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Science
Friday > Archives
> 1998
> June
> June 5, 1998:
Hour One: High-Tech Uprisings
| From Tokyo Rose in World War II to the Internet in Serbia in the mid 90's, communications technology has always played a pivotal role in conflicts. And as people are finding out in the wake of political uprisings in Indonesia, chat rooms, e-mail accounts, and web browsers may be as important to making a political statement these days as printing presses, picket lines and protest chants. Rapid, low-cost communication allowed protesters in Indonesia, made up of thousands of islands, to plan their movements and track responses to their actions - and allowed them to communicate easily with people in the outside world to get news or request assistance. |  | Mass uprisings have always required mass communication - and as technology changes, uprisings adapt to keep up. Activists used faxes following the 1989 Tiennamen Square uprising and in Russia in the early 1990's. Satellite television distribution allowed live, uncensored footage of conflicts in Thailand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of the beginnings of the Persian Gulf War to be broadcast around the world. On this hour of Science Friday, join Ira Flatow for a look at how the latest Internet technology may have played a role in Indonesia - and a look at whether the trend will continue to spread.
Some people have suggested content controls on the Internet to deal with issues like online pornography. Where should the line be drawn between democracy and decency?
Here's what some listeners had to say...
Plus - An international team of physicists announced yesterday that they had seen evidence that neutrinos - tiny, subatomic particles that have long been thought to be massless - actually have mass to them. The announcement, made by the Super-Kamiokande Collaboration group at the Neutrino '98 conference in Japan this week, may provide a source for the "missing mass" in the universe.
The discovery was made by watching the light trails neutrinos make as they plow through a tank of water the size of an office building. Scientists noticed that they were seeing more trails from one type of neutrino (the muon neutrino) moving upwards in the tank than were moving downwards. They deduced that the muon neutrinos passing through the Earth somehow transformed into other particles (perhaps tau neutrinos). In order to be able to oscillate between those states, the scientists claim, the neutrinos must have mass. And since there are so many neutrinos in the universe, even a tiny bit of mass goes a long way towards balancing out the amount of mass in the universe - not enough to completely account for the universe's missing mass, but enough to make a difference.
We'll find out more on this hour of Science Friday.
Guests:
W. Scott Thompson
Director, Program In Southeast Asian Studies
Fletcher School of Diplomacy
Tufts University
Medford, MA
Abigail Abrosh
Program Director, Asia and the Middle East
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights
Washington, DC
Lee Mc Knight
Chair, Internet Telephony Consortium
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
Jordan Goodman
Professor of Physics
University of Maryland
College Park
Articles Discussed:
Related Links:
Indonesia-L mailing list archives (mainly in Indonesian)
CNN.com coverage of the Indonesian unrest
Indonesia Internet Information Center
Surabaya Post Online
MediaIndo
Indonesia Government Links
Online World Newspaper Indexes
http://www.ecola.com
http://www.newspapers.com
Neutrino News from the Super-Kamiokande
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