Standardization

Michele and Russell Poland's credit was shot, but they managed to buy their suburban dream home anyway. After a business bankruptcy and a home foreclosure, they turned to a rare option in this era of tightfisted banking - a subprime loan. The Polands paid nearly $10,000 in upfront fees for the privilege of securing a mortgage at 10.9% interest. And they had to raid their retirement account for a 35% down payment. Most borrowers would balk at such stiff terms. But with prices rising, the Polands wanted to snag a four-bedroom home in Temecula near top-rated schools for their 5-year-old son. By later this year, they figure, they'll be able to refinance into a standard loan.

SACRAMENTO - Americans have been eating hot dogs since at least 1870, when a Coney Island restaurateur started selling sausages on long buns. In California's capital, hot-dog carts keep the tradition going with cheap, quick, lunches for state workers and tourists. But cart owners around the state are threatened with closure by health inspectors, unless lawmakers come to their rescue. That's why the Assembly Health Committee had to come up with a legal definition for "hot dog. " The proposed change to state health laws spells it out: "'Hot dog' means a whole, cured, cooked sausage that is skinless or stuffed in a casing that may be known as a frankfurter, frank, furter, wiener, red hot, Vienna, bologna, garlic bologna or knockwurst and that may be served in a bun or roll.

The 21-member California Academic Standards Commission last week issued recommendations for what the state's 5.5 million public school students should know in reading, writing, math and other subjects. The standards, which still must be approved by the State Board of Education, will be voluntary. But they are expected to guide education from kindergarten through grade 12 statewide, in part because they will serve as the basis for new standardized tests pushed by Gov. Pete Wilson.

M. Jeanne Bartelt, a physical education teacher who was instrumental in efforts to revise statewide PE standards for California schoolchildren, died May 22 in Sacramento. She was 89. The cause was a heart attack, said her partner, Sandra Archer. A PE consultant at the state Department of Education during the 1980s and 1990s, Bartelt helped create a state physical fitness test for students and helped develop teaching guidelines, handbooks and curricula. She also traveled across California training teachers and administrators on ways to teach PE that engage young people and encourage them to be active throughout their life.

Sun Microsystems Inc. said its Java Internet language was rejected as an international standard on concerns about Sun keeping control of the Java trademark and the standards process. The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, vote gives Sun a chance to respond to member comments. Sun wants recognition of the language as a standard to prevent others, notably Microsoft Corp., from altering it to their advantage.

The first national standards proposed for teaching history in America's public schools will be unveiled today amid complaints from conservatives that political correctness prompted the slighting of familiar historical figures such as Ulysses S. Grant and the Wright brothers.

Saying the federal government isn't doing enough to ensure that drinking water is safe, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer on Wednesday introduced a bill calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a separate federal standard for chromium 6. The legislation, co-sponsored by Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), would require the EPA to set a chromium 6 limit based on recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences.

The growth of the Internet's World Wide Web has been so rapid as to be frightening. Like the movie monsters that swallowed New York, its relentless advance is seemingly impervious to obstacles and outside of human control. But, just as every monster turned out to have its Achilles heel, the Web seems to have a serious flaw. The problem is with the language used by the Web to describe the appearance and content of a document.

Eleven paging companies serving more than 30 million customers said they agreed to a set of service standards that will allow them to transmit customized Internet-based information to paging devices. Paging companies will be able to provide more specialized packages of information from the World Wide Web to customers' hand-held paging devices.

In the jargon-laden world of high technology, few things have become more confusing than sorting out the differences among competing digital cellular phone technologies. At least four major digital phone transmission standards are in use in the United States. They carry such bewildering acronyms as CDMA, GSM, IDEN and TDMA, and the battle among them is quickly accelerating, as incumbent carriers and new rivals race to build their new digital wireless networks.

Despite a threefold increase in people and cars in the last 50 years, California's strict vehicle emissions standards have managed to significantly clear the state's air, according to new research. The study also found that Southern California's air chemistry has changed for the better. The amount of organic nitrates in the atmosphere - which cause smog's eye-stinging irritation - has drastically fallen off, according to federal researchers. Ozone and other pollutants have been monitored in the state since the 1960s.

The Aztecs gave us guacamole, but it was Gil Henry who gave us avocados that don't have to sit on the kitchen counter for weeks to become dip-worthy. Until the early 1980s, avocados were green, rock-hard objects that could take many days to ripen once shoppers brought them home. But then Henry pioneered a "ripening room" on his family's avocado farm in Escondido that sped up the process, allowing supermarkets to sell avocados that are ready to eat or close to it. The method has since become the industry standard.

The passage for the seventh-grade lesson was blatantly offensive - an excerpt from a 1938 anti-Semitic children's book . But that was the point: to provide students in the Santa Ana school district with a perfect illustration of insidious propaganda. In the book, a mother and her son gather mushrooms in the forest, and she explains that, as with mushrooms, there also are poisonous people. Slapping his chest in pride, the boy says, "Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews!"

In the uproar about making the morning-after contraceptive known as Plan B available to our daughters, there has been no similar outcry about condoms and our sons. Anyone of any age can walk into a drugstore - as well as most grocery and big-box stores - and buy condoms. If you want to remain anonymous, you can pay cash; no ID is required. If you're too embarrassed to face the checkout clerk, use the self-check aisle or, for $17.97, get a box of 100 - flavored or with "added sensations," even - delivered to your door in a plain brown box. President Obama has suggested that restrictions on making Plan B available to younger girls are justifiable because we can't be confident that a younger girl in a drugstore "should be able - alongside bubble gum or batteries … to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect.

"Celluloid condoms between the audience and the immediate gratification of understanding. " "More like watching Playboy TV than having sex. " Hyperbolic outbursts are not uncommon in opera, but rarely were they so concentrated or, um, vivid. FOR THE RECORD: Opera supertitles: A May 19 article about the history of opera supertitles misidentified director Graham Vick as Graham Vickers. - What riled opera so? Supertitles. Translations usually projected above the stage have driven directors to issue bomb threats.

Automakers are spending billions of dollars to squeeze efficiency from a car part most people never think twice about - the transmission. Over the next five years, many new vehicles will have transmissions with up to 10 speeds, replacing the mostly six-speed transmissions in cars now. Though designed for refinement and performance, the transmissions aim mostly to help meet stricter federal fuel economy and pollution standards. "We are trying to extract efficiency out of every subsystem of the vehicle," said Mircea Gradu, vice president of transmission and driveline engineering at Chrysler Group.

The National Transportation Safety Board, responding to growing concerns about the small aircraft that handle more than 10% of the nation's air passenger traffic, Tuesday recommended imposing on commuter airplanes the tougher standards required of major airlines. In a long-awaited report, the board said commuter pilots tend to work more hours, report greater fatigue and do not receive the same level of training as those working for major airlines.

IBM and Apple, with an assist from Motorola, set aside their legendary differences long enough Monday to formally unveil a new common personal computer standard for the PowerPC microprocessor they began developing three years ago. But machines based on the joint specifications and designed to run a variety of operating systems won't appear until 1996. In the meantime, computer industry watchers say, the IBM-Apple alliance could stumble over technical and political hurdles.

The retirement crisis is deepening, with recent generations of Americans less financially prepared for their golden years than their parents or grandparents, according to a new study. The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts suggests that people who retire over the next quarter-century could suffer declining standards of living compared with earlier generations, a rare and troubling phenomenon in modern-day history. The retirement math is most vexing for Generation X, those people born between 1966 to 1975, and for so-called late boomers, who were born after 1956, according to the study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Backstage at the Emmys last year, reporters were squirming - and not just because of the ill-fitting rental tuxes and too-tight gowns. As "Modern Family" rolled to its third straight Emmy win for comedy series (after earlier pulling in prizes for supporting actor and actress and directing), the usual air of ennui seeped into the press room. Bring us fresh faces! Bring us the excitement of the new! And, while you're at it, three more servings of that delicious chocolate mousse! (There's a reason thoses tuxes pinch at the waistband.)