[Fwd: What's New for Jul 13, 2001]

[Susan Gawarecki <loc@ICX.NET>]

Some bones to gnaw on this Friday p.m.  Robert Park sheds light into

some dark corners...



-------- Original Message --------

Subject: What's New for Jul 13, 2001

Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 15:55:30 -0400 (EDT)

From: "What's New" <whatsnew@aps.org>

To: loc@icx.net



WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 13 Jul 01   Washington, DC



1. "FREE" SPEECH: NO-FEE ACCESS TO PHYSICS DATABASES THREATENED. 

A House Subcommittee recommended a massive cut in DOE's line-item

budget for PubScience, a comprehensive on-line repository of

abstracts and citations in physics.  Is PubScience just another

government boondoggle?  Hardly: It's searched more than a million

times annually and it's cheap.  But the Software and Information

Industry Association sees unfair competition, and targeted

PubScience in an intense lobbying campaign.  Let's see if I've

got this right: government programs that work are "privatized,"

and those that don't live on.  The American Library Association

alone is lobbying hard for no-fee access to DOE's PubScience. 

Elsewhere, Paul Ginsparg, the genius of fast, no-fee scientific

publishing, is leaving Los Alamos and taking his science pre-

print server to Cornell, where he received his physics PhD.



2. NMD: IS THE SYSTEM A SUCCESS?  DEFINE SUCCESS.  Interceptors

failed to hit the target in the last two tests (WN 14 Jul 00;),

but the administration insists the tests were successful, and

they claim the upcoming test on Saturday will be as well. Why? 

Because all the kinks have been smoothed out?  Nah, they are just

changing the definition of success.  In a press conference

Wednesday, an NMD scientific spokesman explained that "every test

is a success." This insight was echoed by supporters of NMD on

Capitol Hill who described these tests as "incomplete successes." 

Despite these successes, when pressed, the panel admitted that

the system wouldn't be ready for deployment for at least 5-6

years. This contrasts with the president's dream of 2004.     

     

3. POWER-LINE HAZARD: ITALIAN SCIENTISTS TELL IT LIKE IT IS.  In

Italy, fear mongers got the public worked up about the supposed

cancer threat from 50-Hz magnetic fields.  A proposed law calling

for limiting magnetic fields to 0.5 microtesla, was stopped only

after 200 distinguished scientists sent a letter to Italian

president Ciampi. It quoted the APS statement, "Power Line Fields

and Public Health," http://www.aps.org/statements/95.2.html.  The

International Agency for Research on Cancer, meanwhile, ranked

EMF as a category 3 threat.  That's the same as ordinary tea, and

even lower than coffee, which is 2B or "possibly carcinogenic." 



4. RADAR HAZARD: HAS PAUL BRODEUR SWITCHED TO WRITING FICTION? 

You remember Brodeur.  He's the guy who got the public all worked

up over power lines and cancer with a series of scare stories in

The New Yorker (WN 25 Aug 89).  Last week, in a letter to the

Boston Globe, Brodeur warned that early-warning radar on Cape Cod

is a serious cancer threat.  Fired by The New Yorker in 1992,

Brodeur told Forbes magazine just last year that he's turned to

writing fiction.  Nonsense!  He's always written fiction.



(Stephanie Young contributed to this week's What's New.)



THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY (Note: Opinions are the author's,

and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.)

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