Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (08/03/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Wednesday, 27 Jul 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 38
Today's Topics:
Announcement - New Newsgroup,
Response to Query - Is Technology Worth it?,
Computers and People - Personal Information Systems &
Automation and Jobs,
Technology - New White House Electronic Mail System
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Date: Sun, 24 Jul 83 16:44:18 CDT
From: Mike.Caplinger <mike.rice@Rand-Relay>
Subject: Sun newsgroup
Reply-to: Sun-Spots-Request.Rice@Rand-Relay
A new newsgroup has been formed to talk about software and hardware
issues relating to the Sun Workstation. This will be an edited list,
sent out about once a week.
Requests and Problems to:
Sun-Spots-Request@Rice (CSNet)
Sun-Spots-Request.Rice@rand-relay (ARPAnet)
Newsgroup Articles to:
Sun-Spots@Rice (CSNet)
Sun-Spots.Rice@rand-relay (ARPAnet)
Everybody who sent add requests to me already: you're on the list.
We don't have facilities yet to FTP archives, but we'll be happy to
mail copies to people requesting them. Our ARPAnet connection through
CSNet/TELENET is probably only 2 months away. Of course, there are no
archives as yet anyway!
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Date: 27-Jul-83 13:29 PDT
From: Kirk Kelley <KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2>
Subject: augmented global consciousness
Postal Address: P.O. Box 1037, Los Altos, CA 94022
Re: Erik's question about technology, I would be more interested in
the question "Has any technological development fundamentally improved
the viability of earth life?" The evidence may be less ambiguous than
for "changed men and women for the better". The answers may be the
same.
Anyone interested in starting an "augmented global consciousness"
where we tele-collaborate on a model of "Gaia" that models its own
viability as a WorldNetworked technique-teaching mathematical
simulation (adventure), let me know.
-- Kirk Kelley
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Date: Wed 27 Jul 83 10:19:42-PDT
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: bias on Worldnet, and technology
Since different people have widely differing views of what constitutes
a biased answer to a question, it is inevitable that there will be
bias on Worldnet, even if it confines itself to reporting facts
(because selective reporting of facts you regard as "important" is
also bias). But at least with Worldnet there will be more likelihood
of alternative sources of opinion being quoted, and easily accessible,
so that if you distrust the first answer you get, there are others.
"More likelihood" does not mean "certainty" though.
What the hell does it mean to ask whether technology has made men and
women "better"? I claim that it has made my grandfather better: he is
still alive and active at the age of 83. It has made my father
better: by reading printed books he becomes a vastly more informed
scholar than he could be if most of the information he needed was
handwritten with only about 3 copies made because of prohibitive
labour cost. And it has made me better: I have access to Human-Nets.
- Richard
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From: "OBLIO::CROLL c/o" <DEC-HNT at DEC-MARLBORO>
Date: 25-JUL-1983 17:15
Subj: jobs in the future
Anyone interested in this topic should check the July 1982 issue of
"The Atlantic". There is an article in it called "The Declining
Middle", by Bob Kuttner (who is a contributing editor of "The New
Republic").
Kuttner's thesis is that most new jobs are being created are at the
top and the bottom of the ladder. The high-paying, middle-class jobs
are the ones being automated, because they're the ones that have the
biggest payoff from automation (in labor savings, mostly). Jobs at
the lowest rungs of the ladder will take the longest to automate,
because wages are very low there, anyway, and there is little
incentive to automate them.
Very interesting viewpoint. Kuttner has a lot to say about the future
of automation, both by robots on the factory floor, and by computers
and networks in offices.
John
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Date: 25 Jul 1983 21:52-PDT
Subject: Executive Data Link.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow
n015 0807 13 Jul 83
BC-LINK
(ART EN ROUTE TO LASER PHOTO 2 CLIENTS)
By DAVID BURNHAM
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
WASHINGTON - When President Reagan or his staff wants to rush a
written message to one of the members of the Cabinet, they no longer
dispatch a messenger in a car through the traffic-clogged streets of
the capital. They send the memorandum at the speed of light by a
computer 431 miles away in Columbus, Ohio.
The new electronic mail system, which has been operating for
several weeks, is called the Executive Data Link. It now connects 60
of the most influential officials in Washington to one another. By
October, 200 officials will be hooked into the system and its planners
believe it will ultimately be an important new tool in what the Reagan
administration calls Reform 88, a drive to increase the efficiency of
the federal government.
''This will be a lot faster,'' said Joseph R. Wright Jr., the
deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. ''It used to
take two days to get a piece of paper back and forth between the White
House and one of the agencies. Now it can be done in less than30
minutes.''
Wright added that the Executive Data Link would eventually be put
to work on a number of different chores. ''Already, however,'' he
said, ''it has proved very useful for negotiating with an agency over
congressional testimony, writing important press releases and other
matters.'' He said a policy could be established at the White House,
for example, and an agency would write proposed congressional
testimony.
''Then,'' he said, ''the agency sends the testimony over, we can
edit it and send it back very quickly.''
While almost all new communications systems are promoted on the
neutral ground of improving efficiency, they often have farreaching
and unarticulated side effects.
The decision to establish the Executive Data Link was an outgrowth
of one of the problems of the modern-day presidency. Many Americans
think of the separate agencies that make up the federal government as
a disciplined army that marches together in the direction chosen by
the man in the White House. Recent presidents have complained,
however, that this is a false picture, that the tendency of the
agencies is to ignore White House directives.
Craig L. Fuller, secretary to the Cabinet, contended that by
helping the Cabinet get involved in the decision-making process at the
earliest stages, the Executive Data Link ''strengthens Cabinet
government.'' He said he used a portable computer to tap into the
network and work with Cabinet members when he was at home or traveling
with the president. Other top officials of the Reagan administration
are enthusiastic, he reported. Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan has
a terminal at his desk and Agriculture Secretary John R. Block carries
a portable terminal when traveling.
The system connects 50 of the highest officials in government
agencies with 10 people on the White House staff through a computer
data center maintained in Columbus by Compuserve Inc. With this
computer, the variety of word processors and terminals in various
offices in the White House and at the agencies are able to communicate
with each other through existing telephone lines.
Wright, a former executive of Citicorp in New York, said that
while the security of the Executive Data Link was considered
sufficiently rigorous to protect the domestic secrets of the
government, it was not used for national security matters. In fact, a
warning is automatically printed at the top of each message: ''This
system is not to be used for classified information.''
Although the system is now being used for such purposes as
drafting executive orders, legislation, congressional testimony and
press releases that need to be cleared by top officials, both Wright
and Jim Kelly, the deputy associate director of the management office
who is in charge of its management reform division, expressed hopes
that it would ultimately contribute to another goal.
''This project is the initial step in a much more expansive
project to upgrade the automatic data processing and telecommunication
on a governmentwide basis,'' Wright told Cabinet members last month.
The potential hazard of unifying the computerized data bases of
the major federal agencies has long worried civil liberties advocates
and was a factor in the enactment in 1974 of the Privacy Protection
Act. Some congressional experts, too, are worried about making it
easier for agencies to compare information about individuals whose
data are contained in different government computers. They fear that
such matching might, for example, be used to track political
opponents, or that information from tax returns, provided by taxpayers
in the belief that it would be used only for tax purposes, might be
used for unrelated matters.
One of the provisions of the privacy law is that federal agencies
must publish the Federal Register details about all new computer
systems and what information will be stored in them. But because the
Executive Data Link does not create a new set of records about
individual citizens, it was not subject to the public notice provision
of the privacy act.
With 66 officials in 22 agencies sending an average of 500
messages a month, current expenses for the Executive Data Link average
$18,500 a month. As the system is enlarged, the costs will increase.
But Kelly said an analysis showed that sending written material by
messengers, regular mail and Express Mail was at least twice as
expensive as sending it electronically.
nyt-07-13-83 1104edt
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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