judith meskill's knowledge notes...

A PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in non-fiction was awarded to her for Silent Dancing, also the Anisfield Wolf Book Award for The Latin Deli, and her work has been selected for the Syndicated Fiction Project. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Witter Bynner Foundation for poetry. A collection of short stories, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, was named a Best Book of the Year, 1995-96 by the American Library Association. It was awarded the first Pura Belpre medal by REFORMA of ALA in 1996. La linea del sol, the Spanish translation by Elena Olazagasti-Segovia of The Line of the Sun, was published in 1997 by the University of Puerto Rico Press. In 1998, The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems was awarded a Paterson Book Prize by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The Spanish translation by Elena Olazagasti-Segovia of Silent Dancing, Bailando en silencio was published by Arte Publico Press in 1998.

For more information visit the Arab Human Development Report 2003.

UNDP - United Nations Development Programme is the UN's global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life.

"Tellabs is demonstrating for service providers our expertise in IP/MPLS data services and optical networking interoperability," said Greg Nulty, senior vice president of technology planning for Tellabs. "During Isocore's industry-first IP-optical integration test, Tellabs showed how Layer 1 through Layer 3 networking, multi-vendor interoperability and dynamic network signalling protocols can help our customers save money."

During the Isocore testing, the Tellabs 8820 multi-service switch router uniquely combined the functionality of an edge router, ATM multi-service switch, Frame Relay switch and Ethernet edge switch into one compact platform. Designed to provide carriers with tremendous flexibility to cost-effectively address several data service applications with minimal investment, the Tellabs 8820 multi-service switch router seamlessly interoperated and enabled three MPLS-based applications during the Isocore multi-vendor testing:
-- Layer 2 virtual private network (VPN) application using the Internet
Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Martini draft, which defines point-to-
point MPLS connections that support virtual local networks or frame
relay/ATM;
-- Layer 3 VPN application using the IETF's RFC-2547bis specification,
which enables IP/MPLS-based IP VPNs to help carriers offer new, high-
quality IP services over their network; and
-- Virtual Private LAN services (VPLS) application using the IETF's VPLS-
over-MPLS draft, which enables carriers to offer point-to-point or
point-to-multi-point WAN extensions of customers' LAN-based Ethernet
networks at costs lower than other WAN-based alternatives.

The Tellabs 5500 NGX-S transport switch, a multi-bandwidth management system that helps carriers reduce their capital expenses by integrating wideband, broadband and Ethernet-over-SONET into a single compact, scalable platform, supported the Isocore test. The Tellabs 5500 NGX-S transport switch provided interoperability with four other vendors' equipment and established information flows through the core SONET infrastructure.

The Tellabs MetroWatch element manager's GMPLS software enabled the first- ever interworking between the IETF's GMPLS and ITU's OIF-UNI specifications for signalling between the IP routing network and optical transport network.

"There were several significant achievements in this testing, including running IP/MPLS applications over a dynamically configured optical transport network, evaluation of the two basic architectural models for the IP optical control integration, namely the peer and the overlay models and their interworking," said Dr. Bijan Jabbari of Isocore. "Tellabs was a key participant in this testing and helped facilitate the interworking between these two architectures."

The Tellabs equipment that was part of this integration test will be showcased in a live interoperability demonstration at the Isocore headquarters in McLean, Va., on Oct. 29, 2003, following the MPLS 2003 International Conference. During the conference, Andrew G. Malis, research fellow for the Tellabs Advanced Data Products group, will present "MPLS Beyond Service Provider Cores" on Oct. 28, 2003, at 4:45 p.m. In addition, Tellabs representatives will be available at the MPLS 2003 International Conference in booth 104.

The goal of Isocore's Internetworking Lab is to advance internetworking through technology validation and product verification and to promote development and rapid deployment of innovative networking technologies. For more information about the Isocore's Internetworking Lab visit isocore.com .

Total research and development spending in China in 2001 reached nearly 60 billion dollars, behind only the United States and Japan who had expenditures of 282 billion and 104 billion respectively, said the Paris-based group in a report published every two years.

China came in ahead of Germany's 54 billion dollars, while India spent about 19 billion, putting it among the top 10 countries worldwide. The OECD data, which measures trends in the knowledge-based economy, said that spending in China has grown rapidly, from 0.6 percent of gross domestic product in 1996 to 1.1% in the latest year.

Most of the rise in research and development expenditure is due to higher business investment, a sign that China has moved quickly towards developing its knowledge-based industries. In China, 60% of the spending in 2001 came from domestic and foreign companies, with the rest coming from the government.

In the past two years multinationals such as Alcatel, General Electric and computer chip manufacturers such as Infineon have set up research centres in China in order to take advantage of lower costs and a comparatively cheap, educated labour force.

Most of research goes into applied technologies, such as the development of new cell phones or auto technology that then uses conventional engineering techniques.

China now has the second highest number of researchers in the world with 743,000, behind the 1.3 million in the United States but ahead of Japan and Russia, with 648,000 and 505,000 respectively.

For the group of 30 OECD countries, spending as a proportion of total output in 2001 was 2.3%, with major non-OECD economies currently accounting for 17% of global research expenditure.

Key issues remain agriculture, Australia's pharmaceutical benefits scheme, local content rules for film and TV, and services and investment arrangements.

A deal must be finalised by the end of the year to meet the deadline set by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister John Howard, and to enable ratification by the US Congress before next year's American elections.

As negotiations began yesterday, unionists protested outside Parliament House against a deal they said would destroy Australian jobs.

Chief information officers (CIOs) attending the event were told that companies that ignore the human factors in IT projects leave themselves at greater risk of failure.

While innovation and technology enhancements have the potential dramatically to improve business processes, speakers at the conference stressed that failing to recognise the impact of IT on people could render investments at best wasted and at worse counterproductive. ...

it is not just the feelings and perceptions of internal users that IT professionals need to take into account.

"Customers are taking control," said Patricia Seybold, chief executive of Patricia Seybold Group, a US-based e-commerce consulting company.

"Thanks to the internet and mobile devices customers can be much more demanding about comparing products. Customers are voting with their feet in that they have not all chosen to do business direct."

Searching for information and purchasing products, whether face-to-face, over the phone or online, can be challenging for customers.

Seybold insisted that IT departments must have the customers' experience uppermost in their minds when developing channels to market.

In an increasingly competitive environment, where customer allegiance lasts only as long as the experience is positive, the risks for firms that don't account for customers' needs and wants are obvious.

Seybold believes that this approach should also be applied to internal staff.

Dr. Alan Paau, assistant vice chancellor for technology transfer and intellectual property at the University of California at San Diego, said the philosophy of his university and the political establishment has been crucial to making San Diego the fourth-largest city for biotechnology and biomedicine.

"UCSD is here to serve the community," Paau recalled the university's chancellor once telling him, "and industry is an important part of the community."

Paau said the top biotechnology centers that cities across the country are trying to emulate are all home to research institutions.

First-ranked San Francisco has Stanford, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley; second-ranked Cambridge, Mass., has Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; third-ranked San Diego has UCSD; and fourth-ranked Raleigh, N.C., anchored by Research Triangle Park, has Duke University, the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State. ...

Paau said physical proximity is the key to building a closely knit, knowledge-based economy. Employees working near the university will spend time there, meeting visiting researchers, attending lectures and integrating themselves into the culture of academia, he said. And researchers will be more apt to serve on boards and act as consultants, he added.

"If you're 30 miles away, it's not conducive to that kind of environment," Paau said. Paau also said researchers are sensitive to how much their political leadership truly values their work.

"This conference will dwell on issues that impact the public good," said Dr. Tzong-leh Hwang, chairman of the Fair Trade Commission. "These include globalization, intellectual property rights and a competition framework for financial reform."

Twenty-nine scholars and experts from 13 countries plus delegates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will speak on various topics such as Harmonization of Competition Laws, Regional Cooperation between Competition Authorities and Globalization and the Development of Competition Framework.

Last year, the European Council meeting in Barcelona set the goal of attaining a level of 3% of gross domestic product for research and development investment in the European Union by 2010, to achieve the objectives set out at Lisbon.

Euroscience, an association that aims to influence science and technology policy, welcomed the announcement with some reservations.

"This is an excellent idea," said Jean-Patrick Connerade, president of Euroscience. "In principle, what it does is open up the Commission to organizations which are external to it, and therefore it is a welcome development because it achieves a greater integration of the European scientific community."

But in line with Euroscience's grassroots perspective, he noted that the statement focuses on integrating institutional, "top-down" research.

"Many of us feel that bottom-up research, or blue sky research, at the European level is still not really very well organized," he told The Scientist.

They pointed out that trade barriers were falling because India, Russia and China and many other countries had technological expertise and because high-speed digital connections and new technologies made it far easier to communicate from afar.

Besides this, for instance, a Java programmer in India, fresh out of college can be hired for $5,000 a year versus $60,000 a year in the US. The technology is such that why be in New York, when you can be 9,000 miles away with far less expense, they said.

Witnesses before the committee, headed by Don Manzullo, Republican-Illinois, were Harris Miller, president of Information Technology Association of America (ITAA); Ron Hira, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-USA); Robert Dupree, vice president of American Textile Manufacturers Institute (ATMI); and Natasha Humphries, a software engineer from Santa Clara, California.

Committee chairman Manzullo said moving American jobs offshore could have "serious consequences for the long-term economic viability of this country. The U.S. is in danger of losing its competitive advantage in the technology sector".

"Even though the U.S. economy has recovered from its most recent recession, it has largely been a jobless recovery," he added.

To combat the phenomenon, Manzullo urged passage of a bill that would exclude domestic manufacturers and producers from taxation of up to 10 percent. He also advocated a more US-centred purchasing plan for the Department of Defence (DoD).

"It is imperative that Congress strengthen and fight for stronger 'Buy America' legislation," he said. "These provisions include increasing from 50 percent to 65 percent the amount of US content required in major DoD purchases."

But Harris Miller, the ITAA president, was sceptical that legislation would solve the problem.

"ITAA believes that the US cannot legislate or regulate its way out of this perplexing situation," he said in his written testimony. "At the same time, to do nothing ... is to risk an ever-increasing number of knowledge-worker jobs disappearing overseas."

Miller advocated "detailed analysis of the situation, examination of various policy and programmatic approaches to address identified challenges, and a plan of action to implement critical policies and programmes."

Miller said "We also need an increased spending by the federal government on Information Technology and R&D."

Ron Hira, who chairs the research and development policy committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-USA), disagreed, saying investment in education would fail without "reasonably secure" career opportunities for graduates.

Himself being of Indian ethnicity, Hira mentioned how Indian students largely opt for mathematics, science, engineering, R&D, software, chip design and computer technology. So much so they have built a vast pool of highly qualified technical personnel, making India, a country of more talent than capital.

"And while overseas outsourcing cannot be blamed for all of the unemployment facing American engineers, it certainly is a major contributing factor."

Natasha Humphries, who was laid off recently as a senior software quality assurance engineer, narrated her own personal experience of facing tough competition from H1-B visa professionals and from the offshore technical team in India.

The report, "Preventing A Brain Drain: Talent Retention in Greater Boston," indicates that 50 percent of graduates in 2003 who received associate, bachelor's, or graduate degrees from 10 institutions in the metropolitan area left the state.

That statistic is of real concern to business officials, who fear Boston, long known for its knowledge workers, could lose its economic edge as other cities vie for bright young talent.

"If this continues, the loss of college graduates will have a serious impact on Boston's economy as it begins to pick up," said Paul Guzzi, the chamber's president. "We want to retain the talent that will create the new software companies and the new high-tech companies."

The report concluded 20 percent of the graduates -- 2,100 were polled -- would have left anyway. But the other 80 percent might have stayed if the Boston area offered more job opportunities, rents and home prices that are more affordable, and a more diverse and vibrant atmosphere, the study said. A separate study released yesterday, from the Boston Redevelopment Authority, also underscored the importance of young people to the area's economy.But it sounded an optimistic note, pointing out that Boston has retained more young people than most other major US cities. The BRA report, "Boston's Dynamic Workforce: Attract, Retain, Absorb," said young adults -- defined as 20- to 34-year-olds -- made up 33 percent of the city's population in 2000, down from 36 percent in 1990. It attributed the decline to demographic shifts that are taking place around the country.

He also slammed the state of California's political system as "anti-business," blamed the American primary school education system for a shortage of computer scientists and warned of a continued migration of American IT jobs overseas.

Barrett said the current political crisis in California was the result of years of anti-business legislation.

The California-based chip-maker had more US employees outside California than it did in the state.

"We are diversifying out of California," he said.

When asked about future investments in California, Barrett replied, "It's very simple," emphatically shaking his head 'no'. "There's not much incentive at this time." While Barrett said he didn't expect Governor-elect, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to repeat those policies, he didn't say whether the change in leadership would affect Intel's view of the California business climate.

Barrett's assessment of public education was equally blunt.

"The K-12 system in the US does an excellent job of weeding out anyone who's interested in science," he said.

Barrett also criticised public education's seniority-based system.

"Meritocracy should rule, not seniority," he said.

Barrett also dismissed the idea that bringing more technology into schools would solve the problem.

"If technology was a solution to the education problem, we'd [already] be far ahead," he said.

The end result of the current educational system was a shortage of US talent and a situation where 50 per cent of all advanced degrees were awarded to foreign nationals, he said. US-funded colleges paid to educate them.

"And then we send them home and the jobs follow them," Barrett said.

To reverse the brain drain, Barrett said the US should "staple a green card to every diploma. [That] would do wonders for the US economy." While he said the ratio of domestic Intel employees has remained constant at 60 per cent during the past decade, increasing competition from US-trained IT professionals in Russia, China and India and the "dwindling number of IT graduates in the US" could change that.

"There is huge competition coming for jobs," he said.

Those three countries could produce between 250 million and 500 million knowledge workers.

Barrett said that while European and Asian companies continued to spend on IT, dthe U.S. enterprise market was "the weakest we see today". While Intel had seen "a bit of strength" in the market after two-and-a-half years of flat sales, US global competitiveness would suffer if enterprises waited much longer, Barrett said.

WEF said in statement on Thursday that this year's Summit is unique in that it brings together international organizations and the Chinese government in close partnership.

The meeting, "China Business Summit 2003 and the World Economic Development Declaration," with more than 600 participants from foreign and Chinese companies, will tackle discussions around the Summit theme of China under New Leadership.

International partners include the International Finance Corporation (IFC), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), while the local partner for the Summit is the China Enterprise Confederation.

As China's leading forum for local and foreign business, the Summit will draw upon a rigorous program that captures and charts China's growth and development.

WEF said the program will also benefit from the participation of the Chinese government at all levels, led by Executive Vice-Premier Huang Ju, who will give a special address to update participants on priorities and strategies for sustaining economic growth and developing the environment for business.

Wei Che-ho, minister for the NSC, said at a press conference yesterday that people's daily lives have been deeply influenced by ongoing scientific and technological developments. To most laypeople, however, the technical terms used to describe the developments are incomprehensible.

Warner will speak about the necessity of focusing on smaller job employers in southside Virginia rather than taking the 'rifle approach' and basing the whole economy on the large manufacturing companies, said Ellen Qualls, Warner's spokesperson.

Across the board, however, service industries are unlikely to be able to drive living standards forward at the same pace as those that transform raw materials into goods. Factories take the lead, even in the information revolution.

Over the past three years, for instance, output per hour worked in the UK economy has grown 3.8 per cent. Over the same period, output per hour worked in manufacturing grew 9.5 per cent. Other production industries such as energy were not far behind.

These were not vintage years. The thingmakers have been suffering from global economic stagnation, relatively high interest rates and a relative high pound. The CBI's latest survey found that two thirds of the sector was suffering from excess capacity. In spite of the the euro strengthening, order books and prices have fallen relentlessly and there has been little respite from years of falling output. If the thingmakers had enjoyed a better run, the whole economy would have grown faster.

The US economy is healthier than ours to an important extent because, after a short but worse recession, its knowledge-based high-tech manufacturing is stronger. We cannot achieve that by intervention or subsidy. The City is perennially hostile to thingmakers because risks are often higher and results less predictable than those of the more solid consumer services.

"Nobody has succeeded without taking a risk; if you want to succeed you will have to take calculated risks," the President said yesterday while flying from Sudan to the Bulgarian capital. Kalam was sharing his impressions of the visit to the United Arab Emirates with the reporters accompanying him.

PhD candidate Paulo Gottgtroy is studying at the Knowledge and Engineering Research Discovery Institute (KEDRI), located at AUT's Technology Park in Penrose.

The scholarship, worth $28,000 per year over three years, was awarded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology, a government funding body that invests in innovation with a view to fostering the creation of new knowledge.

Paulo Gottgtroy's research involves building an ontology, or conceptual framework, that makes biomedical knowledge and concepts that are sharable over computer applications and reusable for several purposes.

The ontology will bring together different techniques including statistical analysis, neural networking and ontology to find correlations in the information discovered.

Southern New Jersey can - in fact, must - evolve to compete in the knowledge economy. The region already has many assets: a hub for shipping and transportation, proximity to major markets, and good inventory for offices.

However, historic strengths in manufacturing and agriculture no longer provide the level of employment that South Jersey demands, and so we must look toward the knowledge economy to spur the continued vitality of this region.

We cannot move forward in the knowledge-based economy until the research capacity of the region's institutions is significantly expanded across a wide area of disciplines.

South Jersey needs a constant flow of science and technology research that can be adapted for commercial purposes.

That requires a sizeable mass of scholars producing these innovations and, collectively, becoming a magnet for attracting new enterprises.

South Jersey requires added research capacity in a wide array of disciplines.

Systems biology, information technology security, genomic research, geriatric medicine, nutraceuticals, nanotechnology, environmental science, molecular biology, biochemistry, software engineering, culturally competent health care and pharmaceuticals are prime examples of fields that will create new approaches to combating bioterrorism, developing new technologies, reclaiming brownfields, and improving healthcare and the quality of life for all residents.

The Environment Minister, Marian Hobbs, derides those who oppose lifting the moratorium as Luddites who are anti-research. Decisions around GM need, she says, to be made with rational consideration.

But who is being irrational here? It is increasingly difficult to discern a rational argument for lifting the moratorium next Wednesday.

We have been told that lifting the moratorium is the only economically responsible path. But where is the evidence that pursuing a GM path will result in economic benefit?

We have spent millions building a clean, green image. Research carried out by Lincoln University for the Ministry