user: Q: Sasha and Malia Thrust Into Fashion Roles

IN the view of many American designers, Michelle Obama, as first lady, has a patriotic duty to step into the role of fashion plate. But is it fair to ask the same of her daughters, Malia and Sasha?

President Obama with daughters Sasha, left, 11, and Malia, 14.

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In the week since election night, a lot of attention has been paid to the emerging styles of the Obama daughters. Though they had largely escaped fashion scrutiny during their father’s first term, mostly out of respect for their privacy and their ages, Malia and Sasha, now 14 and 11, are the Obamas whom everyone wants to dress. And, in something of a change of policy, designers are telling the world.

“The torch has been passed,” said the designer Gregory Parkinson, whose press office last week sent out an e-mail blast to fashion reporters alerting them to a recent sighting of Sasha in a yellow patterned skirt he designed for Anthropologie. “This is great exposure for a whole new generation of customers.”

When Chris Benz saw that Sasha was wearing a skirt he had designed (and after clearing it with the White House, he said), he posted the news on Twitter. Later came word that Malia’s blue skirt was from ASOS, and her hot pink belt from Zara. (A spokeswoman for ASOS said it would not actively promote the association.)

While label-checking the first daughters is likely to only get wilder over the next four years (just wait until prom season), it can also be risky for designers if it appears they are capitalizing on the girls as celebrities. Likewise, some magazine editors are careful to cover only events where they are in the public eye. But there is also interest in how their fashion choices play a role in the public perception of the Obama family.

“What has always struck me about this first family is how incredibly well coordinated they are,” said Susan Kaufman, the editor of People StyleWatch. “Being as media savvy as they are, they know how to look good in front of the world.”

Sasha Charnin Morrison, the fashion director of Us Weekly, said that Michelle Obama had been clever to wear the same outfits on multiple occasions. So the significance was not lost on her (or just about anyone) that Sasha’s Chris Benz skirt had previously been worn by Malia.

“This has to be the best hand-me-down family I’ve ever witnessed,” she said.
What are the most important parts of this text?

A: Label-checking the first daughters Sasha and Malia Obama, now 14 and 11, can be risky for designers if they seem to be capitalizing on the girls as celebrities.


Q: The New York Times

“When I connected with Dottie, the ball started to roll,” Spencer said. “If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know where it would have gone.”

In 1987, Collins helped form an association of former players in the All-American league. She drew on her contacts to provide the Hall of Fame with memorabilia from the league, spurring creation of its Women in Baseball exhibit in 1988. Now an enlarged, permanent collection, the exhibit inspired the 1992 Hollywood movie “A League of Their Own,” a reprise of women’s pro baseball during World War II.

Dottie Collins was born Dorothy Wiltse in Inglewood, Calif. Her father, Daniel, a welder for an oil company, taught her to pitch. She played women’s softball in Southern California, then joined the All-American league in 1944 with the Minneapolis Millerettes.

The Millerettes relocated to Fort Wayne, as the Daisies, in 1945, and Collins became a pitching mainstay for them. She had a career record of 117-76 and an earned run average of 1.83.

Some four decades after she retired, Collins reflected on major league ballplayers and said she was none too impressed in light of her feats.

“I pitched and won both games of a doubleheader once pitching underhand,” she told Susan E. Johnson in “When Women Played Hardball.”

“I think I could have pitched a doubleheader overhand, too,” she said. “I don’t think it would be that hard. Nowadays, the men can’t do it, but hell, they can’t do nothin’.”

The All-American league went out of business after the 1954 season, and the images of the young women in their one-piece tuniclike dresses, skirt above the knees, playing before enthusiastic crowds in cities like Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind.; Rockford, Ill.; and Kenosha and Racine, Wis., faded.

Collins and her husband, Harvey, whom she married in 1946, raised a family in Fort Wayne, and like the other ballplayers of her day, she lost touch with former teammates. But the association that Collins helped found brought those women together again. Collins became its treasurer and an editor of its newsletter, and she was also a spokeswoman for the alumnae as interest in the women grew, an outgrowth of the Cooperstown tribute and the Penny Marshall movie, which starred Geena Davis, Madonna, Tom Hanks and Rosie O’Donnell.

Collins is survived by her daughter, Patricia Tyler of Fort Wayne; two grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2000.

June Peppas, a rookie with the 1948 Daisies, remembered how Collins “kind of played mother” to her and fellow rookies, teaching them how to conduct themselves as professional athletes, and how she provided emotional support for former teammates over the years.

“She had a lot of compassion for everybody,” Peppas said from her home in Florida. “She did a lot of letter-writing to support people who had problems. She was a good shoulder.”

When the Hall of Fame exhibit opened, many of the All-American league’s former players were on hand, accompanied by children who had never known of their mothers’ baseball exploits. Collins said she found the moment immensely gratifying.

“The movie is second place so far as we are concerned,” she told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1992. “Being accepted by Cooperstown was the greatest thing that happened to any of us.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Dottie Collins, 84, Star Pitcher of Women’s Baseball League, Dies. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
What are the most important parts of this text?

A: Ms. Collins was a star pitcher in women’s professional baseball in the 1940s and later played a major role in preserving the history of the women’s game.


Q: Optics: Images stored in vapor (video)

It's the latest in vaporware, only it works. DVD's and credit card holograms have nothing on the latest lightweight way to store images -- inside a gas cloud.

Reporting in the journal, Optics Express, a team led by Paul Lett of the Joint Quantum Institute in Greenbelt, Md. report that they can store images of two letters in rubidium gas clouds, the first time that two images have been stored and played back this way. The team reports about 88% efficiency in storage of the images, based on a protocol developed by Australian National University researchers.

The effort is aimed at creating memory storage systems for quantum computers, the focus of the institute, jointly run by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland.
What are the most important parts of this text?

A:

assistant: DVD's and credit card holograms have nothing on the latest light-weight way to store images -- inside vapor.