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Monday, December 10, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Solution: Slow Down
The 70th Anniversary of the first transcontinental automobile trip has passed unnoticed. The 3,094-mile trip from San Francisco to New York City in Clinton, took six, 15 of which were spent waiting for supplies.
We've come a long way since those days. At 70 m.p.h., the trip is considerably faster, and with airconditioned cars, radios and stereo tape decks, a whole lot more pleasant.
Progress has made traveling so pleasant in recent years that Americans covered 320 billion miles of highway on vacations last year.
That's progress.
Including day-to-day travel, about 114 million drivers, in 96 million passenger cars, traveled 980 billion miles in 1972 alone.
It has been nice. But the freedom to pick up and go, by car, train or plane, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
To Americans, still living with the myth of an ever continuing Westward Expansion, constraints and limits have been accepted. To Americans accustomed
to being received abroad with open arms, a decline in popularity is not easily understood.
But the fact is that there are no more open lands to be conquered, no more territory in which to grow crops and populate, and only finite resources.
People in other countries are beginning to look at the figures that show the United States' disproportionate use of energy. If they turn an occasional cook into an international tourist, who can blame them?
That the world's energy resources are finite is fact. Widespread use of nuclear energy and solar power isn't yet feasible, and it may be that neither will turn out to be the panacea hoped for.
The only real solution to the energy dilemma, then, is to slow down. And while we're slowing down, we might stop to think about all those automobiles, barreling from highways and tightly, music, blaring, airconditioning blowing. Do we really need to be so comfortable?
Even at 50 m.p.h., we've still come a long way from 1903.
—Linda Hales
Pach Expose Praised
Reader Responds
Tothe Editor:
I wish to applaud the editor and staff of the Kanas for bringing attention to the existence of the secret fraternity Pachacamac. The exposure of unknown leaders in the society has attempted to exert, pressure upon our society's institutions is the highest service a free press can offer. The public can only defend itself against improper influences upon its government, its market, its army and society when it has the true situation made known.
But even before I left, I still didn't pursue those rumors as I might have. Perhaps I should have, because as a participant in student government I should have been very sensitive to any indication of unrest or improper influence upon the administration.
I first beard rumors of Pachacamac's existence a little over two years ago while I was serving with Student Senate President John F. Peters. He said Kansan a nicle is correct. Pachacamac had some connections with Dillon's administration. I don't know whether that was true. I left Dillon's administration soon after the resignation and was absent from KU for about a year.
As Clark Davis, Webster Groves, Mo., junior, pointed out, I agreed that some individuals wished to join a secret club and "wear yellow and green on Thursday" or
whatever, then that is their right. It is an agreement of the freedoms of association and of space.
As Eric Meyer pointed out in his Kansan editorial, Pachacamac may be entirely harmless. Or maybe secret influences at the office are more important than anything really important. But I don't think anyone would be startled if I suggested that those individuals who are today the "cream of the KU fraternity crop" will, someday, be brought under the spotlight positions of authority in our larger society. If these men carry away with them attitudes like this—that they are above the majority—then it is really hard to explain why business trusts get started.
When we think our individual cause is above mutual compromise—and when we become unwilling to submit ourselves to the same criteria of that compromise becomes surely certain.
It is a healthy thing that the Kanisan is performing its duties. I hope Chancellor Will pick his checker to open in office. The members of Pachacamac will seriously consider their position. I hope we will be more careful about allowing elitist attitudes to escape
John House
First year law student
Lawrence
Many View Ecology As Threat
Rv. JOHN E. GOODRICK
Recently the tone of voice of leaders in this nation has changed. Ecology was going to save us all from our ultimate destruction, but now it has become a group of rebels holding back progress, an American way and the standard of living.
Ecologists and people, not ecologists who are people, has become the phraseology. It is frightening to think that few have noticed that ecologists are now simply "groups." It was a man's idea, too, and he used a name, idea, for the future and now, one crisis later, it has become something or a group that is stopping progress.
great men who discovered such processes. Because it tries to be so exact and to include not only man in its analysis, but also his environment, it takes time. But now, after one crisis, it is put aside, supposed for a short while, because man is too busy and has no time for such foolishness.
Ecology is simply a mathematical formula of measuring input and output, stimuli and response to stimuli, a product and the cost of production. Ecology's theory suggests that stresses shows faults in great processes and eventual results not calculated by the
WE CANNOT AFFORD TO put away ecology, hide it in the closet for even a short while. It has taken environmental scientists this long to make people understand why it is to be put aside as each crisis develops it may as well be put aside altogether.
Ecology is not a "use it when you need it" science. It deals with environments and use the factors that effect such things. For example, the effect of nature. Nature is a balanced system and can absorb repeated minor changes, but man is no minor factor in nature's balance. He can and has changed nature's balance over time. The nature's balance and still survive.
Everyone knows the possible results of radioactive fall-out, but few results are so dramatic. The ocean's plankton, which supply most of the world's oxygen, may be in danger of extinction as pollutants continue to pour into our nation's waterways and eventually into the great catch basin of them all.
Now is not the time to throw up our hands. If man's need for fuel is great now, don't fire the ecologist—let him work right along with the engineer. There is no need to go all out for saving the environment or all out to destroy it. Ultimately the question is one of man and his needs. But for years the ecologists
THESE SAME POISONS are also filtering through our soil and contaminating our ground water, the major source of drinking water for the entire world. If we continue to ignore such dangers we are only fooling ourselves. We are sticking our heads into the sand like the ignoble ostrich.
have been studying and learning man's effect on his environment and have come to believe that a positive effect is
You don't close the eyes of an ecologist and spray with DDT for one week. You don't allow oil spills to go unheeded for a week, and you don't let the beaches and tell the ecologist that the beaches are temporarily off bounds. You don't strip a mountainside of trees and tell the ecologist later. You don't explode an ammonia tank and ask the ecologist what will happen.
Ecology is a science of the present and future. Putting ecology in the closet will not alter the consequences of rash actions. If progress must be made at the expense of man's environment let it be known, but also let us know what the consequences are of such actions so that future decisions will not be in vain.
(John Goodrick, a 1972 graduate, is the assistant publisher of the Versailles (Mo. Leader-Statesman).)
Europeans' Seriousness Open to Question
By STEPHEN S. ROSENFELD
WASHINGTON—This has been the “Year of Europe,” all right, though not the year in which West Europe’s ties with the United States have weakened. Yet in the year they were redefined and strained. It was done, of course, not by the intended process of diplomacy but by the forced draft of events. This has disgruntled the United States and trying to cope. Where is Europe now?
The world war left Europe for the first time unable to care for its own defense. The slight nuclear forces built since by Britain and France only underline the gap between the power of Europe and that of the Soviet Union, the one menace to it. Only the United States has kept them from falling more or less under the Soviet shadow.
Europe is in perhaps the most devastated and vulnerable condition it has been in since World War II. Its general prospects haven't been so poor in all those years. Nor is there visible, at least from here, any substantial signal that Europe groups the fx it is.
ESPECIALLY AT THIS delicate moment when post-Vietnam America was recalculating its relationship with Europe, it behovied the allies to act in a way making possible a smooth transition. By taking its own Mideast path, however, Europe has cut a deep cash in the principle and fabric of European affairs, and independence depends. Almost perversely, the shallow European complaint about being inadequately "consulted" in the
October war ignores this fundamental claim.
The basic "Atlantic" argument has always been, after all, that European and American security are inseparable. After the U.S. developed its own long-range nuclear force, that argument became something of a myth but, all the same, it was a myth of over arching value—to Europe.
From it, the United States got influence of various sorts in Europe but Europe got something more basic; protection. To fracture that myth before the allies have made any other effective provision for their own protection would seem to be entailed, taught by a faintic gift to Moscow, but it is not that direction that Europe has now.
THE EVENTS OF OCTOBER cannot fail to erode the sense of mutuality and interdependence which Europe had hoped the United States would bring to trade and monetary negotiations. It remains a mystery just how European thought the United States could hold a firm position in the East-West troop repression talks in Vienna, even while they weakened the American military. An Ahlat later, the results will be seen in congressional votes on maintaining American troops in Europe.
But the oil: Europe depends on Arab oil. Those who invoke this "realistic" explanation for European policy should explain what limits there may be to King Faisha's requests for proof of their "friendship."
Imagine, it's not hard—that King Faisal, alarmed that western oil distress may lead to military moves against him, asks, say, France to take a holiday from NATO in order to secure his throne. Imagine a quiet Kremlin offer to, say, the British, of a
couple of million extra barrels of oil a day, if the British will only . . .
REASONABLE MEN no doubt can differ over whether the Europeans acted in a "moral" way, but there can be precious little difference over whether they were politically sensible. Now to hear the French foreign minister mutter about Europe is not easy for him. "Sir humiliated in its very existence," only shows how deep the rot has set in.
A country or continent that can jump through Kaisa's haop—did Europe make even a formal remonstrance?—while challenging the policy and purpose of its one proven and essential ally, betrays a lack of seriousness.
From King Faisal, Europe can expect for its pains little more than resumption of oil shipments at prices fit to bust the continental treasury and to devour the economic strength which was its one chance to serve its people well. From the United States, Europe must expect to suffer the consequences of its own acts that weaken damages if these various damages can be limited in some measure, they cannot be undone.
THIS HAS practically nothing to do with the future of the Mideast-Europe's judgment on that is only of academic interest and not everything to do with the future of Europe.
Against the only real and abiding threat to the independence of the continent, namely, the Soviet Union, the Europeans seem actually to think that the temporary favor of an Arabian king is worth more than them and to believe in maintaining relationship with the United States.
Or are Europeans so numbed by their newly revealed condition of political and economic vulnerability that they can no longer tell?
'Stumbling Upon the Golden Goose'
By JIM STINGLEY The Los Angeles Times
NORTH HOLYWOOD, Calif.-Saltem away in the shell of an old supermarket
'Hooligans' Make Waves
The Los Angeles Times
By MURRAY SEEGER
MOSCOW—Strange things can be heard crackling over the Soviet air waves these days—but from the hated foreign broadcasts not from such stations as Radio Demon, The Diamond, Dragon, Ninchaok, Black Soul, Sea Devil and Tempest.
They are all illegally operated inside the Soviet Union—mostly by young radio enthusiasts—and the government is taking ever more serious measures to stamp them out. However, with all of the modern electronic means of tracking down the private shortwave and ultrashortwave broadcasts, the authorities have found that
BUT THE FACT THAT the term applied to these illicit operators is "radio bolligans" indicates an even more serious form of criminality, criticizing the regime, the distribution of information otenting the government and the Communist Party and the playing of rock music, which is regarded by the authorities as "agressive" and "decadent bourgeois culture."
The official reason for the crackdown, according to the government-controlled press, is that the radio hobbies perform broadcast on channels reserved for its official use.
Moreover, since such radio equipment is not generally available in Soviet shops, most of it used by the illicit operators has to be purchased in factories and even public telephone booths.
Backing up the government's contention that the broadcasts can have harmful results are published charges that they have interfered with airport ground-to-air navigation at airports, disrupted vital traffic and caused radio noise on Radio Messe's shortwave broadcasts.
THE PHENOMONON IS widespread throughout the country, as in several of its illicit activity coming from Moscow, the central Volga area and the southern Caucasian republics.
broadcasts were heard in one five-hour period.
The hobbities themselves claim they experiment and take big legal risks because there are few opportunities for them to learn shortwave radio operation through channels and because they are bored with the output of the government stations.
OFFICIAL SHORTWAVE CLUBS and the operators belonging to the voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation and Navy can have channels assigned to them, but most of the illegal enemies wander all over the shortwave bands.
"We discovered broadcasts by the so-called Radio Center recently," a policeman reported. "The man was using a wave to a control service of a railroad terminal."
"Irregent information on the condition of the tracks, the time of arrivals and departures, were pressed out of the air by the notices, jazz music and indecent stories."
In one industrial area a total of 115 illegal
In Baku, on the Caspian Sea, rado stations
named Flying Skeleton, the Parasite and the Black Cat were shut down after being accused of preventing the talking down of a crippled airliner and interfering with an emergency message from a doctor to a first-aid crew on an offshore oil rig.
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building in North Hollywood, several gray and blue computers are whirring and spinning.
That's where the "me" part comes in. Every book the computer completes is a separate, personalized edition in which a character himself or herself the leading character.
What the computers produce at 1,100 words per minute are books—as many as you can write in a day. Preschoolers and primary students who have two things in common—an inability or lack of focus
The words go like this: "Me, me, me, me,
me, me, me..."
EXAMPLE: YOUR CHILD is named Shea Bigeh. She lives on J寸ingDrive in Columbus. She was born on May 1. She has a degree in French and three friends, Lea, Vicki and Douglass.
The end result may be a major breakthrough in modern reading education.
The computer takes this information and weaves it throughout one of four preprinted, preillustrated children's book manuscripts that, when completed, will be hardbound. The results are illustrated in this passage from the book, books entitled "My Friendly Giraffe":
“One morning, she was playing with “Douglas in front of her home. When she looked up, what do you think she saw you do?” “You drive the Drive? You grassed it. I A giraffe!”
And the results of this computerized magic, according to Me-Books Publishing Co., a subsidiary of Dart Industries, have—nation and worldwide—been astounding.
by Sokoloff
Tests conducted by two University of Southern California specialists in elementary schools were so positive that the specialists, Helen Petrie and Sue Schrager, concluded that "the concept of personalization, that is, seeing one's own name in print, is a significant tool in developing enthusiasm for reading.
Dr. Grace A. Ransom, associate professor of curriculum and instruction and director of the USC reading centers, adds that the new concept "is one of the milestones toward developing the enthusiasm which will doubtless have instaintable effects on reading in the future . . ."
"WE EXPECT PERSONALIZATION to be a major factor in the teaching of science."
In the tests, the kids freaked over seeing their names and the names of their pets, brothers, sisters and friends right there in nice, black type.
Kids who previously considered reading alongside corporeal punishment "ran around the neighborhood to show the book," or "to listen to a teacher, to visit," or "to take it to bed with them."
"The second group represents normal, school-age beginning readers. Ninety-five per cent (of the 200 tested) enjoyed reading books because of the personalization and 89 per cent thought the book more enjoyable than any other they had previously read.
THE FASCINATION, according to research, applies really to three major groups.
"The third group represents children who are slow readers or have a reading disability. Many of these cases represent a lack of interest in reading. Personalized books provide this interest and grounding reading improvement evolves.
"First, the prereading group, ages 2 to 6,
becomes more attentive, learns words
faster and relates words to illustrations," said Petrie and Schrager.
but Gosden, son of Freeman Godsen Sr., radio's original "Amos" of "Amos and Andy," then leaned across his desk and whispered: "But just between you and the pencils, we are phenomenally successful, beyond anybody's projections."
According to Freeman Goaden Jr., publisher: "Well, we've got a lot of things in the woodpecker and I don't care at this point to do anything, but that we are doing in facts and figures."
WHICH BRINGS US BACK to Me-Books
that will include an item from
it impatiently and (exclusive but
not implied) by the author.
Of course, stumbling upon the golden goose hasn't been all that easy, Goden admits, "Murphy's law has been present throughout the inception," he said. "That's the law that says what can go wrong, will go wrong."
"WHEN WE First STARTED, the card instructions were to list a brother, a sister and a friend. Fine. Well, I start getting calls. One lady from Michigan was upset. The child she had ordered the book for had two sisters and no brothers.
"Fortunately that was easy to tell the computer to fix. Now we tell people to list up their computers."
"So when she got the book, only one sister was mentioned and this reduced the other to none."
"Another mistake was on the Christmas book. We had four stockings hanging over the fire and told the computer to put the name of the hero on the large stocking and then the name of the first-listed friend, then dog, then cat.
"Well, we have a rule if they don't list a dog to out that "Spot" in for the dog and give it to him."
"Sure enough, we started getting calls from people who had no dogs or cats but had three kids and there we had some fictitious animal's name on their stocking.
"So we had to tell the computer to, in the future, list all children first, then fill with
GOSDEN'E YEYS up long in the same manner as the computer's lights when running.
"sooner just how far his company could take this personalized concept of printing, he squints in a manner mindful of W. C. Kirkpatrick, who is good poker band close to his chest.
"I will not say we will or will not do these things," he says, "but we have the capability of advancing the concept to include a multitude of things.
Geden is convinced that Me-Books has found its own good thing.
we to have a bear by his tail," he
goed, "and we go to go where the bear
goes.
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