Basic HTML Version
in the wake of today's WORLD EVENTS
•
Unemployment at Nine-Year High
By the end of 1970 the U. S. unemployment figure
reached the 6.0 percent rnark. Sorne pessimistic economists
and businessmen thought it would climb even higher by mid–
summer of 1971. Other experts disagreed, claiming a "min–
iboorn" would soon come.
In any case, the figure of 6 percent was the highest
unemployment cate since the recession of December 1961. A
new element has also entered the jobless figures. Unemploy–
mcnt rates for all white-collar workers rose to 3.7 percent -
the highest leve! in the thirteen years that figures have been
kept.
A full three perccnt of U. S. professional and technical
workers - frorn a work force of over eleven million - are
out of work. The number more than doubled in one year.
Still the greatest unemployrnent cate was among blacks.
It had reached 9.3 percent in October 1969 and later climbed
to this figure again. Even this total is a low one since many
blacks have sirnply stopped searching for jobs an·d are not
induded in the statistics. In other words, perhaps one out of
every ten blacks has no job.
Two paradoxes are involved in the jobless statistics. The
one involves unskilled laborees who cannot find work because
of lack of developed vocations. Or when work is found, it
pays little and offcrs few other rewards. On the other side of
the unemployrnent scale are the "overtrained" and "over–
educated" - aerospace engineers, for example.
This is the irony of our Twentieth Century Technological
Age. Our "advanced" societies have stressed detailed scien–
tific education - but are now putting sorne of the recipients
of this education out to pasture. On the other hand, jobs
have been created with highly demanding skills for thc few
while others with no or lesser skills rnust settle for demean–
ing labor or go on welfare.
*
*
* *
*
•
Knowledge Explosion
"lf a World Science Information System is not set up
soon, the tower of Babel will sound like a melodious chorus
in comparison."
These were the words of Burton Adkinson, head of the
Office of Science Informat ion Service at the National Science
Foundation. His remarks carne at the conclusion of severa!
lectores collectively titled: International Sharing of Scientific
Information. The lectures were presented at the annual meet–
ing of the American Association for the Advancernent of Sci–
ence (AAAS) held in Chicago this past December.
One of the most pressing information problerns revolves
around the widening scientific and technological gap between
the developing l'have" nations and the underdeveloped
"have-not" nations.
The so-called gap is largely due to the massive prolifera–
tion of scientific literature. It is estimated that if an average
reader tried to catch up with just one year's output of learned
publications in the sciences, it would take him about
50
years
of reading 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
This "pollution of the printed word," as one librarían
calls it, is so vast that millions of dollars are wasted annually
by scientists rcpeating research that someone else has already
painstakingly carried out and published. Obviously, "have–
not" nations do not have the resources to keep up with this
explosion of knowledge. But wealthy nations are also suffer–
ing because of this explosion.
One observer estimated that a graduate engineer has a
"half life" of about ten years. Half of what he knows at any
given moment will be obsolete in ten years. And half of what
he will need to know ten years hence has not yet been made
available.
To facilitate the ever-burgeoning problem of remaining
abreast of the latest advancemcnts in just one field alone –
chemistry - the American Chemical Society publishes a bi–
weekly journal which contains only abstracts or condensed
summaries of scientific papers. This journal, "Chemical
Abstracts," has increased from an annual, 3,500-page, 2-vol–
ume publ ication in 1907 through a 9,300-page, 3-volume
publication (7,706 abstracts) in 1947 to a massive 37,600-
page, 24-volume edition (113,39L abstracts) in 1968.
An amusing comrnent often passed about "Chemical
Abstracts" is that if the number of persons employed as
abstractors for just thi s publication continued to increase at
the present alarrning cate, every scientist in the United States
would be cmployed as a "chemical abstracts" abstractor by
the year 2000. Naturally this is ridiculous, but it does reveal
the problern of staying on top of it all.
It is obvious that even joint efforts to bring about sorne
degree of intcrnational scientific coordination are staggering.
How will scientific publications be analyzed? How com–
pl icated will be the retrieval systcm? And perhaps the most