March 8, 1985

Under this heading, The Times amplifies articles or rectifies what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective. An article in Business Day yesterday about a list of problem banks maintained by the Comptroller of the Currency reported that 33 banks on the list were considered in danger of failure.

There are talking robots, walking robots, robots that draw pictures, robots that play Bach on the organ, and singing stuffed animal robots. There are computer-designed 3-D movies featuring songs with refrains like ''Machines and humans can be friends.'' There are even what have been dubbed ''ladies of the future'' - phalanxes of hostesses dressed in high- tech metallic shades of silver and gold. Here, in this land of shrines, the newest shrine is a paean to science and technology. Tsukuba Expo '85, which opens later this month 32 miles outside Tokyo, offers pavilion after pavilion extolling the wonders of the next century. But while its sponsors have billed it as a show displaying developments in science and technology never seen before, it appears to be a vision with a large dose of Disneyland, at times a shrine more to showmanship than to science.

He is one of the most disliked, if envied, men in the oil patch. To this day, municipal officials in Texas complain that he promised them 20 years of cheap energy, then reneged. Competitors marvel at how, penniless and relatively inexperienced, he could start a gas-pipeline company from scratch, win some big cities as customers, and build a $6 billion- a-year energy comglomerate. On one point, though, nearly all agree: Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the 60- year-old chairman and chief executive of the Houston-based Coastal Corporation, is one of the most persistent and driven men in the energy business. ''He's been successful because he works about 18 hours a day,'' said Ervin O. Buck, a Coastal director.

The American Dental Association's Council on Dental Therapeutics will probably grant its seal of approval in the ''near future'' to several proposed agents for toothpastes or mouthwashes that fight plaque and gum disease, an official said today. Several Wall Street analysts and dental experts said the new products would be the largest scientific breakthrough in the toothpaste industry in decades, with substantial profits at stake in the high margin business. Hercules Segalas, a senior vice president with Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., said the anticipated action would greatly help the Procter & Gamble Company, which he said was poised to bring to market a prescription mouthwash that would fight gum disease and a toothpaste that would fight accumulations of tartar. ''The potential to oral health of some of these chemical agents would be very significant,'' said Edgar W. Mitchell, secretary of the A.D.A.'s Council on Dental Therapeutics. ''The dental profession is almost eager to have some of these products on the marketplace.''

The collapse of E.S.M. Government Securities Inc.,, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., firm with losses estimated at more than $250 million, is a reminder to local government officials and other investors that their supposedly safe investments in United States Treasury securities can be jeopardized by problems at the securities firm they do business with. Large dealers in government securities and major investors have learned how to protect themselves against the failure of firms like E.S.M. But smaller investors are discovering that in such cases their loans may turn out to be backed by thin air rather than the Treasury securities they expected. The investments at issue in the E.S.M. case are repurchase agreements, or repos, a widely used financing technique whereby local governments lend money to securities dealers. Under such an arrangement, the dealer sells securities and simultaneously agrees to repurchase them at a price high enough to compensate the lender for the use of its money. In the case of E.S.M., the firm also arranged reverse repurchase agreements, where it made loans to banks and thrift units, which provided securities to the firm as collateral.