What was going on when I was born?

Beginning today, The New York Times is following a new way of reckoning the bid and asked quotations in the National Association of Securities Dealers' listing of over-the-counter quotations. The new system, which is known as "inside" quotations, is intended to show investors the best price at which over-the-counter trades can be executed.

Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, 47-year-old chairman of the National Broadcasting Company, has been asked by the network's president, Fred Silverman, to resign and is expected to do so in a few days, an NBC official reported yesterday.

ANYONE can tell at a glance that chimpanzees and humans are different, but new research has shown that the chromosomes of the two species are strikingly, even perplexingly, alike.

WHEN I quipped, early on, that I felt like a laboratory animal running around in an exercise wheel, when I called myself an "organism," Dr. Weitzman took offense. My human being-hood, he said, my subjective states and modes of decision-making, were exactly the focus of interest. They were, in fact, what separated this research from the many animal studies that have been done.

AS the American automobile industry struggles to survive in its gloomy new world, it is taking a fresh look at every technology that holds promise of saving fuel. The companies are cutting weight, using electronics and trying everything from diesel engines to electric motors, but one of the brightest hopes involves new understanding of the science of aerodynamics.

MEXICO CITY, July 6--Rising political violence in Central America since the revolution in Nicaragua last year has provoked economic crises that are aggravating tensions and hardship among the poor peasants and workers of the region.

AJO, Ariz., July 7--It was to have been a smooth, if somewhat risky journey for these middle-class newcomers to America. But the smugglers who promised to fly them from the border to Los Angeles and the hope of a new life instead abandoned them to a desert horror they never imagined.

This may be the quintessence of the city on a warm afternoon early in July: Three women eating hamburgers at a lunch counter chatter in French, comparing their hamburgers with those in an establishment with an exotic name that turns out, on closer eavesdropping, to be McDonald's.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. DESPITE the recent wave of criticism by consumer forces and others, standardized tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test--along with grade-point averages and other statistical measures of academic performance--are apparently becoming more rather than less important in the college admissions process.

WASHINGTON, July 7--The Carter Administration intends to nominate Barbara S. Thomas, a 33-year-old New York lawyer, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Administration officials said today.