Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column ; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. Length
URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES (90%); WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (90%); INTERNET & WWW (88%); CUSTOMER SERVICE (71%); ARMED FORCES (63%); WEB SITES (50%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT (66%); MOBILE & CELLULAR TELEPHONES (91%) Telephones and Telecommunications; Cellular Telephones; Prices (Fares, Fees and Rates); Computers and the Internet COMPANY: VERIZON WIRELESS INC (68%); SPRINT NEXTEL CORP (66%); VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC (90%); CINGULAR WIRELESS LLC (54%) ORGANIZATION: Sprint Nextel; Verizon Communications; Cingular Wireless; T-Mobile (Co) TICKER: S (NYSE) (66%); VZC (LSE) (90%); VZ (NYSE) (90%); VER (SWX) (90%) INDUSTRY: SIC5063 ELECTRICAL APPARATUS & EQUIPMENT (68%); NAICS517212 CELLULAR & OTHER WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS (54%); NAICS517110 WIRED TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (90%); SIC4813 TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS, EXCEPT RADIOTELEPHONE (54%); NAICS517210 WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (EXCEPT SATELLITE) (90%); SIC4812 RADIOTELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS (68%) PERSON: Damon Darlin LOAD-DATE: March 10, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photos: Liza Tremblay got out of her contract, but it took persistence. ''I think I got across the idea that I meant business,'' she said. (Photo by Doug Kuntz for The New York Times )(pg. C6) (Photographs by Tony Cenicola/Illustration by The New York Times)(pg. C1) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1040 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching BYLINE: By JOHN MARKOFF SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 920 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information. The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines. He says his latest effort, to be announced Friday, will help develop a realm frequently described as the ''semantic Web'' -- a set of services that will give rise to software agents that automate many functions now performed manually in front of a Web browser. The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world's digital information is a fundamental shift away from today's World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog. In contrast, Mr. Hillis envisions a centralized repository that is more like a digital almanac. The new system can be extended freely by those wishing to share their information widely. On the Web, there are few rules governing how information should be organized. But in the Metaweb database, to be named Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and even meaning. For example, an entry for California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would be entered as a topic that would include a variety of attributes or ''views'' describing him as an actor, athlete and politician -- listing them in a highly structured way in the database. That would make it possible for programmers and Web developers to write programs allowing Internet users to pose queries that might produce a simple, useful answer rather than a long list of documents. Since it could offer an understanding of relationships like geographic location and occupational specialties, Freebase might be able to field a query about a child-friendly dentist within 10 miles of one's home and yield a single result. The system will also make it possible to transform the way electronic devices communicate with one another, Mr. Hillis said. An Internet-enabled remote control could reconfigure itself automatically to be compatible with a new television set by tapping into data from Freebase. Or the video recorder of the future might stop blinking and program itself without confounding its owner. In its ambitions, Freebase has some similarities to Google -- which has asserted that its mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. But its approach sets it apart. ''As wonderful as Google is, there is still much to do,'' said Esther Dyson, a computer and Internet industry analyst and investor at EDventure, based in New York. Most search engines are about algorithms and statistics without structure, while databases have been solely about structure until now, she said. ''In the middle there is something that represents things as they are,'' she said. ''Something that captures the relationships between things.'' That addition has long been a vision of researchers in artificial intelligence. The Freebase system will offer a set of controls that will allow both programmers and Web designers to extract information easily from the system. ''It's like a system for building the synapses for the global brain,'' said Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a technology publishing firm based in Sebastopol, Calif. Mr. Hillis received his Ph.D. in computer science while studying artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1985 he founded one of the first companies focused on massively parallel computing, Thinking Machines. When the company failed commercially at the end of the cold war, he became vice president for research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering. More recently he was a founder of Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm based in Glendale, Calif. Metaweb, founded in 2005 with venture capital backing, is a spinoff of that company. Mr. Hillis first described his idea for creating a knowledge web he called Aristotle in a paper in 2000. But he said he did not try to build the system until he had recruited two technical experts as co-founders. Robert Cook, an expert in parallel computing and database design, is Metaweb's executive vice president for product development. John Giannandrea, formerly chief technologist at Tellme Networks and chief technologist of the Web browser group at Netscape/AOL, is the company's chief technology officer. ''We're trying to create the world's database, with all of the world's information,'' Mr. Hillis said. All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Mr. Hillis said. In the future, he said, the company plans to create a business by organizing proprietary information in a similar fashion. Contributions already added into the Freebase system include descriptive information about four million songs from Musicbrainz, a user-maintained database; details on 100,000 restaurants supplied by Chemoz; extensive information from Wikipedia; and census data and location information. A number of private companies, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, have indicated that they are willing to add some of their existing databases to the system, Mr. Hillis said.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1041 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
Fire roared through this house on Wednesday night. Relatives and neighbors ran to help, but they could only stand there, in the bitter cold, and watch. One father -- he had been driving a cab in Manhattan when he got a panicked call from his wife -- ran back and forth outside, screaming. A terrified mother threw two of her children from a window to neighbors below, then jumped, wearing only a bra and panties. In all, eight children and a woman were killed, all of them part of an extended family of immigrants from Mali. Four of the children and the woman were found on the fourth floor. Two died in a bedroom on the third floor. One was found on the second floor, and one was on the stairs. Excluding Sept. 11, 2001, it was the deadliest fire in New York since 1990, when 87 people were trapped in the Happy Land Social Club, also in the Bronx. Fire Department officials said the blaze started in a cord attached to a space heater on the ground floor, then raced up a wooden staircase to consume the second, third and fourth floors. The row house, built in 1901, had no fire escapes. Although there were two smoke alarms in the building, neither had batteries. Help came late for several reasons. The four women in the house did not call 911. They tried to put out the fire themselves, according to the Fire Department. The first call to 911 came from a neighbor across the street, at 11:08 p.m. A fire engine arrived at the scene 3 minutes and 23 seconds later. Other things went wrong. While the women tried to put out the fire, they left a door open, allowing the fire to spread upstairs. A padlocked gate in front of the house stood in the way of firefighters, who went back to the truck to get a bolt-cutter. The first two floors were already filled with fire and smoke, and women and children on the upper floors were weakening from smoke inhalation. ''Sometimes it just seems more painful and more unfair when it's children that die,'' Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday. ''When children die, everyone around them, everyone who loved them, die a little bit as well. ''It's one small building, but one very large tragedy for our city.'' Mayor Bloomberg said he believed 22 people lived in the building: five or six adults and as many as 17 children. Firefighters rescued two children from the third floor, and several other survivors got out on their own. The dead included four members of the Soumare family: Harouma and Sisi, 7-month-old twins; Djibril, age 3; and Fatoumata, their mother, 42. Five children in the Magassa family died: Bilaly, 1; Djama, 3; Abudubary, 5; Mahamadou, 8; and Bandiougou, 11. At 1 a.m. yesterday, six children were brought to Jacobi Medical Center, said Michael Heller, a spokesman. An infant boy was dead on arrival. Five others, suffering from burns, were treated in a hyperbaric chamber, which is used to relieve carbon monoxide poisoning. Moussa Magassa, the father of five of the dead children, was in Mali on business when he was told of the fire and is on his way back to New York, said Alpha Kassogue, a health educator at the African Services Committee, a social services agency. Last night, Manthia Magassa, the mother of five of the dead children, sat on a bed in a neighbor's apartment. On her lap was a niece, one of the children who survived. They were surrounded by roughly a dozen African women, one of whom translated the single sentence she spoke: ''I'm in pain.'' Relatives came and went yesterday, dazed with grief. Word had spread to Mali so quickly that Adama Traore, who works as an outreach worker at the African Services Committee, got an early-morning phone call about the fire from a relative in Africa. Women in head wraps and colorful batik dresses gathered in a friend's apartment in High Bridge Gardens, where they lay on couches, some nursing babies, with frozen looks on their faces. ''We sit and we pray for them,'' said Miriam Tall, a relative of Fatoumata Soumare, who died with three of her four children. ''We cannot make them get up. If you die, you die.'' By late afternoon, a stream of African Muslims had filled the Islamic Cultural Center on East 166th Street, where Mamadou Soumare, the cabdriver, was worshiping. Donations had mounted to $11,000, said Sheik Moussah Drammeh, who is helping to organize burials for the family. The four members of the Soumare family will be sent to Mali for burial, and the five dead Magassa children will be buried in New York, said Imam Konate Souleimane, general secretary of the Association of African Imams. He said funeral plans would be discussed today. Musa Dukuray, 41, said he was at the mosque out of loyalty to Mr. Soumare, who, he said, sacrificed everything for his children. ''He never had a nice pair of pants,'' Mr. Dukuray said. ''He was just working hard all the time.'' Two of the injured children improved yesterday and were transferred to Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in fair condition. Two others were released, Mr. Heller said. A woman was in stable condition at Lincoln, and a 7-year-old girl remained in critical condition at Jacobi. Four firefighters and one emergency worker were also hospitalized with minor injuries. The house, at 1022 Woodycrest Avenue, belongs to Moussa Magassa, one of three brothers who moved to New York from western Mali 25 years ago. The brothers prospered, and were known as pioneers among the city's Malian community, estimated at 5,000 to 10,000. The families were from the Sarakhole clan, natives of rugged country who are known as traders and entrepreneurs, Mr. Kassogue said. Mr. Magassa's brother Mody is the vice president of the Association of Malians Living Abroad. All three brothers sent a portion of their earnings back to Africa. ''Immigration is in their blood, in their culture,'' Mr. Kassogue said of the Sarakhole people. ''They come here, they work hard and they build everything in their home towns -- roads, houses, hospitals, day care.'' Moussa Magassa bought the house in 1996, for $139,000. It became a crossroads for dozens of West African families who moved to the area. Fatan Kanoute, 17, a junior at Bronx International High School, said she used to stop at the house every day after school. The children were happy and boisterous, she said, and the home was spacious compared to her own. Though Fatoumata Soumare often prepared traditional African stews, she said, the children wanted -- and got -- hot dogs. Mr. Magassa had two wives in the home, living on different floors, according to a friend of the family and a cousin. On the third floor lived Aisse Magassa and four of Mr. Magassa's children. All lived. Aisse Magassa is believed to have broken a leg jumping from the house. On the second floor, Manthia Magassa lived with seven children, five of whom perished. ''Both wives,'' said the friend, Bulansa Kebbeh, 30. The cousin, 12-year-old Dieinabou Magassa, asked about the relationships in the house, said, ''Aisse is his other wife. Manthia is his wife too.'' On the ground floor lived Niakale Magassa, a statuesque woman who left every morning for an English class at the High Bridge Community Life Center. She desperately wanted to improve her English, but she couldn't keep herself from nodding off in class, because she was exhausted from caring for the children, said Mohammed Barri, 20, a Sierra Leonean immigrant in the same class. Recently, he said, she had inquired about jobs at a 99-cent store and a gas station. ''I think she needed money, because her husband is not here,'' Mr. Barri said. Moussa Magassa has worked as a carpenter for the school system. In 2000, when he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, he stated that he had $214,700 in assets -- the house representing $170,000 of it -- and $132,124 in liabilities. He was also listed as the owner of an import-export business. Both of his brothers filed for bankruptcy over the course of the next four years. In the neighborhood, the house was chiefly known as a place full of children. A small crowd of them convened every morning before school for the walk around the block to P.S. 73. Mr. Kassogue, of the African Services Committee, said Manthia Magassa's serial pregnancies became a running joke. ''We were teasing her, 'Why are you making so many kids?' '' Mr. Kassogue recalled. But, he said, ''she was appreciating being pregnant.'' The house was quiet on Wednesday night, and most of its residents had gone to bed. According to the Fire Department, Niakale Magassa awoke to flames near her bed, and removed her child to safety, then called the three women upstairs to help her extinguish the fire. It was not clear how they tried to quench it, Fire Department officials said. Mr. Soumare was driving his taxi, due to finish his shift at midnight. But shortly after 11 p.m., his wife called him on his cellphone. He was at Amsterdam Avenue and 139th Street, a little more than two miles away. ''She said, 'We have a fire,' '' Mr. Soumare said. ''She screamed. I said, 'Go up to the top floor. Call 911.' '' Fatan Kanoute, 17, was asleep in a house across the street, where many of the Magassas' relatives live. She heard a cousin screaming and ran out onto Woodycrest Avenue. But there was nothing she could do. ''Nobody can get in, and nobody can get out,'' she said. ''Too much fire.'' Aisse Magassa threw two of her children out a window to neighbors in the yard below. Edward Soto, 28, who lives in a building across the street, said he had caught one of the children but had been unable to break the fall of the other. ''The mother said, 'Please, God, don't kill my children,' '' Mr. Soto said. ''Then she went and she jumped. When I looked up the woman was coming down. I screamed out and screamed out. She came down hard.'' Charles O'Neal, 21, was out there, too, watching from the front porch of No. 1021. The street was full of thick black smoke, and the fire kept growing, he said, as if it ''was relighting itself.'' He said he saw Mr. Soumare run down the street screaming, and watched as police officers pushed him back against a wall. Mr. O'Neal stood outside for almost three hours, until the street had grown quiet and firefighters' water had turned to sheets of ice. What stuck with him, he said, was one moment of it: He was standing there when firefighters carried out two children. Their bodies were laid out on the road, still in their pajamas.
Outside the scene of the fire yesterday, there were official vehicles and despairing relatives, including Banta Haidara, an aunt of some of the children who perished. (Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times) Mamadou Soumare, a cabdriver who lost his wife and three of their four children, with mourners yesterday. (Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. B5)
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1042 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Australian Muslims Go for Surf, Lifesaving and Burqinis BYLINE: By RAYMOND BONNER SECTION: Section A; Column 3; Foreign Desk; CRONULLA JOURNAL; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 958 words DATELINE: CRONULLA, Australia, March 3 As a teenager growing up in a Sydney suburb, Mecca Laalaa never felt anything but Australian, even though she was for the most part unable to engage in the most quintessential of Australian pastimes: swimming at the beach. ''Restricted by my clothing,'' Ms. Laalaa explained. Ms. Laalaa is a Muslim and has voluntarily worn the burqa, the traditional head-to-toe covering for Muslim women, since she was 14. It is hard to swim, she said, if your body is swathed in cotton, which is very heavy when wet. Now, her clothing quandary solved by a novel fashion, the burqini, Ms. Laalaa, a vivacious 20-year-old, has become a Surf Life Saver, as volunteer lifeguards here are known, lured to the beach by a new outreach program for Australia's Muslims. The program, On the Same Wave, was started a year ago by the nonprofit group that organizes the volunteers, Surf Life Saving Australia, along with the federal Immigration Ministry and the local council. The outreach was the response to an ugly episode on Cronulla Beach, about 20 miles south of downtown Sydney, in December 2005, when skinheads and neo-Nazis, many drunk and with racial epithets painted on their bodies and T-shirts, marauded through the area beating up Lebanese men. Many here and abroad wondered if Australia was headed for a period of rising racial tension. The riots set off a round of soul-searching and left many Australians asking if the violence reflected an underlying racism in their society. Among Australia's population of roughly 20.2 million, fewer than half a million are Muslims, most of them in Sydney and Melbourne. On the Same Wave was intended to promote cultural understanding, introduce people from minority groups -- Chinese, Somalis, Sudanese -- to beach culture and safety, and above all to increase and diversify the membership of Surf Life Saving, said Vanessa Brown, its membership director. It has also challenged the public perception of a virtually sacred Australian icon, the Surf Life Saver, as someone who is always blond, blue-eyed and sun-bronzed. ''It's a stereotype, that's accurate,'' said Suzie Stollznow, diversity manager for Surf Life Saving New South Wales. Under the program, 22 men and women, from 14 to 40 years old and including a woman with three small children, signed up to become Surf Life Savers. Most were ethnic Lebanese, but there was a Palestinian, a Syrian and a Libyan. ''But all proudly Australian,'' said one, Suheil Damouny. ''It's important to mention that.'' Like most Muslim immigrants here, Mr. Damouny, 20, a sportswriter at The Torch, a weekly newspaper, does not like to be referred to by ethnicity. His grandparents fled Palestine in 1948 and moved to Lebanon, then to the United Arab Emirates, where he lived until moving to Australia seven years ago. He considers himself Australian. Mr. Damouny said his friends could not understand why he wanted to be a Life Saver, especially in Cronulla. And they did not think he could pass the rigorous eight-week course. ''But I did,'' he said proudly. Seventeen finished; one woman dropped out after making the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and coming back in a full burqa. Nodding to where a yellow surfboard with the red letters ''Surf Rescue'' rested waiting to be paddled out in an emergency, Mr. Damouny, who is about 5 feet 7 and weighs 140 pounds, said: ''The hardest was getting used to that big, ugly thing. It is quite heavy.'' One requirement was to be able to pull an unconscious swimmer on board, and then get him to shore, ''through massive waves,'' Mr. Damouny said. Ms. Laalaa broke her nose when she was trying to paddle out through the crashing surf and the board reared up and kicked back into her. She also twisted both ankles, she said. ''I have black-and-blue bruises all over my body,'' she said. ''But I'd do it all over again.'' She admits that she was an unlikely candidate. ''I'm a girly-girl,'' she said. ''I like to walk on the street in high heels.'' But Ms. Laalaa said one reason she had joined the lifesaving program was to educate Australians about Muslims. ''They don't think Muslim women swim,'' she said. ''Or do anything,'' she quickly added with an irrepressible laugh. When people see women wearing the burqa, they think they are oppressed. ''I am not oppressed,'' she said. ''I do have my own mouth. I am educated. I do make my own decisions.'' For her and other women, the biggest obstacle, she explained, was what they would wear. That was solved by a local fashion entrepreneur, Aheda Zanetti, who designs ''dynamic swimwear and sportswear for today's Muslim female.'' For Surf Life Savers, Ms. Zanetti, whose label is Ahiida, came up with a two-piece outfit made of spandex, form-fitting but fully covering, even the hair. Ms. Laalaa pulls her hair back into a bun and hides it under a bright red hood that is an extension of the long-sleeved yellow top. Ms. Laalaa said her father, a welder, was completely supportive, as was her mother, a homemaker, and her three brothers and sister. She said her family was not that different from other Muslims in Australia. Most are moderate, she said. Experts here agree. It is the radicals who grab the headlines, they say. Ms. Laalaa said Muslims had felt fully integrated into Australian life until the attacks of Sept. 11. That is when the tensions mounted, when many Australians began looking at Muslims with suspicion. ''Before 9/11 they didn't know us,'' said Shayma Almoty, a friend of Ms. Laalaa's. ''Now they've become afraid and fearful of us.'' ''Which is ridiculous,'' chimed in Ronya Chami, 21, an accountant and another longtime friend. The message to other young Muslims, Ms. Chami said, is, ''Get out there and be part of Australia.'' Yüklə 4,36 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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