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Even so, climate modelers admit, building a completely realistic mock earth is an impossibly tall order. "You divide the world into a bunch of little boxes," explains Michael MacCracken, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The size of the geographic box -- the degree of detail called for -- limits the model. Smaller grids dramatically increase the number-crunching power required. "The state of the art would be to get down to small areas so we can say what's going to happen in Omaha," says Livermore's Stanley Grotch. "The models just aren't that good...
Indeed, the world according to Hite is just that, a subjective view. In her report, Hite makes no pretense of maintaining the distance from her subject matter customarily expected of a social scientist. Describing the radical feminist outcry against marriage, for example -- "exploitation of women financially, physically, sexually and emotionally" -- she does not hesitate to add her opinion that it is "just and accurate." Hite's analysis is colored by her entrenched view that today's men and women are incapable of getting through to one another, that most men are treacherous troglodytes and women are socially conditioned to serve...
Many statisticians take issue with this approach. Hite's choice of women's organizations means she was getting mostly one kind of person -- "joiners," observes Regina Herzog, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. The very low 4.5% response rate is also worrisome. "Five percent could be any oddballs," says Herzog. "We get pretty nervous if respondents in our own surveys go under...
...California the Rand/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior was bombarded by ten applicants for each of its five openings. At Vermont's Middlebury College, almost 10% of the 1,900 undergraduates now major in Soviet studies, a program only in its third year. Says Berkeley Political Scientist Gail Lapidus: "Suddenly, it's an exciting time to be in Soviet studies...
While working on nuclear-fission control at the Soviet Institute of Atomic Energy in 1958, the young scientist was stunned by his first meeting, in Geneva, with scientists from outside the Soviet Union. He still relates the experience with wonder: "For the first time I met foreign scientists, Americans, doing the same job and reporting their results. It was like meeting extraterrestrials -- extraterrestrials working with the same laws of physics. It was exemplary proof that science has no borders...