I
NATION/WORLD
The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, October 14, 1998 - 5
Yugoslavia maps
plan to solve crisis
Israeli ambush
clouds talks on
eve of summit
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -
Rushing to meet a deadline set by
NATO, the government outlined its
plan yesterday to comply with a deal
to solve the Kosovo crisis while for-
eign powers took the first steps to put
2,000 monitors in place to prevent
cheating.
Threatened by NATO airstrikes,
Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic agreed Monday to with-
draw special forces from Kosovo,
begin peace negotiations with sepa-
ratist ethnic Albanians and allow
international observers into the trou-
bled Serb province.
But several agreements to put the
deal into force are still to be final-
ized, and it wasn't clear when ethnic
Albanians who have fled Yugoslav
security forces might begin to
return to their villages.
NATO officials said they hadn't
called off the airstrikes yet, and
that they could still bomb any time
after Friday, the deadline for
Milosevic's compliance.
"We hope that this will mark a
turning point ... but the truth is not
in what I am saying here today. The
truth is in compliance," U.S. envoy
Richard Holbrooke said after wrap-
ping up week-long talks with the
president.
If honored, the commitments
should end a seven-month crack-
down against Kosovo Albanian
militants in the southerrbian
province that killed hundreds -
most of them civilians - and left
up to 300,000 displaced.
In a rare televised address, the
first since the 1995 Dayton agree-
ments that ended the Bosnian war,
Milosevic sought to portray the
agreements as a victory, saying
they "avert the danger of a military
intervention against our country."
"The agreements ... are entirely
in accordance with the interests of
our country," he added, citing
"enormous pressures that we have
been exposed to."
Since the crackdown began Feb.
28, Milosevic has insisted the cri-
sis was an internal matter in which
foreign powers should play no role.
The crackdown was aimed at the
rebel Kosovo Liberation Army
fighting to wrest Kosovo away
from Serbia, the dominant republic
of Yugoslavia.
Holbrooke said the key to the
accord was Milosevic's decision to
allow a 2,000-member "verifica-
tion mission" and to permit aerial
verification by non-combat aircraft
that could begin as soon as the end
of the week.
"They are not monitors, not
observers," Holbrooke said. "They
are compliance verifiers."
Despite the rush to implement
the Kosovo accord, officials admit-
ted yesterday it could take weeks
before the full complement of
2,000 international observers is on
the ground to make sure Milosevic
lives up to the agreement.
The Vienna-based Organization
for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which is responsible for the
ground component, lacks a large per-
manent staff. It will have to turn to its
54 member states, including the
United States, Russia, Canada and
European Union countries, to pro-
vide people with the proper training
and skills for the job.
In the Kosovo capital, Pristina,
the political representative of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, Adem
Demaci, said he was disappointed
that the verification forces in
Kosovo would be unarmed. And in
Geneva, Switzerland, other KLA
representatives said nothing short
of independence was acceptable.
Milosevic must take four steps:
withdraw special troops from
Kosovo, sign an agreement on the
verification mission, sign an agree-
ment on airborne reconnaissance
over Kosovo and hammer out a
"framework agreement" by
November outlining future talks
with ethnic Albanians,
The Serbian government hur-
riedly outlined its plan yesterday
for a political solution for the
Kosovo crisis and announced local
elections in the province for 1999.
The "principles for a political
solution with a time frame for their
The Washington Post
JERUSALEM - On the eve of a
crucial Middle East peace summit near
Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu set a strikingly pessimistic
tone yesterday, declaring "there is no
chance of signing an agreement at this
stage."
His remark came hours after gun-
men believed to be Palestinian mili-
tants opened fire on a pair of young
Israelis bathing in a forest spring
near Jerusalem, killing one, wound-
ing the other and darkening the
already murky prospects for success
at the Middle East peace summit
beginning tomorrow at the Wye
Plantation on Maryland's Eastern
Shore.
Although the number of Israelis
killed in terrorist attacks in the past
two years is the lowest in a decade, the
midday shooting was the latest in a
number of violent attacks on Israelis in
recent weeks. Netanyahu said it had
gravely damaged hopes that the U.S.-
brokered talks could break a 19-month
deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace
talks.
"Without fulfillment of all
Palestinian security commitments,
there will not be an agreement," he
said in a prepared statement. "And, in
light of this gloomy reality, there is no
chance at this stage of signing an
agreement."
If Netanyahu's comment was meant
to lower expectations for the talks, it
probably worked, It may also have
been intended to soothe hard-liners in
Netanyahu's conservative coalition,
whose apprehensions that Israel may
swap more occupied West Bank land
for what they regard as an empty
Palestinian promise of peace have
turned to something approaching
political panic.
Leading the charge against a peace
deal has been Israel's National
Religious Party, which buttresses the
far-right wing of Netanyahu's fractious
governing coalition. Members of the
party have threatened bluntly to aban-
don Netanyahu's coalition if he agrees
to a troop pullback at the Maryland
talks - a threat they may not be able
to make good on, since Netanyahu
could count on the backing of Labor
Party opposition members to support a
peace deal.
Nonetheless, hard-line activists.
including Jewish settlers in the West
Bank, demonstrated tonight outside
Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem,
warning the prime minister that a
troop pullback that leaves Jewish set-
tlements stranded in a sea of
Palestinian-controlled territory would
amount to a betrayal.
"If there is a (troop withdrawal), the
public and its leaders will receive a
directive from us to topple you," Rabbi
Avraham Shapira, a National
Religious Party leader, reportedly told
Netanyahu.
In the wake of yesterday's shootings,
Uzi Landau, chairman of parliament's
foreign affairs and defense committee,
called on Netanyahu to cancel his
summit meeting with Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat. Landau, a hard-
line member of Netanyahu's own
Likud party, said Netanyahu's atten-
dance "is providing a green light for
future terrorist attacks."
Netanyahu gave no indication he
will not depart for the meeting, which
the Israeli media is treating like a
rerun of the 1978 Camp David talks
between Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat and Israeli leader Menachem
Begin, which were mediated by
President Carter.
But he did stress Israel's critical
need for security guarantees from the
Palestinians, without which he said
no deal could be reached. Under a
U.S. proposal that Netanyahu and
Arafat will discuss, Israeli troops
would withdraw from a further 13
percent of the West Bank, which
would give Palestinians full or partial
control of about 40 percent of the tqr-
ritory.
AP PHOTO
Richard Butler, United Nations chief arms inspector, arrives for a Security
Council consultation with an unidentified, staff member at the U.N yesterday.
fulfillment" envisage self-rule in
Kosovo, establishment of local
police, elections within nine
months, amnesty and an interna-
tional investigation of alleged war
crimes and monitoring.
Political negotiations with the
ethnic Albanians also will continue
in Kosovo, led by Christopher Hill,
the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia.
The ethnic Albanians, who form 90
percent of Kosovo's 2 million popula-
tion, have insisted on independence
rather than regaining the autonomy
Milosevic stripped in 1989.
International leaders stepped up
efforts to resolve the crisis because
of fears that thousands of homeless
refugees would die if they could
not return to their homes by the
time winter sets in.
For some Kosovo refugees it is
too late.
Besart Buqa died yesterday in
Kosovo, only five weeks old, after
spending the entire life of five miser-
able weeks as a refugee, living under
plastic sheets and make-up tents.
His mother and father say they
were too afraid of Serb forces to
return home in Budakovo, 25 miles
southwest of Pristina.
The boy died of the cold and
exposure, his parents said.
Professors debate Internet essay grading
The Washington Post
It took Hugo Rousselin, a sophomore at New
Mexico State University, about 20 minutes to tap out
his first essay for his psycholinguistics class on the
computer in his bedroom. It took less than 20 seconds
to find out he had gotten a "B."
Good, the accompanying comments read, but "you
need to define the word superiority effect and what it
does" So, minutes before class the next day, Rousselin
ducked into the computer lab, called up his essay, and
did just that. And - seconds later - found out he had
raised his grade to an "A."
Rousselin's essay was graded not by his professor,
Peter Foltz, but by the computer program Foltz helped
design. The technology represents one of the first
major efforts in the country that employs computers to
evaluate the content of a student's essay, rather than
simply check its spelling, grammar or adherence to
rules of style.
"I think it's kind of creepy to think that a computer
is starting to do what only we used to be able to do,"
Rousselin said. On the other hand, "you get immediate
feedback. In my other psychology class, I wrote a five-
page paper and I didn't get it back until two weeks
later."
The technology will be commercially available in a
few months, and scores of educators - from elemen-
tary schools to universities - have said they are eager
to implement the Intelligent Essay Assessor in their
classrooms. Even the venerable Educational Testing
Service, which administers most of the nation's stan-
dardized tests for college and graduate school admis-
sions, hopes by the beginning of next year to be using
a similar technology to judge the written essays sub-
mitted by takers of at least one of its major exams.
For an outfit that hires several thousand human
beings each year to score written responses, computer-
ized grading is an advance that can be implemented
"economically and fairly," said Barbara Voltmer, who
oversees the Oakland office.
There's no question the technology is efficient. And
developers claim it is also reliable. In several studies of
the Intelligent Essay Assessor, when two people and
the computer graded the same essays, the computer
agreed with each grader as often as the graders agreed
with each other.
But the mounting interest in the technology has been
matched by concern among some educators that, even
if such programs can judge the quality of essays the
quest for efficiency is coming at the cost of human
involvement and could harm students.
Foltz and his partner, Thomas Landauer, who teach-
es at the University of Colorado in Boulder, say the
ideal use of their technology is not necessarily to grade
students' work but to give students feedback that might
improve their writing in later drafts. "My goal is not to
replace teachers. My goal is to have students do more
writing," Foltz said.
But he acknowledgesthere's nothing to stop slothful
teachers, eager to unload a burden, from using the
computer in place of human involvement.
Landauer began work on the technology 10 years
ago, when he was a researcher for Bell
Communications, a telecommunications firm.
In essence, the technology is propelled on the idea
that, with enough data, a computer can learn to under-
stand the use of language the same way people do.
To understand how it works, consider the case of a
college professor who wants to assess a couple of hun-
dred students taking his Psychology 101 class. The
professor feeds into the computer the Introduction to
Psychology textbook. Once the computer has mathe-
matically analyzed the book's language, Landauer said,
it will comprehend the words in much the same way
people do: What they mean, how they are used, how
different concepts relate and what would be appropri-
ate ways of describing them.
To grade a specific assignment, the professor can do
one of two things. He can feed the computer a "gold
standard" essay and tell the computer that anything
close to it receives the highest grade. Those that fall
below that ideal rank according to how far off the mark
they land. Alternatively, the professor can feed into the
computer a set of about 20 essays that have been grad-
ed, so that the computer knows what constitutes an A
paper, a B paper and so on. Then the computer reads
the students' submissions, one by one.
For each essay, the computer looks at the combination
of words used and assesses the content and meaning,-and
compares it to what it has already seen. It then assigns a
score, and reports how confident it is in that score.
Because the program already has a "vocabulary" it
learned from the textbook, Landauer said, it knows
which words and phrases mean the same thing and can
compare essays that don't use the same terms. In this
way, it goes beyond less-sophisticated attempts of
computerized grading systems, which only looked to
words that matched exactly.
If the computer sees the word "doctor" used with
Aphersity of California at Santa Barbara physicist Waiter Kahn poses at his home
estdrday. Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Researchers from
5 universities win
*Nobel Prizes
Digging for hope
The Washington Post
Researchers at five American univer-
sities won the Nobel Prizes in physics
and chemistry yesterday for their inves-
tigations of the behavior of matter at the
very smallest scale.
The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences awarded the physics prize to
Robert Laughlin of Stanford
University, Horst Stormer of Columbia
University and Daniel Tsui of Princeton
University for their discovery that
under certain circumstances, electrons
act like weird "quasiparticles" with
bonds among atoms form and change.
The process is so difficult that Paul
Dirac, one of the architects of quantum
theory, observed in 1929 that they pro-
duced "equations much too complicat-
ed to be soluble."
But Kohn and Pople, laboring inde-
pendently on different aspects of the
problem, invented ingenious computa-
tional methods that now make it possi-
ble to predict many aspects of reactions
and molecular structures in pharmaceu-
ticals, climate chemistry and astrono-
my, among other fields. The work
Indiana Senate
candidate raises
money via Web
The Associated Press
Internet surfers who log on to Evan Bayh's Website can
now do more than read the Indiana Senate candidate's biog-
raphy, see his commercials and learn about his stances on
issues. They can also type in their credit card number and
send him a contribution.
Bayh, the state's former governor and a Democrat, has
collected a grand total of $250 so far, but experts say the
future for such sites is bright. A trend becoming more
prevalent during this campaign cycle has several candi-
dates actively seeking such online contributions. But
while Internet fund raising has its pros and cons, most
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