September 1990

Who Says Science Can't Be Fun? Playing The Odds Sign Of The Times Bridging The Gap The Invisible Professor The organizers of next month's annual meeting of the Association of Science-Technology Centers in Orlando, Fla., have made a bold bid to boost attendance by including in the registration packet a one-day pass for three popular theme parks in the area -- Universal Studios, EPCOT Center, and Sea World. The ploy is one way for ASTC, an association of more than 300 museums and affiliated insti

Your article concerning the award of the 1990 Rossi Prize to Stirling Colgate [The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 21] contains one error. The work Dr. Colgate did in the 1960s on neutrino emission from supernovae was done at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, not at Los Alamos. Dr. Colgate defected from California to New Mexico after the work you cited was completed. It was a privilege, a pleasure, and an education to work with him during his tenure at Livermore. There is a long-standing, frie

I would like to compliment you on a fine review of the events that occur during a radioactive decomposition that is transmitted through several phase shifters and is eventually detected as photons ["Environmentalists Toast New Liquid Scintillation Cocktails," The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 23]. This is truly a "black box" for quite a few people. I would, however, like to present my views, which differ significantly from yours, on the use of drain- dischargeable cocktails. As you point out,

The article "Ruling Could Inhibit Peer Review Candor" [The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 1] surprised me by its one-sidedness. Although the Penn/EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] case was briefly described, the article explored only the ruling's potential negative impact, and only from the point of view of the academy. Surely, there are meritorious counterarguments or other viewpoints worth mentioning. In fact, if the ruling were to inhibit "candid" expositions of race or gender

Today, more than ever, scientists are finding themselves immersed in "hot" fields--highly publicized, hyperdramatized research areas in which pursuit of funding is wildly competitive and change is quick. The media, ever in pursuit of the big story, the banner headline, stoke the fire, seizing every opportunity to trumpet sudden breakthroughs. Thus perpetuated is the public's widely held misapprehension that scientific progress is achieved primarily in sudden flashes of genius or serendipity by

The articles listed below, all less than two years old, have received a substantially greater number of citations than others of the same type and vintage, according to data from the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. Why have these research reports become such standouts? A comment following each reference, supplied to The Scientist by one of the authors, attempts to provide an answer. K.V. Visvanathan, S. Goodbourn, "Double-stranded RNA activates

News that a National Institutes of Health grant review committee intends to make a site visit causes many principal investigators to reach for aspirin and antacids. And indeed, a poor presentation to the committee virtually assures a research group that NIH will not fund its project. Yet a site visit need not be a traumatic experience. In fact, a clever PI can often turn the site visit into an opportunity to convince the NIH committee of the value and scholarship of a project. And remember: Si

Rear Admiral William C. Miller has been appointed the chief of naval research. Miller, who will report directly to the secretary of the Navy, heads an agency that comprises the Office of Naval Research (ONR), created by Congress in 1946, and the Office of Naval Technology (ONT), established in 1980. The agency has an annual budget of more than $1 billion, which is allocated for research and development work conducted at universities and Navy laboratories and by industry. Miller is the 17th offi

B.F. Skinner, 86, died of leukemia last month in Cambridge, Mass. The noted behaviorist had received a lifetime achievement award two days earlier from the American Psychological Association at its meeting in Boston, during which he offered a 15-minute address on his work. Born in Susquehanna, Pa., in 1904, Burrhus Frederic Skinner earned his B.A. at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1926 and received his Ph.D. in 1931 from Harvard. He joined the psychology department at the University of

After spending 17 years in the United States, Israeli-born physicist Mordehai Heiblum has returned to his native country to head the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Since 1978, Heiblum has worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he most recently was the manager and a research staff member of IBM's microstructure physics group. His present interests include ballistic electrons

A recently published study by the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Studies reports that as the 1980s wore on, unemployment among new science graduates with bachelor's and master's degrees declined. However, according to the report, the starting salaries of these fledgling scientists were lower than those of newly minted engineers. What's more, women were receiving lower starting salaries than their male colleagues. Similarly, newly graduated black scientists were pai

When the sixth annual Scientific Computing and Automation Conference and Exposition begins in Philadelphia tomorrow, conferees will be hearing about hundreds of scientific software packages that are now on the market. By contrast, in 1985, when the first conference was held, only a few applications were available for technical users of microcomputers, mostly in the area of data management and statistics. There were no more than a handful of software packages at the dawn of the so-called microc