(1) The costs associated with natural disasters are increasing rapidly. As a result, officials in government and industry have focused more attention on disasters and their effects. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has estimated that disasters cost the country about 1 billion per week. Hurricane Andrew, the Midwest flood of 1993, and the Hanshin earthquake have shown that individual disasters can cost tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. This increasing cost has resulted in greater funding from government and industry for the development of technologies related to disaster prediction, and has led to more research into the effective use of predictive information.

(2) The insurance industry has long been aware of the dangers of natural disasters; the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, bankrupted scores of insurance companies. But the industry has focused particular attention on disaster prediction in recent years, as spiraling costs revealed that many companies had underestimated their financial exposure. For instance, prior to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, many insurance experts thought that the worst hurricane possible would do no more than 8 billion in damages to the industry. The damages caused by Hurricane Andrew, estimated at about 17 billion, shattered these beliefs. Today, estimates of worst-case disaster scenarios approach 100 billion.

(3) The insurance industry has therefore increased its support for research into disaster prediction. One such effort involves a number of companies that have joined together to support the Bermuda-based Risk Prediction Initiative, which funds disaster research. The expectation is that the resulting information will place the industry on a more solid foundation to make decisions about the risk of future disasters. The industry has also lobbied for the government to bear some of the financial burden of disaster insurance. Such a program already exists for flood insurance, set up in the late 1960s by the federal government to insure flood-prone areas. These types of programs, effectively implemented, could be increasingly necessary in the future to make insurance available in areas prone to disasters.

(4) Because the stakes are so high, the science of disaster prediction has a bright future. The various projects and programs illustrate that disaster prediction is a topic of concern to scientists and policy makers alike. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes all show that the effective use of disaster predictions not only requires advanced technology but also requires that society consider the entire process of prediction—forecasts, communication, and use of information. Because they cannot predict the future with certainty, and because much remains to be learned, scientists warn that society must understand the limits of scientific predictions and be prepared to employ alternatives. Wisely used, however, disaster prediction has the potential to reduce society’s vulnerability to natural disasters.

(1) When Gina Garro and Brian Duplisea adopted 4-month-old Andres from Colombia last month, they were determined to take time off from work to care for him. Though Garro’s $40,000 salary will cover their mortgage, the couple will have to freeze their retirement accounts, and pray that nothing goes wrong with the car. “It takes away from your savings and your security,” says Garro. “Things will be tight.’

(2) The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act was supposed to help families like Garro’s, offering a safety net to employees who want to take time off to nurture newborns, tend to their own major illnesses or care for sick relatives. But while the law guarantees that workers won’t lose their jobs, it doesn’t cover their paychecks. One survey last year showed that while 24 million Americans had taken leaves since 1999, 2.7 million more wanted to, but couldn’t afford it. That may change soon. In response to increasing demands from voters, at least 25 states are now exploring new ways to offer paid leave. One possibility: tapping state disability funds. A handful of states—New York, New Jersey, California, Rhode Island and Hawaii—already dip into disability money to offer partial pay for women on maternity leave. But that doesn’t help dads or people caring for elderly parents. New Jersey and New York may soon expand disability programs to cover leave for fathers and other caretakers. Thirteen states, including Arizona, Illinois and Florida, have proposed using unemployment funds to pay for leave.

(3) Massachusetts has been especially creative. When the state’s acting governor, Jane Swift, gave birth to twin daughters in May, she drew attention to the issue with her own “working maternity leave”: she telecommuted part-time but earned her usual full-time salary. Even before Swift returned to work last week, the state Senate unanimously passed a pilot plan that would use surplus funds from a health-insurance program for the unemployed to give new parents 12 weeks off at half pay. Another plan, proposed in the House, would require employers to kick in $20 per worker to set up a “New Families Trust Fund”. Businesses would get tax credits in return. This week Swift is expected to announce her own paid-leave plan for lower-income mothers and fathers. Polls show widespread public support—another reason Swift and other politicians across the country have embraced the issue.

(4) Still, not everyone’s wild about the idea. People without children question why new parents—the first group to get paid leave under many of the proposed plans—should get more government perks than they do. Business groups are resistant to proposals that would raid unemployment funds; several have already filed suit to block them. As the economy slows, many companies say they can’t afford to contribute to proposed new benefit funds either. Business lobbyists say too many employees already abuse existing federal family-leave laws by taking time off for dubious reasons or in tiny time increments. The proposed laws, they say, would only make matters worse.

(5) For Garro and Duplisea, though, the new laws could make all the difference. “We’re trying to do the right thing by the kid, and we have to sacrifice,” Duplisea says. In Massachusetts and plenty of other states, help may be on the way.

(1) Given the briefest of glances at a picture, most people believe they have not had time to recognize anything in it at all. Ask them whether they saw an animal and they consider themselves to be making a futile guess. Yet those guesses are right much more often than they are wrong. That is because the brain can carry out immediate visual processing even when it does not have time for anycognitive back-chatter. A neuroscientist trying to understand how people recognize objects would thus start with this simplest of systems.

(2) That is the purpose of Dr. Serre’s computer. His project is nothing less than an attempt to reverse-engineer the relevant part of the brain. That part is the ventral visual pathway. Anatomy shows that it is organized into numerous areas. Experiments on monkeys, in which researchers have recorded what excites individual nerve cells in each of these areas, give strong hints about how it works.

(3) The pathway is hierarchical. Signals from the retina flow to the most basic processing area first; the cells in that area fire up others in the next area; and so on. Those in the first area are fussy. They react to edges or bars in particular orientations. By combining their signals, however, cells in the second area can respond to corners or bars in any orientation. And so the system builds up. Cells in the final area can recognize general things, animals included.

(4) Dr. Serre considered his computer’s processing units analogous to nerve cells, and he organized them into areas, just as they are in real brains. Then he let the machine learn in much the same way that babies do. First he mimicked early development when nerve cells are plastic. At this stage babies’ brains tune their nerve cells to visual features according to how common those features are in the world around them. That is why kittens raised so that they see only vertical lines have brains that look different from those raised in an environment with purely horizontal ones. Dr. Serre’s processor developed sensitivities in a similar fashion when he showed it lots of photographs. That stage complete, he then told the computer when what it “saw” contained an animal, and when it did not.

(5) The result was a model that closely imitates the ventral visual pathway. Processing units in each area are sensitive to the same set of features as nerve cells in the brain’s analogous areas, and they are linked together as they are in the brain. This artificial recognition system correctly distinguishes photographs containing animals from those without creatures 82% of the time; Dr. Serre’s students get it right 80% of the time. Moreover, his computer and his volunteers tend to slip up on the same images—and turning photographs on their sides makes poorer animal-recognizers out of both, by roughly the same amount.

(1) Avra Leodas of Santa Fe, N.M., makes objects in clay—weighty, solid, mysterious, elegant sculptures. Her simple forms may at first glance appear to spring from nature, but many have been inspired by man-made objects. The surface textures sometimes resemble stone and sometimes steel, echoing the balance she achieves between nature-made and human-made inspiration. But the surfaces of these archetypal shapes also suggest ancient civilizations—an evocation of the history of human life on earth.

(2) In fact, the artist herself says that they remind her of artifacts found in an archaeological dig. The analogy becomes clear when looking at her current installation at the Robischon Gallery in Denver. As single items, the shapes are marvelous small sculptures. But placed in relationship to each other, the metaphors they evoke are endless—depending only on the imagination of the viewer. The fact that the objects remind us of tools as much as they do of organic and aesthetic objects reinforces thearchaeological metaphor.

(3) “This work is a tremendous departure from what I’ve been doing for the last 17 years,” Leodas says. “There are a lot of connections, but the transitions are really important to me. I was doing these large vessels up to three feet in diameter. There are some similarities between the old and the new work in what the forms are about—classic, simple, elegant, unadorned work. The vessels, though, are intensely glazed in jewel-like tones.”

(4) “People like to make reference to my Aegean heritage—the deep underwater blue and green. For me, it was a process of refinement, trying to make the perfect one. I worked with only six or seven forms, and I dealt with balance and proportion. For example, if I was working with an oval shape, I would do it tall and narrow or wide and short—playing with proportion that way.”

(5) There came a point, however, when she reached the end of her experiments with vessels, when she had done everything she needed to do with that application of her medium.

(6) “I knew I had to change what I was doing, but I had no idea how. After the buildup of my reputation,it was just like being a baby.”

(7) “These new forms are all closed—as opposed to a vessel, where I am thinking about inside-outside, containing space. This body of work was a tremendous outpouring 1 did not plan at all. I did not plan or think about how one was leading to the next one. I just made them…”

(8) Leodas says these objects have been influenced by her love of tools. “When I was thinking about the new work, I went to a blacksmith friend’s shop, pulled out his tools, and photographed them. There is just something about the well-made tool that really does its job…” There is a piece that ended up looking like a tire rib, another that resembles a blacksmith’s hammerhead, and another whose form derives from the disc between the vertebrae of a whale.

(9) In the end, she believes that the forms are both very personal and at the same time universal. The artist’s passion for clay is plain, and her sense of fun is as apparent as her expertise in the medium.

(1) Steven Spielberg has taken Hollywood’s depiction of war to a new level. He does it right at the start of Saving Private Ryan, in a 25 minute sequence depicting the landing of American forces on Omaha Beach in 1944. This is not the triumphant version of D-Day we’re used to seeing, but an inferno of severed arms, spilling intestines, flying corpses and blood-red tides. To those of us who have never fought in a war, this reenactment—newsreel-like in its verisimilitude, hallucinatory in its impact—leaves you convinced that Spielberg has taken you closer to the chaotic, terrifying sights and sounds of combat than any filmmaker before him.

(2) This prelude is so strong, so unnerving, that I feared it would overwhelm the rest of the film. When the narrative properly begins, there’s an initial feeling of diminishment: it’s just a movie, after all, with the usual banal music cues and actors going through their paces. Fortunately, the feeling passes. Saving Private Ryan reasserts its grip on you and, for most of its 2-hour-and-40-minute running time, holds you in thrall.

(3) Our heroes are a squad of eight soldiers lucky enough to survive Omaha Beach. Now they are sent, under the command of Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), to find and safely return from combat a Private Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have already died in action. Why should they risk their lives to save one man? The question haunts them, and the movie.

(4) The squad is a familiar melting-pot assortment of World War Two grunts—the cynical New Yorker (Edward Burns) who doesn’t want to risk his neck; the Jew (Adam Goldberg); the Italian (Vin Diesel); the Bible-quoting sniper from Tennessee (Barry Pepper); the medic (Giovanni Ribisi). The most terrified is an inexperienced corporal (Jeremy Davies) brought along as a translator. Davies seems to express every possible variety of fear on his eloquently scrawny face. Tom Sizemore is also impressive as Miller’s loyal second in command. As written by Robert Rodat, they could be any squad in any war movie. But Spielberg and his actors make us care deeply about their fate. Part of the movie’s power comes from Hanks’ quietly mysterious performance as their decent, reticent leader (the men have a pool going speculating about what he did in civilian life). There’s an unhistrionic fatalism in Captain Miller; he just wants to get the job done and get home alive, but his eyes tell you he doesn’t like the odds.

(5) The level of work in “Private Ryan”—from the acting to Janusz Kaminski’s brilliantly bleached-out color cinematography to the extraordinary sound design by Gary Rydstorm—is state of the art. For most of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg is working at the top of his form, with the movie culminating in a spectacularly staged climactic battle in a French village. The good stuff is so shattering that it overwhelms the lapses, but you can’t help noticing a few Hollywood moments. Sometimes Spielberg doesn’t seem to trust how powerful the material is, and crosses the line into sentimentality. There’s a prelude and a coda, set in a military cemetery, which is written and directed with a too-heavy hand. But the truth is, this movie so wiped me out that I have little taste for quibbling. When you emerge from Spielberg’s cauldron, the world doesn’t look quite the same.

(1) Just over 10 years ago, Ingmar Bergman announced that the widely acclaimed Fanny and Alexander would mark his last hurrah as a filmmaker. Although some critics had written him off as earnest but ponderous, others were saddened by the departure of an artist who had explored cinematic moods—from high tragedy to low comedy—during his four-decade career.

(2) What nobody foresaw was that Bergman would find a variety of ways to circumvent his own retirement—directing television movies, staging theater productions, and writing screenplays for other filmmakers to direct. His latest enterprise as a screenwriter, Sunday s Children, completes a trilogy of family-oriented movies that began with Fanny and Alexander and continued with The Best Intentions written by Bergman and directed by Danish filmmaker Bille August.

(3) Besides dealing with members of Bergman’s family in bygone times—it begins a few years after The Best Intentions leaves off—the new picture was directed by Daniel Bergman, his youngest son. Although it lacks the urgency and originality of the elder Bergman’s greatest achievements, such as The Silence and Persona, it has enough visual and emotional interest to make a worthy addition to his body of work.

(4) Set in rural Sweden during the late 1920s, the story centers on a young boy named Pu, clearly modeled on Ingmar Bergman himself. Pu’s father is a country clergyman whose duties include traveling to the capital and ministering to the royal family. While this is an enviable position, it doesn’t assuage problems in the pastor’s marriage. Pu is young enough to be fairly oblivious to such difficulties, but his awareness grows with the passage of time. So do the subtle tensions that mar Pu’s own relationship with his father, whose desire to show affection and compassion is hampered by a certain stiffness in his demeanor and chilliness in his emotions.

(5) The film’s most resonant passages take place when Pu learns to see his father with new clarity while accompanying him on a cross-country trip to another parish. In a remarkable change of tone, this portion of the story is punctuated with flash-forwards to a time 40 years in the future, showing the relationship between parent and child to be dramatically reversed: the father is now cared for by the son, and desires forgiveness for past shortcomings that the younger man resolutely refuses to grant.

(6) Brief and abrupt though they are, these scenes make a pungent contrast with the sunny landscapes and comic interludes in the early part of the movie.

(7) Sunday’s Children is a film of many levels, and all are skillfully handled by Daniel Bergman in his directional debut. Gentle scenes of domestic contentment are sensitively interwoven with intimations of underlying malaise. While the more nostalgic sequences are photographed with an eye-dazzling beauty that occasionally threatens to become cloying, any such result is foreclosed by the jagged interruptions of the flash-forward sequences—an intrusive device that few filmmakers are agile enough to handle successfully, but that is put to impressive use by the Bergman team.

(8) Henrik Linnros gives a smartly turned performance as young Pu, and Thommy Berggren—who starred in the popular Elvira Madigan years ago—is steadily convincing as his father. Top honors go to the screenplay, though, which carries the crowded canvas of Fanny and Alexander and the emotional ambiguity of The Best Intentions into fresh and sometimes fascinating territory.

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PASSAGE TWO

PASSAGE THREE

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PASSAGE FIVE

PASSAGE SIX