Mr. Sindy will leave tonight after work with 48 of his friends from Arlington's Kurdish community. They will pile into seven minivans – each carrying seven people – to drive for 12 hours.

When they reach Nashville early Saturday morning, they will vote at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, the city's only polling place for the election. Then, they'll climb back into their minivans and head home to their families and jobs.

"It is a long drive, but you are with friends," Mr. Sindy said.

This is the second trip the voters will make to Tennessee in the last month. Registration for the vote also took place in Nashville.

The money and time required to travel to Nashville has kept many Dallas-area Iraqis from voting, and registration at polling places across the nation has been lower than expected. Only 3,930 registered in Nashville, down from the 16,000 officials had hoped to see.

Some local Iraqis said they could not get time off from their jobs or miss school. Others said they couldn't leave their families or afford airplane tickets.

Temer Tovi is heartbroken that he cannot participate in the historic day of Iraqi freedom, he said.

"I've got a business, and I have no time to travel for two days," said the owner of Mediterranean Cafe & Bakery in Richardson. "They should bring one to Texas. Anywhere in Texas, we would go."

Just another reason to repeal the Wright Amendment and allow Southwest to fly to Nashville from Love Field.

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?

His wife, Lynne, was seated next to him. Her coat has a hood, too, and it is essentially a parka. But it is black and did not appear to be functioning as either a name tag or a billboard. One wonders if at some point the vice president turned to his wife, took in her attire and asked himself why they seemed to be dressed for two entirely different events.

Here's the beginning:

Economists argue for free trade. They have two centuries of theory and experience to back them up. And they have recent empirical studies of how the liberalization of trade has increased productivity in less-developed countries like Chile and India. Lowering trade barriers, they maintain, not only cuts costs for consumers but aids economic growth and makes the general public better off.

Even so, free trade is a tough sell. "The truth of the matter is that we have one heck of a time explaining these benefits to the larger public, a public gripped by free trade fatigue," the economist Daniel Trefler wrote in an article last fall in The American Economic Review.

One problem, he argued, is that there is not enough research on how free trade affects industrialized countries like the United States and Canada. Another is that research tends to concentrate on either long-term benefits or on short-term costs, instead of looking at both.

"We talk a lot about the benefits of free trade agreements, but when it comes to academics studying it, we know next to nothing in terms of hard-core facts about what happens when two rich countries liberalize trade," Professor Trefler, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.

His article, "The Long and Short of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement," uses detailed data on both Canadian industries and individual companies to address these gaps. (The paper is on his Web site at http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/trefler/) The study looks at the effect of tariff reductions, the simplest kind of liberalization.

Tariffs are usually not considered that significant in developed countries, where many major industries compete without such protection. But, Professor Trefler said, "they're not significant except where they matter."

Read the rest here. Unfortunately, to illustrate the article, the photo staff chose an industry to which this story doesn't apply. Automobiles were tariff-free before the Free Trade Agreement. In fact, one reason the productivity boost is so remarkable is that some major industries were already tariff-free. (I suggested something with beer, but I guess they didn't have a good photo.)

If you're at all inclined to wade through econometrics--or, for that matter, to just skip to the bottom line--I recommend downloading the Trefler paper. The non-mathematical parts are unusually well written for an academic piece. A personality actually comes through the prose, even making an occasional self-deprecating joke.

Yeah, it's a pain. The following excerpt from an internal document (with anything remotely sensitive redacted) gives a hint of just how much, but I can tell you from personal experience that there's nothing quite like dealing with this stuff for the first time, under the kind of deadline pressure characteristic of software release implementations, when obstacles have to be cleared in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. The new de facto size threshold for publicly-traded companies is one thing, but the stress these requirements are placing on individuals is something else:

Passed in 2002, Sarbanes-Oxley requires Information Technology groups to test, evaluate, reconcile, document, publish, and monitor internal control procedures that directly impact financial information. As such, [deleted] has identified key financial applications that require compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. Those impacted applications can be viewed on the [deleted] web site under [deleted].

Based on the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and the compliance audit completed, [deleted] will be making changes to our policies and controls to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. The following policy changes will be made effective on [deleted].

– Category 4 change requests for Sarbanes-Oxley identified applications will no longer be accepted.

– Any automated work order that is a code migration or affects batch scheduling (this includes temporary, permanent and adhoc executions) for Sarbanes-Oxley applications must be tied to a Change Request. These automated work order types will not be implemented to production without a corresponding approved Change Request.

– Change Requests for Sarbanes-Oxley applications are required to have a business unit point of contact (name and phone number) for change request approval. The business unit point of contact is defined as a non-[deleted] associate who is authorized to make such a request.

– Change Requests for Sarbanes-Oxley applications are required to have a business unit point of contact (name and phone number) to perform user acceptance testing of the change.

– Business unit point of contact (name and phone number) must send an email to the implementer signifying formal User Acceptance prior to code being placed into production. This email will be documented in [deleted].

– [deleted] infrastructure/maintenance activities will be reviewed by change type to determine if a business unit point of contact is also required. This list of change types will be published when complete.

As I write this, I am -- among other things -- pulling together a list of Sarbanes-Oxley related questions which now appear in our online ticketing systems, with typical answers, so that our people won't have to hack their way through a bureaucratic jungle on a daily basis. Your tech-writer correspondent is dead on -- there's definitely a market for people who can deal with this stuff.

Now for the good news. I expect things to get better with time, not because the regs will ease up, but because process developers like me will gnaw away at this stuff until it's (relatively) painless. The analogy is airport security, where a barrage of questionable (to say the least) requirements resulted, initially, in high costs and annoying delays; but three years on, the procedures -- at least in the airports I've been in -- have been significantly streamlined.

Recall our discussion about process improvements in general of a few months back; my intuitive guess (is there any other kind?) would be that with sufficient dedication, compliance costs could be halved every three years. See also the Kamm quote at the end of my sig. We're not marching toward dystopia; there is a deal of ruin in a nation, as I believe Adam Smith said. That multi-hundred-million-dollar revenue figure for the smallest possible public company may drop quite dramatically within this decade.

This is no defense of Sarbanes-Oxley, which I regard as a triumph of conspiracy theorists who think that all publicly-traded corporations -- well, all corporations, actually; these are just the ones they can get to easiest -- are up to no good and must be constrained with the present-day equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws. Fuckers.

Blogging is light this week, because I'm working not only on my Times column but on a feature for a special Times section on small business. In an interview today, the CFO of the company I'm profiling said in passing that it's no longer feasible for businesses its size ($68 million in sales) to be publicly held. Fortunately for these founders, the grand visions they had at age 26--15 years ago--didn't come true. They built the business steadily, using retained earnings, and never went public. But similarly sized public companies are now looking to go private. Somehow I don't think this particular distortion does much to protect the public.

Orders received before February 2 will be filled promptly. (Orders received after then will be shipped on February 15, assuming I don't run out of books.) Please be sure to not only give me your shipping address but also to tell me to whom I should inscribe the book. Thanks!

Four years ago, Mr. Cunningham said, a state corrections officer raped him near the showers of a prison. Afterward, the inmate lay in bed, weeping. "When I was awake, I thought about wanting to die, because I didn't want to live with this," said Mr. Cunningham, 33.

Since 2000, at least 129 Texas prisoners, including Mr. Cunningham, have alleged that they were raped or had had sexual contact with corrections officers, according to state records. Allegations of inmate-on-inmate rape are even more frequent and appear to be increasing. Overall, the number of reported sexual assaults in Texas prisons has increased 160 percent, to 609 in 2004 from 234 in 2000.

Inmate advocates – who have launched a nationwide legal campaign against assaults and the complacency that they say allows them to flourish – say that the problem is greater than the statistics show, with the situation in Texas acute.

"I really have become convinced over the last three years or so that Texas is the prison-rape capital of the country," said Margaret Winter, a lawyer who represents two inmates who sued the prison system. "When prisoners report it, they are ignored, laughed at and often punished."

Read the whole thing.

Prison rape isn't a way to be "tough on crime." It is crime, whether perpetrated by prisoners or by guards. Because it's illegal, not a public policy, I'm a dubious about the success of an Eighth Amendment challenge. But at least these lawsuits bring some much-needed court discovery and public scrutiny.

His favorite entries so far: "I made the screen blue ... to match my eyes"; "Hi, I'm Bill. And this is my friend, Longhorn Reduced Media Version"; "A hot new amateur every day!"; "Thanks for the brownies, Steve"; "It's not the Blue Screen of Death, it's The Blue Screen of Desire"; and "... I'm waiting for your call. Dial 1-800-LONGHORN, now."

4) People who are arguing that it's stupid to generalise from means or distributions to individuals...are right, but only in a trivial, irrelevant way. The particular discussion at hand revolves around the fact that there are fewer women than men in many scientific disciplines, particularly, it seems to me from the outside, the ones that involve a great deal of rather abstruse math. We are looking at a population, not an individual, and it is entirely proper--nay, necessary--to discuss group averages. That we cannot divine any individual's ability from those averages is true, but irrelevant; we're looking at the group.

Look at it this way: I am 6'2 (1.88 metres), which puts me four standard deviations from the mean height of American women--approximately one tenth of one percent of American women will be as tall as, or taller than, I am.

Could we use the average of the female population to predict that I am not 6'2? No! I am 6'2. We would get the answer wrong if we tried to use the average predictively.

Could we use the average to bet, sight unseen, on whether or not I am taller than 6'1? Yes! Only 0.3% of the female population is taller than 6'1. If you had to bet, you'd bet against it. Of course, in my case you'd be wrong--but it would still be the right way to bet.

But do we need to bet? No! We can measure me. Similarly, physicists considering female candidates have lots of other means to assess their physics ability. They don't need to look at whether or not she's female.

But if we were looking at an organisation that only hired people who were taller than 6 feet because they needed them to reach very tall shelves, most of the employees would be men. We might infer discrimination, but we'd be wrong. It's just that innate differences would produce differing results for men and women. And if I showed up and they refused to hire me because I'm a women, and women have a very low probability of being that tall, that would be discrimination, because they can look right at me and see that despite being a member of a group with a lower mean height, I myself am in fact configured like a beanstalk.

As it so often does, the WaPost distinguished itself with a more sophisticated knowledge of relevant sources than demonstrated in newspapers to the north, quoting the eminent economic historian Claudia Goldin, who knows where the statistical bodies are buried on all sorts of labor market issues:

"I left with a sense of elation at his ideas," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor who attended the speech. "I was proud that the president of my university retains the inquisitiveness of an academic."

"Retains the inquisitiveness of an academic." Which implies that those who want to silence him do not. That's tough. And true.

I parsed the debate on sex roles in this Reason editorial.

Thirty-five years ago, an Episcopal minister self-published 100 copies of a slim job-hunting guide and gave them away at a conference for college chaplains, many of whom were facing layoffs. Soon he was getting requests for more and more copies. Two years later, the little book had a commercial publisher, the small Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, Calif. ''What Color Is Your Parachute?'' has since become a classic, the ''job hunter's bible,'' and sold more than 8 million copies. The 2005 edition, with a large grinning photo of its author, Richard N. Bolles, on the cover, was published in November. A lot has changed since the early 1970's, but not as much as we sometimes like to think. Job losses and career angst didn't start with the bursting of the tech bubble or the midlife crises of the baby boomers. Even way back when, white-collar workers, some of them highly trained technical experts, lost their jobs for reasons beyond their control. The first commercial edition of ''Parachute'' singled out aerospace engineers, whose profession was ''being phased out of our society.''

The book takes its title from the idea that sooner or later each of us is going to have to bail out of our current job, usually involuntarily, with only our enduring talents to support us: ''The time to figure out where your parachute is, what color it is, and to strap it on, is now -- and not when the vocational airplane that you are presently in is on fire and diving toward the ground,'' Bolles wrote in the 1973 edition.

''Parachute'' arrived on the scene when business practices and employee ideals and attitudes were beginning to shift. The postwar ''loyalty ethic,'' in which workers got security in exchange for obedience, was dying. More Americans were starting to look for personal fulfillment in their work, which made them increasingly likely to change jobs, while employers were becoming more ruthlessly pragmatic about layoffs. ''The view that there was loyalty between company and worker back then was also a myth,'' Bolles said in a 1999 interview in Fast Company magazine. ''Even then,'' he said, ''the conditions that produced the workplace realities of today were very much in place.''

The article's conclusion got compressed a bit for space reasons. Here's the original:

The old work ethic preached that liking your work wasn't important. The new one preaches that enjoyment is essential, even (in Bolles's 1972 formulation) "divine radar" indicating what you should be doing. Parachute's 2005 edition includes a chapter aimed at helping readers identify the transferable skills they most enjoy using and the environments in which they find the greatest satisfaction. Its title, "When You Lose All Track of Time," suggests a purely secular reading of Parachute's search for meaningful work.

Even if you don't believe that a higher power has given you a destiny on earth, every human being has the capacity to find what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls "flow"--the total engagement with some sort of problem solving, from climbing mountains to writing computer programs to knitting, that causes a person to lose track of time. Flow activities give people their happiest moments, and these activities are intrinsically rewarding, regardless of any greater meaning. The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that provides flow.

That message makes Parachute not only practical but intellectually contrarian. Protestantism, claimed Weber, divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty. Capitalism, he continued, "has destroyed" that delight "forever."

What Color Is Your Parachute? is an extended, market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.

For more on related themes, see my 1995 review of Charles Heckscher's White-Collar Blues, this oped piece on William Whyte's The Organization Man, and this lecture on the "power of play," derived from chapter seven of The Future and Its Enemies.

I note your reference in your website to the fact that Modernism Magazine cites the O. Winston Link Museum, located in the old Norfolk and Western Railway station in Roanoke as having removed the "COLORED" sign from above its door.

Let me point out that this sign was removed decades ago when segregation on public conveyances was no longer permitted nor tolerated. The station itself was closed in 1971, with the termination of passenger service, and subsequently used for offices until it was abandoned about 20 years later. The museum does discuss the fact that the station was a segregated facility in a text and illustrative panel installed inside the museum.

From the Library of Congress, here are a couple of vintage photos of the station, which was redesigned by Raymond Loewy in 1947:

As a former Rochestarian who returns there annually, I can attest to the appeal of the Wegman's experience. The local nickname for Wegman's biggest store in the Rochester area is "Mega-Weg." The quality and variety of foods and goods are amazing. The stores are clean, have wide aisles, and have more sensible floor plans than most other big grocery stores. (Wegman's does not mimic its competitors that put simple, common staples at opposite ends of their stores hoping that you'll buy something extra from the 20 aisles you walk past.) As you noted, Wegman's prices are higher than the big bargain groceries, but Wegman's value is unsurpassed.

We now live near Memphis, and the large groceries here (Schnucks, Kroger, and Wal-Mart Super Stores) can't hold a candle to Wegman's. The former two deliberately understock popular brand-name items hoping that customers will buy their lower quality, higher margin, in-house goods. My wife and I both are annoyed by this inconsiderate policy.

Doug Rubin '81 writes that there's now a Wegmans in Princeton, which has come a long way since the two of us were in college there:

Whole Foods just opened as well (but I hear it's very expensive)

Meanwhile the local (relatively small) Wal-Mart is being transformed.  Their stationery and housewares sections are being taken over by its grocery offerings which offer Cheerios, Pace Picante Sauce and Coca-Cola at "low prices every day".  It's a pit and a pain the check out, but it's cheap.  We've probably saved $400 or more on diapers there during the last 3 years!  

Three things about Wegman's that my wife and I are thrilled by:
1) their store brands are of the highest quality/value I've ever seen.
2) they go out of their way to buy local produce, which must be a hassle, but engenders relationships and "stickiness"
3) their in-store cafeteria(s, yes I've been to others) offer quality that exceeds the specialty ethnic restaurants (Indian, Chinese) in the area.

And, yes, they are always training and recognizing their employees.

And Reason's Jeff Taylor, who visited a Buffalo Wegmans in the summer, adds:

The produce was amazing, a result of what must be some serious attention to detail and a great quality-control system. It was there I encountered the Platonic form of peaches, the uber-peach, the one peach to rule them all. Almost as big as a grapefruit and positively erupting with that peachy smell of peachiness. We took pounds from the store and ate them raw with the abandon of zombies eating brains, grilled them for insane salads, pureed them for drinks. Then they were gone and, I think, we cried.

I find it hard to believe you can buy a decent peach, let alone a great one, outside the peach orchards and farmers markets of the South. But Jeff lives in North Carolina (not as good as South Carolina or Georgia for peach expertise but close), so I'll trust him.

Thanks to designer James Wondrack, president of the Upstate New York AIGA chapter, who took me to Wegmans when I was in Rochester last year speaking to the AIGA and a conference at RIT. One of the great things about all the traveling I do is that I don't have to wait for national press coverage to find out what's going on in the country.

DETROIT -- Automotive companies are caught in the tension between Americans' continuing thirst for speed and horsepower, and their nobler impulses toward better mileage and cleaner emissions. But there's no ambivalence about something else: Consumers relish vehicles that simply look sharp, making design itself the new rudder of the automotive marketplace.

The renewed preoccupation with design is understandable, given a little history. The '70s and '80s snuffed out the industry's bolder renderings, victims of safety and fuel-economy concerns. And auto makers spent the '90s essentially copying the unvariegated "jellybean" design of Ford's best-selling Taurus sedan. But global competition, the rise of the SUV and the digitization of the design process have combined to produce a profligate number of new vehicle types and models these days.

With quality and functional differences among products largely having narrowed over the past decade or so, eye-catching design can be decisive. "Both consumers and the car companies are ready to see more chances taken out there," says Chris Chapman, director of automotive design for DesignWorks USA, a unit of BMW. "People are kind of sick of the same old thing, and they're looking for something new."

Thanks to reader Lawrence Rhodes for sending this free link from the Opinion Journal site.

John Davis, chief executive of Pegasus Solutions Inc., figures Sarbanes-Oxley cost his Dallas-based technology services company nearly $1 million, or 2.5 cents a share in unrealized earnings. For a company with just under $200 million in 2004 revenue, that's a lot of dough.

"All of our controls were already in place," Mr. Davis says. "All we did was put them in writing."

Chief executive Jeff Rich says Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. spent an extra $8.5 million on Sarbanes compliance without changing its operations one iota.

"Sarbox should be called the Accounting Industry Rehabilitation Act," he says. "The only people benefiting from Sox are lawyers and accountants. That's ironic since they were part of the problem to begin with....

Sarbanes is actually bolstering ACS' acquisition pursuits, Mr. Rich says, pointing to its tender offer for Superior Consulting Holdings Corp. in Dearborn, Mich.

"In all candor," says Mr. Rich, "Superior is $100 million in revenue and too small to be a public company today."

Even with twice that much revenue at Pegasus, Mr. Davis says he feels the pressure.

"Quite frankly, we may be too small to be a public company," he says. "You're going to have to look at revenues probably in excess of $500 million a year before going public makes sense."

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