Notebook

Table of Contents New Medium, Same Message Cybermanners Dead Sea Detectives Presidents With Disabilities Holiday Cheer The late media maven Marshall McLuhan has arrived in virtual form on the Internet as Project McLuhan. The project's aim, according to Nelson Thall, president of the Marshall McLuhan Center for Global Communications, Ontario, Canada, is to revitalize and update McLuhan's work to take advantage of and address the communications power of the tens of millions of interlinked computers called the Internet. Concerning television, primarily, McLuhan's observation that "the medium is the message" hit a chord in the 1960s, Thall says, and, today, the medium of the Internet demonstrates the ongoing relevance of McLuhan's thinking. "Again, the medium is still very much the message," Thall said. "No information or product or service ever communicated via the Internet, now or in the future, will ever be as important or as hungry for resources as the Internet itself." Project workers will seek to apply the master's analytical approaches to "almost every area of our society in which culture and technology clash--which, not strangely, is most of them," according to Thall. For more information, send the message "subscribe mcluhan-list" to the address: majordomo@inforamp.net. The medium may still be the message, but will that message be a polite one? A new report from the National Research Council compares the way people communicate on the Internet with their use of print, telephone, radio, and television media. The report, Rights and Responsibilities of Participants in Networked Communities, assesses whether existing guidelines for information exchange on older media will be adequate for the new electronic medium, using hypothetical scenarios in four areas--free speech, electronic vandalism, intellectual property interests, and privacy--to explore behaviors. The volume is available from the National Academy Press; call 800-624-6242. Soon, it will also be available on the World Wide Web at: http://www.nas.edu; via gopher at: gopher.nas.edu; or by ftp at: ftp.nas.edu. Religious scholars have added DNA technology to their repertoire of research tools. A team, which includes scientists from Brigham Young University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will use DNA fingerprinting to reassemble pieces of the Dead Sea scrolls. In the project's first year, the researchers expect to isolate three to four genes from each of 50 fragments. The scrolls, which are printed on animal hides, are currently in about 10,000 different pieces and may represent 800 individual scrolls. The team says they hope to link the fragments and ultimately the entire scrolls together based on their unique DNA signatures. "We should be able to get an idea of how many scrolls there are, which pieces go together, and where the scrolls were produced," says team member Scott Woodward, associate professor of microbiology at Brigham Young in a statement. Because the scrolls are made from animal hides, DNA tests may also reveal which fragments are from related animals in order to identify scrolls that may be from different herds or geographic areas. In late January, the Working Group on Disability in United States Presidents, an ad hoc group that includes neurologists, neurosurgeons, policy experts, and political scientists, met for the first time at a conference hosted by former president Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Citing several examples of presidents who have had disabilities while in office--most notably disabilities that were hidden from the public, such as president Franklin Roosevelt's paralysis due to polio--the group aims to develop a series of recommendations for possible revisions to the 25th amendment. This constitutional amendment outlines the procedure for presidential succession. Physician James F. Toole, director of the Stroke Center at Bowman and director of the project, maintains that there should be a straightforward mechanism for a president's attending physician to report to the public certain disabilities from which a president might be suffering. "Being a neurologist, my point of view is that it's the brain that runs the body and the brains of people run society, and if you have a sick brain in the leadership, you have a disabled society," asserts Toole. Rationalization is a wonderful thing, especially when backed up with scientific evidence. A University of North Carolina researcher has determined that the gorging that goes on almost continuously from Thanksgiving through New Year's may be offset by the bustle of preparing for and enjoying the holidays. Barbara Ainsworth, an assistant professor of physical education, exercise, and sports and her colleagues have compiled a list (no doubt checking it more than twice) of energy expenditures from holiday-related as well as standard physical activities. "For example," she says, "in one hour, a 150-pound person burned about 160 calories shopping for Christmas presents, and another 112 calories just writing Christmas cards." Ainsworth compiled the list--which factors in weight, time spent in the activity, and intensity--as part of a project to standardize measurements used in metabolic research throughout the United States and abroad to help scientists. Her work was incorporated in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination, an estimate of how physically active Americans are, produced by the National Center for Health Statistics. Other fat-burning holiday activities: unpacking Christmas decorations (245 calories), watching holiday bowl games (63 calories), shoveling snow (420), and talking on the phone with relatives (70).

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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