Privatization and the new public management.
Privatization is now commonplace throughout the world: in communist, socialist, and capitalist countries; in developed and developing countries; in democracies and dictatorships. In the United States privatization is being practiced by Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites. It is no longer a partisan or ideological issue,...

Directors roster: in affiliation with Spencer Stuart--a quarterly record of new director appointments.
IN ITS 2002 analysis of S&P 500 company proxies, recruiting firm Spencer Stuart reports that the most in-demand outside directors were active chairmen, presidents, and CEOs, who represented 41% of executives recruited to boards last year. Retired executives represented 12% of board recruits. But new demands placed on directors...

Beyond Columbia: is there a future for humanity in space?
On the first day of February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia started its return to Earth at the end of a sixteen-day mission. While the mission had apparently performed "without a hitch," the shuttle suffered a series of failures in the last minutes of reentry, followed by a cutoff...

The diamond in the desert: the story of the giant Readymix logo on the Nullarbor.
Topographic maps and aeronautic charts of the Nullarbor depict a 3.2km x 1.6km diamond shape 13km northwest of Caiguna, on the Nullarbor Plain, labelled "Readymix", "Readymix sign" or "Aerial landmark". The history of the feature is revealed, and placed in the context of the Eyre Highway, during the sealing...

Forum Letters.
Athena Stopped Time, Not God I respond to Samuel Larson's short rebuttal of NASA's "discovery" of missing time in SKEPTIC 8-4. The story is an obvious hoax perpetrated by fundamentalist Christians. NASA knows perfectly well that the missing time is not due to the intervention of the Judeo-Christian deity....

Astrium-Germany goes into orbit.
Astrium will consist of Franco-British Matra Marconi Space, plus Dasa's Space Infrastructure and Dornier Satellitensysteme units Three years after it was first mooted in public -- by Armand Carlier, then as now CEO of Matra Marconi Space, already a bi-national Franco-British company -- Astrium took legal shape...

Europe's dream.
The Ariane 5 Rocket that lifted off from the European space center in French Guiana last June 4 was 169 feet tall, half again as tall as the nave of Notre Dame. On this, its first test flight, Europe's brand-new launcher was carrying four scientific satellites, called Cluster; they...

Career opportunities for mathematicians.
In the mid 1960s while still a Morgan State University physics major (who was thought of as a math major by others in the math department), I was intrigued by a very interesting question posed by one of my fellow students. We were involved in an informal conversation when one...