughout the day. For instance, when the Apple/NeXT merger was announced, they had an amazing amount of traffic because it was all there. People know that it’s there, and they know the people who run it. They’ve really done a great job of capturing personality.

News.com is a c|net site that covers the Internet. They’ve done a very good job in terms of being a resource for their users and providing frequent updates. If you haven’t visited that site, I’d really encourage you to. Firefly is a site that you’ll hear more about later today, I think. It’s a site that uses collaborative filtering technology developed at MIT to enhance relationships between users for music and movie reviews. It rates the movies that you’re interested in and compares it to the movies that other people have said they’re interested in. It says, “Hey, these are movies that these people who like the same sorts of movies as you’ve liked also like, go check them out.” I’d encourage you, if you have a chance, to go see that presentation and to visit that site.

Finally, for more information, you can feel free to contact me at this address. Also, if you want to leave me your business card, I’d be happy to send you a copy of this presentation. I guess I’d like to close with making an announcement that today, after 16 months of running this on our own, we’re pleased to be able to announce that we just received our first major investment. So, thank you very much.

There's a saying in many of the newsrooms that I've worked in: "Every time we run an obituary, we've lost a subscriber."

The reason, of course, is that people my age are not reading newspapers anymore.

I realize many of you are still developing your online strategies, but in an effort to keep things from repeating themselves, I'd like to talk to you today about your future users and a phenomenon you may not be aware of.

There are currently 14.4 million two-year and four-year college students in the United States. And that number is projected to grow to 19.2 million in the year 2000.

The most important piece of advice I can give you is go visit a college campus and get to know these people. Because there is no better focus group for what the future holds than a college campus today.

Inspired by widely available grant money and student demand, colleges are racing to connect every dorm room to the Internet. College students have high speed connections and often receive their access for free. They don't have to tie up a phone line; fight with their spouse or their kids for use of the computer; or worry about their boss looking over their shoulder. Plus, they use the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

While they read fewer newspapers, listen to less radio, and watch less television, college students use the Internet more than any other demographic group.

While college students make up just five percent of the U.S. population, at least one in every five Internet users is a college student.

Indeed, 85 percent of college students are projected to use the Internet at least once this semester, 62 percent at least once per week, and 50 percent will use it every single day.

All told, college students will spend 70 million hours online this week alone.

And it's not hard to see why.

Online discussion groups are replacing face-to-face sessions with professors. Classwork is assigned and submitted online. Already, students are using the web to find out what's for dinner, what's showing on campus, how the football team did, and what the weather forecast is.

And best of all, why bother picking up the phone to call Mom & Dad when you can ask for more money by e-mail?

Yet for all their numbers online, college students are dramatically underserved by today's online content offerings. Our company is working to fill that void.

We publish a site called Student.Com that combines the writing of the nation's top collegiate journalists with innovative uses of Internet technology to create a comprehensive, in-depth site devoted to college life. Many of the lessons we've learned will be applicable to you in your efforts.

Our site currently has four main concentrations:

1. A daily newsmagazine written by college journalists from around the country. We cover everything from financial aid policies to new movies and music to how to brew beer in your dorm room. If you're 21 or over, of course.

2. Community enabling features that help to facilitate interaction between our members. Among the most popular is "Yenta, the Student.Com matchmaker." An early version of Yenta allowed users to indicate whether they were a "prince" or a "princess" and whether they were searching for a "prince," a "princess," or an &quot artist formerly known as Prince."

3. Information services that help students to organize their lives. For instance, our site is the only place on the Internet where you can search television listings for up to six weeks and get e-mail reminders before a show airs.

4. Entertaining interactive features like the "Rejectomatic" which sends fake rejection letters to your friends. If any of you were rejected for the position of "coffee filtration technician," that was us — and we're sorry.

Over time, college students will get their news from us, meet new friends through us, buy their course books through us — and maybe even land a White House internship through us.

So what does this mean to you? A number of things:

1. Be ready for a world when your site is "always on."

College graduates will be a driving force in the deployment of broadband Internet access to the home. News cycles will increasingly have less meaning.

2. Allow users to shape their own experience and help them manage their lives.

How many of you are putting school lunch menus into databases that will let parents know when a meal their child won't eat is being served?

Or what about geomapping your crime reports so users can see where the dangerous parts in their neighborhoods are?

Or what about something simple, like letting users post the locations of pot holes and street signs that need fixing?

3. Experiment with story forms and conventions.

You're not going to attract young readers by doing the same types of writing as in your print editions.

4. Build context into whatever you do.

Give people access to the tools they need to make the decisions in their lives.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with one thought: For all the bells and whistles, the Internet is still at its heart a medium of words. If we as an industry can get college students to read online, there just may be hope for newspapers yet.

Then the WordPress development team comes along and introduces the brand new WordPress Widgets: slick chunks o’ code that make it easy to modify your WordPress-powered site’s sidebar from a simple drag-and-drop menu. Overnight there’s a new widget blog, a flurry of rejiggered themes, and the utterly grotesque new jargon “to widgetize.”

The good news? Customizing a third-party WordPress theme is much, much easier for end-users.

The bad news? While coding up a widget isn’t rocket science, it’s beyond the PHP skill level of most theme designers. (Those who want end-users customizing their themes, that is.)

As a result, there’s an awful lot of perfectly good code suddenly consigned to the dustbin. On the flip side, there’s been a ton of energy devoted to creating widgets that are essentially wrappers for existing plugins.

Wouldn’t it be better if making widgets were as simple as making theme template files? Well, now it can be that simple thanks to modifications I made to a sample widget by plugin writer Kaf Oseo.

Here’s how it works:

1. Download and install the WordPress Widgets plugin.

2. Download and install my Theme Widgets plugin.

3. If you are not using the WordPress default theme (Kubrick) or a theme that has already been updated to be widget-friendly, follow the instructions for enabling the dynamic sidebar.

4. For each widget you want to offer, create a file with the appropriate code in your theme folder using a name that begins with widget- or widget_.

   For example, try creating a file named widget-example.php in your theme file with the following contents:

   <?php
   /*
   Widget Name: Theme Widgets Example
   */
   
   print("<p>This is an example of the Theme Widgets plugin.</p>");	
   ?>
   
   

5. Go to the “Sidebar Widgets” item in the presentation menu. At the bottom of the page you should have a new dialog box that lets you set the number of theme widgets:

   

6. Then find "Theme Widget 1" in the “Available Widgets” box above and click on the widget options icon (where the blue arrow is pointing below).

   

7. You should see a dialog box like this one:

   

8. Just click on the radio button for the theme widget you want — in this case you’ll obviously just have the one widget-example.php to choose from — and fill in the optional title and text fields if you’d like.

9. The close the widget and be sure to click on the “Save changes” button, which may not be visible on your screen unless you scroll down.

   

10. If all goes well, the next time you visit your site you should see “This is an example of the Theme Widgets plugin.” in your new sidebar. You’re now in business!

So there it is: ten simple steps to theme widget happiness. It’s so easy, it’s Automaggic!

WordPress-powered URLs ending in /search/foo (where “foo” is your search term) now work the same way as the old-school format of index.php?s=foo. They’re cleaner, more intuitive, and darned easier on the eyes.

The only problem? The search form included in most templates produces old-school URLs instead of the newer ones, and the various ways of recoding the search form (see last year’s discussion on the wp-hackers mailing list) seem more trouble than they’re worth.

Thankfully, there’s a simple, elegant workaround using the WordPress WP_Query class. Just add the code below to the very top of your header.php template and say goodbye to ugly search URLs.

<?php
if ((is_search()) && ($_GET['s'])) {
	wp_redirect(get_bloginfo('url')."/search/".get_query_var('s'));
} //if
?>

As usual, standard disclaimers apply.