Former Long Beach Executive Director Toby Rothschild, now a policy wonk in Iwasaki's outfit, agreed. "To some extent, I did look at it and say, 'We are the littlest kid on the block, and we don't want to get beat up so we need a bigger protector,'" Rothschild said. "Once we got past that, it became a real positive for the Long Beach program and Long Beach clients." But to the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley legal aid program, the positives of merging with Dudovitz's program, San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, were never obvious. A meeting in late 1999 between Dudovitz and the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program's board showed how little the two programs had in common and how difficult bridging the gap between their ideologies would be, Dudovitz recalled. Although no merger plans were discussed, board members at the smaller program knew of Dudovitz's preference for impact litigation over direct services. "We had a discussion about what our separate views were," Dudovitz said. "The message we got was that they wanted their program to stay as it was." Lauralea Saddick, former executive director of the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program, said her board simply did not share Dudovitz's desire to spend money influencing social policy and participating in high-profile litigation over poverty-related issues. "Our board's philosophy was that the money given by the federal government was to help people with basic everyday needs," Saddick said. "It might take a little bit of humility to take those kinds of cases. Impact work is very important ... but what was the good of getting the law changed if no one is there to help the individual?" Before the San Gabriel program was subsumed by Dudovitz's group, it offered to merge with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County. The boards of both organizations eschewed impact litigation in favor of the 1960s model of providing direct client services. Supported by resolutions from the Pasadena, San Gabriel, Eastern and Foothill bar associations, the two programs drew up plans to merge and submitted them to the Legal Services Corp. Dudovitz won Iwasaki's backing to oppose the deal, and Legal Services Corp., the national funding source, overruled the proposed San Gabriel-Pomona Valley/Orange County merger. On Jan. 27, 2001, the federal agency awarded the San Gabriel-Pomona Valley service area to Dudovitz under the umbrella of an expanded San Fernando program, citing the location of both programs in Los Angeles, which would allow "better coordinated and more effective advocacy on county government policies." The San Gabriel-Pomona Valley program sued Legal Services Corp. to stop the takeover, claiming the federal program based the decision on favoritism for the politically active Dudovitz and the politically powerful Iwasaki. Though the federal suit accomplished little, it effectively suspended the end of the old program and the start of the new one for nearly a year.

It was thought that it would be difficult to bridge the gap between the ideologies of which two organizations?

The factory is highly automated and designed to shift flexibly to produce many different kinds of chips to suit demand. "The diversity is the big difference with this plant," said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a research firm. "It gives IBM the capability to make so many different kinds of custom chips, and the world is going to custom chips." The 140,000-square-foot plant is a testament to advanced manufacturing technology. The 300-millimeter silicon wafers -- about the size of a standard pizza -- are shuttled around the facility in enclosed plastic pods, which ride on overhead tracks. They drop down from wires automatically into machines, sheathed in stainless steel and glass, for each stage of processing and fabrication. Throughout the 500 processing steps, which typically last 20 days, the wafers are not touched by human hands. The circuits etched into the chips are less than one thousandth the width of a human hair. Human operators are there to monitor the systems, catch errors and fine-tune the production process for maximum efficiency. Because each of the hundreds of processing machines is self-enclosed, and essentially airtight, the uniforms operators wear are less constricting than in the previous generation of chip plants, which looked like space suits. The operators at the East Fishkill factory wear light nylon uniforms, light blue shoe coverings and translucent hair nets made of paper. They look more like workers in a bakery. Yes, said Richard Brilla, director of the new facility, "but the donuts are a lot more costly here." Each wafer, holding hundreds of chips, is worth $6,000 to $10,000 apiece, depending on what insulation, circuitry and materials are used.

What is the approximate size the circuits etched in the chips as described above?

In the rest of the world, China's supreme sage, Kongfuzi (K'ung Fu-tzu), is better known by the romanized name "Confucius." He was born in 551 b.c. in what is now Shandong Province in eastern China. So profound was his influence that eleven Chinese emperors made pilgrimages to the birthplace of the Great Teacher. You, too, can pay your respects at the vast temple raised on the site of his home in the small town of Qufu (Chufu), and at his tomb in the woods just to the north. The classics of Confucius, while seldom addressing spiritual and metaphysical matters, set standards for social and political conduct that still underlie many of the Chinese ways of doing and perceiving. Confucius laid great stress on the proper and harmonious relationships between ruler and subject, parent and child, teacher and student, the individual and the state. These relationships were deemed to be hierarchical and dictatorial. If the order was disturbed, dire consequences inevitably resulted. The son who disobeyed the father would bring disaster upon himself and his family, just as the emperor who defied the "mandate of heaven" or ignored the good of the empire brought ruin upon the nation. Over the centuries Confucius has suffered more changes of fortune than probably any other philosopher. Honored soon after his death as the greatest of scholars, he was later revered as semi-divine; you can still visit temples to Confucius in many Chinese cities. During the Cultural Revolution (19661976), however, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary force. It was only after the death of Chairman Mao (1976) and the opening of China to the outside world under more progressive reformers that Confucius, too, was "rehabilitated." Unlike Confucius, about whose life many specific and even colorful details are known, the philosopher Laozi (Lao Tse or Lao-Tzu) is an enigma. Estimates of his date of birth vary by well over a century. One legend even says he taught the young Confucius. Laozi is immortalized by his book of thoughts on man, nature, and the universe, Daodejing ("The Way and Its Power"), which became the major text of China's greatest indigenous religion, Daoism (Taoism). With its emphasis on nature, intuition, the individual, paradox ("The knowledge which is not knowledge"), and the cosmic flow known as "The Way," Daoism became the religion of artists and philosophers. After the death of Confucius, the Zhou Dynasty entered a period of strife known as the "Warring States" period (475221 b.c.).
Was the Mandate of Heaven about hierarchical and dictatorial relationships of order?