EFTA00226396

thereby in one act destroying a distinguished New England law firm. The shock was compounded by the 
fact that the remaining partners did not even try to reconstitute the firm, but instead interpreted this mass 
exodus as a sign that the firm could no longer survive. 
Closer examination reveals that the problems went back many years,perhaps several decades. Through 
the middle of the twentieth century, Hill and Barlow did indeed have a deserved reputation as a firm of 
outstanding lawyer statesmen who not only were leaders in litigation and trusts, but who also stood out for 
their service to the community. Yet, on my analysis, this sterling reputation turns out to have been a mixed 
blessing. By the 1970s and 1980s, the situation in law had changed dramatically throughout the land. 
Whether lamented or not, the era of the lawyer statesman was over. Law firms were becoming much larger 
and more internationalized; corporate law divisions and the high-metabolism specialty of mergers and 
acquisitions were growing morerapidly than other spheres; many large corporations built up their own in-
house legal teams; and individual lawyers were becoming far more mobile, as opportunities to make very 
large salaries materialized for those who were willing to jump ship. 
None of these trends in itself necessitated a de-professionalization of the law. And indeed, many 
moderately sized law firms in New England and elsewhere took steps to modulate these trends: they 
increased in size or developed distinctive niches; they actively sought largecorporate clients; and they 
reconfigured salary schedules to reward those lawyers who brought in the most business. Perhaps most 
importantly, the more reflective firms realized that law was becoming more ofa business; they recruited or 
trained professional managers; they were sensitive to the clout of specific partners and divisions; they paid 
close attention to changing patterns of income and expenses; they established governance vehicles whereby 
the most important members consulted regularly about trends and how best to meet them; they favored 
frequent, open, frank communications about all matters that materially affected the firm; and they were 
prepared, when necessary and with regret, to retire or marginalize partners who could not in any 
demonstrable way contribute to the well-being of the firm. 
According to our interviews with former members of Hill and Barlow, the firm did not seriously 
undertake any of these measures. Memberscontinued to take pride in the history of the firm, and many 
continued to serve the community in various ways. But they did not work any longer as a firm of dedicated 
partners (epithets such as 'a hotel forlawyers and 'university-style governance were used 11 
informants).Costs spiraled, but steps were not taken to increase income commensurately (or to lower costs, 
for example, by reducing the number of associates or moving to less luxurious quarters). Most damaging, 
the lawfirm never was able to create a governance structure that was widelyrespected by its members and 
that could meet these various challenges. On my analysis, it was the combination of the inordinately 
successful real estate group, on the one hand, and the ensemble of dysfunctional governance structures, on 
the other, that made the firm's closure inevitable. 
I do not conclude that the Hill and Barlow partners necessarily compromised their practice of law per 
se. I do believe that both the real estate division, and the remaining partners who failed to deal decisively 
with the shifting terrain, undermined law as a profession. Inacting in their own self-interest, they 
contributed to the destruction of the accumulated wisdom, public service emphasis, and pluralistic view of 
legal practice that had once characterized Hill and Barlow.To the extent that law simply becomes a 
collection of free-agent practitioners, for sale to the highest bidder, or a set of employees of multinational 
corporations, it will indeed be a diminished profession. 
Accounting became a technical rather than back-of-the-envelope practice in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries with the widespreaduse of double-entry bookkeeping and other financial and business 
innovations. With the rise of corporations a century ago, and the adventof increasingly complex taxation 
and investment policies, the role of the independent certified auditor gained steadily in importance. 
Particularly at times of crisis, such as the stock market collapses during the first two-thirds of the twentieth 
century, the public was reminded of the importance of the accounting professions. Perhaps to hisadvantage, 
the auditor was seen as a rather colorless individual whofollowed technical rules in the manner of the 
archetypical Dickensian clerk or Weberian bureaucrat. 
Within the profession and amongst those with close ties to the profession, there was keen awareness of 
crucial shifts that began in the1970s. The wall that had once separated auditors from the firms theywere 
monitoring had begun to crumble. Increasingly, personnel circulated between accounting firms and well-
heeled client firms. Accounting firms set up consulting branches that worked with client firms; over time 
EFTA00226816

the amount of consulting business often equaled or even surpassed that dedicated to the monitoring of the 
books. In the go-go financial milieu of the 1980s and 1990s, as documented in our Good Work Project and 
many other sources, markets became increasingly dominant in many spheres of life. Indeed, at the end of 
the 1990s,1 made a quip that turned out to be uncannily prophetic: "If markets come to control everything, 
in the end there will be only one profession--accounting. And that is because only the auditors will be able 
to tell us whether the books are on the level or have been cooked." 
But like most of the public, I was unprepared for the huge accounting scandals that captured the 
headlines at the start of the twenty-first century. Led by the renowned firm Arthur Andersen, all the 
majorfirms were shown to have abandoned their professional disinterestedness (or 'independence,' as it is 
referred to in the profession) in flagrant ways. It was no longer unusual for accountants to hold stock in, 
work for, or consult for the firms they were allegedly monitoring;and for their part, firms went out of their 
way to provide lucrativework and extra perks for the supposedly independent auditors. 
The smoking gun was the relationship between energy giant Enron and the flagship professional 
services firm of Arthur Andersen. These rums met powerful sanctions: bankruptcy with possible jail terms 
for those high-level managers whose involvement crossed the line from compromised to frankly bad work. 
At the time of this writing, other major accounting firms like Ernst and Young and 
PricewaterhouseCoopers have also had to pay significant penalties; punitive new regulations and legislation 
have been put into place; and many other business firms--established ones like General Electric and Xerox, 
newer ones like Tyco, WorldCom, and Global Crossing--have undergone probes or have even dissolved. 
Mean-while, the tacit or demonstrable complicity of members of boards of directors has been amply 
documented, and the domain of accounting as a whole lies very much under suspicion, its standingas a 
profession open to strong challenge. 
The core value of the profession of public accounting is captured in the descriptor public.' Accountants 
receive training, licenses, and status commensurate thereto on the assumption that they will represent the 
public's interest in their review of the financial practicesof individuals or corporations. Should the books 
appear questionablein any way, it is the duty of the public accountant to raise questions to the responsible 
individual or corporation, and, if necessary, to refuse to certify that the accounts conform to generally 
accepted accounting principles. 
Whether one thinks of journalism, law, or accounting, it is tempting to posit a golden age--a time when 
professionals were professionals, and the vast majority exemplified the highest values of the domain. But 
the mixed reputation of lawyers and journalists over the decades reveals the superficiality of such an 
analysis. And when one examines the history of accounting in the United States in the twentieth century, 
one also discovers an oscillation between periods when auditors were under suspicion for questionable 
practices, and periods when corrective measures were installed and the prestige of the profession was 
restored. Indeed, such a swing of the pendulum can be seen in thehistory of Arthur Andersen. 
At the start of the twentieth century, like other accounting firms, Andersen carried out non-audit 
services. By the 1960s, it was possible to become an Andersen consultant without having worked as an 
auditor for the two prior years; and in 1973, a separate consulting arm of the firm had been set up. In the 
late 1970s, CEO Harvey Kapnick tried unsuccessfully to split the time into two separate entities and was 
pressured to resign thereafter. During the 1980s, the consulting arm of the firm became increasingly 
powerful, and the lines between consulting and auditing blurred. By the late 1980s, the tension between the 
accounting and consulting anus was so acute that the two parts ofthe firm were in constant argument and 
occasionally in court. By 1999, Arthur Andersen had become the slowest growing of the Big Five 
accounting firms, and in 2000, the consulting arm, Accenture, finally became a wholly independent entity. 
As is now well known, Andersen had become the auditor for Enron. Widely touted as a model for a 
new kind of company for a new millennium, Enron trafficked in the selling of energy (especially gas) and 
energy futures. In 2000, it was, on paper, the seventh largest firm in the United States, with a book value of 
100 billion dollars. In 2001, the Enron bubble burst when it became clear that much of the corporation's 
alleged size, activity, and profitability was in fact fraudulent, the result of imaginative advertising and 
improper accounting. Andwhen Arthur Andersen began to shred its Enron documents, the fate ofthe firm 
was sealed in the eyes of the media, the general public, and, eventually, the legal system. 
EFTA00226817

Studies of the Andersen-Enron connection reveal that it had been deeply compromised for years. 
Enron was one of Andersen's largest clients; it paid a total of over fifty million dollars a year to Andersen's 
auditing, consulting, and tax divisions. Employees shuttled back and forth between the two companies with 
such ease and frequency that it was sometimes difficult to tell for which they were working; at least eighty 
former Andersen auditors were working for Enron. The supposed line between the company being audited 
and the auditors evaluating the books of that company had become so blurted that, in effect, itno longer 
existed. And yet it has proved difficult to demonstrate sheer illegality. This is both because the nature of 
Enron's business was so new and so convoluted, and because so much of the role of the auditor/accountant 
remains an issue of professional judgment rather than of sheer legality or illegality. 
In my view, the chief embodiment of compromised work in the accounting profession is the condition 
of wearing two hats--hats that inevitably pit key interests against one another. On the one hand, as 
representatives of the public, auditors and their umbrella organizations are supposed to remain at arm's 
length from the companies they monitor. On the other hand, the excitement and the monetary gains 
availablefor consulting prove irresistibly seductive for many auditors and their umbrella organizations. One 
cannot at the same time offer advice and feedback to companies while standing disinterestedly apart from 
their practices: in effect, one has become judge and litigant at the same time. 
In each of the cases discussed, the background history covered a much longer period than I had 
anticipated. Jayson Blair's case reflected larger-scale trends at the Times, dating back to the 1980s and 
exacerbated by the appointment of a new managerial regime in 2001: Hill and Barlow failed to recognize. 
let alone adapt to. forces that middle-sized law firms had been confronting for decades; and Arthur 
Andersen encountered longstanding tensions in the accounting profession regarding appropriate relations 
with clients. Nor are the cases restricted to the particular examples on which I happened to focus: Within 
journalism, similar scandals had occurred in recent years at The BostonGlobe, The Washington Post, USA 
Today, and The New Republic. Severaldozen major law firms in Boston and elsewhere had either closed 
downor were absorbed into larger and more profitable firms. In recent years, each of the Big Five 
accounting firms saw significant scandals; comparable 'multiple hats' problems arose in Europe and Asia: 
and compensatory legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act caused turbulence in a great many American 
corporations. Whatever their usefulness for conceptualization and exposition, the three levels of analysis 
that I had selected turned out to be more closely related than I had expected. 
If the study of good work is in its early adolescence, then the examination of compromised work is in 
its infancy. Finn conclusions would be decidedly premature. And yet, given the importance of the problem, 
and its indissoluble links to issues of good work, a ■ 
summary comments are in order. 
Because persons and institutions can go bad for any number of reasons, isolated cases of compromised 
work cannot be prevented. What is susceptible to treatment is the soil in which compromised work is likely 
to arise and thrive. Our three cases and others that could have been treated suggest that superficial signs of 
alignment can in fact be the enemies of good work. Respected institutions like The New York Times, Hill 
and Barlow, and Arthur Andersen create in their members--and in the general public--the belief that these 
institutions are inherently good and above suspicion. Those assigned the job of surveillance internally or 
externally may become lax, and, accordingly, those who are tempted to practice compromised work may 
find an unexpectedlypromising breeding ground. (In writing about the Jayson Blair case in The New 
Yorker of June 30, 2003, Elizabeth Kolben said that this "paper of record" cannot afford to "check up" on 
its employees; it hasto assume they are trustworthy.) 
Indeed, these circumstances obtained in each of our three examples: layson Blair was on the make: 
Raines and Boyd wanted to remake the culture of the Times even at the cost of violating its most 
imponantvalues. And while various alarm bells tolled, none sounded loudly enough or insistently enough 
to be heard. Despite the enviable reputation of Hill and Barlow, many lawyers left the partnership starting 
in the 1980s; the particular requests of the real estate group were not taken seriously enough; and attempts 
to address the issue of financial survival and partnership communication were undertaken too late andwith 
too little sense of urgency. Arthur Andersen had actually resisted temptations to enter the consulting world. 
But when it finally succumbed, it entered with a vengeance--and despite warnings about conflicts of 
interest. Spokespersons for the firm continued to enunciate the fundamentals of accounting, but too many 
partners and workers were trying to wear two incompatible hats. When the ambivalent Andersen 
encountered the swashbuckling Enron, a disaster was in the making. 
EFTA00226818

In each case, superficial features and blandishments obscured the central values of the domain. During 
the Blair-Raines period at the Times, scrupulous and fair reporting was sacrificed to the 
immediatelyaccessible and sexy. At Hill and Barlow, the norms of an effective partnership were 
undermined, as lawyers and entire departments went their own selfish way. And sometime in the last few 
decades, those responsible for the atmosphere of an accounting company forgot that it was supposed to be a 
public trust. Those on the inside should have seenthese problems and made loud noises, but efforts to right 
the culture were too weak and ineffective. And so in each case it took a dramatic event--Blait's plagiarism, 
the real estate department's exodus, the Enron meltdown--to reveal what should have been clearer to those 
onthe outside and clearest to those entrusted with preserving and embodying the values of the domain. 
What happens when such a critical point is reached? It is possible, of course, that the domain will 
continue to deteriorate, and may come to be replaced altoget er. Newspaper editor Harold Evans has 
quipped, "The problem many organizations face is not to sta in business but to stay in journalism" The 
i 
lawyer statesman no longer exists; it remains unclear whether he is being replaced by a viable option, or 
whether lawyers have just become high-priced free agents or cogs in a corporate legal machine. And if 
there are too many Enrons and Global Crossings, the Big Five will dwindle to Little Zero--and it is not 
clear whether the books will be monitored in the future by independent accountants, government officials, 
or private investigators. 
It is also possible that these professions will continue to survive but attract a different type of person 
with different kinds of values. With few exceptions, for example, broadcast television joumalismexists as 
entertainment rather than as news. Totalitarian countries have bookkeepers, but, as the old joke goes, they 
produce "whatever numbers you would like us to produce." And it is certainly possible tohave lawyer 
whores who sell their services to the highest bidder. Insuch cases, those who want to know what is really 
happening in the world, whether the books are really accurate, or whether they can get a fair trial, will no 
longer look to the members of the ascribed profession. 
One goal of the GoodWork Project is to help bring about a happier scenario. Professions will always 
feel pressures of one type or another, and, at the time of powerful market forces, these pressures can be 
decisive. The forces cannot be ignored; they must be dealt with--but they must not be succumbed to. Those 
individuals, institutions, andprofessions that actively cope with these forces while adhering to the central 
and irreplaceable values of the domain are most likely to survive and to thrive. 
How to do this? In our project, we speak of the four Ms that help to propagate good work (these were 
initially designed to address individuals, but they can be applied as well to institutions and even whole 
professions). The Ms seek answers to the following questions: Whatis the mission of our domain? What are 
the positive and negative models that we must keep in mind? When we look into the mirror as individual 
professionals, are we proud or embarrassed by what we see? And: When we hold up the mirror to our 
profession--or, indeed, our society--as a whole, are we proud or embarrassed by what we see? And, if 
thelatter, what arc we prepared to do about it? 
I suggest that if the individuals and institutions described here had perennially posed these questions 
and tried to answer them in a serious, transparent way, they would not have become targets for our study. 
Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the 
Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the last decade, he has codirected the Good Work Project with 
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. Gardner has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 
1995. 
[cl 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 
1 I thank Jeffrey Epstein for his support of these investigations. 
2 I thank Ryan Modri, Paula Marshall, and Deborah Freier for theirinvaluable research efforts. 
3 Technically, Hill and Barlow became a corporation in 1992. 
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270 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2005 Telegraph Group Limited 
All Rights Reserved 
The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) 
November 29. 2005 
SECTION: FEATURES; Science; Pg. 26 
LENGTH: 1091 words 
HEADLINE: A DIY guide to saving Planet Earth Human survival depends on problem fixing not 
avoidance • in particular learning how to cool down our planet, says David Deutsch 
BYLINE: David Deutsch 
BODY: 
Let's start with a couple of ideas that everyone knows. The first - dramatically named Spaceship Earth -
is that our planet is uniquely suited to us and our survival. The universe outside is implacably hostile; if we 
mess up our spaceship, we have nowhere else to go. The second is that, despite our traditional self-image, 
human beings are not the hub of existence: as Stephen Hawking famously put it, we're just a chemical scum 
on the surface of a typical planet in orbit around a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy 
Everyone knows these things, yet they are both false. In fact, if you were looking for a pair of truths so 
important that it's worth carving them on blocks of stone and reciting them every morning before breakfast, 
you could do a lot worse than to carve denials of those two ideas 
Are we at a typical place? Most places in the universe are not on a planet, or even in a galaxy. Travel 
right outside the galaxy • say, 100,000 light years - and you still haven't reached a typical place. You will 
have to go about 1,000 times as far, into deep, intergalactic space, so remote that if the nearest star were to 
explode as a supernova, it would be too faint to see. It's also very cold, less than three degrees above 
absolute zero. And it's empty: less than one millionth the density of the highest vacuum that scientists can 
currently attain. 
That is how unlike Earth a typical location is. Yet the two are similar in one remarkable way. 
Take a telescope and gaze even further out than where we've just been, at a "quasaf. That was 
originally short for "quasi-stellar object", meaning "it looks like a star". But we now know what it really is. 
Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the centre of some galaxy collapsed towards a super-
massive black hole. Intense magnetic fields directed some of the matter and gravitational energy of that 
collapse back out into intense jets, illuminating the surrounding gas with the brightness of a trillion suns. 
Billions of years later on the other side of the universe, a certain kind of chemical scum can accurately 
describe, model, predict and explain what those jets really are. One physical system, the human brain. 
contains an accurate working model of an utterly dissimilar one, a quasar. Not just a superficial image but 
an explanatory model embodying the same mathematical relationships and causal structure. That's 
knowledge. 
And if that weren't amazing enough, the faithfulness of this model is continually increasing. That's the 
growth of knowledge. So this chemical scum is different. It models, with ever-increasing precision, the 
structure of everything. Our planet, thanks to us, is a hub that contains within itself the structural and causal 
essence of the rest of physical reality. 
This doesn't require any special physics or miracle. Just matter and energy - and evidence, with which 
we chose between rival explanations of what is really out there. In intergalactic space, these three 
prerequisites are at their lowest ebb: it's empty, cold and dark. 
EFTA00226820

But imagine a solar-system-sized cube of intergalactic space. That cube still contains a million tons of 
matter. Which is more than enough, say, to build a fusion-powered space station complete with scientists 
who might be collecting evidence to create an open-ended stream of knowledge, just like us - if the right 
knowledge were there to start it off. 
Therefore we are not in a uniquely hospitable place either. If intergalactic space is capable of creating 
an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost anywhere. And the limiting factor, both there and 
here, is not physical resources but knowledge. 
The Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has written a book about our vulnerability to scientific 
accidents, terrorism using weapons of mass destruction and other dangers: he thinks civilisation has only a 
50 per cent chance of surviving this century. But I believe our survival depends not on chance but on 
whether we can create the relevant knowledge in time. It always has depended on that, and always will. The 
vast majority of all species and all civilisations that have ever existed are now extinct. If we want to be the 
exception, our only hope is to harness the one feature that distinguishes our species and our civilisation 
from all others, namely our special relationship with the laws of physics: our ability to create new 
knowledge. 
Take global warming. According to the best available scientific theories, it is too late to avoid a global-
warming disaster. For if it's true that our best option is to suppress carbon-dioxide emissions with the Kyoto 
protocol at a cost of hundreds of billions of pounds, then that's already a disaster by any reasonable 
measure. 
And those measures aren't even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it a little. Most 
likely it was already too late before anyone even knew about it: in the 1970s, the best available science was 
telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new Ice Age that would kill billions. The 
lesson seems so clear that I am baffled that it does not inform public debate: it is that we cannot always 
know. 
No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. 
Therefore, societi needs to shift its stance from problem avoidance to problem fixing.
 world is abuzz 
with plans to cut emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to cool the planet. Or to thrive on 
a warmer one. And not at all costs, but efficiently. Some such plans exist: swarms of mirrors in space that 
would deflect sunlight away from the Earth; encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide, 
and so on. Such problem-fixing ideas, currently mere fringe research, ought to be at the heart of 
humankind's approach to an unknowable and dangerous future. The ability to put things right, not the 
impossible prescience needed to stave off all harm in advance, is our only hope of survival. 
So take those two stone tablets and carve the two denials I spoke of. On the first, carve: problems are 
inevitable. And on the second: problems are soluble. 
David Deutsch is a professor of physics at Oxford University. This month he won the 5100,000 "Edge 
of Computation" prize, funded by the philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein, for his work on quantum computers. 
When he first proposed quantum computation in 1985, it seemed only a theoretical possibility. But the past 
decade has seen simple quantum computers that many believe will pave the way to a scientific revolution. 
LOAD-DATE: November 29, 2005 
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233 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2006 Associated Press 
All Rights Reserved 
The Associated Press State & Local Wire 
March 17, 2006 Friday 11:52 PM GMT 
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS 
LENGTH: 1513 words 
II EADLINE: A package of news briefs from the Caribbean 
BYLINE: By The Associated Press 
BODY: 
CARIBBEAN: Sugar producers in final push to get more EU aid 
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) The Caribbean will send another team to several European capitals in 
a final push to get more aid for the region's sugar industry after large subsidy cuts were imposed in January•, 
an official said Friday. 
Representatives from the African, Caribbean and Pacific trade group head to Europe in April, 
following a first group that went in early March seeking extra funds to deal with the EU's 36-percent cut in 
sugar subsidies. 
The EU for years gave its former colonies in the Caribbean. Africa and the Pacific preferential access 
to its markets and paid high pnces to encourage development. The World Trade Organization said the 
regime was unfair and ordered the bloc to reduce quotas and prices for sugar, as well as for bananas and 
cotton. 
The EU has earmarked USS47 million ([#x20ac)40 million) in aid for the I8 sugar producing ACP 
countries in 2006. Caribbean sugar producers argue the reduced compensation is unfair because EU farmers 
who face the same subsidy cuts were to be compensated US$7.9 billion ([#x20ac)6.5 billion). 
Caribbean sugar producers include Guyana. Jamaica, Belize, Trinidad and Barbados. St. Kitts closed 
its industry after the cuts were first announced and because of rising production costs. 
ST. VINCENT: St. Vincent police find bullet that killed PM's press secretary 
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent (AP) St. Vincent police have recovered the single bullet that killed the 
prime ministers press secretary and have sent it to another Caribbean island for analysis. an official said 
Friday. 
The bullet was found imbedded in a seat in Glen Jackson's sport utility vehicle, said Bertram Pompey. 
acting police commissioner, who declined to specify where the bullet was sent for testing. 
Jackson, whose nude body was discovered Feb. 6 in the SUV near his home in the Cane Garden area 
outside the capital, was Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves' press secretary. He played major roles in the 
governing Unity Labor Party's successful 2001 and 2005 elections campaigns and hosted a radio talk show 
program. 
Gonsalves has said two Scotland Yard specialists were expected to join three British investigators 
working with local authorities to investigate Jackson's death. Thousands of people turned out Wednesday 
for his funeral. 
About 118,000 people live in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, an island chain in the southeast 
Caribbean Sea. 
EFTA00226822

JAMAICA: Jamaican man charged with killing six family members 
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) A man has been charged with killing six family members, including four 
children, whose bodies were found along a beach in western Jamaica last month, police said Friday. 
Michael McLean, 38, was charged Thursday with six counts of murder, police said. 
McLean, the common-law husband of one of the victims, Terry-Anne Mohammed, 42, has been in 
custody since Feb. 28. He turned himself into police because he said he feared for his life after neighbors 
accused him of the murders. 
Mohammed's burnt corpse was found by police about a half-mile a 
the mutilated body of her 
8-year-old son, Jessie Ogilvie. The bodies of Mohammed's niece, Farika 
McCool, 27, and two of 
her children were also found on the beach with their throats slashed. 
One week later, police say McLean led them to a nearby parish where George-McCool's 6-year-old 
daughter, Jhaid, was buried in a shallow grave. 
The slayings may be drug-related, said Arthur Martin, assistant commissioner of police. 
There were a record 1,669 homicides last year in Jamaica, which has recently received the help of 
Scotland Yard and London's Metropolitan Police to fight the crime wave. 
HAITI: New U.S. ambassador arrives, takes up post 
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) The United States will provide support to Haiti and work with the 
country's recently elected government, the new U.S. ambassador said Friday. 
Janet A. Sanderson, former ambassador to Algeria, also has served at diplomatic missions in Egypt, 
Jordan, Israel, Kuwait and Bangladesh. 
"With the election of a new president, new perspectives now present themselves to Haiti," she said 
while presenting her credentials to the Haitian government. "Haitians are looking for a better life. And they 
are ready though impatient to work ardently to succeed." 
President 
W. Bush nominated the career diplomat to replace James Foley, who left Haiti late 
last year. 
The United States is one of the main donors to Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. 
GUYANA: U.S. diplomat lambasts drug trade, tells police to stop fraternizing with criminals 
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) The drug trade is fueling a surge in violent crime and corruption in 
Guyana, and police must stop fraternizing with known drug traffickers, a U.S. official said Friday. 
The drug trade has grown from a trickle to a multimillion dollar business in the South American 
country, and communities are small enough for everyone to know who is involved in it, said Michael 
Thomas, the U.S. embassy's deputy chief of mission. 
"The public will not trust a police officer they see having lunch with a drug trafficker," said Thomas, 
who spoke at the end of an FBI-sponsored community policing training course. 
Drug trafficking accounts for an estimated 20 percent of the country's gross domestic product, the U.S. 
State Department said in its annual narcotics report released last week. Local media regularly report crimes 
that are believed to be related to drugs, the report said. 
Weak law enforcement has contributed to the problem, and U.S. federal agents believe anti-drugs 
agencies intercept a small amount of the cocaine that transits Guyana, the report said. 
PUERTO RICO: U.S. contractor gets 10-year sentence in education fraud case 
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) A U.S. contractor was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for his 
role in a USS4.3 million ((gx20ac)3.6 million) fraud scandal involving Puerto Rico's education department 
and its former chief. 
EFTA00226823

Norman Olson was convicted of four counts of bribery for paying more than USS73,000 
(11/x2Oac)60,400) in political favors as pan of a scheme uncovered four years ago. 
Olson, president and owner of National School Services, a Chicago-based business that provides 
teacher training and education consultants, said he plans to appeal. 
"I respect the decision of this court even though I feel that I am innocent of these charges," Olson said 
following his sentencing. 
Olson was found guilty of paying bribes to Victor Fajardo, former education secretary from 1994 to 
2000, in exchange for contracts with the department between 1999 and 2000. 
Fajardo pleaded guilty in 2002 to extorting some USS4.3 million from contractors doing business with 
his agency. 
U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS: Nobel Prize winning physicists debate universe structure in U.S. Virgin 
Islands 
CHARLOTTE AMALIE, U.S. Virgin Islands (AP) Twenty of the worlds top physicists, including 
three Nobel Prize winners, are meeting in the U.S. Virgin Islands to debate the structure of the universe. 
Nobel prize winners Gerardus 't Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and experimental and 
theoretical physics pioneer Stephen Hawking are among the minds that have converged in the island of St. 
Thomas to discuss some of physics most puzzling questions, such as the existence of black holes and 
alternate dimensions. 
"This is a remarkable group, as far as the level of people who are here," said Wilczek, who won the 
2004 Nobel Prize in physics with Gross and H. David Politzer for their explanation of the force that binds 
particles inside the atomic nucleus. 
Jeffrey Epstein, a New York money manager whose J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation helped 
finance the six-day conference that began Thursday night, said the U.S. Caribbean territory's natural beauty 
will help the scientists relax and concentrate. 
"You work best with friends. The idea is to take them for a walk on the beach. Take them on a 
submarine ride," he said. "I think some really great ideas will come out of this." 
CRICKET: Solanki spurs England A to series-leveling win 
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (AP) Captain Vikram Solanki spanked 92 as England A cruised to a series-
leveling 90-run triumph over West Indies A in their fourth one-day cricket international at Windward 
Cricket Club on Friday. 
The five-match rubber stood at 2-2 with the decider on Sunday at the same venue. 
Solanki, the Worcestershire right-hander, cracked nine fours off 121 balls to lead the visitors to a 
formidable 269 for nine off 50 oven. 
The home team limped to 179-9 off 50 oven in its pursuit. England fast bowler Sajid Mahmood 
engineered a top-order slide, claiming three for 33 while offspinner Gareth Batty took 3.26. 
Left-hander Ryan Hinds topscored for West Indies with a labored 32 off 70 balls. 
England A, batting first after winning the toss, stumbled early on as West Indies' new ball pair of 
Andrew Richardson and Tino Best reduced it to 15-2 in the fifth over. 
But Solanki and Jamie Dalrymple added 132 for the third wicket to till the balance back to their side. 
Dalrymple cracked four fours and three sixes in 62 off 75 balls before he was stumped trying to hit out 
at offspinner Omani Banks. 
LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2006 
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461 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2004 SOFTLINE INFORMATION, INC. 
Ethnic NewsWatch 
Forward 
April 23, 2004 
SECTION: Vol. CVII: No. 31; Pg. 6 
SLI.ACC-NO: 0604FWDM 104 000012 
LENGTH: 936 words 
HEADLINE: Fund Helps Persecuted Scholars Reach Safe Havens 
BYLINE: Popper. Nathaniel 
BODY: 
In a seemingly different life, Ahmed Subhy Mansour was a scholar at 
Cairo's venerated Al-Azhar University. He studied the history of dictatorship 
in Islam and the place of death and paradise in the Koran. But some aspect of 
his research did not go over well with the authorities, and in 1987 he was 
fired from his position and jailed for two months. 
Since then he has searched for a place to continue his work and his life, 
particularly after a number of newspapers accused hint of upholding Zionism, a 
crime punishable by death in Egypt. After 15 years of wandering, last year he 
finally found a new home -- as a research fellow at Harvard University. 
The match was made through the Scholar Rescue Fund, started two years ago 
by the Institute of International Education. Since it was created, the rescue 
fund has enabled Mansour and 44 other scholars to escape persecution in their 
home countries, and -- just as importantly for many of them -- to continue 
their scholarly work with a position at an American university. At Harvard, for 
example. Mansour has pushed ahead with the creation of a center for studying 
and reforming the Wahabi influence on Islamic institutions in America. 
The rescue fund is not the first such project run by the International 
Institute of Education, which also sponsors the Fulbright scholarship program. 
During the 1930s and 1940s. the institute's Emergency Committee in Aid of 
Displaced Foreign Scholars helped bring more than 330 scholars, most of them 
Jewish, from Nazi Germany to the United States, including such luminaries as 
philosopher Martin Buber, physicist Enrico Fermi and novelist Thomas Mann. 
Descendents of several of those earlier scholars, along with families of 
other Jewish refugees, gathered recently at the Park Avenue apartment of Jewish 
philanthropist Patti Kenner to raise money to help revive the rescue program. 
After cocktails, the crowd of about 100 guests retired to Kennees warm living 
room to sit on plush couches among pastoral landscape paintings. Four recently 
rescued scholars had been brought in for the evening, and two of them told 
their respective tales of persecution in Iran and Pakistan, which seemed much 
more than a world away from the safety of the Upper East Side. 
"I've had such an easy life," Kenner said after hearing the scholars 
speak, with a tone of gratitude that was representative of her guests. "I've 
never experienced anything difficult. We're all so lucky." 
EFTA00226825

The fund is being revived at a time when many observers are talking about 
global antisemitism reaching its highest levels since the 1930s, when the last 
rescue program was in operation. In the program's =rent incarnation, though, 
none of the 45 scholars who have been rescued are Jewish. 
The one scholar so far whose work was connected to the Jewish community 
was a Palestinian scholar, who felt threatened by both Israeli and Palestinian 
officials for his work analyzing the policy of political assassinations. 
"He was advocating less violence on both sides, and it made him unpopular 
with a lot of people." according to Robert Quinn, director of the Scholar 
Rescue Fund. 
The rescue fund has little in the way of guaranteed funds to ensure its 
survival. The goal of the night was to raise I million for an endowed chair in 
the name of Ruth Gruber, a 93-year old photojournalist who was on hand to tell 
of her trip to Europe in 1944, when she helped rescue 1.000 Jewish refugees. 
The Gruber chair is part of a larger effort to create a 10 million 
endowment that is being lefisefugee-turned-millionaire Henry 'mad, along 
with fellow businessmen 
Soros, Thomas Russo and Jeffrey Epstein. 
While the roster of scholars who have been helped suggests that the 
Jewish funding for the program does not come out of a narrow ethnic 
self-interest, the scars of Jewish history were evident beneath the surface of 
the appeals for donations at Kenner's apartment. 
The guest speaker for the night was Hanna Holborn Gray, who came over 
with her parents through the 1930s rescue program and went on to become the 
first female president of the University of Chicago. 
"In the 1930s, the German academic world was seen as a model, and one saw 
how quickly that could vanish," Gray recalled. 
Almost all of the 45 scholars funded in the last two years have hailed 
from either African or Muslim-majority countries. Many of them -- including 
Mansour and an Iranian scientist who spoke at Kenner's home -- have been 
punished for the pro-Western and pro-Israel slant in their work 
The hind's directors, however, have been astonished at the diversity of 
the 450 scholars from 84 countries who have applied so far. Many of the 
applicants come from far beyond the traditional disciplines of the humanities 
in which dissidents might be expected to work. 
The threat of bodily harm was a constant for most of the applicants, and 
Jarecki ominously remembered that many of the more than 5000 applicants who 
were turned down by the institute during the 1930s perished a few years later. 
A scholar from the Ivory Coast at Kenner's gathering described his own 
situation -- being forced to hide in the countryside after teaching political 
science courses that were critical of the government 
as a re-emergence of 
darker periods from the past. 
"This is the same old story," the African scholar said. "It is the 
history of the universe. The history of power corrupting people." 
Article copyright Forward Newspaper, L.L.C. 
JOURNAL-CODE: FW 
LOAD-DATE: September 30, 2004 
EFTA00226826

math-•counting 
attitude--positive 
10 
9 
66.6 
60.0 
speech act 
9 
60.0 
space--size 
8 
53.3 
space--grasping 
7 
46.6 
sound--speech 
7 
46.6 
logic-•universal 
7 
46.6 
quantification 
space--housing 
6 
40.0 
Table 2 Diverse schemes for story understanding 
domains 
Domain 
Representation/Reasoning 
Schemes 
space 
frame, generalized cylinder model, 
interval logic, occupancy grid 
time, action effects 
causal model, event calculus, 
situation calculus, transframe 
reactivity 
neural net, production system, 
subsumption architecture 
schemas, scripts 
finite automaton, frame, frame-
Aray, generalized Petri net 
subgoaling 
first-order logic, K-line, marker 
passing, semantic net 
emotions, attitudes 
microneme. neural net, temporal 
modal logic 
** Trademark or registered trademark of Cycorp, Inc. 
Cited references and notes 
(1.) M. Minsky, The Emotion Machine, Pantheon. New York (forthcoming). Several chapters are on 
line at http://web.media.mit.eduf minsky. 
(2.) The use of reading comprehension tests as a metric for evaluating story understanding systems 
was previously proposed in L. Hirschman, M. Light, E. Brcck, and J. Burger, "Deep Read: A Reading 
Comprehension System," Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics, College Park, MD, June 1999, Association for Computational Linguistics (1999). 
(3.)1. McCarthy, "Programs with Common Sense," Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisation 
of Thought Processes, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London (1958), pp. 77-84. 
EFTA00226827

(4.) J. McCarthy, "From Here to Human-Level Intelligence," Proceedings of the Fifth International 
Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'96), Cambridge, MA, 
November 1996, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA (1996), pp. 640-646. 
(5.) L. Morgenstern, "A Formal Theory of Multiple Agent Non-monotonic Reasoning," Proceedings 
of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA (1990), pp. 538-
544. 
(6.) E. M, 
"The Naive Physics Perplex," Al Magazine 19, No. 4, 51-79 (1998). 
(7.) D. Lenat, "Cyc: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure," Communications of the 
ACM 38, No. 11, 32.38 (1995). 
(8.) More details can be found in E. T. Mueller, "Story Understanding," to appear in Encyclopedia of 
Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group, London (2002). 
(9.) E. Charniak, Toward a Model of Children's Story Comprehension, Technical Report AITR-266, 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1972). 
(10.) R. C. Schank and R. P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, L. Erlbaum 
Associates, Hillsdale, NJ (1977). 
(II.) R. E. Cullingford, Script Application: Computer Understanding of Newspaper Stories, Technical 
Report YALE/DCS/tr116, Computer Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT (1978). 
(12.) R. Wilensky, Understanding Goal-Based Stories, Technical Report YALEIDCSAr140, Computer 
Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT (1978). 
(13.) M.G. Dyer, In-Depth Understanding, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1983). 
(14.) A. Ram, Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, 
Memory, and Learning, Technical Report YALE/DCSitr710, Computer Science Department, Yale 
University, New Haven, CT (1989). 
(15.) C. Dolan, Tensor Manipulation Networks: Connectionist and Symbolic Approaches to 
Comprehension, Learning, and Planning, Technical Report 890030, Computer Science Department, 
University of California, Los Angeles, CA (1989). 
(16.) E.T. Mueller, Natural Language Processing with ThoughtTreasure, Signiform, New York 
(1998), full text of book available on line at http://wvAv.signiform.comitt/booW. 
(17.) L. G. Alexander, Longman English Grammar, Longman, London (1988). 
(18.) E. M, 
Representations of Commonsense Knowledge, Morgan Kauffman, San Mateo, CA 
(1990). 
(19.) S. E. Fahlman, NEIL: A System for Repretenting and Using Real-World Knowledge, MIT 
Press, Cambridge, MA (1979). 
(20.) M. Shanahan, Solving the Frame Problem, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1997). 
(21.) D.A. Randell, Z. Cui, and A. G. Cohn, "A Spatial Logic Based on Regions and Connection," 
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan 
Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA (1992), pp. 165.176. 
(22.) B. Kuipers, "The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy," Artificial Intelligence 119, 191-233 (2000). 
(23.) P. Singh, "The Public Acquisition of Commonsense Knowledge," Proceedings of the AAAI 
Spring Symposium on Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access, 
Palo Alto, CA, March 2002, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (2002). 
(24.) M. Minsky, The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, New York (1985). 
(25.) A. Sloman, "Beyond Shallow Models of Emotion," Cognitive Processing I, No. 1 (2001). 
EFTA00226828

•I 
• 
The reactive and deliberative layers differ in that the deliberative layer evolved much later and 
requires a far more sophisticated long-term memory, as well as symbolic reasoning capabilities using a 
short-term reusable memory. The meta-management layer may have evolved at a still later time and 
requires explicit use of concepts referring to states of an information processing architecture. The earliest 
organisms, such as most existing organisms. were totally reactive. Deliberative and meta-management 
layers evolved later. Adult humans appear to have all three types of processing, which is probably rare 
among other animals. 
One of the key features that gives H-Cogaff its generality is the fact that different components, instead 
of forming parts of simple pipelines, can concurrently send information of various kinds to arbitrarily many 
other components, allowing a wide varlet' of feedback mechanisms and triggering mechanisms. 
In story understanding, the meta-management level may control the deliberative level in a number of 
ways. 
• If the deliberative level is spending too much time considering certain details and those details are 
not crucial to the story, the meta-management level will make the deliberative level stop. 
• If the deliberative level is spending too much time on a task that does not relate to the goal of 
reading the story, the meta-management level will make the deliberative level stop. 
• If the deliberative level becomes confused, the meta-management level will tell it to go back and 
reread. The deliberative level may have ruled out a possibility earlier that needs to be reconsidered in light 
of new information. 
Minsky further elaborates the H-Cogaff architecture into the six-level architecture called "Model Six" 
shown in Figure 2. (I) At its bottom lies a "zoo of instinctive subanimals" built upon ancient, ancestral 
systems that still maintain our bodies and brains. These include systems for feeding, breathing, heating, 
sleeping, and other systems that keep us alive. The deliberative and reflective levels are engaged to solve 
more difficult kinds of problems. The self-reflective level is engaged when the problems involve our 
relationships with our past and future selves. At the top lies machinery that we acquire from our societies. 
such as suppressors and censors, imprimers and values, and our various kinds of self-ideals. 
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED) 
Multiple reasoning and representation schemes and levels. An architecture of diversity would embed 
representations from natural language to micronemes (27,1) as depicted in Figure 3. The representations 
depicted include frames, transframes, frame-arrays, K-lines, and micronemes. A frame is a representation 
based on a set of slots to which other structures can be attached. (28) Each slot is connected to a default 
assumption that is easily displaced by more specific information. A transfrarne is a particular type of frame 
representing the causal trajectory between the initial and resulting states representing a situation that a legal 
action was performed on. A frame-array is a collection of frames that share the same slots, making it easy 
to change perspective with respect to physical viewpoint or other mental realms. A knowledge-line or K-
line is a wirelike structure that attaches itself to whichever resources are active in solving a problem. The 
K-line simplifies activation of those same resources when solving a similar problem in the future. 
Micronemes arc low-level features for representing the many cognitive shades and hues of a context. In 
Figure 3, new evolved structures are made from older lower-level ones, and the tower shown might be a 
plausible Darwinian brain-development scheme. 
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED] 
Table 2 shows just a few of the diverse representation and reasoning schemes useful for domains of 
story understanding. 
We propose to address the commonsense reasoning problem starting with stories for very young 
readers. However, to demonstrate all of the different ways we think when understanding a story. and what 
we would eventually expect a commonsense story understanding system to be able to handle, consider the 
following adult story (the discussion here is condensed from Reference I). 
Joan heard a ring and picked up the phone. Charles was answering her 
question about how to use a certain technique. He suggested she read a 
EFTA00226829

certain book, which he would soon bring to her since he had planned to be 
in her neighborhood. Joan thanked him and ended the call. Soon Charles 
arrived and gave her the book. 
Following are a few of the understandings an adult reader would have after hearing the story. 
• Joan heard a ring. She recognizes it as a telephone bell and feels the need to respond quickly. She 
knows how to use the telephone. 
• She picked up the phone. She is subsequently holding the phone to her car. 
• Charles was answering her question. Charles and Joan are not in the same room. Charles also knows 
how to use the telephone. 
• He suggested she read a certain book. Joan probably now feels some relief, since she knows where 
to find the knowledge she needs. 
• He had planned to be in her neighborhood. Joan will not be surprised when he arrives, because she 
will remember that he said he would come. 
• Ile gave her the book. Will she have to give it back? The story does not tell us that. 
These conclusions are based on reasoning and representations in many realms, as follow. 
The physical realm. In this realm, give might mean the motion of the book through space. This could 
be represented as a transframe that starts with Charles's hand holding the book and ends with Joan's hand 
carrying it. One must know a lot about physical things and how they behave in space and time. 
The social realm. In this realm, give may signify social acts that can alter the relationships of the 
actors. What were Charles's motives or his attitudes? Clearly, he was not returning a loan. Was he hoping to 
ingratiate himself? Or was he just being generous? How will Joan feel about Charles after he gives her the 
book? One must know a lot about what people arc, and a certain amount about how people work. 
The dominion realm. Given Charles gave Joan the book, one infers not only that Joan is holding the 
book, but also that, at least for a time, she possesses the right to use it. 
The conversational realm. How do conversations work? Consider how many elaborate skills are 
involved in a typical verbal exchange. One has to keep track of what is being discussed, what one has 
previously told the listener, and what the listener knows. Thus conversations are partly based on knowledge 
of how human memories work and what is commonly known in one's culture. One has to make sure the 
listener has understood what was said and why it was said. One certainly needs to know how to speak and 
to understand some of what one may hear. 
The procedural realm. How does one make a telephone call? One must first find a phone and dial a 
number. Then once the connection has been established, one says hello, talks a bit, and eventually leads 
into why one called. At the end, one says goodbye and hangs up the phone. Generally, such scripts have 
certain steps that are specified, while other steps provide for more room to improvise. 
The sensory and motor realms. Each of the above steps raises questions. For example, it takes only 
one second or so for one's arm to reach out in order to pick up the phone. How can one do that so quickly? 
The kinesthetic, tactile, and haptic realms. Using a telephone or any other physical object engages a 
great base of body-related knowledge and skills. One anticipates how the phone will feel against one's ear 
or sandwiched between shoulder and cheek. One expects certain haptic sensations such as the feel of the 
phone's weight. One strengthens one's grip when the phone starts to slip. 
The temporal realms. People have elaborate models of time where events are located in futures and 
pasts that are represented in relation to other times and events or in anecdotal stories. 
The economic realm. People know and reason about the costs incurred by each action or transaction in 
terms of money, energy, space, or time. 
EFTA00226830

The reflective realm. People know about themselves. One knows to some degree what one can or 
cannot do, what kinds of problems one can solve, how one's thinking and memory works, and what sorts of 
things one is able to learn. 
.Along with these positive kinds of knowledge, one also has negative knowledge about what might go 
wrong when using a phone. One must know what to do if one gets a wrong number, if there is no answer, 
or if a modem or intercept recording is reached. 
Example system with architecture of diversity. Thus far, the Sloman and Minsky architectures arc 
theoretical constructs and have not yet been implemented. However, there are examples of working 
systems that capture the spirit of such architectures. One such example is the NI system depicted in Figure 
4. (29) M integrates multiple reasoning processes and representations to serve as an assistant to a user 
collaborating with other workers within a virtual meeting room that hosts multimedia desktop 
conferencing. NI serves to recognize and classify the actions performed by the participants as well as the 
objects upon which the actions arc applied; example actions and objects are brainstorming on a whiteboard, 
coauthoring a document, and creating and working with other artifacts. 
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED] 
Next steps 
The two recent meetings held in March 2002 at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and in 
April 2002 on St. Thomas indicate that there is a dedicated group of recognized researchers interested in 
working together on a project to develop a solution to commonsense reasoning. We are now planning to 
undertake some of the next steps in a plan for such a project. The inspiration for this work comes from 
Minsky's past and forthcoming work. We close with his thoughts on how such a project might be realized, 
as follows. 
Our goal is to aim toward a critical "change of phase" that will come when we cross a threshold at 
which our systems know how to improve themselves. This is something that all young children can do, but 
we do not know enough about how they do it; so one goal of the project must be to develop better models 
of how normal people think. 
We will start by trying to implement some of the architectures proposed over the past decade. There 
already exist many useful schemes for representing and using knowledge mostly of a factual nature for use 
on what we call the deliberative level. However, there has not been enough work on the higher reflective 
and self-reflective levels that humans use, as they learn to improve their thinking itself. Any such system, 
we claim, will need additional kinds of meta-resources, which will include systems that manage, criticize, 
and modify the already operating parts of the structure. 
In the field of AI we already have many resources related to this, for example, neural networks, formal 
logic, relational databases, genetic programs, statistical methods, and of course the heuristic search, 
planning, and case-based reasoning schemes of earlier years. However, our goal is not to discuss which 
method is best. Instead we will try to develop a plan of how to incorporate into one system the virtues of 
many different approaches. Of course, each such scheme has deficiencies and our hope is that our system 
can escape from these by using higher-level, more reflective schemes that understand what each of those 
other schemes can do and in what context they are most effective. 
Table I Early reader corpus: top 10 domains of common 
sense 
Domain 
Number 
Percentage 
of Stories of Stories 
space--location 
14 
93.3 
space--motion 
It 
733 
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606 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2002 Gale Group, Inc. 
ASAP 
Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved. 
IBM Systems Journal 
September 1, 2002 
SECTION: No. 3, Vol. 41; Pg. 530; ISSN: 0018-8670 
IAC-ACC-NO: 91469723 
LENGTH: 6160 words 
HEADLINE: An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning; Technical forum. 
BYLINE: McCarthy, J.; Minsky, M.; Sloman, A.; Gong, L.; Lau, T.; Morgenstern, L.; Mueller, E.T.; 
Riecken, D.; Singh, M.; Singh, P. 
BODY: 
Although computers excel at certain bounded tasks that are difficult for humans, such as solving 
integrals, they have difficulty performing commonsense tasks that are easy for humans, such as 
understanding stories. In this Technical Forum contribution, we discuss commonsense reasoning and what 
makes it difficult for computers. We contend that commonsense reasoning is too hard a problem to solve 
using any single artificial intelligence technique. We propose a multilevel architecture consisting of diverse 
reasoning and representation techniques that collaborate and reflect in order to allow the best techniques to 
be used for the many situations that arise in commonsense reasoning. We present story understanding--
specifically, understanding and answering questions about progressively harder children's texts--as a task 
for evaluating and scaling up a commonsense reasoning system. 
In the fall of 2001, a proposal was developed by Marvin Minsky, Erik Mueller, Doug Riecken, Push 
Singh, Aaron Sloman, and Oliver Steele for a project to develop a human-level commonsense reasoning 
system. The basic proposal was (1) to develop certain ideas of Minsky and Sloman about a multilevel 
cognitive architecture, and (2) to develop the system in a way that would exploit many existing artificial 
intelligence techniques for commonsense reasoning and knowledge representation, such as case-based 
reasoning, logic, neural nets, genetic algorithms, and heuristic search. 
We proposed to organize a meeting at which we would bring together many of the major established 
researchers in the area of commonsense knowledge and reasoning. Riecken organized a preliminary 
meeting at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in March 2002, at which many IBM researchers 
were invited to discuss and react to this general subject as well as to present their own ideas. Afterwards, 
the specific proposal was discussed in more detail by specialists in commonsense knowledge and reasoning 
at a meeting held on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, in April 2002, and hosted by Jeffrey Epstein. This 
Technical Forum contribution focuses on the preliminary meeting, but also contains some material 
presented at the April meeting, including some material from Minsky's forthcoming book The Emotion 
Machine. (I) 
At the IBM meeting, a broad consensus was reached on three main points. First, there was agreement 
that the community should strive toward solving a nontrivial problem that would require a level of 
knowledge, and a capability of reasoning with that knowledge, beyond what is demonstrated by current 
systems. The problem put forward was that of story understanding. An important advantage of the story 
understanding task is that standardized tests are available to evaluate students on their reading 
comprehension skills. Moreover, these tests require the use of commonsense reasoning skills. It is thus 
possible to evaluate the performance of any story understanding system against that of students at different 
reading levels. (2) 
EFTA00226832

Second, there was consensus that the story understanding task provides a strong testbed for evaluating 
a commonsense reasoning system. Not only dots such a system need several different forms of reasoning, 
representation, and learning, but it also needs them to work in conjunction with each other. In addition, the 
task highlights the importance of using and reasoning with common sense. This is illustrated by a sentence 
from a story about a child and her grandfather: "He gently takes my elbow as we walk so that I can help 
show him the path." Knowledge of the fact that the grandfather is blind, and the commonsense facts that 
people ordinarily use their sight to find paths and that blind people are unable to see, enable the inference 
that the child is guiding the grandfather and not merely pointing out the path, another frequent sense of the 
word "show." Absence of this commonsense knowledge could lead to the incorrect interpretation of the 
word "show." 
Third, there was agreement on the need to develop a testbed architecture for representation and 
reasoning that allows different systems and representations to work with each other. Researchers often try 
to solve a problem using just one form of representation and reasoning. But such an approach does not 
work well for sufficiently complex problems such as story understanding. In contrast, enabling various 
techniques to collaborate will allow the best techniques to be used for a given situation. Any such 
architecture must provide metalevel control and knowledge that will enable different techniques to 
determine whether or not they are suited for a given task, to decide what other techniques may be better for 
the task, and to communicate information and share partial results with each other. 
What makes commonsense reasoning difficult 
Commonsense reasoning--the sort of reasoning we would expect a child to do easily--is difficult for 
computers to do. Certainly, the relative paucity of results in this field does not reflect the considerable 
effort that has been expended, starting with McCarthy's paper "Programs with Common Sense." (3) 
Nevertheless, the problem remains unsolved. What is it about commonsense reasoning that makes it 
difficult to automate? Various explanations have been suggested, some of which we discuss in this section. 
McCanhys commonsense informatic situation. The knowledge needed to solve a commonsense 
reasoning problem is typically much more extensive and general than the knowledge needed to solve 
difficult problems. McCarthy points out that the knowledge needed to solve well-formulated problems in 
fields such as physics or mathematics is bounded. (4) In contrast, there are no a priori limitations to the 
facts that are needed to solve commonsense problems: the given knowledge may be incomplete; one may 
have to use approximate concepts and approximate theories; one will generally have to use non-monotonic 
reasoning to reach conclusions; and one will need some ability to reflect upon one's own reasoning 
processes. Morgenstern provides an example of the commonsense informatic situation in the problem of 
two friends arranging to meet for dinner at a restaurant. (5) 
Explicit vs implicit knowledge. Commonsense knowledge is often implicit. whereas the knowledge 
needed to solve well-formulated difficult problems is often explicit. For example, the knowledge needed to 
solve integrals can be found in explicit form in a standard calculus textbook. However, the knowledge 
needed to arrange a dinner meeting exists in vague, implicit form. Implicit knowledge must first be made 
explicit, which is a time-consuming task requiring a serious knowledge engineering effort. 
Domain knowledge. A huge amount of knowledge is needed to do even simple forms of 
commonsense reasoning. For example, to figure out what sorts of objects will work as stakes in a garden--a 
reasoning task that seemingly demands no effort--requires knowledge of plant materials, how plants grow, 
flexibility and hardness, shapes of plants, soil texture, properties of wind, spatial reasoning, and temporal 
reasoning. (6) Although there have been a number of efforts to capture large amounts of world knowledge, 
most notably the Cyc '• project, (7) we are not at this point aware of any knowledge base that contains the 
information necessary to reason about stakes in a garden or about fumbling for an object in one's pocket. 
This Technical Forum piece does not present a solution to these difficulties. Rather, we are attempting 
to see how far we can progress on an important commonsense reasoning problem even in the presence of 
such difficulties. 
Story understanding as a vehicle for studying commonsense reasoning 
Story understanding requires addressing the commonsense informatic situation. A story understanding 
system should be able to read and understand a story, and demonstrate its understanding by (1) answering 
EFTA00226833

questions about the story, (2) producing paraphrases and summaries of the story, and (3) integrating the 
information the story contains into a database. Further, useful results from this work will have a direct 
impact on many business products and services. 
A brief history of story understanding systems. Starting in the 1960s, (8) researchers have studied 
story• understanding and have built systems that can read and answer questions about simple stories. An 
early system built by Chamiak (9) used a single mechanism, test-action demons, for making inferences in 
understanding. In the 1970s, Schank and Abelson (10) proposed scripts, plans, and goals as knowledge 
structures for understanding. These knowledge structures were incorporated into the SAM (I I and PAM 
(12) story understanding systems. 
In the 1980s. knowledge structures for emotions, story themes, and spatial/temporal maps were 
incorporated into BORIS. (13) AQUA (14) used case-based reasoning to retrieve and apply explanation 
patterns in order to answer questions raised by anomalies encountered while reading a story. CRAM (15) 
used a connectionist approach to story understanding. 
Recent story understanding systems have adopted the approach of understanding a story by building 
and maintaining a simulation that models the mental and physical states and events described in the story, 
as demonstrated in ThoughtTreasure. (16) The advantage of this approach is that it is easy to answer 
questions about the story simply by examining the contents of the simulation. 
Cntical problems for story understanding systems. The story understanding systems built so far work 
only on the particular stories they are designed to handle. For example, SAM (I I) handles five stories, 
BORIS (13) three, AQUA (14) five, and ThoughtTreasure (16) three. What prevents story understanding 
systems from scaling up to hundreds of previously unseen stories? 
We contend that story understanding research is blocked on three critical problems: (1) complexity of 
the structure of natural language, (2) necessity for large commonsense knowledge bases, and (3) 
combinatorial explosion in the understanding process. 
Complexity of the structure of natural language. Rare is the simple subject-verb-object sentence that 
maps into a simple proposition. More typically, text contains numerous language phenomena such as 
adverbials, compound nouns, direct and indirect speech, ellipsis, genitive constructions, and relative 
clauses. (17) Present-day syntactic and semantic parsers have trouble producing accurate parses of typical 
story sentences. 
Necessity for large commonsense knowledge bases. Understanding even simple stories requires 
knowing a huge number of facts. For example, understanding the first paragraph of The Cat in the Hat 
requires knowing about children's play, how children can be affected by winter weather their relationship 
to their parents, and notions of discipline, boredom, surprise, and risk. Similarly, as 
(IS) points out, 
the first paragraph of The Tale of Benjamin Bunny assumes familiarity with concepts o quantity, space, 
time, physics, goals, plans, needs, and communication. 
Combinatorial explosion in the understanding process. Multiple possible interpretations arise at all 
levels of language. Words are ambiguous as to part of speech and word sense. Sentences are syntactically 
ambiguous. There are several possible explanations for any action of a story character. several possible 
explanations for those explanations, and so on. We get a combinatorial explosion: the understanding 
process must search an extremely large space of possibilities. 
Approaches to critical problems in story understanding. that can be done? We propose a three-
pronged approach. First, to deal with the complexity of the structure of natural language, we make a major 
cut in complexity by going back to books for early readers. Second, to deal with the necessity for large 
commonsense knowledge bases, we propose to identify the domains most frequently used in a restricted set 
of stories and to address these first. Last, to deal with the combinatorial explosion in the understanding 
process, we propose a new paradigm for commonsense reasoning: an architecture of diversity. 
Early readers. Early reader texts arc designed for preschool and kindergarten students. These texts 
employ a small or controlled vocabulary, short sentences, and limited language constructions. Working 
with early reader texts will enable us to effectively solve the language front-end problem using existing 
research techniques. 
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Text annotation for domain identification. We cannot hope to deal with the commonsense informatic 
situation head-on. The point of icCarthy's 1996 paper (4) 's that any domain can be relevant to a particular 
problem: when reading a story, any area of knowledge ma be necessary for comprehension. This is less 
true for stories designed for very young readers: although, as our examples above show, a great many 
concepts and domains arc still needed for full comprehension even of early reader texts. Nevertheless, we 
believe we can make progress by choosing to address those domains that most frequently turn up in 
children's stories. Such an approach would, we hope, make the problem tractable. 
We thus propose the following corpus-based approach. We start with a corpus of stories at the 
preschool and kindergarten levels and divide the corpus into a development set and a test set. We manually 
annotate each story in the development set with an informal inventory of what domains of commonsense 
knowledge and reasoning must be addressed in order to understand the story. We sort the domains by their 
frequency and attempt to develop methods to understand the domains that occur most frequently. We start 
with the most frequent domain, proceeding to the next most frequent domain, and so forth. Development 
proceeds on the development set, and a final evaluation of the generality of the system is conducted on the 
previously unseen test set. Wc iterate this process on successively higher reading levels, progressing to 
stories designed for Grades I, 2, and 3. This approach, based on an incremental series of experiments, will 
enable a significant research focus at each step on an architecture of diversity. 
To demonstrate how this approach would work, we formed a corpus of 15 early reader stories and 
annotated them as to the domains of common sense necessary for understanding them. The vocabulary size 
was 561 words. The top 10 domains of common sense arc shown in Table I. This provides us with a path 
for research in understanding the story corpus: focus on handling the most frequently appearing domains of 
common sense. 
Dealing with these concepts is by no means trivial. We plan to leverage the extensive work that has 
been done in these areas. Such work includes: ThoughtTrcasure, (16) NETL2, (19) Cyc, (7) Shanahan's 
formalization of time, (20) the RCC formalization of space, (21) and Kuipers's Spatial Semantic Hierarchy. 
(22) We will also employ rapid knowledge formation techniques such as Open Mind. (23) 
An architecture of diversity 
Many attempts to build intelligent computers have hunted for a single mechanism (such as universal 
sub-goaling, propagation rules, logical inference, probabilistic reasoning) or representation (such as 
production rules, connectionist networks, logical formulas, causal networks) that would serve as a basis for 
general intelligence. Why have these approaches so far failed to achieve human-level common sense? 
We believe that the problem is too large to solve using any single approach. Human versatility must 
emerge from a large-scale architecture of diversity in which each of several different reasoning 
mechanisms and representations can help overcome the deficiencies of the other ones. (24,1) Our 
hypothesis is that such an architecture can overcome the combinatorial explosion problem in story 
understanding. 
Multilevel cognitive architecture. We conjecture that the information processing architecture of a 
human is something like the three-level architecture developed by Sloman in the Cognition and Affect 
project (25) (Ii-Cogaff), shown in Figure 1. This conjecture is based on evidence of many kinds from 
several disciplines, and constraints on evolvabilitl, implementability in neural mechanisms, and 
functionality. (26) 
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED) 
Reactive processes are those in which internal or external states detected by sensors immediately 
trigger internal or external responses. Deliberative processes are those in which alternative possibilities for 
action can be considered, categorized, evaluated, and selected or rejected. More generally a deliberative 
mechanism may be capable of counterfactual reasoning about the past and present and hypothetical 
reasoning about the future. The depth, precision, and validity of such reasoning can vary. Meta-
management processes add the ability to monitor, evaluate, and to some extent control processes occurring 
within the system in much the same way as the whole system observes and acts on the environment. The 
three layers operate concurrently and do not form a simple dominance hierarchy. Arrows represent flow of 
information and control, and boundaries need not be sharp in all implementations. 
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