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Surveying the damage, Church Historian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago sees a "widespread sense of moral disarray." Once, notes Bryn Mawr Political Scientist Stephen Salkever, "there was a traditional language of public discourse, based partly on biblical sources and partly on republican sources." But that language, says Salkever, has fallen into disuse, leaving American society with no moral lingua franca. Agrees Jesuit Father Joseph O'Hare, president of Fordham University: "We've had a traditional set of standards that have been challenged and found wanting or no longer fashionable. Now there don't seem to be any moral...
NCSA, one of five regional supercomputer centers established since 1985 by the National Science Foundation, is rapidly emerging as a leader in scientific graphics. Last year, for instance, Artist Donna Cox and Computer Scientist Ray Idaszak helped Caltech Astrophysicist Charles Ross Evans produce a short videotape depicting what in theory would occur in the collision of two neutron stars. To the untrained eye, the colliding stars look more like exotic flowers than a cosmic catastrophe. But the colors all have a quantitative meaning: areas colored red are ten times as dense as yellow ones, and yellow represents 100 times...
...Some scientists warn against going overboard with the new technique. Says James Blinn, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who created some of NASA's most spectacular computer simulations of planetary flybys: "Sometimes a half- baked idea gets printed up prettily and gets more attention than it deserves." Still, Blinn believes, as long as the scientific data used to generate the images are accurate, computer graphics can prod scientists to move in exciting new directions. NCSA's Upson agrees. "If we play our cards right," he says, "we may actually make a dent in how people do science...
James MacGregor Burns, Williams College political scientist and biographer of Franklin Roosevelt
Nevertheless, at least a third of the 527 members meeting in Washington (the proportion needed to bar an election) seem to have been swayed by Lang's underlying argument that social scientists, however eminent, may not belong to the NAS and perhaps should form an academy of their own. Says one physical scientist: "It's not enough to be excellent. One has to meet the norms of science as well." But that view leaves wide open the question of who, inside the NAS or out, ought to define those norms...