Living-Today: Issues of modern living

SINGLE MOMS

Single mothers may find the challenge of looking for and finding a potential romantic partner overwhelming at times but there's good news, according to a recent online survey. It found single men are very open to dating single women with children.

In a recent Match.com poll, 41 percent of the more than 3500 singles responded to the question "Do Single Moms Make Better Matches" with a resounding "Yes! Their patience and compassion is a big plus." Another 33 percent stated they would be open to dating a single mom if she could be "The One."

"When single moms are considering re-entering the dating scene, they should remember just how special they are and how much they have to offer," said Trish McDermott, Match.com's Vice President of Romance.

Match.com offers the following dating advice for single moms:

1. Give yourself permission to be both a mom and a romantic partner. Acknowledge that your children want you to be happy, and a happy mom is a better mom. Let your friends and family know that you are ready and looking for romance. Although the search for a great date or a life-long romantic partner can be time consuming, single moms really can have it all. And thanks to the Internet, that search isn't as time consuming as it once was.

2. Make a plan and go for it. Develop well-thought strategies for finding a partner and allocate some time, separate from parenting responsibilities, for your search. And remember, this isn't all work -- dating should be fun, too.

-- Post an alluring profile and actively engage in interacting with potential dates on Match.com or other similar online dating service.

-- Attend all the parties you are invited to, and throw a few of your own.

-- Join clubs.

-- Go to dances.

-- Flirt with people you meet at the grocery store

-- Remember it's OK to get rejected; that means you're in the game

3. Make friends. Even when there isn't much chemistry, become friends with some of your dates. Friends have friends of their own, one of whom might be your future life partner. Continue to evaluate your efforts and fine-tune your strategy. Stay in the game and don't stop until you're in the relationship you desire.

LOTTERY

Seven out of 10 Oklahomans want the state to adopt a lottery system to fund education, a poll conducted for the Daily Oklahoman and KWTV said.

The findings, published Sunday in the Daily Oklahoman, found about 67 percent of those polled said the state should have a lottery. That number rose to 73 percent when respondents were told the money would be used for education.

The University of Oklahoma Political Science Department's Public Opinion Learning Laboratory conducted the random survey of 400 Oklahomans. The findings closely resemble poll results at the end of 1993, which show 63 percent of residents wanted a lottery. The lottery was defeated in May 1994 by about the same percentage as those who said they supported it.

The Oklahoma Constitution must be changed by the people or the Legislature to make a lottery legal.

The survey, however, did refute one aspect of the argument of lottery opponents. According to the poll, the people who gambled the least were in households with combined annual incomes of less than $30,000. The most likely gamblers made more than $75,000 a year.

"It's not the poor people betting a lot of money. It's the middle income people," Gary Copeland, director of the Carl Albert Center and the faculty adviser for the poll told the newspaper.

Of those who said they gambled in the last year, 39 percent said they bought a lottery ticket in one of 38 states that have a lottery. Those state include Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.

State Sen. Brad Henry, D-Shawnee, introduced a bill in the state Senate this year that would have allowed Oklahomans to vote on the issue. He was forced to withdraw the legislation after realizing there was not enough support for the measure to pass the Legislature. Henry told the Daily Oklahoman that a lottery had the potential of raising $300 million for education.

ALEXANDRIA LIBRARY

Whether the contents of Egypt's original Alexandria Library of antiquity burned up in a violent conflagration or just mouldered away through neglect, history shows that storing documents on papyrus and parchment isn't the best way to make information last.

The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina -- recently completed in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria at a cost of $200 million -- has of course the latest in firefighting and manuscript preservation technology so that its growing collection won't have to fear the elements. However, information in this library will for the most part not be stored in perishable paper formats, but rather the focus will be on massive amounts of digital information.

Last Saturday, the library announced a partnership with the California-based Internet Archive, IA, that will provide the Bibliotheca with an information gift worth $5 million consisting of IA's entire archive of the world wide web from 1996-2001, 2,000 hours of Egyptian and U.S. television, 1,000 American archival films and a book scanning facility.

"The key words are preservation and access, this is the basis of our partnership," said library director Ismail Serageldin, a former vice president of the World Bank.

The Web archive as well as the movies and TV programs would be made available to the world either at the library itself or through its Web site (bibalex.org). IA takes a snapshot of the Web every two months because old pages are constantly expiring and new pages are being born. In this manner information that would otherwise be lost is preserved, which makes for a very large archive of some 100 terabytes, or 100 million megabytes of information. This is the equivalent of a 100 million volumes, more than four times the number of books in the Library of Congress, still the world's largest library of physical books.

While the Alexandria Library has an eventual capacity of 8 million volumes, its current collection is only a quarter million books, as well as several collections of rare manuscripts and archives donated by various nations. The donation makes the Library the only other site of this material in the world besides the original IA location in California and is a major step forward in the library's effort to be a center of digital knowledge. The archive will be continuously updated at a rate of 10 terabytes of information a month.

The physical structure of the library itself will serve as a locus for human interaction of experts and researchers who can meet and debate in person or online. "We aspire to recapture the spirit of the ancient library," says Serageldin.

Of course, one way in which the library will differ from its predecessor, however, is that it'll be open to ordinary people. The original library was a scholars-only affair -- with the notion of public libraries only becoming widespread in the 19th century.

(Thanks to UPI's Paul Schemm in Alexandria, Egypt)