Das Speichern von Bildern aus Photoshop in Kombination mit der jüngst erschienenen Mac-OS-X-Version 10.5.3 kann zu Datenverlusten führen. Anwender sollten daher ihre Arbeiten nicht direkt auf Servern sichern.

Photoshop-Produktchef John Nack hat heute in seinem Blog Meldungen verschiedener Nutzer von Photoshop bestätigt, nach denen das Speichern von Bildern aus Photoshop CS3 in Kombination mit der jüngst erschienenen Mac-OS-X-Version 10.5.3 zu Datenverlusten führen kann. Das Problem tritt immer dann auf, wenn der Anwender eine Datei aus Photoshop heraus direkt auf einen Server sichert. Unbestätigten Anwenderberichten zufolge sind von dem Problem auch andere CS3-Anwendungen wie Indesign betroffen.
Nach Nacks Blog-Eintrag liegt der Fehler bei Apple. Der Betriebssystem-Hersteller arbeite eng mit Adobe zusammen, um das Problem zu beheben. Wenig überzeugend ist allerdings der Hinweis Nacks, dass es generell nicht ratsam sei, Dateien direkt auf Server zu sichern.
Anwender von Adobe-Anwendungen und Mac OS X 10.5.3 sollten also bis zum Vorliegen einer Problembehebung ihre Dateien zunächst lokal – etwa auf dem Schreibtisch – speichern und erst dann auf einen Server kopieren. Umgekehrt sollte man Dateien von Servern auf den lokalen Rechner kopieren und erst dort öffnen. Welche Mac-OS-X-Version verwendet wird, verrät der Eintrag „Über diesen Mac“ im Apfel-Menü.

The BMW 5 Series offers a 3-liter twin-turbo 6.

ONCE companies roll out an all-new car, they usually sell it for five or six years before it undergoes a full redesign.

At the rough midpoint of that cycle, the model will be “refreshed.” This refers not to pouring mojitos in the tank, but to modest changes that keep consumers buying until the next all-new model shows up. The refreshing will include subtle refinements to the body and interior, the latest gadgets, maybe a new powertrain option.

As you might deduce, these models aren’t as significant as a redesign. Yet occasionally there’s an addition worth trumpeting. For the BMW 5 Series, the refreshing news for 2008 is an engine. Not just any engine, but one so marvelous that I’d urge anyone to skip the others that are available.

This thrill-a-minute in-line 6 — with 3 liters, 2 turbochargers, 300 horsepower and 300 pound-feet of torque — was introduced for 2006 on BMW’s smaller 3 Series. And like the bears’ proverbial porridge, it delivers just-right heat for the rear-drive 535i and the all-wheel-drive 535xi. Both are ridiculously stronger than the 230-horsepower base models (the 528i and 528xi), with identical mileage: 17/25 in city and highway driving.

And compared with the V-8 version of the 5 Series, the 550i, they are lighter, cost several thousand dollars less and are almost as quick.

While the basic automatic-transmission 528xi takes a snoozy 7.6 seconds to reach 60 miles an hour, the 535xi blazes there in 5.6 seconds, a remarkable two-second advantage. Despite having 360 horsepower, the burly V-8 model is basically neck-and-neck at 5.5 seconds.

The engine is so good that you could drop it into a rusty Chevy Cavalier and you’d still want the car. And its neatest trick, besides its free-revving brilliance, is to remind you of what a definitive sport sedan the 5 Series can be — despite a lofty price, screwy ergonomics and styling that can still provoke bar brawls.

I tested a 535xi for a week. And with weighty all-wheel-drive, smallish 17-inch wheels and less-gummy all-season tires that accompany it, this was hardly the sportiest version. Yet even this ostensibly tamer BMW attacked downhill descents on the Taconic Parkway north of New York City at speeds that would have cowed most competitors.

Piloting the 5 Series feels so natural that you barely notice turning the grippy, well-designed steering wheel; it’s more like flexing muscles in your palms and fingers, and the BMW anticipates where you’re headed. The ride is luxurious, the cabin quiet.

Another win: The 535i weighs 3,703 pounds, versus 3,968 for the 550i, giving it a handling edge; even the all-wheel-drive model weighs less at 3,946 pounds.

The BMW’s drawbacks, often documented, cannot be overlooked. The clumsy iDrive knob remains the most illogical, ill-conceived systems controller from any car company. And the 5 Series’ cold, synthetic-looking interior badly needs a makeover; higher-quality seat leather would be a good start.

The other big change for 2008 is the spacey looking (and somewhat spacey acting) console shifter for the six-speed automatic, bequeathed from the new X5 sport wagon. It’s clumsy to press the shifter’s side button to toggle forward for reverse, back for drive. But the lever works beautifully when you use it to shift gears manually.

For the 2008 model year, all 5 Series cars get a barely discernable makeover for the front fascia, headlamps and taillamps. A restyled center console features six memory buttons that store all manner of presets: radio stations, navigation destinations, phone numbers. New options include a U.S.B. and iPod integration kit, adaptive cruise control and a lane-departure warning system that vibrates the steering wheel when the car starts to drift from its lane.

The 535i ($50,175) and 535xi ($52,375) start at $5,100 more than the respective base models. But they cost $7,000 to $9,000 less than the big-daddy 550i.

A generous array of options kicked my 535xi to $61,825. Once again, the BMW premium rears its head.

Since it’s impossible to drive a 5 Series and pretend you didn’t enjoy it, I’m determined to end on an up note. Or on two notes: BMW has consistently ranked first or a close second among luxury brands for resale value, according to Automotive Lease Guide. And while its rivals have dropped free-maintenance perks, BMW continues to cover scheduled maintenance for four years or 50,000 miles, including unexpected wear items like brakes.

Along with the smartly configured 535 versions, those are two more practical reasons to splurge on a 5 Series.

Oct 4th 2007

From The Economist print edition

The American presidency is Hillary Clinton's to lose. But that doesn't make her a shoo-in just yet

AP

IF GREAT writers have a special insight into the souls of their countrymen, Hillary Clinton ought to be pleased. Philip Roth, one of the grandest old men of American letters, said last year that if anyone could lose 50 states for the Democrats, she could. This week he said he is no longer sure.

Mr Roth is hardly alone, either in his previous hatred for the former first lady or in his grudging new acceptance of her. It is still more than three months until the votes are cast in the first primaries, and over a year until the election. With no incumbent president or vice-president running, this should be the most open race for 80 years—but it certainly doesn't feel that way. Never mind the oddness, in a republic, of having Bushes and Clintons in charge for, possibly, 28 years on the trot: at the moment, the return of Hillary and Bill Clinton to the White House looks likelier than any alternative (see article).

Mrs Clinton is polling an average of some 18 points clear of her nearest rival, Barack Obama, for the Democratic nomination, and one poll this week put her 33 points ahead. She leads solidly in all the early primary states except, crucially, Iowa (which matters because it comes first), where she has only an insignificant lead. In head-to-head polls, she now handily defeats any of her Republican rivals—and the Republicans are divided and demoralised. And this week she reversed the only measure on which she was trailing: in the third quarter of the year, she narrowly beat Mr Obama in raising campaign contributions. Mr Obama's superior fund-raising has been the main source of worry for the Clintonistas.

That does not mean she will win. Things could go wrong even in the primaries: ask Howard Dean, who seemed unstoppable for the Democratic ticket at Christmas 2003, before it all went wrong one night in Des Moines. There are plenty of things that could trip up Mrs Clinton, not least her husband. But barring some stumble or scandal, Americans will as usual decide on the candidates' merits, so the key to the election is to decide which qualities are most in demand this time around.

Brilliantly dull

Top of the list surely must come competence—the attribute that has been most sorely lacking in the Bush administration, whether in the planning for post-war Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina or the management of the federal budget, which George Bush, like a reverse King Midas, has transmuted from a $240 billion surplus to a $160 billion deficit.

This is where Mrs Clinton currently leads the pack. True, she has never run anything herself, and her most notable foray into governance, her 1993-94 attempt to reform the American health-care system, was a catastrophe. But she has learned from watching the rest of her husband's presidency and, more recently, as a senator for New York, where she has been hard-working, consensual, effective and a little dull. Her campaign is superbly organised. In debates, her mastery of detail is remarkable. Her second plan for health-care reform is a much more moderate beast. And her Democratic rivals, Mr Obama and John Edwards, have much less experience than she does. On the Republican side, though, she faces a couple of effective governors and a former mayor of New York who turned that city's finances and crime rates around. She has yet to spell out much of her policy platform, including on such vital issues as tax or climate change; and has suspiciously meddlesome tendencies. She has already retreated alarmingly from her husband's commitment to free trade.

After competence must come toughness on security: traditionally a difficult area for Democrats, but less so after seven years of incompetent machismo. More than any of her Democratic rivals, Mrs Clinton has striven to neutralise the Republicans' advantage here. She has refused to apologise for her 2002 vote in favour of war with Iraq, and declines to commit herself to withdrawing the troops that are still there. But she was fully involved earlier this year in Democratic attempts to saddle the president with a deadline for quitting, and remains vulnerable to a Republican challenger. America's military weakness during the Clinton years has been overshadowed by the disaster under Bush; but it was under Mr Clinton that al-Qaeda took root and grew. That said, Americans want a tough president, not a psychopath: some of her Republican rivals remain worryingly bellicose.

Hillary the healer?

The third challenge for the next American president requires a different set of qualities: he or she will have to be a healer, both at home and abroad. America's standing in the world has been hugely damaged by the war, by Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and by the high-handed way in which it has treated international bodies and agreements. The country needs a leader who will rebuild alliances. Hillary Clinton has no direct experience of this, but she has already declared that Bill would be her “ambassador to the world”. His charm may help make up for the superpower's tendency towards unilateralism; though foreign leaders may be as uncomfortable as some Americans with the idea of an unelected spouse swanning round the globe representing America.

At home, Mrs Clinton will need to narrow the divisions that the bitter partisanship of the Bush presidency has widened. She can be an unforgiving enemy—witness her campaign's hysterical reaction when a Hollywood mogul went over to Mr Obama's camp. In recent years she has not given much impression of feeling anyone's pain but her own, though she is a funnier and warmer speaker than she gets credit for. Can such a woman, whose “negatives” are among the highest in the business, reunite America? This doubt remains a big obstacle to a Clinton comeback.

For all her years of scheming and positioning, Mrs Clinton is not the finished article. No process is better at revealing flaws than American presidential elections. This newspaper, like many voters, will reserve judgment on this still often awkward and unknowable woman until it has seen more of her and her policies next year. But so far the Clinton comeback has been impressive. That is why it is her presidency to lose.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same again — in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species.

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, a new moon, on Oct. 4, 1957. Climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well, rising above the atmosphere and into orbit, Sputnik crossed the threshold into a new dimension of human experience. People could now see their kind as spacefarers. Their enhanced mobility might someday prove as liberating as the first upright steps of hominid ancestors long ago.

The immediate reaction, though, reflected the dark concerns of a world in the grip of the cold war, a time of fear and division in which the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, stared each other down with the menace of mass destruction. Sputnik altered the nature and scope of the cold war.

It was an unprepossessing agent of alarm. A simple sphere weighing just 184 pounds and not quite two feet wide, it had a highly polished surface of aluminum, the better to reflect sunlight and be visible from Earth. Two radio transmitters with whiskery antennas issued steady signals on frequencies that scientists and ham operators could pick up, and so confirm the achievement.

The Russians clearly intended Sputnik as a ringing statement of their technological prowess and its military implications. But even they, it seems, had not foreseen the frenzied response their success provoked.

When the Soviet dictator Nikita S. Khrushchev received word of the launching, he was of course pleased, and he and his son, Sergei, turned on the radio to listen to the beeping Sputnik. They went to bed, the son remembers, without realizing “the immensity of what was happening during those hours.”

The Soviet press published a standard two-column report of the event, with a minimum of gloating. But newspapers in the West, particularly the United States, filled pages with news and analysis.

Sputnik’s signal reverberated through chambers of the powerful and down ordinary streets. People listened and, from rooftops and backyards, saw in the night a moving point of light, like an errant star. The interrogatory of invention used to be “What hath God wrought?” Now it was “What are the Russians capable of next?”

“No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life,” Walter A. McDougall, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has written. A younger generation may draw comparison with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Sputnik plunged Americans into a crisis of self-confidence. Had the country grown lax with prosperity? Was the education system inadequate, especially in training scientists and engineers? Were the institutions of liberal democracy any match in competition with an authoritarian communist society?

In “The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age” (1985), Dr. McDougall wrote that before Sputnik the cold war had been “a military and political struggle in which the United States need only lend aid and comfort to its allies in the front lines.” Now, he continued, the cold war “became total, a competition for the loyalty and trust of all peoples fought out in all arenas of social achievement, in which science textbooks and racial harmony were as much tools of foreign policy as missiles and spies.”

At the time of Sputnik, John F. Kennedy was the junior senator from Massachusetts with no particular interest in space. Yuri A. Gagarin was an unheralded Russian military pilot. John H. Glenn Jr. was a Marine Corps pilot who had recently set a record for the fastest transcontinental jet flight to New York from Los Angeles. Neil A. Armstrong was testing high-performance aircraft in the California desert. Their lives were soon to be changed, as were those of hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, other workers and ordinary people everywhere.

Thomas J. O’Malley, an aviation engineer in New Jersey, would move in a few months to a forlorn spit of land at Cape Canaveral, Fla., to be a test conductor in the accelerated development of the Atlas missile, which would eventually lift American astronauts into orbit. “We had one goal,” he recalled recently. “To get something up there as quickly as possible.”

Christopher C. Kraft Jr. soon found himself working with a task force planning an American response to the challenge. He would become the first flight director of astronaut missions, but at the start, he has written, the morale of American engineers was low. “I wasn’t the only engineer who was stunned at how much I didn’t know and how much I had to learn,” he said.

When the Sputnik news reached Huntsville, Ala., Wernher von Braun was beside himself with restless frustration. Mr. von Braun, a German-born rocket scientist working for the United States Army, said this country could have beaten the Russians into orbit if not for Pentagon orders to resist any thought of adding a small satellite to the Jupiter-C missile he had been testing.

To make matters worse, the first American attempts to launch a tiny Vanguard satellite were embarrassing failures. It was the end of January 1958 before Americans succeeded with Explorer 1, boosted into orbit by a multistage version of Mr. von Braun’s Jupiter-C. But the much larger Sputnik 2 had already carried the dog Laika into orbit, a harbinger of human spaceflight. The original Sputnik — in Russian, “satellite” or “fellow traveler” — was no onetime fluke.

•

The post-Sputnik dynamic even reached out and recruited me. I was then a soldier in the cold war. Along with nearly every able-bodied young American man (even Elvis had to put in his two years), I was fulfilling my obligation to interrupt life and career for military service. I had completed college and was a reporter on military leave of absence from The Wall Street Journal, at the Army base in Fort Dix, N.J.

The morning after the Soviet triumph, I was on a one-day pass in Trenton. I bought the papers and spread them out on a coffee shop table. Banner headlines trumpeted the news. The recondite language of rocketry and orbits tied up my head, but I read on. I gave a passing thought to the coincidence of Sputnik’s going up on my birthday; at least I should never forget the date the space age began.

My story should at this point resound with destiny’s thunderclap or a sudden gust swinging open the door, scattering the papers and leaving me strangely moved. But I had no premonition that Sputnik had set in motion events that would shape my career. It was not until 1959, soon after I returned to The Journal from service in West Germany, that I felt the Sputnik effect.

Newspapers and other media, influenced by Sputnik, were scrambling to expand coverage of science, medicine and technology. I agreed to the managing editor’s suggestion that I try my hand writing about medicine. One thing led to another, from medicine to science and space exploration, to Time magazine and eventually to the staff of The New York Times to cover the most ambitious American response to Sputnik: the Apollo program.

•

Sputnik should not have come as such a surprise. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had embarked on the development of ballistic missiles for carrying nuclear warheads to great distances. They had also announced plans to launch artificial satellites in the International Geophysical Year, a cooperative 18-month scientific undertaking to study Earth and its atmosphere, beginning in 1957. Khrushchev had reiterated Soviet intentions only two months before.

But a shock it was, a wake-up call. One of the intriguing might-have-beens of history is: What if Americans had deployed the first satellite?

Alex Roland, a historian of technology at Duke University and a former NASA historian, said that a first launching by Americans would have merely confirmed their reputation for technological superiority. The costly rivalry for dominance in space, he said, would have probably been waged with much less driving urgency.

John M. Logsdon, director of the Institute of Space Policy at George Washington University, agreed. “If not for Sputnik,” he said, “there would probably not have been Apollo.”

But after Sputnik, there was no stopping the momentum of the space race. Critics attacked the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who at first had dismissed Sputnik as an event of only “scientific interest.” Soon the Defense Department stepped up missile development. The Democratic Congress established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The perception of a threatening Soviet advantage in missiles persisted. Necessity had dictated the Russian concentration on missiles. Ever since World War II, American bombers had been more capable than those of the Russians, who also had no air bases in striking distance of their adversary’s heartland, in contrast to the American bases that ringed the Soviet Union.

An exaggerated estimate of the “missile gap” became a rallying cry of the 1960 presidential campaign and may have been crucial in Kennedy’s narrow victory. Not long after he took office, the Russians scored another stunning triumph. In April 1961, Gagarin became the first human to fly in Earth orbit.

After weeks of closed-door consultations, Kennedy went before Congress, on May 25, and declared, “Now it is time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise — time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement which, in many ways, may hold the key to our future on Earth.”

He committed the country to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

•

How brief the space race was, the 12 years from the wake-up call to the first walk on the Moon, but thrilling, mind-boggling, even magnificent at times.

While the Russians forge ahead, Americans begin catching up with the Mercury and Gemini flights in orbit. As the goal comes into sight, there are the countdowns of tingling anticipation. In the dark before dawn, we drive toward the shining light enveloping a spaceship that looks like an obelisk out of antiquity, waiting to be launched. The blast of the Saturn 5, just three miles of sand and scrub away, beats on your chest and shakes the ground you stand on. Once at full thrust, and unbound, the huge rocket at first appears to be losing its fight against gravity, then slowly rises to the occasion and is off over the ocean, fire and vapor trailing behind. Spacefarers are on their way to the Moon.

Three lunar voyages are most sharply etched in memory. The Apollo 8 astronauts, in December 1968, are the first to reach the Moon, circling it 10 times. Out their windows they see the achingly beautiful Earth, blue and green under swirls of white clouds. On Christmas Eve, the men take turns reading verses from Genesis. It is a gift from on high at a time of turmoil and despair in the year of assassinations, rioting cities and a divisive war.

Then there is Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong steps down the landing craft’s ladder and takes “one giant leap for mankind.” Buzz Aldrin joins him for the first walk on the Moon. In contrast to exploration’s previous landfalls, the whole world is watching on television.

In the current documentary film “In the Shadow of the Moon,” Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who remained in lunar orbit during the landing, recalls that on the crew’s world tour afterward, people they met felt they had participated in the landing, too. “People, instead of saying, ‘Well, you Americans did it!’ ” he said, “everywhere, they said, ‘We did it!’ We, humankind, we, the human race, we, people, did it!”’

The warmth of shared experience was remarkable, given the origins of the space race in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence.

Apollo 11 essentially ended the space race, and public interest in spaceflight was flagging by the time of Apollo 13, in April 1970. The residual self-assurance that committed the country to Apollo in 1961 had given way to self-doubt. The war in Vietnam, another chapter in the cold war, shoved Apollo to the periphery of the national mind.

Apollo 13 is the mission that failed, but a drama of epic dimensions worthy of Homer. Three astronauts go forth on a daring quest, meet with disaster, face death and barely limp back to the safety of home. If anything, this brush with death put a more human face on spaceflight and made it seem more exciting, and dangerous.

By the end of 1972, the last of the 12 men to walk on the Moon packed up and returned home, and no one has been there since. At the conclusion of that flight, Apollo 17, I solicited historians’ assessments of the significance of these early years in space. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. predicted that in 500 years, the 20th century would probably be remembered mainly for humanity’s first ventures beyond its native planet. At the close of the century, he had not changed his mind.

•

In succeeding years, the Russians and Americans continued spaceflights, at a reduced pace. Most American money went into the space shuttles, the reusable vehicles confined to orbit that never lived up to their promise to make human flight more routine. The public’s most lasting images of the program are the Challenger’s deadly explosion shortly after liftoff in 1986, and the Columbia’s disintegration on re-entry 17 years later.

It was left to the relatively low-budget robotic spacecraft to sustain the impression of exploration and discovery on this new frontier. In that respect, they alone exceeded early promises. Russian and American craft explored Venus. American vehicles landed several times on Mars, and a European capsule reached the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Two Voyager craft made a grand tour of the four giant outer planets and are now approaching the edge of the solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope still sends images from deep in cosmic time.

Carl Sagan, the astronomer and author, often spoke of this as the golden age of planetary exploration. “In all the history of mankind,” he wrote, “there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the solar system, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct disks moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.”

•

One evening in 1990, I drove across Baltimore on a sentimental journey. Every so often since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the last gasps coming out of the exhausted Soviet Union itself, I had allowed myself reflections on my two years as a soldier in an unconventional war and the nearly half-century of anxieties of living in a world primed to blow itself up.

I could hardly think of myself outside the context of the cold war. Without the intense Soviet-American competition epitomized by the space race, I would not have become a science journalist who wrote about astronauts going to the Moon to “beat” the Russians. I would therefore not be in Baltimore again, this time with astronomers who were preparing to look into the heavens via a giant orbiting telescope.

I found my way to Travelers Lounge, the bar that had been across from the gate to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird. We used to tarry in the back room there, over pitchers of beer fueling arguments about politics and the American novel. I took a stool and told the bartender that it had been more than three decades since I last had a beer here, back in my Holabird sojourn.

“One of them comes in every few months and looks around,” the bartender said. “We’re about the only thing left from those days.”

So I had seen. The fort was gone. In its place stretched one corporate complex after another, buildings of glass and steel and spreading car parks. The names I saw were as unfamiliar as their digitized new-technology goods and services. I imagined I was looking on a monument to the cold war, and how apt it seemed.

The conflict we had lived through did not lend itself to heroic and triumphal iconography, nothing like the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue, nothing to glorify war or proclaim victory. So these commercial enterprises rising from cold-war technology, supplanting an old fort, were working monuments to the end of the cold war, monuments that do not look back.

At least Travelers and I had made it through this passage in history. Over my shoulder, I saw families and couples dining, not a beer pitcher or soldier anywhere. I wondered what post-cold-war memories these diners would bring back there in coming years.

I took my leave of Travelers and an era. I had to be fresh in the morning for another meeting with people at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They were tending their own monument to the cold war, which had fostered the Hubble Space Telescope’s technology. I wanted to learn more of our — and my own — expanding universe.

•

Over a long dinner, after the cold war and almost 30 years since the first lunar landing, a former astronaut who walked on the Moon and one of the Apollo flight directors got to skylarking about the good old days, something people do when they think of their past receding and the world changing all around. They laughed almost to tears telling cherished stories, one trying to top the other.

Then a cloud seemed to pass over their faces. Pete Conrad, the astronaut, who would soon die in a motorcycle accident, and Gerald D. Griffin, the flight director, wondered in perplexity what had happened to their good old days. What of those grand prospects of a few decades ago? No humans have flown to Mars, as once predicted, or established a permanent base on the Moon. A long-sought orbiting space station was finally being assembled in orbit, but no one seemed sure what it was good for, except as a demonstration of cooperation by many nations, including Russia, in a major space endeavor.

Economics and shifting national priorities had thwarted the most ambitious post-Apollo plans.

Dr. Logsdon of George Washington University called Apollo “a product of a specific time in history,” and a singular crash program responding to a perceived threat to the country. It did not represent a firm commitment by society to full-scale space exploration.

As Dr. Roland of Duke pointed out, Apollo “did just what it was designed to do, which was to convince the world and ourselves that we were masters of technology, and it wasn’t designed to do anything else.” As yet, he said, “we have not identified a mission for astronauts that was commensurate with Apollo.”

Dr. Roland noted that telecommunications was the only space enterprise that pays for itself and, he added, “It has transformed the world.” All other space activities, military and civilian, depend so far on “what states believe are in their best interest to invest in” — and those interests have changed since the cold war.

Let Neil Armstrong, known as a man of few words, have the last word.

“I think we’ll always be in space,” he said in an interview for NASA’s oral history program. “But it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control and can’t anticipate that will cause things to happen or not happen.”

Mr. Armstrong then struck a note sure to resonate with many of his contemporaries. “We were really very privileged,” he said, “to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go.”

Fifty years of spaceflight have taken people to the Moon and have sent unmanned vehicles zipping to the fringes of the solar system. What could the next 50 years bring?

Much more, or potentially not much more. Government-financed space travel could stall in the face of America’s growing aversion to risk and a kind of orbital ennui. NASA has, after all, already tried for more than a decade to develop follow-on vehicles to the flawed space shuttle and is in the process of trying again.

Private enterprise is stepping up, but the industry is still fragile.

Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said in an interview that he was confident of one thing for the foreseeable future: “We’re going to have a space program.”

Beyond that, all bets are off.

“The one thing of which we can be certain,” Mr. Griffin wrote in a recent essay on the Web site of the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, “is that in trying to envision the world of 2057, two generations in the future, we will be wrong.”

Experts in government, industry and science agree, however, that these three broad trends will shape the coming decades in space:

¶NASA has embarked on a program to return to the Moon by 2020, not just for what some critics call “flags and footprints,” but also for a lasting presence with scientific research and preparation for expeditions to asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The space shuttle program is being wound down by 2010 to create the next generation of vehicles.

¶Other nations, notably Russia and China, have ambitious plans and could spur a space race like the one that sent Americans to the Moon. “It took Sputnik for us to recognize what the Soviet Union was up to,” said Harrison H. Schmitt, who flew the last mission to the Moon, in 1972. “I don’t know what it will take this time.”

¶Private enterprise is moving ahead, beginning with space tourism and, later, transport services for NASA and other governments to outposts like the International Space Station. Beyond that, ventures could include mining on asteroids and manufacturing drugs in space.

John M. Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University, says a big question has yet to be answered.

“At the level of government, I think we’re still struggling as to why we’re sending people to space,” Dr. Logsdon said. “It’s a decent question, and I think it’s an unanswered question.”

That leaves the manned space program at a precarious point, he said, adding: “If the current proposals to restart human exploration fail politically, indeed, the human space flight endeavor conducted under government auspices might well lose its momentum. I obviously hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s far from a slam dunk that we’re going back to the Moon and on to Mars.”

Entrepreneurs say they have the answer — money. Peter Diamandis, a founder of the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million competition to put a pilot in space without government financing, said that with all the energy and minerals to be found there “the first trillionaires are going to be made in space.”

In the next 50 years, Mr. Diamandis said, “economic engines,” not political ones, will push the space frontier.

Dr. Logsdon is skeptical. “There are a variety of alluring prospects that have been around almost since the start of the last 50 years that are still there as alluring prospects,” he said. “And we are not further along in knowing whether they can be turned into reality or not.” The continued reliance on chemical rockets, for example, limits the weight that can be taken into space.

Yet much has changed in the last 50 years that could lay the foundation for the next 50. A new generation of ultrawealthy entrepreneurs who grew up with a space fascination are pouring personal fortunes into making space businesses real.

Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, paid for SpaceShipOne, the tiny craft that won the X Prize in 2004. Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, is developing rockets through his company, Space Exploration Technologies, and has NASA financing that could lead to his spacecraft’s carrying people and supplies to the International Space Station.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is developing rockets at a site he owns in western Texas.

Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in hotels, is developing a space transportation system and a space station that could be used as an orbiting hotel or a research base.

The official charged with regulating commercial spaceflight, Patricia Grace Smith of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in an interview, “When I look out 50 years from now, I fully expect that we will have actual, operational spaceports” that are commercially operated and owned.

At the dusty, sprawling Mojave Air and Space Port in California, dreamers and pragmatists join in planning the future.

Jeff Greason, the founder of Xcor Aerospace, one of several rocket companies there, said his industry was ready to talk big again after years of having to shake off the pixie dust of science fiction. “We had to stop focusing on the grand and glorious future,” he said, “because otherwise, people weren’t going to take us seriously as a business. We very consciously turned the vision thing off.”

“We’re making progress on real businesses that turn profits,” he added.

Other companies are already in the game. Mr. Greason’s neighbor, Scaled Composites, is working on a successor vehicle to its SpaceShipOne.

Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic, which will buy the vehicles, has a long list of potential space tourists.

Esther Dyson, a longtime technology guru who is encouraging investment in space, said the development of rocket businesses paralleled the early days of personal computing and the Internet. Early government financing created technologies whose use was largely limited to government and academia.

“So eventually these commercial types came in, and suddenly a whole lot of revenue came in,” she said. ”It benefited the research types, as well as the commercial types. And it created an infrastructure for the public.”

That led, in turn, to today’s Google, Netscape, Google Earth, “all these wonderful things we take for granted.”

Mr. Greason predicts that government will take the lead in long-range exploration, but that industry will take up the slack closer to home. Just as the military relies on private air carriers, he said, “the government efforts will become customers of the private efforts.”

NASA will meanwhile be trying to extend the reach of humanity. Mr. Griffin, its administrator, laid out a rough timetable for the goals that President Bush set in 2004.

He sees the mileposts clearly along the way, returning to the Moon by 2020, with a “small lunar outpost” a few years later, on the way to “towns on the Moon.” The first flights to Mars could occur in the next decade, he said, so that by the 100th anniversary of spaceflight in 2057, “we can be looking back at the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on Mars.”

If the United States wants to lead the way, he said, the clock is ticking.

“This is the last generation of Americans which is going to have the unquestioned opportunity to lead that enterprise,” Mr. Griffin said. “Because in the next generation we are going to find, at least, Russia, China, India and Europe fully as capable as we are. It will be a matter of interest and politics and societal will or desire. But it will not be a matter of capability.”

Whoever takes them on, the challenges will be greater than any that spacefaring nations have yet faced. They involve radiation levels that science does not yet know how to protect against and problems like reduced gravity and Moon dust, which is ultrafine-grained, chemically reactive and highly abrasive, all of which may mean serious health problems for astronauts.

At a conference in June on lunar settlements, Dr. James S. Logan, a former chief of medical operations at the Johnson Space Center and a founder of Space Medicine Associates, a medical consulting group, pointed out that the previous missions to the Moon involved just 600 total man-hours on the surface, a figure likely to be exceeded on the first return mission.

In his presentation, Dr. Logan pointed out that the earlier exposure times, “while significant,” did not provide strong evidence that long-duration exposure would be safe.

At a conference on space medicine this year at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Peggy A. Whitson, an astronaut who is about to take her second stint aboard the International Space Station, said radiation would continue to be a concern.

“We have to just accept the fact that if we’re going to explore,” Dr. Whitson said, “we’re going to have to accept a higher level of radiation” than, say, OSHA permits for atomic workers.

Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon on the panel with Dr. Whitson, said, “To me, an unacceptable level of risk would be a radiation exposure that would result in acute and substantial performance effects, either fatality or cognitive decline.”

If the effects are so debilitating that the mission fails, Dr. Clark said, “it’s pointless to go.”

There could be other problems with a Mars mission that scientists are just beginning to explore. At the Rice conference, Dr. Nick Kanas of the University of California, San Francisco, a psychiatrist who has studied astronauts, described what he called the “Earth out of view” phenomenon.

Dr. Kanas’s research has found that one of the most positive parts of going to space is seeing the Earth. But on a trip to Mars, the Earth would dwindle to a bluish speck.

“No one in the history of humans has ever studied what it’s like to see the Earth as a little dot,” he said.

In an interview, Dr. Kanas said losing the visual connection with the home planet could be a “unique stressor.”

Communications would slow markedly, with lags of more than 40 minutes, he said. Ready access to powerful telescopes and libraries of Earth images might help, but it would be important to fight those feelings of “extreme isolation and loneliness.”

Mr. Griffin acknowledged that problems like radiation presented grave challenges in each new environment, but added that he was confident that protections would be discovered, just as early sailors learned that sauerkraut and lemons could protect them from scurvy on long voyages.

And he predicted that the lessons learned about bone growth, cell biology, damage prevention and repair would help treat diseases on Earth.

Mr. Schmitt, the Apollo astronaut, agreed. Despite very real risks of living in space and on other planets, he said, “I don’t see any showstoppers.”

Stuart Witt, general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port, takes an even longer view. In his office, with composite craft being designed in nearby buildings, Mr. Witt noted that five centuries ago, Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men. Two years later, one ship returned, with 18 men.

He quoted from memory a passage from Charles Van Doren’s book “A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future” (1991), pointing out that after the surviving ship returned loaded with valuable spices, subsequent expeditions “never lacked for sailors to man them and for captains to lead them.”

“They knew that the spirit of exploration was far bigger than any individual,” Mr. Witt said.

The argument resonates with Mr. Griffin: “Every time that humans have invested in the past in breaking through new frontiers, it’s been to our profit.

“It may be tough on the individual explorers, but it’s been pretty beneficial for the human race — as we sit here,” he continued, waving his arms to take in his office, Washington and America, “in what once was the New World.”

“We’ll lose people,” he said flatly, and risks must be minimized. But exploring is “embedded in our DNA.”

The urge to go beyond might actually be ingrained in the helical curves of our genes as one of the many behavioral traits now being linked to genetic propensities, said Jeffrey M. Friedman, director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at the Rockefeller University.

Indulging in a bit of speculation at a reporter’s request, Dr. Friedman said “it’s very plausible to suggest” that there might be a primal urge to explore and take risks.

“And you sort of have direct evidence of it in the history of human migrations,” he added.

In any population, there would be a spectrum of traits from stay-at-homes to explorers, with those at either end of the spectrum prospering in some circumstances and suffering in others.

The future holds promise and peril, as any visitor to Mojave can see. At Scaled Composites, an explosion last month killed three employees. The accident involved the nitrous oxide that Scaled Composites uses as a propellant, though there was no rocket test at the time. The accident is under investigation.

Meanwhile, the company continues to develop its next craft, and Virgin Galactic said no customers had canceled. When asked whether the accident gave him second thoughts, James Lovelock, the 88-year-old British scientist and author, said, “I have no qualms whatever.”

The $100,000 price of the Tesla Roadster is well beyond the budget of even most sports car buyers.

ELECTRIC cars are the future.

That, at least, is the message automakers are sending to consumers as they trumpet big plans for cars that can bypass the gas pump.

Of course, backers of electric vehicles, or E.V.’s, floated those assurances in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, when General Motors released its star-crossed EV1. Today, almost no one drives an electric car.

But with a gallon of premium gas topping $3 on average, and as carmakers and entrepreneurs pour money into the latest generation of electric cars, the prospects appear brighter.

Trading the internal combustion engine for batteries could bring well-publicized advantages: reducing pollution, raising mileage, promoting energy independence. E.V.’s and plug-in hybrids could deliver the gasoline equivalent of 100 miles a gallon or more. For consumers, that would in effect roll back the clock to buck-a-gallon gas. Car owners could save money in their sleep, recharging in the off hours when electricity is cheapest.

And compared with hydrogen fuel-cell cars, the infrastructure for electric cars already exists, requiring only more plugs in more places. Aside from home recharging, it would be easier to install pay-per-use outlets at curbsides and in parking lots than to spawn a network of hydrogen filling stations. Wal-Mart and McDonald’s might offer convenient electricity for customers or employees.

Sounds good? There is one problem. There is still not a single E.V. or plug-in hybrid available that can approach the driving range, interior room and performance of a typical gas-powered family sedan, at anywhere near the price that an average consumer would pay.

From a technical standpoint, the Tesla Roadster may well be the most impressive E.V. yet. But this plug-in two-seater, based on the Lotus Elise, is cramped and has near-zero cargo space. Its $100,000 price is well beyond the budget of even most sports car buyers.

So automakers, including Tesla, are again assuring Americans that practical, affordable E.V.’s are on the way.

Experts say the cars’ arrival hinges on two make-or-break issues:

•

Developing safe, affordable lithium-ion batteries lasting 100,000 miles.

•

Overcoming a psychological barrier among people who can imagine the benefits — but who can also see themselves stranded with a dead battery and no place or time to recharge.

As for batteries, progress has been made, but more is needed. The EV1 started with old-school lead-acid batteries; today’s hybrids have more robust nickel-metal-hydride units. But the most efficient batteries are lithium-ion, the kind found in cellphones and laptops. These cells would double or triple the power of, say, a Toyota Prius battery pack, but at half the weight or size.

Prabhakar Patil is chief executive of Compact Power, a company vying to power a G.M. plug-in hybrid based on the Chevrolet Volt concept car — and to have them ready by 2010 or 2011. He was previously chief engineer for the Ford Escape Hybrid.

He is convinced that his company can bring in lithium-ion batteries on time and on budget — and that plug-in hybrids are the necessary bridge between gasoline and pure E.V.’s.

“If you had asked me even five years ago, I’d have said forget it,” Mr. Patil said of the technology’s prospects. But since Sony offered the first commercial lithium-ion cells in 1991, their costs have fallen by a factor of 12, he said. Today, California’s Air Resources Board calculates that lithium-ion packs would cost $3,000 to $4,000 in mass production, cheap enough to be feasible.

As with most plug-in proponents, G.M. envisions its Volt as a second car in a household, the one that handles commuting and errands. The Volt is designed to travel up to 40 miles on battery power alone, delivering the equivalent of 100 m.p.g. or more.

The Volt’s gasoline engine would be used solely to charge the batteries, delivering a total range of 640 miles. At the Frankfurt auto show this month, G.M.’s Opel division showed the Flextreme, a variation on the Volt with a small diesel engine charging the batteries.

The issue of travel range brings up the second E.V. hurdle: the psychology of electricity. After 10 years of sales and heavy publicity, hybrids have grabbed less than 2 percent of the market. And that’s for cars that don’t need to be plugged in.

That’s why the plug-in hybrid “is a great step toward a pure E.V.,” Mr. Patil said, adding, “You skip the gas station, save time and money, and it takes away the fear factor on the limited range.”

Every plug-in and E.V. on the horizon still takes several hours to charge, though some new approaches are being considered. Altair Nanotechnologies of Reno, Nev., claims that its batteries can be juiced up in 10 minutes via a special high-voltage charging unit, thanks to minutely scaled lithium titanate electrode materials. Those performance claims will be tested when Altair supplies batteries for a promised electric pickup from Phoenix Motorcars.

An interesting aspect of E.V.’s is the proliferation of small, feisty companies trying to beat the G.M.’s and Toyotas at their own game. In recent decades no upstart has survived, but Bryon Bliss, a vice president at Phoenix, said major automakers remained largely wedded to the internal combustion engine, creating opportunities for new companies with fresh ideas.

“The perfect storm is brewing,” Mr. Bliss said. “The demand is there to get off petroleum. But the big companies haven’t exploited it, and there’s an opening for smaller companies to fill this market.”

Are electric cars in the pipeline, or are they still a pipe dream? Strip away the promises and the offerings are virtually nonexistent. Not a single purely electric vehicle with four seats and the ability to reach highway speeds is being mass-produced anywhere in the world.

The glorified golf carts known as neighborhood vehicles are not street-legal in many states and don’t meet the needs of most families. And while some tinkerers have turned Priuses into plug-in hybrids, most alternative-car experts consider this retrofitting to be a technical and economic dead end.

Despite the daunting challenges, several companies insist that the time and the technology are now right. Here are the electric cars closest to reality:

Tesla Roadster

With an initial 2008 run of 600-plus cars now set to begin production late this year, the Tesla has attracted unprecedented interest in E.V.’s thanks to its sexy looks, its blistering acceleration (0 to 60 m.p.h. in less than four seconds) and a driving range that was just revised upward to 245 miles.

The Silicon Valley start-up has benefited from tens of millions of development dollars from Elon Musk, the PayPal founder who is Tesla’s chief executive and is developing his own space program; backers include Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.

The Tesla has provoked a worldwide outpouring of fait accompli press coverage: the technology will put Detroit’s dinosaurs out of business, it is said, and render the internal combustion engine obsolete. Yet that would be a tall order for a company with no experience in the brutal auto business, one that has yet to build its first production car, open its first showroom or build its first service facility.

In August, a co-founder, Martin Eberhard, was shunted aside for a new interim chief executive, and the start of production was delayed for about four months. Yet company executives said that their desire to deliver a top-quality car is the only reason for the delay. To alleviate concerns, Tesla has allowed some buyers to test-drive pre-production models and post unedited comments on the company’s Web site

(teslamotors.com).

When I took a brief spin in the Tesla last spring, company officials did their best to deflate overwrought expectations. They are the first to emphasize that the $100,000 British-built roadster aims to prove the fun and feasibility of E.V.’s, not solve the transportation issues of average Americans. But Tesla is developing a second E.V. (its code name is White Star), a generously sized, $50,000-$70,000 sport sedan. Starting in 2010, Tesla plans to make 10,000 White Stars at a new plant in Albuquerque.

Certainly, the celebrity-friendly Roadster is a marketing smash. But the White Star will be the real test of Tesla’s technology and long-term prospects.

Zap-X

The company name, Zap, sounds like something from a Batman comic. (It stands for Zero Air Pollution.) But if the project gets off the ground, the Zap-X would be one superpowered E.V., with a claimed top speed of 155 m.p.h. and a 350-mile range. While the car has been derided by skeptics as “vaporware” that will never see production, the Zap-X would be based on the APX concept car by Lotus, which is also building the Tesla at its Hethel, England, factory.

The five-passenger aluminum-intensive crossover would use high-tech electric hub motors at all four wheels, delivering 644 horsepower to the ground from a lithium-ion battery pack. The hub motors would eliminate the need for transmission, axles and conventional brakes, opening up space beneath the floor for a giant battery pack.

On Friday, Steven Schneider, the chief executive of Zap, closed a long-brewing deal with China’s Youngman Automotive Group to manufacture E.V. passenger cars, buses and heavy equipment. Mr. Schneider said the alliance opens the door to bringing the Zap-X, and possibly other electric models, to the United States by about 2010 for around $60,000.

Chevrolet Volt

G.M. doesn’t like the Volt to be called a plug-in hybrid, since it considers the car more of an E.V. But the concept car has a tiny gasoline engine, albeit one that’s used exclusively to pump electricity into lithium-ion batteries, not to power the wheels. And there’s definitely a cord attached, requiring eight hours to recharge from a household plug but far less with higher-voltage current.

G.M. is designing the Volt to run on electricity alone for up to 40 miles. So for more than 85 percent of American commuters, the Volt would indeed work like a pure E.V., using no gasoline and delivering up to 150 m.p.g. G.M. hopes to bring a car like the Volt to market by 2011 or 2012.

Think City

The Think company illustrates the hurdles faced by E.V. makers. Founded in Norway in 1990 as Pivco Industries, the company has run out of money, gone into receivership and passed through multiple owners. Now it has been revived as Think Nordic. Yet over 17 years, it has produced little of note.

Under Ford’s ownership beginning in 1999 and driven by California’s electric-vehicle mandate, the company produced 1,000 sluggish 50-mile-range Think City cars. Ford dumped the disastrous project in 2003, crushing leftover American models (as G.M. did with the EV1). Now, the company plans a second-generation two-seat Think City for Europe in 2008, powered by lithium-ion batteries provided by Tesla in a $43 million deal. The company has floated vague plans to sell the car in some American cities in 2009.

Beyond urban use, the new model’s performance may not satisfy Americans: the company claims a mere 110-mile driving range and top speed of only 62 m.p.h.

Phoenix S.U.T.

Looking like the offspring of a Honda Ridgeline and a Subaru Baja, the Phoenix S.U.T. starts life as a South Korean pickup, the Ssangyong Actyon.

Phoenix adds a tiny twist: its lithium-ion batteries are said to employ nanotechnology — in this case, incredibly small lithium-titanate particles — to deliver faster recharging, safer operation and longer life. Ssangyong will ship the pickups, minus a powertrain, to Ontario, Calif., where Phoenix will install the batteries and electronics.

Using a special high-voltage charger, Phoenix claims the truck could store enough juice in 10 minutes to cover 100 miles. (A full charge would take six or seven hours from household current.) For now, only utility companies and other fleet customers can buy one of the $45,000 sport utility trucks from the initial 500-unit run. The company plans a small public introduction in 2008.

Wrightspeed X1

The racy Wrightspeed E.V. is the brainchild of Ian Wright, a New Zealander who was formerly chief engineer at Tesla. Essentially a juiced-up, lithium-ion version of the Ariel Atom tube-frame racer, the Wrightspeed is sickeningly fast. It is also stripped-down and devoid of comforts — a track car that’s nearly useless on public roads. Wright hopes to bring the X1 to market for around $120,000. But even more so than the Tesla, the only thing the Wrightspeed would solve is the need to roar into the pits for a quick fuel stop.

Electrum Spyder

Another bit of California dreaming, this is a convertible E.V. from Universal Electric Vehicle of Thousand Oaks. The company, which is seeking corporate financing, claims the Electrum Spyder (estimated price: $69,900) could reach 100 m.p.h. and travel up to 150 miles on a charge of its nickel-zinc batteries. A $25,000 upgrade would add lithium-ion cells, increasing the range to 250 miles.

The company says it is taking orders for the car, with deliveries beginning 10 months after an unspecified start of production. The company said it was also designing a two-door four-passenger model with a target price below $45,000.

Venturi Fetish

If the Tesla strikes you as common, consider the Venturi Fetish. First shown at the Paris auto show in 2004, the two-seat roadster, powered by lithium-ion batteries, has a claimed top speed of 100 m.p.h. and a one-hour charging time. The Monaco-based company says it plans to build 25 Fetishes, priced at a cool $500,000 each.

Tango

It looks like a car that got caught in a trash compactor. Only three inches wider than a yardstick, the Commuter Cars Corporation’s Tango is an all-electric two-seater. George Clooney, who is to get one of the first 10 Teslas sold to the general public, has reportedly bought a Tango, too.

Sep 20th 2007

From The Economist print edition

What the credit crunch means for bonuses

AFP

Get article background

“DEAR Valued Bloomberg User,” began an e-mail sent out recently by the information provider to the universe’s masters. “This is...to remind you that we can still provide complimentary access to our service should you find yourself temporarily in-between jobs.” Having the bad news broken by another firm’s computer could be a new low for an industry not known for letting people go tactfully (“Your pass stopped working today? I’m so sorry”). Happily things do not seem to be as bad as all that.

In London some jobs will probably go. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) reckons that more than 5,000 people will be hauled in for a talk about career progression by the end of the year. For comparison, the City shed 20,000 jobs after the dotcom bubble burst and 40,000 after Black Wednesday in 1992. However, the CEBR reckons that 10,000 new jobs were created in the year to July, so any reduction would still mean a big net gain in jobs over a two-year period.

As for bonuses, one financial headhunter that specialises in finding drones rather than filling corner offices says that at least one City firm has told its managing directors (who are less senior than the title makes them sound) that a certain number of them will receive no bonus at all this year. This gloom is not widely shared: most report bonus expectations being managed rather than vaporised—provided, of course, that things get no worse.

In New York the picture is similar. Some areas that have been booming over the past year will be affected. Mergers and Acquisitions mbanking, where the pipeline of deals looks less than inspiring, leveraged loans and a few other corners of fixed income may do badly. Conversely, anyone who trades volatility, of which there has been plenty, or sells options, which should be a good business in uncertain times, will have prospered.

Even the people most at fault for the recent turmoil—the creators of the collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and conduits that spread subprime-mortgage debt around the financial system—may end the year with new Porsches. Headhunters on Wall Street report that some have been snapped up by hedge funds looking to extract some value from these illiquid instruments. Just as imprudent banks have been saved from their mistakes by indulgent central bankers, so CDO-makers could be rewarded for the mess that they helped to create. Vroom-vroom.

By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN

ERROL, N.H.

WE are hunting moose in northern New Hampshire, a predatory band of three adults and two children in the new Buick Enclave.

Nicely equipped in all other respects, our 2008 Enclave lacks a gun rack, but that is not a problem on this hunt. While this state does allow moose hunting — a pursuit that strikes me as presenting all the challenge and peril of bagging a dairy cow — we are just hoping for a moose sighting to amuse a pair of visiting nephews from the suburbs of Cleveland.

The newest member of the Buick family, the Enclave went on sale in the spring, in part to fill the void created by the dismissal of the Rainier, Terraza and Rendezvous models, Buick’s entries in the S.U.V., minivan and crossover market segments. Expecting one vehicle to replace three might seem like a daunting assignment, but the Enclave is intended to attract buyers who spend more and are import-minded. In any case, the combined sales of the three pink-slipped Buicks amounted to only about 71,000 last year.

The name Enclave suggests upper-class luxury, peace and quiet. Frankly, I prefer the name suggested by a colleague — the 2008 Buick Gated Community — because that seems even more protective and exclusive. Whatever you call it, the Enclave is quite good, though not perfect. But it certainly provides quiet and soothing family transportation and is a pleasing alternative to a trucklike S.U.V.

The Enclave shares its car-type mechanical underpinnings, including a six-speed automatic transmission and 3.6-liter V-6 engine, with two cousins in the General Motors family, the GMC Acadia and the Saturn Outlook. The Enclave has three rows of seats, is available in seven- or eight-passenger configurations, and is aimed at competitors like the Acura MDX and Lexus RX 350.

Prices begin at $32,790 for a front-wheel drive CX; the fancier CXL starts at $34,990. All-wheel drive adds $2,000.

The Buick is the most expensive of G.M.’s crossover triplets, although the amount of standard equipment varies among the three. The Acadia starts at $29,845 and the Outlook at $28,340. The fanciest Outlook, with all-wheel drive, is $150 less than the least-expensive front-drive Enclave. The front-drive Enclave CX I tested had options that included a Bose stereo and a DVD player ($1,980); the total on the window sticker was $36,260.

As dusk enveloped our hunting party, we cruised through Errol here in the northeast corner of the state, an area with a reputation as a moose-rich environment. Some 30 miles of roaming had not resulted in a single moose sighting, but we traveled in comfort. The Enclave’s suspension provides a splendid buffer against rough two-lane roads and the cabin is quiet.

The Enclave gets more soundproofing than its cousins. This reflects G.M.’s idea that a quiet interior should be a virtue of all Buicks; noise isolation has become a main selling point for Lexus, a brand Buick hopes to compete against.

We also had a pleasing amount of room. During our week in the Enclave we routinely carried five adults and two children on hourlong drives without anyone being uncomfortable, even when two adults shared the third row with a child. There was enough room behind the third row (19 cubic feet) to carry duffel bags and a small cooler.

The cabin’s design showed that G.M. was successful in its effort to upgrade its interiors, apparently after concluding that this is where people sit and it should look nice. But there were some minor problems.

Rear visibility wasn’t good because of the huge roof pillars in the back. A “smart slide” feature for moving the second-row captain’s chairs forward (to allow easier entry to the third row) was balky. A strap used to release the seatback and allow it to fold forward proved a real hazard; pulling it sent the seatback slamming forward at great speed, whacking anybody in its path.

The good news for families is that all Enclaves have curtain air bags to provide head protection in a side-impact crash for all three rows and skid-correcting electronic stability control.

There is also OnStar, which now offers turn-by-turn route guidance, a feature I found easier to use than many traditional navigation systems. Call OnStar and give the operator an address, and audible and written instructions are sent to the vehicle. The system worked well even in Boston, one of America’s great navigational challenges.

Toting all this around is an independent suspension that is quite a trickster. During my first miles around town it seemed as if the steering was a little too light and the suspension too soft. It was easy to conclude that the Enclave was sloppy. But my attitude changed as I drove New Hampshire’s zigzag two-lanes, steadily increasing speed as I gained confidence in the Buick’s handling. Yes, the body leans a little, but the Enclave corners quite well for such a big vehicle.

G.M.’s engineers get no points for being weight-watchers. With all-wheel drive, the Enclave weighs about 5,000 pounds, a considerable load for an engine rated at 275 horsepower and 251 pound-feet of torque. The six-speed automatic was developed with Ford, which uses it on vehicles including the Edge and the 2008 Taurus.

With seven people on board, the powertrain did an adequate job, though at times the transmission was slow to downshift, leaving the driver waiting for acceleration. Ford seems to have done a better job of programming the transmission for its vehicles.

For the front-drive model I tested, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates fuel economy at 16 miles a gallon in the city and 24 on the highway. Those figures were calculated under the new 2008 formula, which is intended to be more realistic than previous estimates.

The Enclave has four-wheel disc brakes. Initially, the brake pedal seems firm and reassuring. But it loses some resistance about midway, slightly undermining confidence.

A dozen or so miles north of Errol, as dusk fades to darkness, we admit to failure in our moose hunt and decide to head home. A small dirt road looks like the perfect turnaround spot, and I pull in.

There, maybe 100 feet away, chomping on some greenery, is a moose. The moose looks up and continues its buffet, assuming we have come in peace. See what I mean about the challenge of shooting a moose?

Clearly the moose is not impressed with us or the Enclave. I, on the other hand, have grown to like it, and it has been so long since I liked a Buick that the experience is slightly disorienting. This big wagon offers families comfort, competent handling and a solid package of safety features.

Our hunt successful, the nephews wonder whether they may turn on the DVD player, and if there is a shortcut home. No, the house is a couple of hours away, but in the Enclave that’s not a bad thing.

Illustration by David G. Klein
By N. GREGORY MANKIW

IN the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged. The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants.

Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.”

Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Once chief economist to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Feldstein has devoted much of his career to studying how high tax rates distort incentives and impede economic growth. But like most other policy wonks, he appreciates that some taxes align private incentives with social costs and move us toward better outcomes.

Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word “tax” only if followed immediately by the word “cut.” Democratic consultants recommend the word “tax” be followed by “on the rich.”

Yet this natural aversion to carbon taxes can be overcome if the revenue from the tax is used to reduce other taxes. By itself, a carbon tax would raise the tax burden on anyone who drives a car or uses electricity produced with fossil fuels, which means just about everybody. Some might fear this would be particularly hard on the poor and middle class.

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

The case for a carbon tax looks even stronger after an examination of the other options on the table. Lawmakers in both political parties want to require carmakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they sell. Passing the buck to auto companies has a lot of popular appeal.

Increased fuel efficiency, however, is not free. Like a tax, the cost of complying with more stringent regulation will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher car prices. But the government will not raise any revenue that it can use to cut other taxes to compensate for these higher prices. (And don’t expect savings on gas to compensate consumers in a meaningful way: Any truly cost-effective increase in fuel efficiency would already have been made.)

More important, enhancing fuel efficiency by itself is not the best way to reduce energy consumption. Fuel use depends not only on the efficiency of the car fleet but also on the daily decisions that people make — how far from work they choose to live and how often they carpool or use public transportation.

A carbon tax would provide incentives for people to use less fuel in a multitude of ways. By contrast, merely having more efficient cars encourages more driving. Increased driving not only produces more carbon, but also exacerbates other problems, like accidents and road congestion.

Another popular proposal to limit carbon emissions is a cap-and-trade system, under which carbon emissions are limited and allowances are bought and sold in the marketplace. The effect of such a system depends on how the carbon allowances are allocated. If the government auctions them off, then the price of a carbon allowance is effectively a carbon tax.

But the history of cap-and-trade systems suggests that the allowances would probably be handed out to power companies and other carbon emitters, which would then be free to use them or sell them at market prices. In this case, the prices of energy products would rise as they would under a carbon tax, but the government would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.

The international dimension of the problem also suggests the superiority of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade. Any long-term approach to global climate change will have to deal with the emerging economies of China and India. By some reports, China is now the world’s leading emitter of carbon, in large part simply because it has so many people. The failure of the Kyoto treaty to include these emerging economies is one reason that, in 1997, the United States Senate passed a resolution rejecting the Kyoto approach by a vote of 95 to zero.

Agreement on a truly global cap-and-trade system, however, is hard to imagine. China is unlikely to be persuaded to accept fewer carbon allowances per person than the United States. Using a historical baseline to allocate allowances, as is often proposed, would reward the United States for having been a leading cause of the problem.

But allocating carbon allowances based on population alone would create a system in which the United States, with its higher standard of living, would buy allowances from China. American voters are not going to embrace a system of higher energy prices, coupled with a large transfer of national income to the Chinese. It would amount to a massive foreign aid program to one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies.

A global carbon tax would be easier to negotiate. All governments require revenue for public purposes. The world’s nations could agree to use a carbon tax as one instrument to raise some of that revenue. No money needs to change hands across national borders. Each government could keep the revenue from its tax and use it to finance spending or whatever form of tax relief it considered best.

Convincing China of the virtues of a carbon tax, however, may prove to be the easy part. The first and more difficult step is to convince American voters, and therefore political consultants, that “tax” is not a four-letter word.

Vivienne Flesher
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

THE kiss you share with the exquisite stranger is electric, deep and seemingly endless — that is until you open an eye and see drool on your pillow.

If only you could have slept long enough to consummate the seduction. Then again, you had no idea you were dreaming. Besides, you cannot control the nightly ride on the wings of your subconscious. Or can you?

Maybe, if you learn to practice “lucid dreaming,” a state in which a sleeping person becomes aware he or she is dreaming and may even be able to direct the action. Those who regularly experience the phenomenon say that like the physics-defying characters in “The Matrix,” they are able to generate or manipulate the fantastical events that unfold. They can fly without wings, play instruments they never learned, go bowling with T. S. Eliot — and, yes, indulge sexual fantasies.

It is likely some people have always had such dreams, said Jayne Gackenbach, a professor of psychology at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta, who conducts research into lucid dreaming. But the esoteric practice, which has been acknowledged in the West since at least 1867, seems on the verge of becoming much better known.

A film exploring its allure, “The Good Night,” written and directed by Jake Paltrow and starring his sister, Gwyneth, Penélope Cruz and Martin Freeman, is opening Oct. 5. Depressed by his waking life, the film’s main character is determined to master the art of lucid dreaming to escape to an inspiring, sensual unreality with a lacquer-lipped knockout. “What I find myself most attracted to are things that can actually occur,” Mr. Paltrow said in an interview. “There’s really nothing in this movie that couldn’t happen.”

For those wishing to become lucid dreamers, a nine-and-a-half-day instructional retreat, “Dreaming and Awakening: Lucid Dreaming, Consciousness and Dream Yoga,” is scheduled to begin Oct. 1 in Hawaii. Don’t want to pay the airfare? On Oct. 3, an online chat about lucid dreaming takes place, part of the PsiberDreaming conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. There are new and soon-to-be published books, like “Lucid Dreaming for Beginners: Simple Techniques for Creating Interactive Dreams” (Llewellyn Publications) and “Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection and the Body of Light in Western Esotericism” (Weiser Books).

“It has gone from this very obscure type of dream to being discussed at the various dream and consciousness conferences,” Dr. Gackenbach said.

But it is not only dream experts discussing the topic. Two filmmakers described their lucid dreaming earlier this year. Michel Gondry, who directed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” described for The Guardian lucid dreams in which “I generally end up having sex with the first girl I can find.” Guillermo del Toro, the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” mentioned his lucid dreaming on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air.” “Pan’s Labyrinth” brings to life a twiggy mythological creature (a faun) he encountered in lucid dreams as a boy; the film won an Oscar this year for its surrealistic makeup.

Other films, including “Waking Life” and “Vanilla Sky,” have woven lucid dreaming into their plots. So have television series like “Alias,” “Star Trek” and “Ed” (Daryl Hall and John Oates make an appearance in Ed’s dream). Novelists including Stephen King, William Boyd and Graham Joyce have written about lucid dreaming, and the Verve, a British rock band, sang about it in “Catching the Butterfly.”

“Lucid dream” is the name of pop and jazz CDs, small businesses, modern artworks, even a sex toy.

Still, many people have never heard of it. Established sleep researchers say lucid dreaming is occasionally reported by subjects, though it is difficult to validate scientifically. “Yes, lucid dreaming exists,” said Dr. Rodney Radtke, the medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Duke University. “Yes, people certainly can, within their dream, realize ‘this is just a dream’ and continue to participate.”

“Do I believe that someone could potentially alter or interact with their dreams in such a way that they could change the dream? Yes,” he said. “Do I think that you could essentially design a dream — ‘Oh, I want to go to Honolulu and have this big hunk hit on me’? It’s a bit of a stretch. But I can’t say it can’t happen.”

He added: “Only in New York or California do they worry about this stuff.”

Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and the founder of the Lucidity Institute (lucidity.com), conducts lucid dream research and teaches people to do it.

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Dr. LaBerge said. “Fly. Dream sex. That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and anxieties, learning more about yourself.”

A student at Stanford University, where Dr. LaBerge conducted much of his research, wrote in The Stanford Daily: “In one of my earliest experiences with lucidity, I announced to an auditorium full of people that I was their god (wasn’t I?). When they did not respond deferentially, I used telekinesis to send one of them flying across the room.”

It can be particularly appealing to those who have nightmares, as it allows them to realize while still asleep that they are just dreaming.

Interest in these potential real-world benefits and the otherworldly freedoms of lucid dreaming — as well as the questions it provokes about the precarious nature of reality — has spurred the invention and evolution of seemingly wacky dream aids. There are masks with lights and sounds; Orwellian devices that announce THIS IS A DREAM! in the middle of the night; and pills.

At the Hawaii gathering next month, attendees will be able to check out Dr. LaBerge’s NovaDreamer, a mask meant to light up during REM sleep and cue the person entangled in the sheets that he or she is dreaming. It is based on the notion that people can make a plan while awake and then execute it in their dreams. A light or sound is meant to remind them of their goal of lucid dreaming without actually waking them up. Participants may also take part in experiments with an herbal version of a drug that impacts acetylcholine, a neurotransmitting compound that affects memory.

As bizarre as these things may sound, there is a scientific rationale for cueing users during REM sleep. “REM-sleep dreams are much more visual,” said Matthew P. Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. “They have a strong narrative that runs through them. They’re hallucinogenic.”

There are several reasons for this, including that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes more inactive during REM sleep, while other areas of the brain, like the visual and emotional centers, rev up.

Scientists, however, are still trying to discover the difference between the dreaming brain and the lucid-dreaming brain. The leading candidate, Dr. Walker said, is the lateral prefrontal cortex. He thinks that during REM sleep, the activity level of this logic-oriented part of the brain begins to rise back to waking levels, and when it does, an invisible switch is flipped and the sleeper gains lucidity. “In the next five years, I think somebody will demonstrate that,” he said.

Lucid-dream researchers say there are myriad mental exercises a person can do during waking hours to try to become cognizant while dreaming. One technique involves performing various reality checks many times a day — such as looking at the numbers on a watch, looking away, and then looking at them again to make sure that night has not suddenly become day. The theory is that if a person does this regularly while awake, he or she will likely repeat it while dreaming and will recognize inconsistencies — if, say, the watch is melting in a Dali-esque way. Then the sleeper will think: “This looks surreal. I must be dreaming.”

In “The Good Night,” the would-be lucid dreamer performs a series of reality checks: he flips a light switch on and off (light in dreams is not usually nuanced); looks in a mirror (reflections in dreams are often obscured); and stares at his hands (in dreams one’s hands may be elongated or have fewer fingers).

Keeping a dream journal is also said to promote better recall and to train people to identify signs that indicate they are dreaming — chatting with the deceased, floating cars, talking skeletons. Again, the idea is that when people are sleeping, they will recognize these things as signs they are dreaming and they will become lucid.

Waking up half an hour earlier than usual, staying awake for 30 to 60 minutes and then going back to sleep may also induce lucid dreams, Dr. LaBerge has found. Dr. LaBerge honed his own lucid-dreaming abilities by writing his dreams down immediately after waking and telling himself he intended to remember and recognize his dreams.

Psychologists who study lucid dreaming do not know why some people need more help triggering full lucidity than others, though they agree that adept lucid dreamers are excellent at remembering dreams. Dr. Gackenbach said they tend to have strong visualization and spatial skills. They can look at a machine and envision how the parts work inside, she said, or sew a dress from scratch and know exactly what the finished frock will look like. Many practice meditation.

Of course some professionals, particularly psychoanalysts, think orchestrating one’s dreams is not a critical goal.

“We distinguish between the manifest content of the dream — the dream as you remember it — and the latent content of it,” said Dr. Edward Nersessian, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. “Whatever you manage or do not manage to do with the manifest content isn’t really that relevant. That’s like a screen behind which lies all sorts of answers which you have to go digging for.”

When then asked if lucid dreaming was a dangerous enterprise, he chuckled gently and said: “If people who do it think it calms their anxiety, I’m all for it.”