Notebook

Education Is Everybody's Business Bidding War On Advanced Technology A Cloudy Crystal Ball Global change Aims To Top $1 Billion Physicists Tackle Child Care Despite the existence of a Department of Education, at least 16 federal agencies are involved in the teaching of science and math. That's what an interagency Committee on Education and Human Resources found in an inventory of federal efforts as a first step toward a coordinated approach to promote science and math proficiency. The Education Department and the National Science Foundation dominate precollege efforts. The Department of Defense leads the federal government in undergraduate education, handling 37 percent of the $477 million requested for 1992. Its ROTC scholarships alone funnel $100 million to science, math, and engineering majors. The Department of Health and Human Services' pre- and postdoctoral traineeships and fellowships, offered through the National Institutes of Health and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, account for $421 million of the $805 million requested for graduate training. President Bush is playing catch-up with Congress on funding for the Advanced Technology Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A sweetheart of Congress, ATP helps industrial scientists in such areas as digital imaging technology and robotics. Last year Congress countered the administration's $10 million budget with a proposal of $100 million, eventually agreeing to spend $36 million. This year Bush opened the bidding with level funding of $36 million. "The president gave us a zero increase," says NIST director John Lyons. "But I think the fact he met the previous increase means the administration decided that the ATP is a good thing." Scientific knowledge can be a curse as well as a blessing, warns Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.). At a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on a recent Environmental Protection Agency report about setting priorities to protect the environment, Moynihan observed that "the more an agency's decisions are based on science, the more uncertain those decisions will appear to be." The problem, Moynihan said, is that "science is based on uncertainty, and the more you learn, the more you're not so sure what is the best thing to do." As an example, he cited the agency's 10-year, $500 million study of acid rain. "The answers to the problem," he said, "are less clear now" than before the study was launched. Four integrating themes will consume about three-quarters of the $1.18 billion global climate change budget proposed for 1992. The third year of a comprehensive federal research effort to understand the issue will see nine federal agencies focus most of their attention on climate modeling, energy and water cycles, the carbon cycle, and ecological and population dynamics. The success of the climate modeling effort will depend, in part, on another interagency initiative on high-performance computers and communications. The administration's 1992 proposal represents a 23 percent increase over current spending of $953 million, which was some $50 million below the administration's initial 1991 request. New wrinkles in this year's proposal include $17 million for research on economic issues and $6 million from the Defense Department for work on high latitude dynamics, regional modeling, and oceanography. There still aren't many women members of the American Physical Society, only 6 percent. But the fact that half of them are married to physicists has nudged the society into taking the unprecedented step of offering day care at its two spring meetings in Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. "You should have heard the cheers that erupted when we mentioned it at our conference last November on women in physics," says Miriam Forman, director of professional programs for APS. "Obviously, it's an idea whose time has come." An informal poll of other major societies found that four offered no child care; however, a fifth, the American Psychological Association, has done so since 1977. Forman says she doesn't mind being a bit of a pioneer, but she is concerned that APS may not sign up the minimum of 30 children needed to make the idea feasible.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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