Competition

The goal of the telecommunications bills passed by the Senate and House, according to Congressional Quarterly, is to get competitors "to the starting line at the same time, with roughly equivalent handicaps." On the surface, this doesn't sound too difficult. It happens at the race track every day.But billions of dollars in future profits are at stake in these measures, which revise a 61-year-old communications law and prepare the industry and its customers for the 21st century. For that reason the telephone companies, local and long distance, fought bitterly to the last minute.

Question: Why does it cost only $39 to fly to Chicago but 10 times as much to fly the same distance to another city?Answer: Competition.Airline fare structures have long been the bane of the frequent flier, particularly the business traveler who often buys tickets at the last minute and almost never stays away over a weekend. It is often no more expensive for a vacationer to fly to the West Coast than it would be for the same person to make a business trip to, say, Nashville. That will continue to be true -- at least for some time -- but other dramatic changes are in the offing here in Baltimore.

When it comes to producing and selling electricity in the newly competitive U.S. marketplace, big is good but bigger is better, the latest round of utility mergers suggests."

The way Anne Arundel Community College student Jesse Alton sees it, the world is one big elevator - hopefully, going up. Alton is among several students at the community college who will enter in the school's fourth annual Big Idea Elevator Pitch contest, a competition designed to test young entrepreneurs' ability to crystallize their business ideas and pitch them quickly and effectively. AACC officials looking to give students a boost in selling their ideas created the contest based on the "elevator pitch" concept, which says a person should be able to sell an idea in the time it takes to ride an elevator.

The nine young adult performers who participated in the Howard County Arts Council's Rising Star competition all deserve to be considered winners, but only one of them went home with the $5,000 first prize. It was awarded to Samantha McEwen at the 15th annual Celebration of the Arts in Howard County March 24 in the Peter and Elizabeth Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center at Howard Community College. The 500 audience members acknowledged all nine performances with enthusiastic applause and also filled out ballots that were tabulated at the end of the event.

Alban Gerhardt of Germany beat out 41 young cellists from all over the world to win the first University of Maryland International Leonard Rose Cello Competition Saturday night with a performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto at the Kennedy Center. Gerhardt, 24, wins a cash prize of $20,000 and several engagements, including a New York recital Nov. 13 in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall.The cello competition joins the William Kapell Piano Competition and the Marian Anderson Vocal Competition as the three prestigious music contests, which are given in conjunction with workshops and recitals given by well-known performers and teachers, sponsored by the University of Maryland at College Park.

"No respect for your elders," Robert Yara said to Doug Mock after Mock beat Yara to the finish of Saturday's Quacker Quick Quint at Friends School by 37 seconds.All kidding aside, his elders are the reason Mock, a 25-year-old senior at Salisbury State College, made the trek from the Eastern Shore for the second annual 5-miler at Friends School."I've raced a couple times in Delaware," said Mock, who is doing his student teaching this semester, "but I don't think there's any point in going to a race even if there's prize money if my times are a minute or two slower."

THERE HAS been an accident on the international space station. The astronauts are trapped and running out of oxygen.With only eight weeks to plan and execute a rescue mission, could you design, program and build a robot to save them?West Columbians Walt Destler, 14, his brother, Nathan, 10, and their teammates accepted the challenge in this imaginary scenario. Walt's team, called "One Armed Bandit," brought home two trophies in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge, held in New Britain, Conn., this month.

For music aficionados, no sword is as double-edged as the international performance competitions that occur with increasing frequency these days.The Van Cliburn Piano Competition, the Tchaikovsky, the Rubinstein, the Chopin -- everyone bemoans them. Dehumanizing marathons that reward stamina, not artistry, critics say. The technically assured, "play-it-safe" types win, while the genuine individualist losesout because stodgy old judges are offended by truly original playing.Yet few things titillate the music world more than a dazzling pianistic Olympiad, which is exactly what events like the Cliburn and the Tchaikovsky have become.

For the second straight year, Marylanders have won the highest number of medals in the NAACP's national scholastic competition.Ten Maryland high school students received honors in New York last week at the 22nd annual Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), competing against about 850 teen-agers in 12 categories, including the sciences, arts, math, entrepreneurship and film.Three gold medalists are from Maryland: Osato Dixon of Carver Center for the Arts and Technology in Baltimore, for filmmaking; Karl Kuhn of Montgomery County's Watkins Mill High School, for music composition; and Patricia Edmonds of Woodlawn Senior High School, for the computer science competition.