Wednesday, July 14, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
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Section A · Page 7
Architect captures'40s Kansas in mini form
The Associated Press
DONORA, Pa. — Tom Nichols has an eye for detail as keen as any landscape architect, but he's more likely to pick up a pair of tweezers than hedge clippers any day.
Nichels, who builds miniature landscapes, battlefields and towns for museums, is finishing a job for the Exploration Place science and children's museum in Wichita, Kan.
The 49-foot-by-30-foot model of a Kansas landscape during the 1940s will be separated into 45 pieces and shipped to Wichita in September in a refrigerated truck that will spare the tiny wax trees from melting. Nichols will spend about six months in Wichita setting it up.
Nichols and Al DeSena, president of the Wichita museum, both worked for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and knew one another.
He started working on the Kansas model in 1995 and drove across the state from Denver to Kansas City to research the project. One-third of Kansas' 105 counties will be represented in the $500,000 platform.
"When I had the first conversation about the project, I said, 'It should be easy because there are no trees in Kansas,' "Nichols said at his shop at an industrial park in Donora, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh.
Nichols farmed out some of the work to expert model builders around the country. A woman in Washington County made a farm, and a craftsman in Kentucky made a bridge. Nichols and his wife also made many of the buildings.
The setting is Kansas in early summer, just before the wheat harvest.
"We wanted to go back about 50 years. The baby boomers from that era are now grandparents. They can relate to the '40s with their children and grandchildren," Nichols said.
Detail on Nichols' buildings includes the lace curtains inside the windows. He works 12 hours a day and shows some of the results off at his internet site, www.minidisplay.com.
"It culminates everything I have ever been interested in — architecture, history, culture. We're able to do scenery and animation, whether you want a historical battlefield or a golf course," he said.
Marijuana linked to other drug use
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Young people who smoke marijuana are far more likely than nonusers to move on to harder drugs, a substance abuse research group concludes in a report that opposes efforts to legalize or decriminalize nonmedical marijuana.
"Teen experimentation with marijuana should not be considered a casual rite of passage," said Joseph Califano, chairman and president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
"Teens who smoke marijuana are playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette," he said.
The center's report was released as the House Government Reform Committee
held a second hearing yesterday on the pros and cons of decriminalizing drugs. Testifying were former Drug Enforcement Administration head Thomas Constantine and advocates of relaxed laws on marijuana use.
"Marijuana stands convicted as a gateway drug," Califano said, citing conclusions in the report that youngsters 12 to 17 years old who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine than those who do not.
Other studies have drawn different conclusions about the link between marijuana and more potent drugs. The National Institute of Medicine, in a study last March on the medical uses of marijuana, said that while the drug can cause respiratory disease, there is no evidence that it leads to other drug use.
The Califano report, which focuses on nonmedical use of marijuana, said the drug is especially dangerous for teens, impairing short-term memory, stunting intellectual and emotional growth and increasing the likelihood of unprotected sex, as well as leading to the use of other drugs such as cocaine or heroin.
It said that of 182,000 teens and children who entered treatment in 1996 for substance abuse, nearly half. 48 percent, were admitted for marijuana abuse or addiction.
That compared to 19 percent for alcohol and a secondary drug, 12 percent for alcohol alone, 3 percent for smoked cocaine, 2.4 percent for methamphetamines and 2.3 percent for heroin.
The report concluded that the legalization of marijuana would surely increase use among teen-agers and children. But it also opposed mandatory sentences for possession of small amounts of marijuana, saying prosecutors and judges should be given wide discretion in order to encourage teens to stop using the drug.
"Mandatory sentences are particularly insidious where teens convicted of possession of marijuana are concerned," Califano said.
The report said that 70 million Americans have tried marijuana, making it the nation's most commonly used illegal substance. In 1998, almost 23 percent of 12th graders said they had smoked marijuana within the past month, and just under one-half had tried marijuana during their lives.
Congress debates high-tech exports
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Easing export controls on powerful data and voice-scrambling technology will hamper efforts to track down terrorists and other criminals, the nation's top two law enforcement officials told Congress.
Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh registered Clinton administration objections to encryption-decontrol legislation that is widely supported by high-tech companies.
They said increasing numbers of terrorist groups, drug traffickers, child pornographers and financial criminals already are using the scrambling technology to avoid detection and frustrate prosecution.
Any further easing of restrictions will make U.S. made encryption products
all the more available and will be devastating to law enforcement and damage national security, Freeh told the House Armed Services Committee.
It would also reduce any incentive for the industry voluntarily to develop technology both to protect electronic commerce and to give law enforcement a "key" to unscramble the information with a court's approval, Freah said.
"Terrorists are now actually using encryption, which means that in the future we may wiretap a conversation in which the terrorists discuss the location of a bomb soon to go off, but we will be unable to prevent the terrorist act because we cannot understand the conversation," Reno said.
High-tech industry officials said encryption is important to the future of
worldwide networking and is already widely available outside the United States. It is a vital element in protecting business dealings, retail transactions on the Internet and the privacy of e-mail, the officials said.
"Overly restrictive controls will either stall the networking market or create a major market advantage for foreign competitors," Elizabeth Kaufman, a Cisco Systems executive, told the committee.
She said that even with the decontrol legislation, industry was willing to work with government on a way to give law enforcement access to unscrambled data without compromising the customer's security.
Rep. Floyd Spence, R-S.C., the committee chairman, opposed lifting current restrictions on encryption exports. He said that the legislation also could put the
nation's military at greater risk.
But Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel's senior Democrat, said it was a matter of seeking the right balance between protecting electronic privacy and recognizing legitimate law enforcement and national security needs.
"It would be both tragically ironic and unconscionable for Congress to make it easier for an adversary to do harm to Americans; at the same time, we are working as a government to improve security for Americans all over the world," Spence said.
The legislation, by Rep Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., has been referred to four separate House committees. A Senate version by Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., is advancing through the Senate.