Notebook

Table of Contents Science Publishing Is Not Perishing Computers Say The Darnedest Things But Only If They Travel First Class Turning Dan Quayle Into A Genius? They Just Might Make It, After All Global Warning Two bimonthly science journals debuted last month. Current Directions in Psychological Science, a publication of the Washington, D.C.-based American Psychological Society, brought out its first issue in February. Also bowing was Surgical Oncology, an international journal coedited by surgery professors Courtney M. Townsend Jr. of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pierre J. Guillou, director of the academic surgical unit at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. Meanwhile, the venerable Annals of Internal Medicine, published by the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians, reached a circulation milestone in January. Carolyn Clarick, a fourth-year medical student, became the 100,000th subscriber to the 65-year-old journal. The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies has announced its second annual Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence, called the Quest for the Thinking Computer, Part II. The contest rewards the inventor of the program that comes closest to passing computer pioneer Alan Turing's test of computer intelligence--conversing with a person without being discovered as a computer. At stake is $2,000 in prize money--or, should a computer actually hold an open-ended conversation without being found out, $100,000 promised by the contest's founder, sociologist and entrepreneur Hugh G. Loebner. Entry forms are available from the center, at (617) 491-9020. The contest will be held November 17; entries close July 31. In its December 1991 newsletter, iiFAR (Incurably Ill for Animal Research) notified its members that as a result of animal rights pressure, Northwest Airlines had temporarily stopped shipping dogs bred for research. Readers were urged to write to Northwest as the carrier mulled things over. They did, and according to iiFAR executive director Steve Carroll, "It appears that the letters had a very positive impact." By February, Northwest had announced that after considerable research it had resumed shipping live animals, pledging to only do so humanely. Says John Austin of Northwest, "The conclusion we reached was this is a public policy issue. We're not medical researchers, we're not activists, we're an airline." Since current public policy allows the shipments, they started back up. Regarding animal bans, Carrol says, "Today it's dogs, tomorrow rats and mice and everything." Nobel laureate Arno Penzias recently described for a University of Pennsylvania audience a system of wearable cameras, mikes, and earphones that could be linked via cellular phone to a computer capable of accessing a wide variety of video, audio, and text-based information. With such a system, for instance, the wearer could instantly "identify" anyone in the visual or audio range. But, asked one questioner, wouldn't that make someone like Vice President Dan Quayle seem to have an IQ of 180? Penzias, a member of the Council on Competitiveness, chaired by Quayle, pointed out that politicians already have an uncanny knack for remembering names and faces. Penzias, vice president of Bell Laboratories, noted for his detection of the cosmic "hum" of radiation left over from the big bang, was in Philadelphia on February 20 to receive the university's Pender Award, recognizing his contributions to cosmology and computer sciences. Actress Mary Tyler Moore, America's most famous diabetic, who almost lost her vision to the disease, announced a $100 million effort to develop a bioengineered cure for the disease by the year 2000. By way of a telephonic news conference linking dozens of reporters, representatives of the National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation said the two organizations will join in the quest. A major focus of the initiative will be recombinant human pancreatic cell transplantation. As part of the effort, six academic research institutions in the United States and Canada will begin receiving $3 million to $5 million each over the next five years to investigate these and other research areas. Craig Dorman, director of the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, advised a recent meeting of international oceanographers in Tokyo that the time has come for researchers around the world to mobilize in combating threats to the global environment. "I believe the challenge to us today is to rapidly--almost on a war footing--react to global and national needs for knowledge about the environment and man's effect on it," Dorman told his audience. "Our independence helps us to focus attention on scientific issues irrespective of jurisdictional concerns."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Mar 15, 1992

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