Today the Surgeon General unveiled a new pamphlet about AIDS, calling for sex education in the schools in an effort to slow the epidemic. NPR's Richard Harris has details. "Surgeon General C.Everett Coop has been closely affiliated with the Right to Life Movement, and other organizations that oppose sex education in schools. Until today, the Surgeon General had made no major statement about AIDS; so his recommendations are somewhat of a departure. 'AIDS education must start at the lowest grade possible as part of any health or hygiene program. And there is no doubt that we need sex education in schools and that it includes information on sexual practices that may put our children at risk for AIDS.' He said the Federal Government should allocate more money for AIDS education. Coop also recommended the use of condoms. He said that even religious groups that oppose contraception agree that condoms are needed in the fight against AIDS. Coop added that quarantines and mass blood screening campaigns are unnecessary. His guidelines are published in a pamphlet available through the mail from the Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Richard Harris in Washington.
Attorney General Edward Meese today announced a nationwide crackdown on the pornography industry. Meese said he is committed to redoubling the federal effort to pursue with a vengeance and prosecute to the hilt the criminal elements trafficking in obscenity. The Attorney General also announced the formation of an obscenity task force of federal prosecutors and the creation of an information center to assist state and local authorities. Meese said legislation will be introduced next year to outlaw dial-a-porn services that are found to be obscene and attack obscene cable television programming .
Economic output was 2.4% higher in the third quarter. The modest increase in the gross national product was spurred primarily by a 42 billion-dollar surge in consumer spending. More than half of that is the result of increased car sales. Analysts warned that consumers may have spent more than expected last quarter, which could lead to weak demand in the next two quarters. Real GNP in adjusted 1982 dollars rose to more than 3.5 trillion dollars.
Today the Surgeon General of the United States made his first major public statement about AIDS. He called for sex education in schools, and he suggested more direct ways to prevent AIDS. Many public health officials have been making these same recommendations for years. But as NPR's Richard Harris reports, the statements are something of a departure for the Surgeon General.
When Dr. C. Everett Coop was appointed Surgeon General in 1981, critics were worried that his ties to fundamentalist religion and his involvement in the Pro-Life movement would interfere with his medical advice to the nation. But today, Coop risked offending that constituency as he released a report on AIDS.
"AIDS education must start at the lowest grade possible as part of any health or hygiene program. And there is no doubt that we need sex education in schools and that is includes information on sexual practices that may put out children at risk for AIDS."
Coop's report is in the form of a pamphlet. And in that pamphlet, sex education in school isn't the only controversial issue Coop confronted. The new pamphlet also speaks openly about homosexuality and avoids value judgments about it. The pamphlet recommends the use of condoms to prevent the spread of the disease.
"When I'm talking about condoms, I am talking as a health officer about the protection of a person through the passage of a virus in sexual contact. The fact that those condoms are also used in other circumstances to prevent procreation and to practice birth control makes it a difficult subject. But in talking with even religious groups that are concerned about the use of condoms for the prevention of procreation, they agree with me that the threat of AIDS to the health of this nation is sufficiently great so that we can suggest that this is an acceptable method of protection health."
Alluding to a controversial ballot proposition in California, Coop also spoke out against quarantines and mass blood screenings. The pamphlet also reassures the public that AIDS isn't spread by insects or through causal contact. It discourages the use of illegal intravenous drugs, but it does speak to drug abusers and advises them to avoid sharing dirty needles. Coop said that the federal government will need to spend more money on education about AIDS, and he said his office has no budget to launch and education campaign. But when he was asked whether he had the support of the Secretary of Education, Coop replied, "Let's say I have his ear." Surgeon General Coop said he hoped that his pamphlet will launch a new campaign to combat AIDS. Copies are available from the Department of Health and Human Services. This is Richard Harris in Washington.
There have been over the ages many models of the mind. The mind is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled; or the mind is a machine, breaking down sometimes. Nowadays, the mind is often described as being a computer, processing information. Writer and social theorist Theodore Rozak disputes that model in his book The Cult of Information . He says that the word is over-used, and the mind works more by juggling ideas than sifting through information. In fact, says Rozak, some of the most important ideas have no information at all.
"The example I use most prominently in the book is one that should be of ... familiar enough to all Americans: 'All men are created equal.' Very powerful idea, has absolutely no connection with information. The people who developed that idea and used it for revolutionary purposes were not drawing upon some body of research, some facts and figures about the whole human race. That's not what that idea is based upon. It's based upon experience and upon moral vision. And there are so many ideas like that, and I try to remind people, in this critique, that most of what's going through their mind when they're thinking most of the time, the run of ideas that they've learned from the cradle on up, many of which are matters of wisdom, of judgment, of insight, of intuition that have nothing to do with facts and figures or with information."
"You write on page 213, you say, 'What I am suggesting is that in little things and big, the mind works more by way of Gestalt than by algorithmic processes. That is because our life as a whole is made up of the hierarchy of projects, some trivial and repetitive, some special and spectacular. Pondering choices, making projects: these are the mind's first order of business. This is so obvious, so basic that perhaps we are only prompted to reflect upon it when a different idea about thinking is presented, such as that thought is connecting data points in formal sequences."
"What I'm trying to defend is the idea that thinking takes place on many levels. And the lowest level of all is data processing or information processing. And it worries me if we try to sell people on the idea, and especially kids in the classroom that what they are doing when they are thinking is essentially something that should be modeled upon what a computer does. Well, I think that's a disaster because it is lowering the capacities of the human mind to the lowest levels of thinking rather than acquainting kids gracefully and critically with all the higher levels of thinking that we normally go through in the course of every day of our life."
"All right. There are things that are subjective. There are things like creativity and intuition. But suppose that our experience of those things that is what we experience on the subjective level; on another level, the level that scientists study, these things are in fact productions and outcomes of conscious computational processes."
"As a hypothesis, it's perfectly respectable. The problem is that people working in the field of artificial intelligence have found themselves, willingly or not, linked to a piece of machinery, a computer which they use as their model. I think this has had a very corrupting influence upon people working in the academies, in the field of artificial intelligence. It links them with a massive vested economic interest in our society which is out to sell computers for every purpose you can think of, from string recipes in your kitchen at home to running the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile defensive system.
"And yet, if you muck about with people who are doing artificial intelligence, some of the discussions are the most fascinating discussions I've ever had in my life."
"The people in artificial intelligence have been making promises of the highest level for a very long period of time and always telling us that the great breakthrough in their field is going to happen within the next few years, three years, five years, something of that sort. You know, my question to the people in that field is a very simple one, you know. Deliver the goods, show us that you can do it. And my suspicion is that it can't be done, because they're using the wrong model of the human mind. Well, we could go on disputing that academically for a very long period of time. The fact is they're already involved in selling that idea to the public as a form of machinery out there in the world."
Theodore Rozak is author of The Cult of Information : The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking . |