creating list of lists

Question 1:
I have a long list of variable names such as

first <- c("one","two","three")

and what I want to do is create a list of lists ... where the names  
of each of overall lists components are  "one","two", and "three".

This is the same result as

second <- list(one=list(),two=list(),three=list())

Is there a way to exploit lapply to convert a list such as first to  
a list of empty lists such as second?

Question 2:

In a parallel routine using foreach and doMPI have to put calcualted  
values into a list of lists such as

list(one=one,
    two=two,
    three=three)

It uses the same (large) list of variable names as first in question  
1.  Is there a simpler way to accomplish this with a lapply statement?


I've tried several permutations but no luck! Thanks a bunch.

Jim

===============================
Dr. Jim Maas
University of East Anglia