2000 : WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?

Today (but I hope not tomorrow) I think the most important unreported story concerns the reasons for a return of right-wing extremism in Europe, and for the first time in the U.S. Since I am not a journalist I would not report such a story, but I would first find out if it is really true, and if true then study what its causes are. Is it that people are running out of hope and meaning? Have the Western democracies run out of believable goals? What conditions favor fascism and what can we do to prevent them from spreading?

We have taught our machines to conduct propaganda. Web sites and other media are designed to be "sticky," using any means necessary to maintain our attention. Computers are programmed to stimulate Pavlovian responses from human beings, using techniques like one-to-one marketing, collaborative filtering, and hypnotic information architecture.

Computers then record our responses in order to refine these techniques, automatically and without the need for human intervention. The only metrics used to measure the success of banner ads and web sites is the amount of economic activity - consumption and production - they are able to stimulate in their human user/subjects. As a result, the future content and structure of media will be designed by machines with no priority other than to induce spending.

It amounts to a closed feedback loop between us and our computers, where - after their initial programming - the machines take the active role and human beings behave automatically. Programs adjust themselves in real time, based on their moment to moment success in generating the proper, mindless responses from us. In fact, computers and software are already charged with the design of their own successors. They are encouraged to evolve, while we are encouraged to devolve into impulsive, thoughtless passivity.

Those who stand a chance of resisting - people who actually think - are rewarded handsomely for their compliance, and awarded favorable media representations such as "geek chic." These monikers are reserved for intelligent people who surrender their neural power to the enhancement of the machine, by becoming vested web programmers, for example. Those who refuse to suspend active thought are labeled communist, liberal, or simply "unfashionably pessimistic." Worse, they are unfaithful enemies of NASDAQ, and the divinely ordained expansion of the US economy.

Ultimately, if such a story were actually reported, it would have to dress itself in irony, or appear as the result of an abstract intellectual exercise, so as not to alert too much attention.

The way we learn to use the Internet in the next few years (or fail to learn) will influence the way our grandchildren govern themselves. Yet only a tiny fraction of the news stories about the impact of the Net focus attention on the ways many to-many communication technology might be changing democracy — and those few stories that are published center on how traditional political parties are using the Web, not on how grassroots movements might be finding a voice.

Democracy is not just about voting for our leaders. Democracy is about citizens who have the information and freedom of communication the need to govern themselves. Although it would be illogical to say that the printing press created modern democratic nation-states, it would have been impossible to conceive, foment, or implement self-government without the widespread literacy made possible by printing technology. The more we know about the kind of literacy citizens are granted by the Internet, the better our chances of using that literacy to strengthen democracy. And what could be more important? What good is health and wealth and great personal home entertainment media without liberty?

Every communication technology alters governance and political processes. Candidates and issues are packaged and sold on television by the very same professionals who package and sell other commodities. In the age of mass media, the amount of money a candidate can spend on television advertising is the single most important influence on the electoral success. Now that the Internet has transformed every desktop into a printing press, broadcasting station, and place of assembly, will enough people learn to make use of this potential? Or will our lack of news, information, and understanding of the Net as a political tool prove insufficient against the centralization of capital, power, and knowledge that modern media also make possible?

The same tool that affords tremendous power to the grassroots, the broad citizenry, the cacaphony of competing "factions" necessary for healthy democracy, also affords tremendous power to the elites who already have wealth and power. Guess who can best afford to apply the tool to further their ends? What's in it for big media interests to inform us about how we can compete with big media interests?

The political power afforded to citizens by the Web is not a technology issue. Technology makes a great democratization of publishing, journalism, public discourse possible, but does not determine whether or not that potential will be realized. Every computer connected to the Net can publish a manifesto, broadcast audio and video eyewitness reports of events in real time, host a virtual community where people argue about those manifestos and broadcasts. Will only the cranks, the enthusiasts, the fringe groups take advantage of this communication platform? Or will many-to-many communication skills become a broader literacy, the way knowing and arguing about the issues of the day in print was the literacy necessary for the American revolution?

The "public sphere" is what the German political philosopher Habermas called that part of public life where ordinary people exchange information and opinions regarding potholes on main street and national elections, school bonds and foreign policy. Habermas claimed that the democratic revolutions of the 18th century were incubated in the coffee houses and committees of correspondence, informed by the pamphlets and newspaper debates where citizens argued about how to govern themselves without a King. Public governance could only emerge from public opinion. Habermas wrote: "By "public sphere," we mean first of all a domain in our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed." The public sphere is the reason why the modern coup d'etat requires paratroopers to capture television broadcast stations — because those are the places where the power to influence public opinion is concentrated.

The problem with the public sphere during the past sixty years of broadcast communications has been that a small number of people have wielded communication technology to mold the public opinion of entire populations. The means of creating and distributing the kind of media content that could influence public opinion — magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations — were too expensive for any but a few. Just as books were once too expensive for any but a few. The PC and the Internet changed that. Desktop video, desktop radio, desktop debates, digicam journalism, drastically reduced the barriers to publishing and broadcasting. These technological capabilities have emerged only recently, and are evolving rapidly. While much attention is focused on how many-to-many audio technology is threatening the existing music industry, little attention is focused on political portals. While all eyes are on e-commerce, relatively few know about public opinion BBSs, cause-related marketing, web-accessible voting and finance data.

Look at VoxCap, and the Minnesota E-Democracy Project, project, the California Voter's foundation, and scores of other unreported experiments. Imagine what might happen if more people were told that the Web could help them remain free, as well as enhance their shopping experience?

Living flesh is innervated with all kinds of sensors like taste buds, pressure sensors, photoreceptors and position sensors in muscle fibers, which monitor internal and external conditions. Brains analyze signals from these sensors using built-in and ever-evolving models of the world (that include the owners of the brains) and then use these analyses to formulate plans of action.

One of the most important un(der)reported stories today is the way the inanimate world built by humanity is becoming ever more innervated with sensors (cameras, microphones, strain gauges, magnetic sensors, GPS receivers, transponders, infrared sensors, satellite surveillance, etc.) as well as communications systems linking these sensors to computers that can store, analyze and act on those signals just like biological brains. What's more, all of these sensors are likely to ultimately link into a next-generation Internet via ultra-miniaturized, on-board, wireless connections (one of the main R&D thrusts of the microelectromechanical systems community). Millions of millions of thermometers, barometers, GPs transponders in vehicles, seismic monitors, radiation monitors, department store surveillance cameras, and thousands of other gadgets watching the world will all feed data into the system. This will amount to a global-scale, sensitive infrastructure a planet-sized body, that is — whereby myriad sensory signals will constantly feed into a global-scale cyberspace coursing with sophisticated pattern-recognition abilities, knowledge-discovery (data-mining) systems, and other artificial cognition tools. One consequence will be that Earth will have a new kind of planetary self-awareness akin the bodily awareness living creatures have due to their sensory tissue. Debate about personal privacy will become almost moot since the entire world will constitute a glass house. On the up side, the complexity of this worldwide awareness — and the new categories of data about the world will become available — is likely to lead to emergent phenomena as surprising as the way life emerges from molecules and consciousness from life.

A plausible explanation of how the brain can create internal models of veridical and hypothetical worlds has long eluded theorists. But recently there has been significant progress in the theoretical understanding of this defining aspect of human cognition, and it has scarcely been reported. About a decade ago, I wrote in The Cognitive Brain that the capability for invention is arguably the most consequential characteristic that distinguishes humans from all other creatures. Our cognitive brain is especially endowed with neuronal mechanisms that can model within their biological structures all conceivable worlds, as well as the world we directly perceive or know to exist. External expressions of an unbounded diversity of brain-created models constitute the arts and sciences and all the artifacts and enterprises of human society.

The newsworthy story is that we now have, for the first time, a biologically credible large-scale neuronal model that can explain in essential structural and dynamic detail how the human brain is able to create internal models of its intimate world and invent models of a wider universe.

My story is about pigs! How could anything connected with pigs possibly have significant cultural consequences? It comes from research that entails a fundamental change in the scope of scientific inquiry. To appreciate what is at stake, we need to recall a basic assumption in the practice of western science: reliable knowledge about nature depends upon measurement. We can be sure of the wavelength of light rays from the setting sun, but there's no way we can determine the beauty of a sunset. Or we can find out the weight of a pig, but we can never know if a pig is happy or sad. Western science is about quantities, which are regarded as 'objective' properties of the world that everyone using the same method of measurement can agree on. It is not about qualities such as pleasure, pain, honesty, happiness or grief, which are regarded as subjective states that are not objectively real, however important they may seem to us.

But what if it could be shown that qualities can be evaluated just as reliably and consistently as quantities? And by essentially the same scientific procedures? This is what has been shown in studies by a research team working in Edinburgh. People were shown videos of individual pigs interacting in a standard pen with the team leader, Francoise Wemelsfelder. They were asked to write down for each pig any set of terms that they felt described the quality of its behavior. These included words such as bold, aggressive, playful for one animal; timid, shy, nervous for another; indifferent, independent, self-absorbed for a third, and so on. There was no limit to the number of descriptors that could be used for any pig. A routine procedure was then followed in which each pig was evaluated again by each observer using all their chosen pig-descriptive terms and the results compared over the whole group of observers to see if there was consistency of evaluation. This type of procedure is regularly used in evaluation of food quality and flavour, but it has never before been used to see if people agree about an animal's 'subjective' state in terms of its behavior.

The results were startling: there was a high level of consensus among people about the quality of behavior shown by different pigs. Their assessments were not arbitrary, personally idiosyncratic descriptions, but evaluations with a high degree of intersubjective consistency. This is precisely the basis of scientific 'objectivity': agreement between different observers using an agreed method of observation. This opens the door to a science of qualities with startling implications.

The most important aspects of our lives are connected with qualities: quality of relationships, quality of education, quality of our environment, quality of life generally. We spend a great deal of time evaluating the behavior of those on whom we depend and trying to sort out whether they are happy, angry, depressed, reliable, and so on; i.e., we get a lot of practice at evaluating others' internal states by reading their behavior. And on the whole we are pretty good at it, despite dramatic errors of judgement to which we are prone. So it isn't all that surprising that people with no familiarity with pigs should nevertheless be very consistent at evaluating the quality of their behavior. But what is most dramatically lacking in the lives of people in 'developed' countries at the moment is, by general consensus, quality of life. Quantities we have in abundance - of food, technological gadgets of all kinds, cars, aircraft, information, and so on; the things that our science of measurement and quantities has been so successful at providing. But that science has degraded qualities such as beauty, love, joy, grief, and creativity to mere epiphenomal subjectivity, regarding them as ephemeral shadows with no objective reality. We intuitively know better. But now we can actually explore this territory systematically, scientifically, and reinvest our world with the qualities that are essential for living full lives; not just for humans but also for pigs and cows and trees and cities and landscapes and watersheds and cultures and the biosphere. With a science of qualities we can start to recover the wisdom we lost when we restricted our search for reliable knowledge to measurable quantities and cut ourselves off from the qualitative half of the world without which we and all else must perish.

When we think about our conscious experiences of the world, we are aware of vivid colors, sounds, and feelings. These seem to occur in a world of three spatial dimensions evolving through time. When we look at a typical brain, we see an unbelievably intricate web of networks energized by electrical and chemical processes. These networks often have incredibly large numbers of components. Given such different levels of description, it has been difficult to comprehend how a brain can give rise to a mind.

During the past decade, theorists of mind and brain have finally been able to model the detailed temporal dynamics of known brain cells and circuits...AND the observable behaviors that they control, using the same model. Thus, for the first time in history, there are theories powerful enough to begin to explicitly show how our minds arise from our brains.

The exciting thing about this progress is that, in every case, it depends upon qualitatively new concepts and theories about how our brains adapt on their own, moment - by - moment, to a rapidly changing world. Many outstanding problems in technology also require that an intelligent agent adapt on its own, moment-by-mo ment, to a rapidly changing world. These new concepts and theories have therefore begun to find their way into new technological applications.

Thus the new progress about how our brains work promises to provide a more human technology. The story has not been adequately reported because the new concepts are qualitatively new — for the same reason that brains seem to be so different from minds — and many reporters have not taken the time to understand them.

I have two answers, which will certainly qualify because you may well never have heard of either.

The first, and my primary answer because it is a local matter that the Third Culture can hope to affect, is the closing of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven National Lab.

Many high profile media scientists proclaimed the Supercollider decision as the point at which the US definitively turned away from science. But it was nothing of the sort. It was a badly managed and unwisely promulgated project, immensely expensive and disconnected with the rest of science, about which many perfectly reasonable scientists had serious doubts — not just me, though I seem to have taken the brunt of the blame.

My nominee for this turning point is the HFBR. A coalition of pseudo-environmentalists and trendy New Agers, useful and wellheeled Clinton friends and campaign contributors with Long Island real estate, blew up a leakage which amounted to the amount of tritium in the exit signs of your local movie theatre into a major issue, and Bill Richardson, the Secretary of Energy, caved without listening to the scientists involved. It is reported that the coalition arranged an interview for the Secretary with a supermodel on the afternoon the scientists had asked for a last appeal.

In any case the loss of the HFBR closes one of the world's most productive scientific instruments and sends the entire community off to our friendly competitors in Europe and Japan. Neutron scattering and diffraction is central to much of condensed matter physics and useful in biology, chemistry and several branches of technology. Approximately 300 experiments were run the last year the HFBR was up. There was no conceivable economic reason for shutting it down — it was a very inexpensive instrument relative to the projects which are replacing it. Its real problem is the anti-intellectual bias of the majority culture. If only we had been able to label it "organic" rather than "nuclear" it would have survived.

I will be brief about the other.

You will never have heard the name "Eppawala". This is a project of a US-Japan consortium to mine phosphate in gigantic quantities from a mountain in Sri Lanka, destroying a thousand-year-old irrigation system, numerous antiquities, and many villages and compensating the locals on a typical Third World scale with a minute fraction of the profits — profits which hardly exist if one were to count the true cost of the project. It is a staggering example of the misuse of economic reasoning which characterizes third world "development" projects. Not just third world, in my opinion!

Until a few years ago, tracking the evolution of language was only possible for idle gentlemen: university scholars, amateur dilettantes (whence arose the Oxford English Dictionary), or pompous columnists (only one of whom has a weekly piece in the New York Times Magazine). It was carried on from an elite gentleman's club perspective and consisted of deploring decline and patronizing neologism.

But now we have the tools to do a vastly better job of paying attention to what *we* are saying. Huge quantities of "real" language as it is spoken and written can be collected easily and subjected to sophisticated tracking analysis. Gender, class, nationality: all can be revealed and studied as never before. The ethical and political bases of society as it is (not as it imagines itself to be) can be displayed and analyzed.

Why is this important? Because the way we talk about ourselves and others is the way we create ourselves and our society. The ethical and social revolutions of the last half century have been far reaching, but it is still possible for those who prefer nostalgia to justice to wish those revolutions away. The emergence of a serious journalism of language, supported by good science, would document the way in which all classes and social groups have changed and continue to change. It would tell us things about ourselves that we know in our hearts but have not had the self aware and the wisdom and the courage to say to ourselves aloud. I believe we would all be happier if we knew how far we have come, and I can think of no better way of measuring and showing it.

O.J.'s Search for the Real Killer.

As each presidential candidate makes education the big issue for his campaign we need to understand that none of them actually wants change in education. There are two main reasons for this. The first are vested interests. Those who oppose real change in our schools include teachers unions who lobby heavily for the status quo, book publishers who are afraid of losing the textbook investments they have made, testing services and test preparation services who have a significant investment in keeping things as they are and parents who really would be quite frightened if the schools changed in a way that made their own educations seem irrelevant. No politician wants to challenge a group like this so no politician wants to do any more than pay lip service to the issue. The second reason is more insidious. When real reformers propose that everyone should be equally educated there are gasps from the elitists who run our government. Their concern? If everyone were educated, who would do the menial jobs? Hard as it may be to believe this issue is raised quite often in Washington.

No one, least of all in the press — least of all in the business press — has seen the beginnings of what may be the greatest revolution in the history of commerce: the end of money, and with it the concept of the customer.

Until there was money, there was no such thing as a customer. It wasn't swapping tools for fish that turned a Polynesian islander from a trader into a customer. That's simply barter. The idea of "buyer" and "seller" emerged only when one party swapped something with a fixed use for something fungible. Often, the money received by the seller had a modest utilitarian purpose; gold, for instance, could be hammered into nose rings, false teeth or satellite solar arrays. But money became the foundation of economic life precisely because it had symbolic more than practical value.

Then God gave us lawyers and accountants to prevent underweighing and overcharging, to make sure that every exchange of tangible things for intangible money was perfectly balanced, perfectly reciprocal. But this is a conceit of economists, accountants and lawyers, as everyday commercial life reveals. Because it can be turned into anything, money represents dreams unfulfilled, and unrequited dreams, at any price, are worth more than dreams realized. We all realize this intuitively. A buyer asks a seller to give up a mere thing; a seller asks a buyer to give up hopes and possibilities. For the same reason, it's more costly for sellers to recruit buyers than for buyers to recruit sellers: Sellers can exchange their stuff for only one thing (money), while buyers can exchange their money for anything. That's why, in the real world of purportedly balanced transactions, sellers invariably defer to buyers — why we say "the customer is king" and "The customer is always right."

But let's say it's 2000 and you're Time Inc. You own some of the best-known media properties in the world: Sports Illustrated, People magazine, etc. You want to leverage those properties. So you approach Yahoo!, say, or American Online. You propose to provide content to them. They propose to promote your brand. And as you sit down to the bargaining table to sort out the economics of all this, you throw up your hands and ask, "Are we paying you or are you paying us?" That's how these negotiations actually go.

"Who's paying whom?" Asking a question like that signals that maybe nobody needs to pay anything to anybody. Lots of value is created, but "nobody's paying for it". It just happens because two (or more) business partners create something together. In these situations firms can't begin to account for the nickels and dimes in the deal and may not even bother trying. In these situations, relationships triumph over transactions. Money drastically diminishes as a factor in the deal. And the identity of the customer — Are we paying you or are you paying us? — becomes fuzzy. The very concept of the customer begins to disappear.

Look at Silicon Valley. Every major firm there is a node in a complex network in which a huge fraction of the value creation could never be accounted for in monetary terms. Should Intel pay for Microsoft to optimize operating systems in a way that makes Intel chips ubiquitous? Or should Microsoft pay Intel to design chips that make Microsoft operating systems ubiquitous?

The press and the pundits are clueless about the effects of these de-monetized value-added dealings. No wonder, because all their measurements are expressed as units of money. Unless some dough changes hands, even the biggest commercial developments are as unheard as trees falling in the distant forest. The data mavens at Commerce are blind to the value created when Yahoo! adds a new Web site listing or when Mapquest shaves 0.6 miles off my trip. When the Labor Department calculates the Consumer Price Index it has no idea that its own Web pages are being dished out on free Linux source code or that a building contractor in Bowie, Md., decided to eat a change order because he wanted to preserve the goodwill of his client — and that more and more of the economy is being transacted on such a basis. When Dr. Greenspan and the poo-bahs at the Fed deliberate over the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market, how much weight do you suppose they're giving to the fact that the marginal cost of a transaction in a world of e-commerce has essentially dropped to zero? More de-monetization.

Today most of the money in the world isn't even made of paper, much less metal. It exists as binary digits. No wonder the central banks of the world are heaving their gold reserves into a collapsing market. Who needs gold when money sheds the slightest pretense of being anything but data? Say good-bye to gold. Gold is history. If you want currency backed by something tangible, sign up for 5,000 frequent flier miles on a new Visa card.

Given the number of media outlets for independent voices to tell good stories, the vanilla quality of mainstream reporting is like the proverbial frog in a pot of water who doesn't notice the slow temperature increase and boils cozily. In a consumer-oriented culture under a booming economy, critical voices are marginalized and the questions "we" ask ourselves lose color and substance and become sensational and picayune. A news magazine won't tell you about record-setting U.S. arms sales, for instance, but they will tell you that Ricky Martin is the sexiest man alive.

Consumers don't like to hear that things aren't what they seem, so advertisers won't support those who publish such nonsense. The same goes for education — people are still uncomfortable with the idea that we've descended from apes and so, in the case of Kansas at least, students needn't be burdened with that knowledge.

The most unreported story deals with evolution of human lifespans and intelligence. Although we hear news reports about how humans will live longer in the future, we rarely hear reports that our children or grandchildren will be immortal by the end of the next century. Given the tremendous advances in molecular biochemistry that will take place by 2100, we will certainly uncover the molecular and cellular mysteries of aging, and therefore many humans will live forever, assuming they don't suffer a fatal accident. I am amazed that this obvious concept is not discussed more often or taken more seriously. Of course, the ecological, economic, political, social, and religious implications will be extreme. Imagine an immortal Pope discussing the afterlife with his followers — or the growth of two social classes, those that can afford immortality and those too poor to gain access to the required anti-aging "treatment."

Similarly, most scientists and lay people seem to think that there is intelligent, space-faring life elsewhere in the universe. A related unreported story is just how special human intelligence is. Despite what we see in Star Wars and Star Trek, I don't expect intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution on other worlds. Since the beginning of life on Earth, as many as 50 billion species have arisen, and only one of them has acquired technology. If intelligence has such has high survival value, why are so few creatures intelligent? Mammals are not the most successful or plentiful of animals. Ninety-five percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Most of the worm species on our planet have not even been discovered yet, and there are a billion insects wandering the Earth.

If humankind were destroyed in some great cataclysm, in my opinion there is very little possibility that our level of intelligence would ever be achieved on Earth again. If human intelligence is an evolutionary accident, and mathematical, linguistic, artistic, and technological abilities a very improbable bonus, then there is little reason to expect that life on other worlds will ever develop intelligence that allows them to explore the stars. Both intelligence and mechanical dexterity appear to be necessary to make radio transmitting devices for communication between the stars. How likely is it that we will find a race having both traits? Very few Earth organisms have much of either. As evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has suggested, those that have acquired a little of one (smart dolphins, dexterous spiders) have acquired none of the other, and the only species to acquire a little of both (chimpanzees) has been rather unsuccessful. The most successful creatures on Earth are the dumb and clumsy rats and beetles, which both found better routes to their current dominance. If we do receive a message from the stars, it will undermine much of our current thinking about evolutionary mechanisms.

Despite the improbabilities, we must continue to scan the stars for signs of intelligence. I agree with the ancient Persian proverb, "The seeker is a finder," which suggests we must always search in order to understand our place in our universe.

I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories. As Bergson showed, realization is only one case of the possible. There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects and so on. The beginning of a new millennium seems like a good moment to remember certain roads not taken in an active and dynamic and not nostalgic way.

The very notion of the "most important unreported story" makes it inevitable that any answer will be highly subjective. For can anyone honestly say they know for sure what is the most important thing in life? One might say that the very essence of life is growth and uncertainty about the direction in which it happens. I feel forced to look for striking unreported stories whose ultimate importance is inevitably unknown. Then I find that no story is completely unreported, only underreported compared with the standards I would apply.

In this line, I find that the existence of serious (though not conclusive) scientific evidence for the complete nonexistence of time has been strikingly underreported. But having just published a book on the subject (and also undergone Edge edition No. 60) on this theme, I do not feel like returning to it. I offer two substitutes.

Though certainly reported, there is a feature of modern life that I feel should be given more prominence. It is the extraordinary proliferation of jobs and careers that are now open to people, both young and old, compared with my childhood over 50 years ago. I can gauge this especially well because of a piece of research that is worth mentioning on Edge. In the midst of the Second World War, but when it was already clear that the Allies would win, the British war cabinet decided that it should start thinking about how life should be improved for both the urban and the rural population. Task forces were set to work, researching the existing state. As it happened, the village 20 miles north of Oxford where I grew up and still live (South Newington) was chosen as the centre of an oblong region (measuring 4 by 6 miles on the Ordnance Survey map of Britain) that was to be studied in detail as typical of rural Britain. Every village in it was surveyed, and almost every person living in this region questioned about their lifestyle and occupations.

The outcome was a book and a film called Twentyfour Square Miles, made just after the war, when I was a boy of eight. Every few years, this film is shown in the village. What is most striking is the subsequent incredible mushrooming of career opportunities (and the large degree of equalization of prospects between the sexes). Back in 1945, boys could look forward to jobs in agricultural (quite a lot), as motor mechanics (perhaps 20 such jobs in the entire region), working in the aluminum factory in the nearby town of Banbury, and not much else. For girls the options, apart from motherhood, were essentially limited to domestic service, working as salespersons, and secretarial or other clerking jobs. Probably only about one child in 20 would go on to higher education. The transformation in 55 years has been amazing — and it seems to me to be accelerating. In fact, any reasonably bright young (or even relatively old) person in the region can now choose to follow more or less any career.

There is some concern today that we are all becoming more and more stereotyped. It seems to me that the mere fact that we now engage in such a huge variety of occupations should largely offset any such danger of stereotyping. Now to my second offering.

A highly original book not widely known must be an important unreported story. (The President of Edge can hardly disagree!). It turns out that the book I have in mind is actually quite widely known (it has about half a million sales worldwide, as I learned recently on the phone from its author) but seems to be almost completely unknown in the UK. I am a sufficiently chauvinistic Brit to think that the UK reading world is important, so here goes.

I learned about the book from Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now: It was a professor of religion, James P. Carse of New York University, who came up with the idea of "the infinite game". His 1986 jewel of a book, Finite and Infinite Games, begins, "A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the game."

This struck me as an extremely novel idea. I immediately ordered the book and was not disappointed. A slim volume written in the addictive aphoristic manner of Leibniz's Monadology and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, with both of which it most certainly can be compared, I think it is perhaps the most original perspective on life and the world I have encountered. In fact, I was so delighted that I logged onto amazon.co.uk and ordered 50 copies to send to friends as Christmas and New Year presents (along with a copy of this entry to serve as explanation for the said slim volume).

My order had a gratifying effect on the Amazon sales ranking of Finite and Infinite Games. Before my order it stood at 25499. Two hours later it was 4287. I mention this in the hope that some high Amazon executive reads Edge and will ponder a somewhat less erratic way to measure the rankings, which fluctuate so wildly as to be almost useless. I think they need a Longer Now.

I am writing this on 31st December 1999 while listening to BBC Radio 3's monumental day-long 2000-year history of music called "The Unfinished Symphony". The subtitle of Carse's book seems especially apt in this connection —" A Vision of Life As Play and Possibility". Perhaps the idea of life as an everlasting game or an ongoing symphony is the most important unreported story.

On the subject of slim volumes, the British photographer David Parker, who specializes in science studies and monumental landscapes with a trace of the human element (Utah mainly), recently told me the ultimate traveling-light story. Years ago he was trekking in Bolivia with a friend who takes traveling light to the extreme. He therefore allowed himself just one book, the Tractatus. To lighten even that slim load, he would read one page each evening, tear it out and then deposit it carefully wherever his bed happened to be: beneath a stone if in the open or in the bedside table to rival the Gideon Bible if in a hotel. One can hardly call the Tractatus an unreported story, but the method of dissemination is worthy of Professor Emeritus James P. Carse.

While the absolute numbers of humans on Earth will continue to rise for another generation at least, birth rates around the world are sinking, particularly in the developed countries. In the coming decades many emerging countries — currently boosting the rise in absolute population numbers — will themselves make the transition to lower birth rates. While most estimates see the global population of Earth peaking around 2040-50, what none of them show is what happens afterward. Unless some unknown counterforce arises, what happens after the peak is that the world's birth rate steadily sinks below replacement level. Increasing people's longevity can only slightly postpone this population fizzle.

The main reason this is unreported is that it will be decades before it will happen and until it does, the population boomers are correct: our numbers swell exponentially. But the story is worth reporting for three reasons:

1) Long before the world's population fizzles, it will age. As it already is. The average age of a human on earth has been increasing since 1972. The developing countries are aimed to be Geezer Countries in another twenty years or less. This will affect culture, politics, and business.

2) There is currently no cultural force in the modern societies to maintain human population levels over the long term. Population robustness these days comes primarily from undeveloped countries, and from cultural practices that are disappearing in developed countries. Once the developing countries become developed, there will be little at work to maintain an average of one offspring per person, with millions have more to balance the millions with few or no children. How many future readers will be willing to have three or more kids?

3) There is no evidence in history of declining population and increasing prosperity. In the past rising prosperity has always accompanied rising populations. Prosperity riding upon of declining population *may* be possible through some wisdom or technology that we don't possess now, but it would require developing an entirely new skill set for society.

This story could be reported by asking the non-obvious questions of the usual population pundits: what happens afterwards? What happens in China with a continually declining birth rate? What would happen to the US without immigration? Who is going to work in Europe?

Beyköy is a hamlet sitting on the lonely edge of the world — in the highlands of Phrygia in western Turkey, hundreds of kilometers away from either city or coast. In 1876, a local peasant made a remarkable discovery in these forsaken backwoods — one that ranks today as the world's most important unreported story.

This farmer's pasture extended along the foot of a low but extensive mound, believed to hold the remains of an ancient city. While working his ox and plow along the base of the hill, the farmer struck some objects in the furrow which gave off a metallic noise. After picking up and scrutinizing the large pieces of metal which he had accidentally unearthed, the peasant noticed they were covered with script.

Several years later, the American scholar William M. Ramsay passed through the village. Speaking with some local people, Ramsay inquired if they possessed any coins and artifacts picked up off the ground, with the intention of finding a bargain. Among the pieces offered to him was a tiny fragment containing a short inscription. Wondering aloud about its original location, the locals pointed towards the knoll. After further inquiry, Ramsay found out about the series of spectacular bronze tablets which had also been found there. Unfortunately, they were gone and nobody was able to say where.

As it turned out, the Beyköy bronze tablets had made their way into the archives of the Ottoman empire. Recognizing their possible significance, the curator in charge did not hesitate in contacting the world's foremost authority, German-born Anatolia expert Albrecht Goetze, in order to publish the finds. In the late 1950's, this professor of Yale University began to investigate the texts. For over ten years, he examined, translated and interpreted them. Then, he informed another colleague of their existence. Goetze completed his investigations and manuscript shortly before he died in 1971. Owing to the subsequent death of his editor, the monograph, however, has never been published and the Beyköy tablets remain completely unknown. Goetze had found that they contained lists of Anatolian states, kings, and military actions from as early as the fourth millennium BC up until the eighth century BC. These texts proved conclusively that today's Turkey was once the home of a civilization older and more important to European history than Pharaonic Egypt. Yet, this civilization has remained virtually uninvestigated to the present today.

Now, why should the discovery of the Beyköy tablets be considered the world's most important unreported story? After all, archaeological discoveries — like that of the man in the ice — have often surprised the general public and upset established scholarship. The discovery of the Beyköy tablets, however, is of a different order of magnitude. It shows that the center of European history is to be found way outside the frontiers of the hitherto Old — and accepted — World. Therefore, its impact equals a scientific revolution similar to those caused by Nicolas Copernicus, Charles Darwin and Siegmund Freud. Copernicus' work generated an upheaval, since it demonstrated that humankind is not at the center of the universe. Darwin's research demonstrated that humans do not stand at the ultimate zenith of Creation; instead they are more or less an accidental product of a million years-long evolutionary process. And Freud showed that we are not even in full command of our own mind, our inner selves.

The publication of the Beyköy tablets will take this sequence of upheavals in western thought one step further. It will demonstrate — once and for all — that "western culture" is an arbitrary, abstract concept resting upon the wishful thinking of certain eighteenth century members of the educated class. Old world civilizations, especially that of ancient Greece, evolved from frontier outposts of much older Asian civilizations in the adjacent Orient. The practices characterizing western civilization — domestication of animals and plants, agriculture, husbandry, permanent homes, life in village communities, metallurgy, politics and cosmology — all clearly originated in Asia.

After this paradigm shift, only one even greater upheaval remains — proving that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

As a nation we pay lip service to the idea that we're all created equal. But the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Is this because the poor have bad brains that can't learn to do better, or because their brains never get the opportunity to learn? We know that even the best of brains needs input from the environment to form and flourish. So why do we allow schools in poor neighborhoods, as a rule, to be so much worse?

The difference is less about race than about class. Shouldn't education be more standardized from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and state to state? Improvement of educational opportunities wouldn't solve all the problems the poor face, but is an obvious place to start. Critics of liberal social policy often claim that pouring money into a situation doesn't help. I'm not suggesting that the poor get anything extra, just that they get what others get. A decent education is a right not a privilege.

That's right. No thing exists, there are only actions. We live in a world of verbs, and nouns are only shorthand for those verbs whose actions are sufficiently stationary to show some thing-like behavior. These statements may seem like philosophy or poetry, but in fact they are an accurate description of the material world, when we take into account the quantum nature of reality.

Future historians will be puzzled by the fact that this interpretation has not been generally accepted, 75 years after the discovery of quantum mechanics. Most physics text books still describe the quantum world in largely classical terms. Consequently anything quantum seems riddled with paradoxes and weird behavior. One generally talks about the "state" of a particle, such as an electron, as if it really had an independent thing-like existence, as in classical mechanics. For example, the term `state vector' is used, even though its operational properties belie almost anything we normally associate with a state.

Two voices have recently stressed this verb-like character of reality, those of David Finkelstein, in his book Quantum Relativity, and of David Mermin, in his article "What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us" [1998, Amer. J. of Phys. 66, 753]. In the words of the second David: `"Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not.'" In other words, matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. The ontology of the world thus becomes remarkably simple, with no duality between the existence of a thing and its properties: properties are all there is. Indeed: there are no things.

Two hundred years ago, William Blake scolded the physicists for their cold and limited view of the world, in terms of a clockwork mechanism, in which there was no room for spontaneity and wonder. Fortunately, physicists did not listen to the poet, and pushed on with their program. But to their own utter surprise, they realized with the discovery of quantum mechanics that nature exhibits a deeply fundamental form of spontaneity, undreamt of in classical physics. An understanding of matter as dissolving into a play of interactions, partly spontaneous, would certainly have pleased Blake.

What will be next? While physics may still seem to lack a fundamental way of touching upon meaning and wonder, who is to say that those will remain forever outside the domain of physics? We simply do not know and cannot know what physics will look like, a mere few hundred years from now.

There is an analogy with computer languages. Physicists have a traditional aversion to learning any other language than Fortran, with which they grow up, no matter how useful the other languages may be. But without ever parting from their beloved Fortran, it was Fortran that changed out from under them, incorporating many of the features that the other languages had pioneered. So, when asked how future physicists will program, a good answer is: we have not the foggiest idea, but whatever it is, it will still be called Fortran.

Similarly, our understanding of the material world, including the very notion of what matter and existence is, is likely to keep changing radically over the next few hundred years. In what direction, we have no idea. The only thing we can safely predict is that the study of those wonderful new aspects of reality will still be called physics.

Human brains are making the human world smarter and smarter, so that they (the brains) can be dumb in peace. Or rather, we are progressively altering our environment so that our brains, which are good at pattern-matching, at sensory recognition, and at the manipulation of objects in the world, can support intelligent choice and action by their participation in much larger networks. Human development is a process in which the brain becomes deeply tuned to the available environmental surround, be it pen, paper and sketchpad, or PC, Palm Pilot and designer software. As the century closes, and our typical, reliable environmental props and supports become ever more sophisticated and interlinked, so the mental machinery that makes us who we are is becoming ever more extended, interanimated and networked. In the near future, software agents whose profiles have evolved alongside those of a specific individual will count as part of the individual person. To say that I use those software agents will be strictly false. Instead, my brain and the various personalized manifestations of new technology will constitute integrated thinking things. I will no more be the user of these close-knit technologies than I am the user of the various sub- systems already existing within my biological brain. Instead, better to see both those sub-systems and these close-knit external technologies, as together constituting a spatially extended kind of user or person. The next step may be, as Rodney Brooks suggests, to put as much of that technology back inside the biological membrane as possible. This buys easier portability without changing the real state of affairs. We are already (mental) cyborgs.

And since policy making to deal with such controversies calls for value judgments, and that in turn requires a scientifically literate public to telegraph their value preferences to leaders, miscommunication of the nature of scientific controversy has serious implications for democracy in a world of exploding complexity.

In political reporting, it is both common and appropriate to "get the other side": if the Democrat gives a speech, the Republican gets comparable time/inches/prominence. This doctrine of "balance" — which is still taught proudly in journalism schools in the U.S. — is supposed to underlie the journalistic independence of the Fourth Estate. [And let's not forget that conflict packaged in sound bite-sized chunks garners higher ratings than more circumspect reporting.]

But while journalists rightly defend the need for balance in truly bipolar stories, how many scientific controversies are really two-sided? More likely, there will be several competing paradigms and a half a dozen marginal ideas kicking around scientific controversies. And when the issues have high-stakes political winners and losers — like the global warming topic I work in — it is to be expected that various special interests will compete for their spin. We've all seen media filled with the views of environmental catastrophists, technological cornucopians, ideological opponents of collective controls on entrepreneurial activities, or denial from industrial producers of products that pollute — to name the usual prime players. And each often has their hired or favored PhDs handy with ready explanations and slick sound bites — e.g., why carbon dioxide buildup in the air will be either catastrophic or good for you.

Unfortunately, here is where a serious — and largely unreported by the very people who bring us this daily show — disjuncture occurs. For example, in the name of "balance", a 200-scientist, two-years-in-the-making refereed scientific assessment gets comparable space or airtime to a handful of "contrarian" scientists saying it "ain't so". When I challenge this equal time reporting to my media colleagues, they accuse me of being against "balance". This parade of dueling scientists isn't remotely "balance" I respond, but rather, utter distortion — unless the journalist also reports the relative credibility of each quoted position. I call the latter doctrine "perspective" — as opposed to the "balance" that journalists label.

In science all opinions are decidedly not equal, and we spend the bulk of our effort winnowing the less from the more probable lines of inquiry. Moreover, when we are assessors, we are obligated to report whether our estimates of the likelihood of some set of hypothesized outcomes are based on objective rather than subjective odds. I don't have space to get into the "frequentist" versus "Bayesian" debate over what is ever "objective", but awareness of the issue is also part of what scientific literacy entails — even for scientists.

Nevertheless, I do agree it would be irresponsible not to cover minority opinions in media accounts of complex controversies. My concern comes when contradictory scientific opinions are offered without any attempt to report the relative credibility of these views. Then, the public — and political leaders too for the most part — are left to do that difficult assessment job themselves. More often than not the "dueling scientists" get equal time in the story, confusion sets in and outlier opinions win equal status at the bar of public opinion with more widely accepted views. Of course, as Kuhn has taught us, once in a while someone comes along to overthrow the mainstream doctrine — but we celebrate these paradigm busters primarily because they are rare, not commonplace. One well-known editor argued with me that to report scientific credibility "calls for a judgement on the part of the journalist, and that most reporters lack specialized qualifications to do that". "Without making judgments how can they choose what to report and who to quote", I responded? "Why don't you get someone from the Flat Earth Society to 'balance' every space shot you cover — isn't that a 'judgment' about their lack of credibility"? Of course, they could hire such specialists, but only a few major media outlets do — and those reporters are decidedly not at the top of the respect hierarchy in corporate media.

Science must always examine and test dissent, even if it takes a long time to reduce some uncertainties. But science policy needs to know where the mainstream is at the moment. My mantra to those seeking scientific literacy in order to address the implications of the debate is to remember to ask all competing claimants of scientific "truth" three questions: 1), "What can happen?", 2), "What are the odds?", and 3) "How do you know?" And if you intend to ask the third question, plan to have a pen and paper along and be willing to check references, for question 3) isn't a sound bite-length inquiry.

In summary, most stories turn the doctrine of balance on its head by applying it too literally to complex, multi-faceted scientific debates. Then, the unreported story becomes that there actually are different probabilities that belong to each of the various positions covered, yet these conflicting positions appear in the story to be equally likely.

Science must always examine and test dissent, even if it takes a long time to reduce some uncertainties. But science policy needs to know where the mainstream is at the moment. My mantra to those seeking scientific literacy in order to address the implications of the debate is to remember to ask all competing claimants of scientific "truth" three questions: 1), "What can happen?", 2), "What are the odds?", and 3) "How do you know?" And if you intend to ask the third question, plan to have a pen and paper along and be willing to check references, for question 3) isn't a sound bite-length inquiry.

First is the incredible dynamism, energy and economic hope found in the great cities of the developing world. Most coverage of developing world cities concentrates on the problems: environment, overcrowding, shanty towns. But these cities represent the best hope of the world's poor nations. Modern myth has it that these cities are growing at unprecedented rates in an increasingly urbanized world. In fact the cities of the north grew at even greater rates in the 19th century. Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Calcutta, Buenos Aires and Rio all had more people moving out than moving in over the decade of the '80s. More than two-thirds of the world's cities with populations of more than 1 million were important cities 200 years ago. Miami and Phoenix grew more rapidly than Nairobi in the 20th century; Los Angeles more rapidly than Calcutta. Urban growth is generally good: rising levels of urbanization are strongly associated with growing and diversifying economies, and most of the nations in the south whose economic performance over the last 10 to 15 years is so envied by others are also the nations with the most rapid increase in their levels of urbanization. The developing worlds cities need to be celebrated and not lamented.

Less encouraging is the largely ignored story of climate change. All media have great difficulty in covering stories that develop over generations. Who in 1900 would have written about the changing role of women or the spread of democracy, two of the extraordinary shifts of the last century. The failure of the Kyoto conference on climate change to get significant action by the advanced, industrialized countries on climate change means that the problems will get far worse before there is any chance of them getting better.

Many developing countries are copying the Western way of living, and they are now copying the Western way of dying.

Illnesses like coronary heart disease that used to be very rare in countries such as Japan and other Asian countries are becoming epidemics, causing huge drains on their economies as well as enormous personal suffering — much of which could be avoided. The same is true for prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, arthritis, and so on. Trillions of dollars in direct and indirect expenditures could be avoided, along with untold suffering.

The most important unreported story at the dawn of the Information Age has two parts: (1) The last Sunday of the 20th century passed and the United States Government still continued to outlaw first-class mail on Sunday and (2) no one complained.

A revolution recently occurred in neuroscience that has far reaching implications for our future.

According to all the textbooks in neuroscience, we are born with a full complement of around 100 billion neurons and that it is all downhill from there. This was a discouraging "fact".

Fred Gage, a colleague of mine at the Salk Institute, has discovered that new neurons are born every day in the hippocampus, an important part of the brain for long-term memory of facts and events, even in adults. This was first found in rats, but has now been shown in monkeys and humans, and not just in the hippocampus, but also in the cerebral cortex, the storehouse of our experience and the fountainhead of our creativity. This was widely reported, but what has emerged since then is even more encouraging.

First, the new neurons in the hippocampus don't survive unless the animal exercises; a running wheel in an otherwise standard lab cage is enough to keep new neurons alive and well in mice. Second, the increase in the strengths of connections between neurons in the hippocampus that occurs when they are strongly activated, called long-term potentiation, is twice as strong in mice that had access to a running wheel. Finally, the mice with exercise were smarter at memory tasks. We still do not know how all this happens, but the bottom line is that something as basic as exercise can make you smarter. Recess in schools and executive gyms help not only the body, but can also make the mind sharper.

These results have implications for graceful aging.

Until recently, the dominant view of how the brain develops made the assumption that experience selects neurons and connections from a fixed, pre-existing repertoire. This view had some plausibility when it was thought that all of the neurons you will ever have are present at birth, coupled with evidence of neuron death and pruning of connections during childhood. However, if the brain makes new neurons in adults then this cannot be the whole story, since the growth of new connections must also be occurring, and doing so in an experience-dependent way.

This discovery, coupled with increasing evidence that new connections can grow even between old neurons as a consequence of an enriched environment, means that an active mind along with an active body predisposes us for a lifetime of learning. This is good news for the baby boomers who have embraced health clubs and challenging new experiences, but bad news for couch potatoes who are exercise phobic.

In short, "Use it or lose it".

An active lifestyle and a rich social life are the best insurance against premature senility. We will learn much more about the how the brain renews itself in the next century as neuroscientists reveal more about the mechanisms and circumstances that make new neurons survive and grow stronger connections. Ultimately, this will lead to greater productivity from the elderly, the fastest growing segment in western societies.

The young people I work with at NASA's Langley Research Center are sharp and hard working. We get some of the best, but they are almost all great. And what is rarely understood, nevermind reported, is that they have to process about twice the information that I had to deal with starting out in research in 1959.

Of course, the biggest untrue story told, one probably found in the first cave writings, is that "the younger generation is going to hell."

What is the biggest unreported story?

The hidden consequences for our health and the environment, and for social and economic justice, of our daily choices as consumers of products and services.

Our individual habits of consumption, when multiplied by our vast numbers, have devastating impacts — but we are blind to the chain that links our individual choices with their vaster consequences. I'd like to know what these links are — but they lack transparency. We need something akin to the labels of nutritional value on foods that would surface these hidden consequences of our own actions.

A case in point: what is the environmental cost of choosing to buy a hamburger? How many acres for cattle to graze, how much erosion or degrading of land as a consequence, how much more greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere, how much water used for this purpose rather than other things? How does a burger made from beef compare in this regard to, say, one made from turkey, or from soybeans?

Another case in point: since childhood, I've suffered from asthma. Asthma is becoming epidemic among children, especially in urban neighborhoods. One clear reason for the upsurge is the increase in airborne particulates that irritate and inflame respiratory passages. I live in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, which, because of prevailing winds, receives a large portion of its particulates from the pollution in the metro New York City area, as well as from the industrial Midwest states. One coal-powered electrical plant in Ohio, a notoriously bad offender, contributes almost half the airborne particulates that reach my area from the Midwest. Who are the largest industrial customers of that electrical plant? What products that I'm now buying are built using power from that plant? I might boycott them if I knew.

Individually, the consequences of my choices are admittedly negligible. But if summated across millions of consumers making the similarly informed choices, the impact could be quite great. We could 'vote' for more benign consequences if we had this missing information.

I applaud, for instance, the mutual funds and other corporate citizens who are offering shareholders the option to get their reports via the internet, rather than wasting resources — trees, power, etc. — mailing thousands of hard copies. One fund informs me, for instance, that if all members sign up for internet reports, the savings in pulp amounts to more than three hundred trees per year.

I want more choices like that.

So how about a new investigative beat for journalism: hidden consequences.

In the early nineties, when I graduated from college, the media was obsessed with a generation of indifferent teenagers and twenty-somethings who couldn' t be bothered with social causes, careers, or the general state of humanity. Ironically, the same media structure which had previously been upset with the 60s generation for being too rebellious was now upset the kids born in the 70s and the 80s for not being rebellious enough. They branded us slackers and they called us generation X, ho-hum.

Fast forward five short years. The same media covering the same generation, but instead of dismissing them as slackers they anoint them business titans and revolutionaries controlling the future of business, media and culture. With technology as their ally they will not rest until they've disintermediated anyone or anything inefficient. This group of rebels are on a mission, and their drive is matched only by their insane work ethic. Never a mention of slackers or generation X.

The story that isn't being told in all of this is why a generation of slackers would suddenly create and drive one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the history of industry. Clearly part of this is a matter of perspective. The media givieth and the media takieth away, all in their desire to create sexy stories through polarization, generalization and, of course, exaggeration. However, looking deeper into the issue, is the fact that a generation of young adults, having stumbled onto a new medium (the Internet), was smart enough to seize the opportunity, taking their own piece of the pie and leaving the dead to bury the dead (think: old media).

What did we, as generation X inherit in the early 90s? The remnants of a five-yea r, cocaine-infused, party on Wall Street that ended in tears and a recession. Our generation wasn't filled with slackers, it was filled with such media savvy, and saturated, individuals that we knew that participating in the existing paradigm would only result in low pay and long hours for some old-school company. Is it is a coincidence that this same group of people are the ones who owned the media that obsessed over the slacker generation? Perhaps they hoped to guilt us to getting into line?

Equity is the revolution of our generation, as in having equity in the company you work for. This equity, in the form of stock options, is not on the same level as the equality that the 60s generation fought for, but it is certainly an evolution of that same movement. Don't believe the hype.

"Today's most important unreported story" may be the fact that there are no longer ANY unreported stories. To be sure, there are stories that are given less attention than some might think appropriate, and others that are inaccurate or misleading. But the proliferation of sources of information — the Internet, myriad cable television stations, niche magazines, alternative newspapers — makes it virtually certain that no occurrence can remain secret or unmentioned.

The dilemma that faces all of us is not one of ferreting out information that is hidden but of making sense of the information that is readily available. How much of what we read and see is reliable? And how can we tell? In the not-so-distant past, we could rely, to an extent, on the brand name of the information provider. We all applied our own measures of credence to stories we read in the York Times or in the National Enquirer. But who knows anything about the authors of what we read at www.whatever.com?

Everything — all that has happened and much that has not — is reported.

"America, where are you going in your automobile?" Allen Ginsberg

The years of 1939 and 1999 were snapshots in time ­ revealing the world as it was and as it would be. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, General Motors' "Futurama" and Ford's "Road of Tomorrow" showcased freeways and spiral ramps scrolling around urban towers. The future was clear. American would rebuild its cities and highways to sing a song of prosperity and personal freedom.

In 1999, a snapshot of the Internet revealed what was and what will be. Wires are still being strung. The Ecommerce structure is still being built. And content is still incunabulum.

What is today's most important unreported story? That the choices made about the Internet today will have great consequences in the next century. Like the automotive age, exuberant times make it easy to forget that a bit of thoughtful design will profoundly influence the fabric of our future society.

What's the issue? Access. Half the people in the US don't have computers, but 98% have TVs and 97% have phones. Why do they say they don't have computers? "Too complicated."

Using a computer should be as easy as turning on a TV. And it could be.

Computers interfaces should be self explanatory. And simple. And they could be.

The quality of information design in the US is declining. Good information design should reveal relationships about the information. It should make you smarter. Learning disorders are on the rise. It's not because we are getting better at diagnosing them. It's because we are creating them. All too often our textbooks are confusing or misleading. And that same lack of thoughtful design pervades the personal computer, and the Internet. Information design is a science that needs to underpin our society if we are going to remain democratic and vital.

The biggest difference between 1939 and 1999? The automobile was simple at the outset. It took years to make it complicated and inaccessible. Computers have been unnecessarily complicated since they began. It is hard to make things simple. But they could be.

Once seen as a marginal enterprise of interest only to health food fanatics, organic farming is booming in Europe. Over the last 10 years, the acreage under organic management has been growing by 25 per cent per year. At present growth rates, 10 per cent of Western European agriculture would be organic by 2005, and 30 per cent by 2010. But in some parts of Europe the growth rates are even higher. In Britain, within the last 12 months the acreage more than doubled, but even so the surge in demand for organic food greatly outstrips the supply, and 70 per cent has to be imported. Most supermarket chains in the UK now carry a range of organic products, and the market is growing at 40 per cent per year. By the end of this year, nearly half the baby food sold in Britain will be organic.

Why is this happening? It reflects a major shift in public attitudes, which are probably changing more rapidly in Britain than in other countrides.

First there was the trauma of mad cow disease and the emergence of CJD, its human form, contracted through eating beef. No one knows whether the death toll will rise to thousands or even millions; the incubation time can be many years. Then in 1999 there was the remarkable public rejection of genetically modifie foods, much to the surprise of Monsanto and their government supporters.

Recent surveys have shown the third of the public who now buy organic food do so primarily because they perceive it as healthier, but many also want to support organic farming because they think it is better for the environment and for animal welfare.

The rise in organic farming together with the continuing growth of alternative medicine are symptoms of a mass change in world view.

Governments and scientific institutions are not at the leading edge of this change, they are at the trailing edge. A major paradigm shift is being propelled by the media, consumers' choices and market forces. A change of emphasis in the educational system and in the funding of scientific and medical research is bound to follow, sooner or later.

It's being covered as a publicity ploy by a Lewinsky scandal leftover — that is, not much and certainly not seriously. But check out the pictures. This is a MAJOR makeover. It represents the culmination of a process we have been tracking for awhile — but in two different arenas of celebrity, the real and the Hollywood.

Remember the new Nixon? Distant ancestor of Al Gore remakes and of McCain and Bradley, the "story" candidates, and every prominent real life figure today who is now obliged to play some version of themselves. On the other front, we have cases of performer resurrections in new guises going back to the straightforward comebacks of Frank Sinatra and John Travolta to Madonna and Michael Jackson makeovers to Garth Brooks effort to recreate himself as a fictional celebrity whose name escapes me at the moment.

Linda Tripp's makeover represents a consolidation, a fusion of these trends. This marks a moment when the possibility of making and remaking one's image collapses into the possibility of making and remaking oneself literally.

And it's just the beginning...

No end of changes in our world are cited as we look back on the twentieth century: population growth, scientific and medical advances, communications technology, transportation, child rearing and family structure, depletion of energy and mineral resources, and human impact on the environment, to name a few. In general we analyze these changes over the whole sweep of the century although some, to be sure, because of their exponential character, have made their mark mainly toward the end of the century.

What has gone largely unreported, it seems to me, is the suddenness with which a set of societal changes occurred in less than a decade between 1965 and 1975 (a step function to a mathematician, a seismic shift to a journalist). In that period, we saw revolutionary change in the way people dress, groom, and behave; in the entertainment that grips them; in equity for minorities, women, and the variously disabled; in higher education; and in the structure of organizations.

The unpopular Vietnam war can account for some of these changes, but surely not all. The changes were too numerous and extended into too many facets of our lives to be explained solely by antiwar fervor. Moreover, what happened was not a blip that ended when the war ended. The changes were permanent. With remarkable speed, as if a switch had been thrown, we altered the way we deal with one another, the way we see our individual relation to society, and the way we structure our organizations to deal with people.

I lived through the period on a university campus, and saw rapid changes in higher education, not to mention dress and behavior, that are with us still. My own professional society, the American Physical Society, transformed itself between the late 1960s and the early 1970s from an organization that held meeting and published papers to an organization that, in addition, promotes equity, highlights links between science and society, seeks to influence policy, and cares for the welfare of its individual members. Why did so much with lasting impact — happen so quickly?

Time's "Person of the Year" should have been Abraham Maslow.

The great psychologist is the key to understanding the biggest economic story of our day ? a story that's been obscured by stock tickers crawling across the bottom of every television screen, by breathless magazine covers about dot-com fired insta-wealth, and by the endless decoding of Alan Greenspan's every emission.

Deep into the middle class, Americans are enjoying a standard of living unmatched in world history and unthinkable to our ancestors just 100 years ago. This development goes well beyond today's high Dow and low unemployment rate. (Insert startling factoid about VCRs, longevity, car ownership, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, or computing power here.) And demographics are only deepening the significance of the moment. Roughly seven out of eight Americans were not alive during the Great Depression ? and therefore have no conscious memory of outright, widespread, hope-flattening economic privation. (Note: long gas lines and short recessions don't qualify as life-altering hardship.) As a result, the default assumption of middle class American life has profoundly changed: the expectation of comfort has replaced the fear of privation.

Enter Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. I imagine that at least a majority of Americans have satisfied the physiological, safety, and even social needs on the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid. And that means that well over 100 million people are on the path toward self-actualization, trying to fulfill what Maslow called "metaneeds." This is one reason why work has become our secular religion ? and why legions of people are abandoning traditional employment to venture out on their own. (It's also why I guarantee that in the next twelve months we'll see newsmagazine stories about despondent, unfulfilled "What's It All About, Alfie?" Internet millionaires.)

What happens when life for many (though, of course, not all) Americans ? and ever more people in the developed world ? ceases being a struggle for subsistence and instead becomes a search for meaning?

It could herald an era of truth, beauty, and justice. Or it could get really weird.

Hundreds of stories are reported every year about discrimination, bias, and prejudice against women, minorities, and those who are different. But there's a more pervasive, universal, and possibly more insidious form of discrimination that goes on every day, yet lacks a name or an organized constituency-discrimination on the mating market. Although there are important individual differences in what people want (e.g., some like blondes, some like brunettes), people worldwide show remarkable consensus in their mating desires. Nearly everyone, for example, wants a partner who is kind, understanding, intelligent, healthy, attractive, dependable, resourceful, emotionally stable, and who has an interesting personality and a good sense of humor. No one desires those who are mean, stupid, ugly, or riddled with parasites. To the degree that there exists consensus about the qualities people desire in mating partners, a mating hierarchy is inevitably established. Some people are high in mate market value; others are low. Those at the top, the "9's" and "10's" are highly sought and in great demand; those near the bottom, the "1's" and the "2's," are invisible, ignored, or shunned.

Being shunned on the mating market relegates some individuals to a loveless life that may cause bitterness and resentment. As the rock star Jim Morrison noted, "women seem wicked when you're unwanted." Discrimination on the mating market, of course, cuts across sex, race, and other groups that have names and organized advocates. Neither men nor women are exempt. For those who suffer discrimination on the mating market, there exists no judicial body to rectify the injustice, no court of appeals. It's not against the law to have preferences in mating, and no set of social customs declares that all potential mates must be treated equally or given a fair chance to compete.

But it's not just the rock bottom losers on the mating market that suffer. A "4" might aspire to mate with a "6," or "7" might aspire to mate with a "9." Indeed, it's likely that sexual selection has forged in us desires for mates who may be just beyond our reach. The "7" who is rejected by the "9" may suffer as much as the "4" who is rejected by the "6."

People bridle at attaching numbers to human beings and making the hierarchy of mate value so explicit. We live in a democracy, where everyone is presumed to be created equal. Attaching a different value to different human beings violates our sensibilities, so we tend not to speak in civilized company of this hidden form of discrimination that has no name. But it exists nonetheless, pervasive and insidious, touching the lives of everyone save those few who opt out of the mating market entirely.

In the last ten years, psychology has finally started to deliver the goods — hard facts about what causes human happiness. The results have been astonishing, but their social implications have not sparked any serious public debate:

(1) Almost all humans are surprisingly happy almost all the time. 90% of Americans report themselves to be "very happy" or "fairly happy". Also, almost everyone thinks that they are happier than the average person. To a first approximation, almost everyone is near the maximum on the happiness dimension, and this has been true throughout history as far back as we have reliable records. (This may be because our ancestors preferred happy people as sexual partners, driving happiness upwards in both sexes through sexual selection).

(2) Individuals still differ somewhat in their happiness, but these differences are extremely stable across the lifespan, and are almost entirely the result of heritable genetic differences (as shown by David Lykken's and Auke Tellegen's studies of identical twins reared apart.)

(3) Major life events that we would expect to affect happiness over the long term (e.g. winning the lottery, death of a spouse) only affect it for six months or a year. Each person appears to hover around a happiness "set-point" that is extremely resistant to change.

(4) The "usual suspects" in explaining individual differences in happiness have almost no effect. A person's age, sex, race, income, geographic location, nationality, and education level have only trivial correlations with happiness, typically explaining less than 2% of the variance. An important exception is that hungry, diseased, oppressed people in developing nations tend to be slightly less happy — but once they reach a certain minimum standard of calorie intake and physical security, further increases in material affluence do not increase their happiness very much.

(5) For those who suffer from very low levels of subjective well-being (e.g. major depression), the most potent anti-depressants are pharmaceutical, not social or economic. Six months on Prozac™, Wellbutrin™, Serzone™, or Effexor™ will usually put a depressed person back near a normal happiness set-point (apparently by increasing serotonin's effects in the left prefrontal cortex). The effects of such drugs are much stronger than any increase in wealth or status, or any other attempt to change the external conditions of life.

The dramatic, counter-intuitive results of happiness research have received a fair amount of media attention. The leading researchers, such as Ed Diener, David Myers, David Lykken, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Norbert Schwarz, and Daniel Kahneman, are regularly interviewed in the popular press. Yet the message has influenced mostly the self-help genre of popular psychology books (which is odd, given that the whole concept of self-help depends on ignoring the heritability and stability of the happiness set-point). The research has not produced the social, economic, and political revolution that one might have expected. Journalists have not had the guts to rock our ideological boats by asking serious questions about the broader social implications of the research.

Popular culture is dominated by advertisements that offer the following promise: buy our good or service, and your subjective well-being will increase. The happiness research demonstrates that most such promises are empty. Perhaps all advertisements for non-essential goods should be required to carry the warning: "Caution: scientific research demonstrates that this product will increase your subjective well-being only in the short term, if at all, and will not increase your happiness set-point". Of course, luxury goods may work very well to signal our wealth and taste to potential sexual partners and social rivals, through the principles of conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen identified. However, the happiness research shows that increases in numbers of sexual partners and social status do not boost overall long-term happiness. There are good evolutionary reasons why we pursue sex and status, but those pursuits are apparently neither causes nor consequences of our happiness level. Some journalists may have realized that the happiness research challenges the consumerist dream-world upon which their advertising revenues depend — their failure to report on the implications of the research for consumerism is probably no accident. They are in the business of selling readers to advertisers, not telling readers that advertising is irrelevant to their subjective well-being.

Also, if we take the happiness research seriously, most of the standard rationales for economic growth, technological progress, and improved social policy simply evaporate. In economics for example, people are modelled as agents who try to maximize their "subjective expected utility'. At the scientific level, this assumption is very useful in understanding consumer behavior and markets. But at the ideological level of political economy, the happiness literature shows that "utility" cannot be equated with happiness. That is, people may act as if they are trying to increase their happiness by buying products, but they are not actually achieving that aim. Moreover, increasing GNP per capita, which is a major goal of most governments in the world, will not have any of the promised effects on subjective well-being, once a certain minimum standard of living is in place. None of the standard "social indicators" of economic, political, and social progress are very good at tracking human happiness.

When hot-headed socialists were making this claim 150 years ago, it could be dismissed as contentious rhetoric. Equally, claims by the rich that "money doesn't buy happiness" could be laughed off as self-serving nonsense that perpetuated the oppression of the poor by creating a sort of envy-free pseudo-contentment. But modern science shows both were right: affluence produces rapidly diminishing returns on happiness. This in turn has a stark and uncomfortable message for those of us in the developed world who wallow in material luxuries: every hundred dollars that we spend on ourselves will have no detectable effect on our happiness; but the same money, if given to hungry, ill, oppressed developing-world people, would dramatically increase their happiness. In other words, effective charity donations have a powerful hedonic rationale (if one takes an objective view of the world), whereas runaway consumerism does not. Tor Norretranders (in this Edge Forum) has pointed out that 50 billion dollars a year — one dollar a week from each first world person — could end world hunger, helping each of the 6 billion people in the world to reach their happiness set-point. The utilitarian argument for the rich giving more of their money to the poor is now scientifically irrefutable, but few journalists have recognized that revolutionary implication. (Of course, equally modest contributions to the welfare of other animals capable of subjective experience would also have a dramatic positive effect on overall mammalian, avian, and reptilian happiness.)

Other contributors to this Edge Forum have also alluded to the social implications of happiness research. David Myers pointed out the lack of correlation between wealth and happiness: "it's not the economy, stupid'. Douglas Rushkoff and Denise Caruso bemoaned America's descent into mindless, impulsive consumerism and media addiction, neither of which deliver the promised hedonic pay-offs. Daniel Goleman identified the hidden social effects of our daily consumption habits — they not only fail to make us happier, but they impose high environmental costs on everyone else. Others have suggested that some external substitute for consumerism might be more hedonically effective. David Pink championed a switch from accumulating money to searching for meaning. John Horgan was excited about the quiet proliferation of better psychedelic drugs. Howard Rheingold thinks more electronic democracy will help. They may be right that spiritualism, LSD, and online voting will increase our happiness, but the scientific evidence makes me skeptical. If these advances don't change our genes or our serotonin levels in left prefrontal cortex, I doubt they'll make us happier. There may be other rationales for these improvements in the quality of life, but, ironically, our subjective quality of life is not one of them.

Perhaps the most important implication of the happiness literature concerns population policy. For a naïve utilitarian like me who believes in the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the happiness research makes everything much simpler. To a first approximation, every human is pretty happy. From an extra-terrestrial utilitarian's viewpoint, human happiness could be treated as a constant. It drops out of the utilitarian equation. That leaves just one variable: the total human population size. The major way to maximize aggregate human happiness is simply to maximize the number of humans who have the privilege of living, before our species goes extinct.

Obviously, there may be some trade-offs between current population size and long-term population sustainability. However, most of the sustainability damage is due not to our large populations per se, but to runaway consumerism in North America and Europe, and catastrophic environmental policies everywhere else. Peter Schwartz (in this Edge Forum) mentioned the declining growth rate of the world's population as if it were unreported good news. I take a different view: the good news for a utilitarian who appreciates the happiness research would be a reduction in America's pointless resource-wastage and Brazil's deforestation rate, accompanied by a luxuriantly fertile boom in world population. Given modest technological advances, I see no reason why our planet could not sustain a population of 20 billion people for several hundred thousand generations. This would result in a utilitarian aggregate of 10 quadrillion happy people during the life-span of our species — not bad for such a weird, self-deluded sort of primate.

Prior to about twenty years ago, wars could almost always be understood as depressingly rational events perceived by instigators as being in their own self interests. Certain recent wars and other acts of organized violence are astonishing in that they seem to break this age old pattern. A striking example is the series of awful confrontations in the former Yugoslavia.

If it was only an evil strongman, a Slobodan Milosevic, who instigated the bloodshed, events would have kept true to the old established pattern. Many a leader has instigated conflict, conjuring a demonized foreign or domestic enemy to rouse support and gain power. But that is not really what happened in this case of Yugoslavia. In the past, the demons were accused of posing a material threat. Hitler claimed the Jews had taken all the money, for example. Yes, he claimed they (we) were morally degenerate, etc., but that alone would perhaps not have roused a whole population to support war and genocide. The material rationale seemed indispensable.

By contrast, in Yugoslavia a large number of both middle level leaders and ordinary citizens, not limited to the Serbs or another single group, rather suddenly decided to knowingly lower their immediate standard of living, their material prospects for the foreseeable future, their security, and their effective long term options and freedoms in order to reinforce a sense of ethnic identity. This is remarkably unusual. While ethnic, religious, and regional movements have throughout history sought political independence, they have almost never before resorted to large scale violence unless economic or some other form of material degradation was a critical motivation. Had the English Crown been more generous in the matter of taxation, for instance, he might well have held on to the American Colonies.

It is often pointed out that the cultural context for conflict in the Balkans is extraordinarily old and entrenched, but there are awful psychic wounds in collective memory all over the world. There are plenty of individuals who might under other circumstances be drawn once again into conflict over the proper placement of the border between Germany and Poland, for example, but there is absolutely no material incentive at this time to make an issue of it, and every material incentive to live with the situation as it is.

Similarly, if an uninformed, uneducated population had burst into violent conflict on the basis of bizarre beliefs that the enemy posed a serious threat of some kind, perhaps abducting children to drink their blood, then that would have kept to the historical pattern as well. Neither Von Clausewitz nor any other theorist of war has claimed that war has always in fact been in the self interest of perpetrators, only that it was perceived to be so. But Yugoslavia was a nation that was relatively prosperous, well educated, and informed. Yugoslav society was not closed or controlled to the extent of other contemporary nations formed upon related ideologies. There were relatively open borders and extensive commerce, tourism, and cultural contact with the West.

And Yugoslavia was not Germany between the wars. Yugoslavs were not humiliated or frustrated relative to other populations across their borders. The material conditions were critically different. There was no sense of hopeless economic disintegration, no reason to think, "Even war would be better than this, or at least a risk worth taking."

Before Yugoslavia, war famously spared nations blessed with Macdonald's hamburger franchises. The comforting common wisdom was that economic interdependence reduced the threat of war. Economic globalism was supposed to remove the material incentives from making war, and it indeed it probably has done that.

In former Yugoslavia, an upwelling of need for absolute identity trumped rational, material self interest. This phenomenon can also perhaps be seen in some instances in the rise of Islamic militancy. The recent rise of violent events perpetrated in the name of "traditional" identities, values, and beliefs is startling. Once again, such violence has always existed, but almost always before it has been coupled with a component of material motivation. The Biblical Israelites were enslaved and subjected economic abuse, for example. The fundamentalists who attack abortion clinics seek no improved material prospects. Neither do the Taliban. Or the bombers of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

In all these cases, identity has become more important than wealth, and that is new.

Another possible explanation that haunts me is that the human spirit cannot cope with the changes technology makes to human identity. This can be as simple as MTV blasting into the lives of children who otherwise would never have known the meaning of spandex, piercing, or whatever is in fashion on a particular day. Any thinking person, though, must know that the changes to the human condition wrought by such technologies as MTV, or even abortion and birth control, are mere whispers compared to the roar of changes that will soon come to pass.

In the spirit of tabloid headlines (Ted No Longer Fonda Jane) my Exclusive, Untold Story would be headed Weird Ape Fouls Planet.

Granted Bill McKibben got very close with his book The End of Nature, but there continues a pervasive denial that stops this story from honest resolution.

First, of course, we'd rather not hear about it. At the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival we discussed the dilemma of presenting the dreadful conservation stories without depressing the audience, which is another way of asking, Shall we not hit this nail on the head again? So beyond the various lobbies and doubts that obscure issues such as global warming, the media hesitate to offend, or to be redundant.

Secondly, it's a story I'd rather not research and write because it is a bummer. The first half I did attempt; I truly do think humans are quite a wonderfully weird, unique species and the story of our place within the evolution of life on earth is fantastic (and for many, still unbelievable.) But when it comes to our impact on the earth, the already palpable effects of over-population, I get bogged down in the details, or distracted by Untold Story Number Two (Equal Rights Amendment Never Passed U.S. Senate).

For example: there was a rush by health insurers to provide for coverage of Viagra use, but not of contraception pills for women. Enormous pressures remain for reproduction, from social and religious ones (the Vatican Rag) to the biological cues that inspired John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick) to put these words in the mouth of Jack Nicholson: What a Bait They Set Up. In a roundabout way the fallibilities of being human were covered ad nausea (Leader of Free World Impeached for Thong Thing) and maybe the reason that too will pass is because we would prefer to deny the power of these urges, on par with drugs and greed, plus ego, i.e. parking one's off road 4-WD Range Rover in front of the Hard Rock Café.

So I'm with Bugs Bunny, who said, people are the strangest animals because we have this ability to reason and yet that base stem of the brain, wherever it is located on your anatomy, tends to rule the day. Hollywood might be the only medium that can rattle our cage on such issues of perspective, truly seeing ourselves in context; journalism no longer seems capable of delivering profound, incisive news, unless you dare to have canines as sharp as those of Maureen Dowd.

I found your demand for "most" important a bit of a distraction, so forgive me for ignoring it.

My first thought was "chemistry for non-chemists". Few people write about chemistry for the public, few stories appear in the press. It's intrinsically difficult and, anyway, biology is, for the foreseeable future, just too sensational (in both good and questionable senses) and fast-moving for all but the sexiest of the rest of science to get much of a chance to compete for space in the media. But there is room for unusual science writers who know how to hit a nerve with a neat association between interesting chemistry and the everyday world - there just seem to be too few in existence and/or too little demand. (I'd mention John Emslie and my colleague Philip Ball as two honourable examples.)

The second thought was entrepreneurism. Because of inevitable business secrecy, entrepreneurism too rarely gets adequately opened up to scrutiny and public awareness. That's not to imply a hostile intent - entrepreneurism can provide the basis of riveting tales in a positive as well as negative senses. But, in Europe especially, chief executives of high-technology companies who bemoan the lack of an entrepreneurial culture unsurprisingly resist suggestions that a well-proven journalist be given the chance to roam around their company and write about what they find. Partly as a result of such inevitable caution, and partly because of the way the media approaches business, the public tends to get basic news and oceans of speculation about share prices and profits, gee-whiz accounts of technology, misrepresentation from lobby groups on both sides of a divide, lectures on management, partial autobiographies of successful business people, but, unless a company collapses, nothing like the whole truth. More could surely be done, though the obstacles are daunting.

Speech is a byproduct of the respiratory adjustments associated with walking upright on two legs. With bipedalism came a secondary and unrecognized consequence, the respiratory plasticity necessary for speech. Quadrupedal species must synchronize their locomotion and respiratory cycles at a ratio of 1:1(strides per breath), a coupling required by the shared, rhythmic use of the thoracic complex (sternum, ribs, and associated musculature), and the need to endure impacts of the forelimbs during running. Without such sychronization, running quadrupeds would fall face first into the dust because their thorax would be only a floppy air-filled bag that could not absorb the shock of forelimb strikes. Human bipedal runners free of these mechanical constraints on the thorax employ a wide variety of phase-locked patterns (4:1, 3:1, 2:1 [most common], 1:1, 5:2, and 3:2), evidence of a more plastic coupling between respiratory rhythm and gait. The relative emancipation of breathing from locomotion permitted by bipedality was necessary for the subsequent selection for the virtuosic acts of vocalization we know as speech.

The contribution of bipedality to speech evolution has been neglected because linguists typically focus on higher-order cognitive and neurobehavioral events that occur from the neck up and overlook the neuromuscular processes that produce the modified respiratory movements known as speech.

One of today's great untold stories — or, I should say, it keeps trying to get itself told and is usually mercilessly thrashed or ignored entirely — is the degree to which our behavior is manipulated and conditioned by media.

Most everyone has heard about the studies (more than 200 at last count) that show a direct correlation between increased aggression and exposure to violence portrayed in media. The most compelling of this research suggests that the visual media in particular — television, movies and even video games — employ psychological techniques such as desensitization and Pavlovian conditioning which change how we think about and react to violent behavior.

Of course, the entertainment and advertising industries dismiss these studies, saying it's impossible that their little ol' movie or TV show or 30-second ad or point-and-shooter could actually influence anyone's behavior.

That's what they say to Congress, anyhow, when they get called on the carpet for irresponsible programming.

But how do their protestations square with the gazillion-dollar business of TV advertising, in particular? This is an industry which is based entirely on the proposition that it can and does, in fact, impel people to buy a new car or a new pair of shoes, to drink more beer or get online — to do something different than they've been doing, in some shape or form.

So one of those statements has to be a lie, and if you follow the money, you can make a pretty good guess which one.

Once you are willing to consider this premise (and if you've read the studies and/or are willing to honestly observe your own behavior, it's pretty hard not to), it becomes apparent that a whole lot more than our attitudes toward violence may be influenced by visual media.

Not long ago, for example, it occurred to me that the rising obesity rate of our TV-addicted population might actually have something to do with the fact that any given hour of programming will yield an infinity of food porn — sexy, slender women shoving two-pound dripping hamburgers into lipsticked mouths, or normal-sized families cheerily gorging themselves at tables piled with giant lobsters and steaks and all manner of things oozing fat and sugar.

I mentioned this theory of mine to a colleague last November and, remarkably, the very next day, a blurb in The New York Times' science section announced that a Stanford University study had correlated children's obesity with television watching, and that the American Institute for Cancer Research found that most Americans overestimated a normal-sized portion of food by about 25 percent.

Neither of these two studies directly linked TV's food bonanza with overeating, but they do suggest a connection between what our eyes see and what our brains subsequently do with that information.

It's then no giant leap to wonder whether the constant barrage of TV "news" and political programming — from the Clinton-Lewinsky extravaganza to Sunday morning's meet-the-pundits ritual to the "coverage" of the latest batch of presidential hopefuls — is another case of media desensitization in action.

Could TV itself, the place where most Americans get their daily fix of news, actually be causing America's vast political ennui and depressed voter turnout? Have we become so anesthetized by what we watch that we require the specter of Jesse Ventura or Donald Trump as president to engage, even superficially, in the political process?

The studies that correlate media exposure with a flattened cultural affect about violence would support that general premise.

But as we know, correlation does not prove causation. To prove that TV "causes" violence, for example, you'd have to conduct a controlled, double-blind experiment which, if successful, would result in someone committing a violent act.

The human subjects committee at any responsible research lab or university would never approve such an experiment, and for good reason.

But it must be possible to set up a sufficiently rigorous, violence-free experiment to measure the actual neurological and behavioral effects of visual media. Wouldn't we all like to know what really happens — what happens in our brains, what humans can be impelled to do — as a result of spending so many hours in front of TVs and computers and movie screens?

Considering the massive amount of visual stimuli that is pumped into our brains every day — and the astronomical profits made by the industries who keep the flow going — this seems like a story eminently worth reporting.

Sources from deep inside The New York Times Company, owner of The New York Times, Boston Globe, numerous TV stations, regional newspapers, and various digital properties, and from The Onion, a web based satirical newspaper (www.theonion.com) have verified the rumors. It's true, The Onion, Inc. company headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin has made a offer to buy The New York Times, Inc., company for stock.

This is a serious offer and word is that NYT Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger sees it as a way instantly transform his family's company into a major Internet content provider and thereby pump up the company's stock creating instant wealth for many long time shareholders.

According to people close to the talks, Sulzberger and other New York Times executives were recently seen in Madison Wisconsin where they reportedly attended a Friday afternoon beer bash at The Onion headquarters. Apparently, the executives of both companies really hit it off and have even gone on camping trips together. Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times and Onion's Editor-in-Chief Robert Siegel have formed a "mutual admiration club" and are seriously considering swapping jobs once the merger is finalized.

"Some of the ideas these two groups discuss once they've had a few beers is phenomenal, particularly when you get Mr. Sulzberger into it," reported one of the Onion editors. The New York Times group is particularly intrigued with the success that The Onion has had by using invented names in all its stories except for public figures. By employing an Internet journalistic standard to an old media newspaper like The Times, it is felt that editorial costs can be reduced by a whopping 80%!

Cultural differences between the two companies and differing standards of journalism aren't seen as major stumbling blocks to getting the deal done. The biggest challenge will be to get the two sides to agree to a valuation that gives shareholders of both companies plenty to cheer for. This is complicated because The Onion has a market cap that is several hundred billion dollars higher than the New York Times Company. The expectation, though is this will be worked out to be similar to AOL's purchase of Time Warner, with The Onion shareholders getting about 55 to 60 percent of the merger company. Thus, The New Times Shareholder will see an instant up tick in their stock which should compensate them more than adequately for losing control of the company.

Onion Publisher & President Peter K. Haise will reportedly give up his position to become Chairman of the combined company and move to New York. Arthur Sulzberger will more to Wisconsin, to run The Onion which will be the new flag ship of the what will be called "Onion New York Times Media Giant Company." Haise and Sulzberger have also agreed to swap houses and families as part of the deal, which will facilitate their need to move quickly.

The resulting "Onion New York Times Media Giant Company" will be one of the world's largest media companies in terms of market cap, though only half as big as AOL/ Time-Warner. The year 2000 is already being seen as the year that old media surrendered to new media and there are some more surprises to come. The biggest merger yet could happen this summer when Wired Digital spins out Suck.com which will in turn make a bid to buy The Walt Disney Corporation. Stay tuned dear readers, Suck!Disney could become the biggest acquistion of all time.

The most important untold story according my opinion is how kids replaced the generals as the major source of defining the innovation agenda of the world; how the biblical prophecy "thou shell turn your swords into Sony Playstation 2" is being fulfilled; how the underlying power sending satellites to the skies, creating fabs for 128 bit machines, pushing for broadband, is not any longer based on the defense needs of the big powers ,but on the imagination and the passion of kids (and adults) to play games, see 1000 channels of television, and listen to music!!

This is just amazing, and beautiful. Never in the history of mankind have kids had such a profound influence on the creativity and innovation agenda. It is a very democratic process as well as the decision-making power is distributed widely.

DR. JOSEPH VARDI is the Principal of International Technologies Ventures, a private venture capital enterprise, investing principally for its own account, which has initiated, negotiated, structured and arranged financing for the acquisition of operating companies; and created and funded several high-tech companies in the fields of Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas.

Dr Vardi is the founding investor and the former chairman of Mirabilis Ltd, the creator of the extremely popular Internet communication program ICQ which took the web by storm, making it one of the most successful Internet products of all times, with currently over 65 million users. The company was acquired by AOL.

I. A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship

I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own.

Over the past twenty years, I have often used the metaphor of "computer as Rorschach" to describe the relationship between people and their machines. I found computers used as a projective screen for other concerns, a mirror of mind and self. But today’s relational artifacts make the Rorschach metaphor far less useful than before. These artifacts do not so much invite projection as they demand engagement. The computational object is no longer affectively "neutral." People are learning to interact with computers through conversation and gesture, people are learning that to relate successfully to a computer you do not have to know how it works, but to take it "at interface value," that is to assess its emotional "state," much as you would if you were relating to another person. Through their experiences with virtual pets and digital dolls (Tamagotchi, Furby, Amazing Ally), a generation of children are learning that some objects require (and promise) emotional nurturance. Adults, too, are encountering technology that attempts to meet their desire for personalized advice, care and companionship (help wizards, intelligent agents, AIBO, Matsushita's forthcoming Tama).

These are only the earliest, crude examples of the relational technologies that will become part of our everyday lives in the next century. There is every indication that the future of computational technology will include ubiquitous relational artifacts that have feelings, life cycles, moods, that reminisce, and have a sense of humor, which say they love us, and expect us to love them back. What will it mean to a person when their primary daily companion comes is a robotic dog? Or their health care "worker" is a robot cat? Or their software program attends to their emotional states and, in turn, has its own?. We need to know how these new artifacts affect people’s way of thinking about themselves, human identity, and what makes people special. These artifacts also raise significant new questions about how children apporach the question of ‘What is alive?" In the proposed research the question is not what the computer will be like in the future, but what will we be like, what kind of people are we becoming?

Relational artifacts are changing the narrative of human development, including how we understand such "human" qualities as emotion, love, and care. The dynamic between a person and an emotionally interactive, evolving, caring machine object is not the same as the relationship one might have with another person, or a pet, or a cherished inanimate object.

We have spent a large amount of social resources trying to build these artifacts; now it is time to study what is happening to all of us as we go forth into a world "peopled" with a kind of object we have never experienced before. We need to more deeply understand the nature and implications of this new sort of relationship — and its potential to fundamentally change our understanding of what it means to be human.

We need to be asking several kinds of new questions:

• How are we to conceptualize the nature of our attachments to interactive robots, affective computers, and digital pets?

• How does interacting with relational artifacts affect people’s way of thinking about themselves and others, their sense of human identity and relationships? How do the models of development and values embedded in the design of relational artifacts both reflect and influence our ways of thinking about people?

• What roles — both productive and problematic — can relational artifacts play in fulfilling a basic human need for relationship? Their first generation is being predominantly marketed to children and the elderly. What does this reflect about our cultural values about these groups? How will these objects influence their understanding of who they are as individuals and in the world? Are we reinforcing their marginality? Are we tacitly acknowledging that we do not have enough "human" time to spend with them?

II.

In the 1960s through the 1980s, researchers in artificial intelligence took part in what we might call the classical "great AI debates" where the central question was whether machines could be "really" intelligent. This classical debate was essentialist; the new relational objects tend to enable researchers and their public to sidestep such arguments about what is inherent in the computer. Instead, the new objects depend on what people attribute to them; they shift the focus to what the objects evoke in us. When we are asked to care for an object (the robot Kismet, the plaything Furby), when the cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, people are moved to experience that object as intelligent. Beyond this, they feel a connection to it. So the question here is not to enter a debate about whether relational objects "really" have emotions, but to reflect on a series of issues having to do with what relational artifacts evoke in the user.

In my preliminary research on children and Furbies, I have found that children describe these new toys as "sort of alive" because of the quality of their emotional attachments to the Furbies and because of their fantasies about the idea that the Furby might be emotionally attached to them. So, for example, when I ask the question, "Do you think the Furby is alive?" children answer not in terms of what the Furby can do, but how they feel about the Furby and how the Furby might feel about them.

Ron (6): Well, the Furby is alive for a Furby. And you know, something this smart should have arms. It might want to pick up something or to hug me.

Katherine (5): Is it alive? Well, I love it. It’s more alive than a Tamagotchi because it sleeps with me. It likes to sleep with me.

Here, the computational object functions not only as an evocative model of mind, but as a kindred other. With these new objects, children (and adults) not only reflect on how their own mental and physical processes are analogous to the machine’s, but perceive and relate to the machine as an autonomous and "almost alive" self.

My work with children and computational objects has evolved into a decades-long narrative about the way computation has affected the way we make sense of the world. In many ways, the behaviors and comments of children have foreshadowed the reactions of adults. In the first generation of computer culture I studied, the children of the late 1970s and early 1980s tended to resolve metaphysical conflicts about machine "aliveness" by developing a concept of "the psychological machine"–concluding that psychology and a kind of consciousness were possible in objects they knew were not alive. This way of coping with the conundrums posed by computational objects was pioneered by children, and later adopted by adults. Later cohorts of children's responses to computational objects that were more complex and problematic in new ways again reliably foreshadowed the conclusions the culture at large would soon reach. First, they explained that although machines might be psychological in the cognitive sense (they might be intelligent, they might have intentionality), they were not psychological in the emotional sense, because they did not know pain, or love, they were not mortal, and they did not have souls. Soon after, the children I interviewed began consistently citing biology and embodiment as the crucial criteria that separated people from machines; they insisted that qualities like breathing, having blood, being born, and, as one put it, "having real skin," were the true signs of life. Now, I have begun to see a new pattern – children describe relational artifacts not as "alive" or "not alive", but as "sort-of-alive." Categories such as "aliveness" and "emotion" seem poised to split in the same way that the categories of "psychological" and "intelligent" did twenty years ago.

Children's reactions to the presence of "smart machines" have fallen into discernable patterns over the past twenty years. Adults' reactions, too, have been changing over time, often closely following those of the children. To a certain extent, we can look to children to see what we are starting to think ourselves. However, in the case of relational artifacts, there is more to the choice of children as subjects than a simple desire to stay ahead of the curve in anticipating changes in computer culture. By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future. Because they are the first generation to grow up with this new paradigm, it is essential that we observe and document their experiences.

SHERRY TURKLE is a professor of the sociology of sciences at MIT. She is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit; Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud†s French Revolution, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet..

The press has been preoccupied with possible explanations for the current extraordinary boom. Many articles say, as they always do while a bubble grows, that this market is "different." Some attribute the difference to new information technology. Others credit changes in foreign trade, or the baby boomer's lack of experience with a real economic depression. But you never see a serious story about the possibility that this market is different because investor's brains are different. There is good reason to suspect that they are.

Prescriptions for psychoactive drugs have increased from 131 million in 1988 to 233 million in 1998, with nearly 10 million prescriptions filled last year for Prozac alone. The market for antidepressants in the USA is now $6.3 billion per year. Additional huge numbers of people use herbs to influence their moods. I cannot find solid data on how many people in the USA take antidepressants, but a calculation based on sales suggests a rough estimate of 20 million.

What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug. What effects do these drugs have on investment behavior? We don't know. A 1998 study by Brian Knutson and colleagues found that the serotonin specific antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) did not cause euphoria in normal people, but did block negative affects like fear and sadness. From seeing many patients who take such agents, I know that some experience only improved mood, often a miraculous and even life-saving change. Others, however, report that they become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers. This is exactly the mind-set of many current investors.

Human nature has always given rise to booms and bubbles, followed by crashes and depressions. But if investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs, bubbles could grow larger than usual before they pop, with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences. If chemicals are inhibiting normal caution in any substantial fraction of investors, we need to know about it. A more positive interpretation is also easy to envision. If 20 million workers are more engaged and effective, to say nothing of showing up for work more regularly, that is a dramatic tonic for the economy. There is every reason to think that many workers and their employers are gaining such benefits. Whether the overall mental health of the populace is improving remains an open question, however. Overall rates of depression seem stable or increasing in most technological countries, and the suicide rate is stubbornly unchanged despite all the new efforts to recognize and treat depression.

The social effects of psychotropic medications is the unreported story of our time. These effects may be small, but they may be large, with the potential for social catastrophe or positive transformation. I make no claim to know which position is correct, but I do know that the question is important, unstudied, and in need of careful research. What government agency is responsible for ensuring that such investigations get carried out? The National Institute of Mental Health? The Securities and Exchange Commission? Thoughtful investigative reporting can give us preliminary answers that should help to focus attention on the social effects of psychotropic medications.

Randoph M. Nesse, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Director, ISR Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan and coauthor (with George C. Williams) of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.

Margaret Wertheim asks what is meant by "science." I have an answer. It must involve more than merely cataloguing facts, and discovering successful procedures by trial and error. Crucially, true science involves uncovering the principles that underpin and link natural phenomena. Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with Margaret that we should respect the world view of indigineous non-European peoples, I do not believe the examples she cites — Mayan astronomy, Chinese acupuncture, etc. — meet my definition. The Ptolemaic system of epicycles achieved reasonable accuracy in describing the motion of heavenly bodies, but there was no proper physical theory underlying it. Newtonian mechanics, by contrast, not only described planetary motions more simply, it connected the movement of the moon with the fall of the apple. That is real science, because it uncovers things we cannot know any other way. Has Mayan astronomy or Chinese acupuncture ever led to a successful nontrivial prediction producing new knowledge about the world? Many people have stumbled on the fact that certain things work, but true science is knowing why things work. I am open-minded about acupuncture, but if it does work, I would rather put my faith in an explanation based on nerve impulses than mysterious energy flows that have never been demonstrated to have physical reality.

Why did science take root in Europe? At the time of Galileo and Newton, China was far more advanced technologically. However, Chinese technology (like that of the Australian Aborigines) was achieved by trial and error refined over many generations. The boomerang was not invented by first understanding the principles of hydrodynamics and then designing a tool. The compass (discovered by the Chinese) did not involve formulating the principles of electromagnetism. These latter developments emerged from the (true, by my definition) scientific culture of Europe. Of course, historically, some science also sprang from accidental discoveries only later understood. But the shining emblems of true science — such as radio waves, nuclear power, the computer, genetic engineering - all emerged from the application of a deep theoretical understanding that was in place before — sometimes long before — the sought-after technology.

The reasons for Europe being the birthplace of true science are complex, but they certainly have a lot to do with Greek philosophy, with its notion that humans could come to understand how the world works through rational reasoning, and the three monothesitic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — with their notion of a real, lawlike, created order in nature, imposed by a Grand Architect. Although science began in Europe, it is universal and now available to all cultures. We can continue to cherish the belief systems of other cultures, whilst recognizing that scientific knowledge is something special that tanscends cultures.

Paul Davies is an internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia. Professor Davies is the author of some twenty books, including Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, The Edge of Infinity, The Mind of God, The Cosmic Blueprint, Are We Alone? and About Time.

LINK: "The Synthetic Path" — Ch. 18 in The Third Culture

I'm currently thinking about Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and the Book of Exodus, which is inclining me to the opinion that today's unreported stories are similar to yesterday's: shifting empires and power as the powerless struggle for sanctuary and their own form of salvation.

THOMAS A. BASS is the author of The Predictors, Back to Vietnamerica, Reinventing the Future, Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa , and The Eudaemonic Pie. A frequent contributor to Smithsonian, Audubon, Discover, The New York Times, and other publications, he is Contributing Writer for Wired magazine and Scholar-in-Residence at Hamilton College.