WHAT'S NEW Friday, December 12, 2003

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 12 Dec 03   Washington, DC

1. ELECTRONIC VOTING: HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF YOUR VOTE IS COUNTED? 
You won't.  After the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, election
officials across the country sought to modernize voting.  This
has meant a lot of business for companies that make touch-screen
electronic voting machines.  However, voters may also be getting
the business -  the machine codes are proprietary secrets (WN 25
Apr 03).  This puts vote counting under full control of private
companies, with no way to conduct an audit.  If this isn't scary
enough, there's the fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans from
the CEO of Diebold, the major supplier of touch-screen voting
machines: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver it's electoral
votes to the President."  He is in a perfect position to do so. 
A study for the State of Ohio, found 57 serious security flaws in
electronic voting machines.  Our best hope is H.R.2239, the Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, introduced by
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist.  The bill would require a
voter-verified paper trail for all voting machines, making audits
possible.  There are currently 74 bi-partisan cosponsors. 

2. UNIVERSITY OF WORLD PEACE: TRAINING PROFESSIONAL MEDITATORS. 
The Washington Post yesterday carried a photograph of a peaceful-
looking audience, seated with their eyes closed.  It looked like
an 8:00am section of Physics 101.  The caption said they were
meditating to raise $1 billion to build a University of World
Peace, with scholarships to train 8,000 meditation experts.  You
can imagine that with 8,000 UWP graduates, they will be able to
meditate even larger sums.  Followers of the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi, they sought $1B after 9/11 to train 40,000 meditators who
would generate a "unified field" that would create world peace
(WN 28 Sep 01).  They must not have raised the full amount.

3. HUMAN CLONING: U.N. DEBATE ON TOTAL BAN IS DELAYED FOR A YEAR.
All member nations agree on a treaty to prohibit cloning of human
beings, but the United States leads a push to extend the ban to
include therapeutic cloning of stem cells.  Therapeutic cloning
is regarded as a promising approach to research on treatment of
diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's.  The U.S. position
is opposed by our most important allies and almost the entire
world scientific community.  It is backed by Costa Rica and the
Catholic Church. At home, the Bush administration is at odds with
40 Nobel Prize winners, the National Academy of Sciences, the
American Medical Association, many scientific societies the AAAS. 

4. NOBEL MADNESS: CAMPAIGN BY SCORNED INVENTOR ONLY INTENSIFIES.
There have been a lot of disappointed almost-Nobels, but nothing
before like the costly public rampage of Raymond Damadian, who
was left off the 2003 Medicine Nobel, given for MRI (WN 10 Oct
03).  He began with full-page ads in major newspapers, which is
not inexpensive.  No good could come of this, and most scientists
seemed at most sort of embarrassed for Damadian, but the full-
page ads just kept coming.  On Tuesday, the day before the award
ceremony, he took one last shot: a double-page NYT ad in color.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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