Information Storage And Retrieval

Different people want to know different things when you tell them you're having lunch with Michael Lewis. Financial guys who read his "Liar's Poker" wonder whether he regrets becoming an ink-stained wretch when he could have remained a bond salesman and been filthy rich by now. MTV fans want to know what it's like being married to Tabitha "Rock the Vote" Soren.

For 40 years, historian Gladys Cox Hansen has labored in solitary obscurity among the dusty documents and yellowed newspaper clippings. She's a death scholar of sorts, on a determined quest to honor forgotten victims of this city's defining natural disaster. Hansen is compiling a first-ever register of those who died in the devastating 1906 earthquake and three-day firestorm that left much of this turn-of-the-century cultural and financial mecca in ruins, leveling 90% of the city's structures.

As state officials plan to expand a database containing the names and photographs of reputed gang members, a state arm of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union are questioning whether minorities in Orange County are being unfairly targeted by the project.

TRW Inc., in two suits filed Tuesday, said federal law prohibits attorneys general in six states from bringing legal action against its besieged consumer credit business. The company named as defendants the attorneys general of New York and Texas. TRW, one of the nation's largest credit agencies, said it meets "not only the letter but the spirit" of the law.

Cathy Barnes of Bakersfield was traveling on business in Philadelphia a few years ago when she developed a terrible pain in her abdomen. Doctors at a major medical center there kept her overnight and carried out a battery of tests on her heart. The tests came up negative. When she got home, Barnes went to her regular doctor, and an ultrasound exam found a mass in her kidney. A CT scan showed a kidney tumor, and she was immediately scheduled for surgery to remove it before the cancer spread.

A statewide DNA database of convicted violent criminals is beginning to pay off: Police are making arrests based on genetic matches in rape cases once thought to be unsolvable. Arrests have been made in Los Angeles and Santa Rosa and in Tehama County in cases in which police had no suspects until evidence collected in "rape-kit" exams of the victims was compared with the database kept by the state attorney general.

The Supreme Court, entering the new world of "virtual" pornography, agreed Monday to decide whether the government can make it a crime to have or sell computer-generated images of children having sex. Congress has tried repeatedly to stamp out child pornography of all sorts. Five years ago, it expanded the definition of illegal activity to include a "visual depiction [that] appears to be a minor" engaged in sex acts or "conveys the impression" of even "simulated" sex involving children.

PATIENTS of the land, unite! You have nothing to lose but your privacy. There's a growing national effort to bring medical records into the 21st century by converting the paper records now scattered in doctors' file cabinets to electronic records by 2014. It's a grand idea -- in many ways. If medical records were electronic, prescriptions would be more legible and could be filled more accurately. Public health officials could spot disease outbreaks quickly and track their spread.

The National Institutes of Health quietly blocked public access to databases of patient DNA profiles after learning of a study that found the genetic information may not be as anonymous as previously believed, The Times has learned. Institute officials took the unusual step Monday and removed two databases on its public website. The databases contained the genetic information of more than 60,000 cooperating patients. Scientists began posting the information publicly eight months ago to help further medical research.

The hornbills are stiff as battle-axes, the ostriches sit folded like bath towels, and the shimmering green quetzals lie resplendent in drawers reeking of mothballs. Tray after tray, row after row, the birds and their eggs stretch across the 22,000 square feet of this featureless warehouse on the dusty outskirts of Camarillo, home of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, one of the largest and perhaps least-known ornithology collections in the world.