AAAS Annual Meeting Investigates Challenges for a New Century

Citation

Arthur Mihram, G. and Mihram, D. (1999), "AAAS Annual Meeting Investigates Challenges for a New Century", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916fac.001

AAAS Annual Meeting Investigates Challenges for a New Century

G. Arthur Mihram and Danielle Mihram

The AAAS Meetings

The 165th American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting and Science Exposition was held January 21-26, 1999 in Anaheim, California, at the Marriott and Hilton Hotels adjacent to the Anaheim Convention Center, quite near Disneyland.

The January dates for the meeting appeared at first sight to be a return to the much earlier AAAS meeting dates (for 1975 through 1982), which had been held the first week of January until the venue was Toronto, Ontario. The widespread dissatisfaction with the rock-bottom temperatures experienced there led the AAAS to begin holding the meeting each year at the end of May (1983 through 1986), an arrangement which seemed to be most satisfying; yet, a decision was reached to begin to hold the meetings annually around the Presidents' Day weekend in February, probably because the large hotels typically experience, without a conference, a loss of revenue over that long weekend.

The AAAS 1999 Meeting was to have been held in Denver this February, but as a political reaction to an earlier Colorado referendum on equal civil rights for sexual orientation, the 1999 Meeting was moved to Anaheim, whose facilities were not available in February. (The 2000 Meeting, under the theme, "Science in an Uncertain Millennium," will be held February 17-20 in Washington, DC.) Because Colorado is now considered "politically correct," the AAAS meeting of 2003 will be held in Denver (in chilly February!).

The attendance at this year's meeting was only about 3,500 ­ quite a drop, the recent annual registrations being nearly 5,000. Over 1,000 speakers contributed to the meeting. In addition, this year, as has been the case in the previous two years, the National Association of Science Writers holds concurrently their annual meeting.

Student Scientists

The initial date, Thursday, January 21, was devoted to two events:

1. 1.

   the Student Science Convocation, at which dozens of high school science students prepared poster presentations for their one-day meeting; and

2. 2.

   an Opening Ceremony Lecture, presented in the evening by Eric Haseltine of Walt Disney Imagineering.

Subsequently, at one of the organisational committee meetings held to prepare for the 2000 Meeting, suggestions were made for augmenting the attendance by permitting science graduate students from colleges near the site of the meeting to register at no cost upon providing proper photo ID and university affiliation. Also suggested was an including the Student Science Convocation a discussion annually of ethical conduct in scientific research, perhaps coordinated with a presentation on the Scientific Method, placed in the historical perspective.

Beginning this year, the Student Science Convocation is held as part of the (national) Public Science Day, so that cities across the nation may hold their own student science fairs on that same date. Funded this year by Unisys Corporation, a total of 11 cities [e.g. Phoenix, Portland, Pittsburgh, Hampton (VA), and Augusta (GA)] held their respective fairs on January 21. It would seem an excellent opportunity, using current tele-communicative technology, to include the broadcast of the proposed presentation on ethics in science and the Scientific Method to each city's participating student scientists.

Meeting and Exposition

One feature of the "Meeting and Exposition" feature ­ which has been standard for several years now ­ has become a bit disconcerting to many registrants: the AAAS is holding, concurrent to the Meeting's program, a series of "Science Innovation Symposia," attendance at which requires a separate registration, costing between $35 and $150, in addition to the regular registration fee (these symposia are not workshops). The dismay, which we noticed at the blocked entranceways to these concurrently conducted symposia, on the faces of regular registrants upon being denied admission was rather disconcerting. We began to wonder whether certain advances in science seem, to AAAS, to require special registrants, the resulting group being therefore the only talent available to understand and to pass on this particular symposium's knowledge so as to accomplish the society's ostensible goal: the advancement of science.

Science and Entertainment

The AAAS this year, ostensibly because of its location's proximity to Disneyland (and to Hollywood), featured: Michael Crichton (producer of the TV series "ER"); Bill Nye (star of the TV series, "The Science Guy"); and Eric Haseltine (vice-president of Walt Disney's Imagineering). Other conference reporters (Calverley, 1999, for example) referred to these three as "pop-culture luminaries," and Calverley felt obligated to add: "But the bulk of the [AAAS] meeting focused on serious research spanning the spectrum of science."

Of course, each of the three luminaries can readily use his technologies to portray an image about scientists (and/or medical practitioners) and they each provided a dazzling performance. Novelist Crichton, who as an undergraduate studied anthropology, presented "Science versus Media," though his lecture's apparent goal was to make a public call for the AAAS to be the organisation which will provide ­ for the media and the rest of the entertainment community ­ the names of any "experts" who might be required to vouchsafe a proffered position.

In the press conference, we asked Michael Crichton whether he feared that his apparent goal might not be likened to the performances by many of the legal profession ("experts") who advised the nation on the national television networks' morning shows that "No one is ever charged with the crime of perjury, of lying under oath, in court." Scientists, too, as the Sarton Lecturer (Mary Jo Nye) reported, may not always be objective when it comes to supporting a particular political cause whose advocates may not wish to recognise as either scientifically unsupported or weakly substantiated.

Crichton voiced an opinion that the "legal expert" used by the broadcasting network must have been Harvard's A. Dershowitz, whom many (he added) at/from Harvard find discomfiting. (The offending party, however, had been from the legal Faculty at Yale!) Of course, to us, his response seemed to verify, if not underscore, the very concern raised by our question: Why should the public feel confident that a theme of, or an assertion within, a movie/video IS the truth just because the film-maker had consulted first an AAAS-recommended scientist before producing or releasing it?: "Yale" (though wrong) or "Dershowitz" (though discomfiting).

On Communications, Computers, and Converging Technologies

The AAAS 1999 Meeting included about 109 sessions, each having three to six authors' papers, though on any morning or afternoon there were 12 to 15 sessions being conducted simultaneously. The symmetry of the daily schedule was interrupted on the Sunday with the arrival of Vice-President Al Gore for the presentation of a political address that afternoon.

Since the AAAS gathered paper sessions into quite arbitrary (13 in number) categories (then called "symposia"), the result was a patchwork of sessions. None employed the word "communication" in its title, but two symposia ("Computers, the Internet, and Information" and "Education, Entertainment, and Literacy") included sessions which dealt with topics within the ongoing convergence of communicative and computing technologies.

Calverley (1999) was correct to have noted that many of the sessions did not seem to be conducting serious scientific discussions. We attended many of the AAAS's organising committee meetings this year (held so as to organise the 2000 Meeting), only to observe that the AAAS appears to approve primarily any proposed session "which will draw an audience," meaning not only that many subjects will be treated much too lightly or that the speakers may not be those most familiar with the particular subject at hand but also that the resulting speakers will be only those who are most entertaining.

One of the sessions in the "Education, Entertainment, and Literacy" symposium was entitled, "Science Is Fun!," while another was "'Yuck, Gross!': What Can Online Deformed Frogs Teach about Science?" The notion was presented in the latter that, because an early teenager has seen on the Internet pictures of deformed frogs, then later in life every time he or she encounters TV or news coverage of frogs, he or she will likely "revisit" earlier ideas about deformed frogs and thus "be started on a path toward lifelong science learning." Surely, one must appreciate that a much greater disciplining of adolescent minds will be required in order to produce later an adult contributor to science.

Another session, but in the symposium on "Computers, the Internet, and Information," dealt with "Policing the Internet." Sponsored by the AAAS's own Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility (whose organizational meeting at the AAAS Meeting was also closed to registrants), the first four speakers (two from the AAAS office, a third a recent employee there) warned of the resulting threat to human rights groups if ever we dared to "police" the Internet. The last of the six speakers in the session, from the American Civil Liberties Union, joined the AAAS organisation's speakers and Eric Goldstein of Human Rights Watch in worrying about any online censorship of the Internet. Only one panelist, Philip R. Reitinger of the US Department of Justice, was given time to counter the theme of the session and he felt compelled (annoyed?) at the outset to have to explain to the other panelists that, in order for criminals to be prosecuted, evidence must be first gathered: evidence which in computer format is, unlike "paper trails" (themselves difficult enough to locate), almost impossible to isolate. (For further information, see the audiotape of the exchange between Reitinger and Mihram, 1999.) Are there not too many users of the Internet, infatuated by its near-anonymity, who erroneously conclude that "privacy" is of far greater importance than protection against criminal users?

Is There a Censorship Threat?

We have also been astounded to see so many in positions of authority at leading conferences (e.g. some individuals at the Internet Librarian'98 Conference [November]) who claim that they fear any governmental involvement in the Internet. In order that we individual citizens be protected from the abuse of criminals, we long ago ­ in the Western/Christian world, at least ­ felt the need to empower government to find and to collect the evidence which would redress any (criminal) wrongdoing. We were particularly surprised to hear Alexander Fowler (no longer at AAAS, but now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation) present "No Cyberpolicy Is Good Cyberpolicy" (the title represents essentially what he told the audience), particularly since he definitely heard us expand our views at the 1995 AAAS Meeting (in a session which he chaired) that a national electronic postal service [with its governmentally issued (and secured) "enhanced electronic postmark"] will not only provide him with the "privacy protection" that he believes to be so paramount but also supply us all with the requisite protection against nearly all online criminality (e.g. Mihram and Mihram, 1997; 1998).

Virtual Communities, Databases, and the Giant "E-archive"

Other presentations in the "Computers, the Internet, and Information" symposium dealt with "Virtual Communities," in which it was reported (sometimes by graduate students) that new kinds of "communities" have been formed on the Internet, and are being organized around a common interest (a fact that librarians and social anthropologists have known for quite a while). The focus of the session was on Multi-User Domains (MUDs) or Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs). Originally invented for multi-player games, these "communities" have widened their scope to include applications in education, distributed work environments, and military and other adult training. The same could easily have been said once learned societies (such as the Royal Societies) were formed shortly after printing became sufficiently widespread; unfortunately, these Internet communities are not requiring the rigor, the discipline of mind, which science must expect in order to contribute meaningfully to the nation's advancement.

At the outset of another of this symposium's sessions, one entitled "On the Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science," P.G. Kolaitis of the University of California-Santa Cruz repeated the too-often-voiced myth about the relationship between mathematics and science by quoting the mistaken notions of Wigner, Hilbert, and Godel: e.g. that one studies mathematics only to do science. After all, were it not for the editorial pagination felt necessary in the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, there would be no need for mathematics (!) at all in his scientific treatise! It is, of course, a bit disconcerting to hear, at an AAAS Meeting, audience members having to remind pre-selected speakers of such errors.

A report by Anne Frondorf and Gladys Cotter (from the US Geological Survey), "Developing the National Biological Information Infrastructure: Preparing for the Next Generation," provided an update on the broad cooperative effort to develop a National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII): "http://www.nbii.gov." The NBII is a distributed electronic federation, through which biological data from a variety of sources, including Federal and State government agencies, universities, natural history museums, and private organizations, are made accessible for retrieval, integration, and application to resources management issues. In addition to making progress in supporting greater access to important biological data, the NBII is promoting the development and use of new tools and standards that facilitate the description, exchange, and application of these data: for example, the development of a standard approach for cataloging biological data sets so that potential users may locate and retrieve the data sets that meet their specific requirements; another example is the development of a "controlled vocabulary" for biology to provide greater consistency in how data resources are described and searched on the Internet. According to the presenters, these developments set the stage for the enhanced capabilities of a "next-generation" NBII as called for in 1998 by the Biodiversity Panel of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The session "The Grand Unified eArchive: Scientific Publishing in the Year 2020" proved disappointing. The main question which it proposed to address was: "Can electronic publications be operated at much lower costs than print journals, and still provide all the services that scholars require?" The obvious (for librarians) conclusion was: "That key question is still in dispute." Presentations, including by Ann Okerson of Yale University, noted that available evidence shows that much less expensive journals are already on the Net, yet the transition is likely to be complicated, "since," noted Andrew M. Odlyzko, of AT&T Labs-Research, New Jersey, "the scholarly publishing business is full of inertia and perverse economic incentives." Issues that were identified as still problematic were:

1. 1.

   The current lack of in-depth searching capabilities ­ one should remind the speakers that initiatives such as JSTOR http:// www.jstor.ac.uk/about/index.html are under way;

2. 2.

   Innovative peer-review strategies ­ the proliferation of preprints archives, posted on the Web and made available to all, presents a challenge to the current print-based peer-review of research (presentation by Thomas von Foerster, Springer-Verlag: "Peer Review in the Electronic Era"). Briefly noted as an answer to the peer review problem (yet no information given by the speaker) in this presentation was Paul Ginsparg's eprint archive http:// xxx.lanl.gov/, based in Los Alamos, which has grown in the last four years to now include more than 70 percent of the current physics literature worldwide. It receives 500 new articles per week and is accessed 75,000 times per day by the world's 45,000 physicists.

   A search on the Internet yields other such e-archives, including one that was built on Ginsparg's model, the CogPrints Archive, which, according to its homepage, is "an attempt to generalise to the Cognitive Sciences (and eventually to all learned disciplines) Paul Ginsparg's revolutionary contribution to the Physics community" http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/cogprints.html The reader may find interesting their stand on peer review (see under "Description" on the homepage).

3. 3.

   Fair pricing for value-added materials ­ links within articles to other related documents or to commentaries received after the article's posting;

4. 4.

   Protection of intellectual property; and

5. 5.

   Accessible archiving of the vast amounts of data and resources.

Judging from the comments and questions at the end of the session, a majority of the audience must have anticipated a discussion about e-archives" that focused on electronic scientific archiving, rather than generalities. Indeed, many found the last presentation, "How We Got Here from There: The Transition from Paper" (by R. Stephen Berry, University of Chicago), to be a "truism." Berry's conclusion: the "Giant e-archive" could be described as "the place where everything is" ­ the reviewed "published article"; its preprint; the database on which its results are based; the algorithms and programs which support its conclusion; the search engine; the ongoing dialog (which, presumably, has the life expectancy of that famous battery which goes on, and on, and on ...); and the links among all of these.

Perhaps we were expecting too much of the AAAS symposia on education and/or communication. A final session, one unfortunately placed on the Monday afternoon when most registrants had already left or were making the usual frantic departure from the Meeting, dealt with "Science and the Internet." Though it claimed to be no more than a series of reports or case studies about current developments in Internet capabilities, the report by Gary M. Olson of the University of Michigan on "Collaboratories Enable Global Science" noted that isolated data-recording instruments (Arctic, Antarctic, near-space and/or lower atmosphere) are broadcasting periodic data, which are then placed on the Internet for access via any Internet connexion. One wonders ­ as was mentioned in my own (Arthur's) letter to Benjamin Franklin (Mihram, 1975) ­ whether the science of Dr Franklin's day would not have been proceeding even more rapidly if, even earlier, Copernicus' and Galileo's data could have been made available as quickly.

Science and Religion

The AAAS has for just a few years now organised a "Program of Dialog between Science and Religion," possibly as a result of the success [= rooms overfilled with registrants in the immediately preceding years in the 1980s] of those sessions and symposia held at the AAAS Meetings on topics such as evolution versus creationism; the likely genetic character of intelligence (via separated-twin studies); and the fallacy of accepting the results of lie-detector tests. The Program of Dialog's Website is located at http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/dbsr

Librarians and information specialists might ­ at first glance ­ not connect the discussions between science and religion as very directly pertinent to their disciplines. However, the immediate Past-President, W. Lee Hisle, of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published last year his concern that the library profession is at a crossroads, not because of any conflict between print and digitised materials, but rather because of the moral issue of the librarian's role in assisting in the rearing of our nation's children. He calls to task the ALA's Intellectual Freedom Statement Committee for asking librarians to dodge their responsibilities in determining whether material is inappropriate for children (Hisle, 1998).

The AAAS seems to be drawing on the good will of the Templeton Foundation http://www.templeton.org/ to support not only such special conferences but also the AAAS's Program of Dialog more generally. But, even at this year's Meeting, the session on "Before the Beginning" (purportedly organised, however, by the AAAS's own membership Section L ­ on the history and philosophy of science), the audience there was most dissatisfied with the presentations in the session: e.g. at the very end of the session, an unidentified member of the audience expressed dismay that he could see no way to understand why he should believe notions presented by the speakers (such as one relating that the universe is just a bubble, now apparently quite inflationary ­ but not to worry, since Alan Greenspan is in power and has declared that inflation "is under control." "This is science?" seemed to be the questioner's attitude (cf. Rees et al., 1999).

We raised the question from the floor ­ to Helge Kragh of Aarhus University, Denmark, at the conclusion of his own presentation, "Religious Dimensions of the Steady-State Controversy" ­ whether the issue of a "Big Bang" is not just a metaphor for the Hebraic tale about a cosmological beginning and ­ since the rest of that tale, on biological creation, has been made irrelevant by biologists and geologists leading to Darwin's description of evolution ­ should not we now realise that, to accept the arguments of the proponents of the "Big Bang," we scientists are being asked to be non-scientific, if not anti-scientific (Kragh and Mihram, 1999)? Why should it be difficult, if we can easily conceive of time going on infinitely into the future, to conceive that it has always done so infinitely from the past? Such an attitude, in consonance with the "steady-state universe," would not say that God does not exist, but merely that the Hebraic tale about Yahweh's role in beginning all things is clearly ­ a tale.

At another Program of Dialog session, Owen Gingerich (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) spoke on "Why Is the Day 24 Hours, and When Will the Millennium Begin?" At the outset, he proclaimed surprise that the newly elected AAAS President, S. Gould ­ also of Harvard ­ had been sent to chair the session, Gingerich speculating that perhaps Gould wanted to make certain that his own book (on the date which will end the current millennium) would not be criticised. Presumably, Gingerich was not aware of the criticism which the AAAS had received for rejecting authors who were critical of one of Gould's rather indefensible stands: viz. that there is a lack of progress in biological evolution.

Dr Franz B.M. de Waal, of Emory University, presented a well-attended topical lecture on "Natural Conflict Resolution," a session sponsored also by the AAAS's Program of Dialog. In his presentation, he reported on the nature of observed aggressive behavior in primates, particularly macaques and chimpanzees. He stressed three features: reconciliation ­ a friendly reunion, soon after a physical fight; consolation ­ a friend consoles the victim(s) of a fight; and mediation ­ typically a female (older) will bring the two disputants, who will not even look at each other, together. These features are each a result of social learning, and he noted that many nonprimate (e.g. goats and dolphins) social animals have been noted to express reconciliation.

The presentation prompted us to ask Dr de Waal whether, in the context of our own earlier paper (Mihram and Mihram, 1981) on religion (being humankind's earliest science), he would have observed any of the notions which our own species expresses as "justice," that notion being different for each of the world's major religions: in Judaism, justice is vengeance; in Christianity, justice is forgiveness; in Islam, justice is mercy. He did feel that the primates which he had observed were expressing sometimes vengeance and sometimes forgiveness, but did not comment on mercy (though it seemed that his discussion about mediation must constitute a predecessor to this human notion of legal justice, or mercy) (De Waal and Mihram, 1999).

On the Challenge for a New Century

Of course, the 1999 AAAS Meeting did, as its titular theme promised, present many challenges which confront us as we move into a new (Christian calendar) century. But, challenges always confront science, since we (Humankind) are forever ourselves confronted by naturally occurring phenomena which we do not understand as yet. The AAAS 2000 Meeting, under the heading, "Science in an Uncertain Millennium," will also be a rather hyperbolic statement of a standard facet of science: namely, when will Humankind be able to provide the very explanation for ­ i.e. find the truth about ­ some other puzzling phenomenon of Nature?

Many of the challenges confronting us are uncertain as to their scientific resolution via understanding. However, there should be no dismissal of the scientific enterprise as being one which ­ for a whole millennium ­ will only produce uncertainty.

If the AAAS is seeking to explore the most insightful publications of our own century, its membership would do well to read and reflect on both C. West Churchman's publication (Churchman, 1968) entitled Challenge to Reason and Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz's booklet (Lorenz, 1974): Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins.

The 1999 AAAS Meeting seemed replete with errors within its presentations. We list five which, by listening to the recordings of the respective author's session's audiotapes, will convince one that the AAAS needs to correct its attitude with respect to the apparently indiscriminate selection of its speakers:

1. 1.

   At the session, "On Grammar: What's Innate?," David Peretsky presented a world map projection divided north/south on the Pacific, connoting that properties in languages would likely be universal, but ­ if the world map which he presented had been split through the Atlantic ­ then extant differences could well be explained by noting an Indo-European versus an American-Asian distinction, so that the linguistic differences could likely be explained in terms of innateness (due to nature, not so much nurture). The subsequent speaker claimed that "Language is not acquired through repetition and training" and that "No other species has language," despite the fact that philosopher Karl Popper had years ago noted that one type of language, the "signaling, or warning" function, which many animal species, particularly social animals, employ, means that language is not unique to Humankind (see Peretsky et al., 1999).

2. 2.

   At the session, "Modeling Evolution," John H. Campbell, of University of California at Los Angeles, presented "Evolution Is a Progressive Process," and his presentation was quite opposed to AAAS President Gould's longtime-held position that evolution knows no progress, despite the fact that animals developed neural systems to enhance a species' individuals' survivability; and among animals, Humankind is the only species that builds models for survival outside the neural and genetic systems (i.e. extracorporeally) (see Campbell and Mihram, 1999).

3. 3.

   At the session, "Keys to the Cosmos," Karl Hufbauer of the University of California at Irvine presented "The History of Cosmology during the 20th Century," but failed to mention the aether, the all-pervasive medium which had been used to explain a carrier for the various wavelengths of light. It was strange that he failed to do so, in view of the previously pro-relativistic editor of Nature who in the 1980s penned an editorial which noted the failure of Einstein's general relativity theory, but hastened to caution: "Don't [now] Bring Back the Aether" (see Hufbauer and Mihram, 1999).

4. 4.

   At the topical lecture, "Experimental Evidence for the Faster-than-Light Tunneling of Photons," R.V. Chiao of the University of California at Berkeley described photon-tunneling, noting that photons can be made to travel faster than light, yet this does not threaten special relativity. It was pointed out that the relativity theories "predict" that length and mass are, for moving objects, proportional to the quantity (c² ­ v²), so that any item possessing a velocity, v, greater than the speed, c, of light necessarily presents a problem, since the root of a negative number gives a result which does not exist in the real world (of the nonmathematician) (see Chiao and Mihram, 1999).

5. 5.

   One substitute speaker, John Parsons, of the University of Texas at San Antonio, did, however, raise an important point about the conflict of values which leading scientists tend to encounter whenever their results are not in consonance with the highly publicized reports by TV broadcasters of the research of other colleagues, but reports which are wrong ­ yet tend in the public mind to attain the nature of being correct, or true. Dr Parsons related ("Music and Language") that he felt almost reluctant to make the point that the half of the brain most responsible for spacial orientation is also that for much of mathematics, yet that an infant's listening to Mozart will not make him or her later mathematically inclined. [Indeed, one can note Parsons and Mihram (1999).] In this sense, Parsons was a "breath of fresh air" at AAAS 1999.

Hopefully the 2000 AAAS Meeting and following will find a way to ensure that its speakers are much more cautious ­ more scientific ­ in their utterances than the many that we heard at the 1999 Meeting. Perhaps with "luminaries" (Calverley, 1999) being the highlight of the 1999 Meeting, too many speakers were tempted, and succumbed to the hyperbolic commentary. Of course, science does not progress by the pleasure which one has given to audiences who hear a scientist reporting his or her conclusions, but rather by advancing Human Knowledge: this latter is the intended notion of the advancement of science.

G. Arthur Mihram is an author and consultant from Princeton, New Jersey.Danielle Mihram is Assistant Dean for the Leavey Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. dmihram@usc.edu