Word: pisa
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...progressed so quickly, guided by an engineer who was a family friend, that his competition essay for university admission was judged worthy of a doctoral examination. By 1920 he was teaching his teachers at the University of Pisa; he worked out his first theory of permanent value to physics while still an undergraduate. His only setback was a period of postdoctoral study in Germany in 1923 among such talents as Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, when his gifts went unrecognized. He disliked pretension, preferring simplicity and concreteness, and the philosophic German style may have repelled him. "Not a philosopher...
That includes the use of stolen airline tickets. According to the INS, stolen tickets are part of a package deal, including phony IDs and Social Security cards, that smugglers provide to their clients. And for one person, Barbara Pisa, that news was vindication of sorts. For three years, ever since her Classic Travel Agency in Naperville, Ill., was one of 28 agencies in the suburbs west of Chicago hit by what police describe as a Colombian burglary ring, Pisa has waged a one-woman crusade to focus attention on what she and others say is a serious public-safety issue...
...fatal to travel agencies, which have already seen their commission payments cut by the airlines at the same time that the agencies' business is being eroded by customers using the Internet. "We don't have that kind of money. We're just going to go out of business," says Pisa, who got a letter from American Airlines demanding $16,000 for stolen tickets written on her ticket stock. The airline later relented because Pisa had followed recommended security guidelines. But Georgette Bouland-Anthe, a travel agent in Libertyville, Ill., who lost 6,000 blank tickets to the ring and owes...
Last month Pisa wrote Arizona Senator John McCain, a sponsor of an airline-passenger bill of rights, to tell him about the stolen plane tickets. Intrigued, McCain forwarded Pisa's letter to the Justice Department. It arrived just about the time the INS was arresting those illegals trying to fly out of Phoenix. Pisa's hope is that a Government Accounting Office report due out in June will recommend that the airlines be forced to scan tickets, thereby rendering stolen ticket stock worthless. For some travel agents, that will be a little too late...
Sommers, the director of Expos since 1994, doesn't speak Italian. But this week she's flying to Italy, where the University of Pisa has asked her to help design the country's first writing program for undergraduates. On the day before she leaves, Sommers is practicing the short thank-you speech she'll give to the Italian faculty when she arrives...