Word: fibers
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When those paddlers get serious, they come to Arin Chang, who makes high-end carbon-fiber paddles designed specifically for dragon boats. A former engineer for a mountain-bike company, Chang got involved with dragon boats in 1999 and quickly became an élite competitor, traveling to events in Europe, Australia and Canada. He soon realized that boaters were slowed by traditional wooden paddles, and he designed a lighter, stiffer version that he started selling in 2000 under the brand Burnwater...
...beginning years were very tough, because people were used to spending $30 or $40 for a cheap wooden paddle," Chang says. But individual members of his own team bought and promoted the paddles, figuring they might invest just as much, about $200, in a carbon-fiber tennis racquet. The Foster City, Calif., company's sales got a boost in 2003 when the entire Australian national team ordered Burnwater paddles. Chang sells about 100 paddles a month, six times as many as he sold two years ago, and has competition from a handful of other companies making their own high-tech...
...Meanwhile, Silicon Valley, the pride of the U.S. economy, was crashing, while entire sectors of the so-called new economy disintegrated. And Japan, the world's second largest economy, was locked in a financial crisis redolent of the 1930s. After the tech wreck, everything from state-of-the-art fiber-optic networks to computer chips were dumped on the market, as desperate investors struggled to raise cash at almost any price. The main reason that it has become so easy for the advanced economies to source back-office support in Asia is because communications costs collapsed at the very moment...
Communications are expected to be a huge headache yet again. During Katrina, New Orleans overnight lost $500 million worth of telecom structure--fiber-optic and copper wire--leaving the city's emergency-operations center at city hall with a superfast T1 line as useless as a set of tin cans. Deputy mayor Meffert ended up handing out Nextel walkie-talkies for all the out-of-town help and cobbling together a voice-over-Internet communications system out of old computers, which still serves the city...
...where were the ingredients? There were scary words on the labels--WARNING and DANGER! KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN--and some nasty things I recognized (bleach, ammonia, the generic word disinfectant). With cereal boxes detailing everything from trans fats to soluble fiber, I thought there would be exhaustive lists of everything in those bottles and sprays. But there weren't. If I didn't rinse the bathtub thoroughly, what kind of residue would my daughter's bottom be resting...