When the American Association for the Advancement of Science holds its annual meeting in San Francisco next week, four members of the University's faculty will be among those making presentations.
The meeting, the largest gathering of scientists in the nation, attracts about 5,000 researchers and engineers from industry and academe. Typically, the meeting is also a gathering place for some 600 science journalists seeking story leads on new directions in science.
The four Penn faculty members include: Dr. David Farber, professor of computer and information science; Dr. George Boyajian, assistant professor of biology; Dr. Mark Rosenzweig, professor of economics; and Dr. Donald Ringe, associate professor of linguistics.
Farber, one of Penn's leading researchers in computer information systems, will talk about the need for United States industry to develop a "black box" that will allow American businesses to communicate with international networks without giving up valuable trade secrets.
Farber played a key role in the creation of Project Aurora, a joint effort by American telecommunication companies, universities and the federal government to create a superfast computer network. Penn researchers worked with BellCore to design a network link that could transmit the entire contents of an encyclopedia from Philadelphia to Boston in a quarter of a second.
Boyajian, an expert in the evolution of complex biological systems, is a panel member of a seminar entitled "Evolution and Extinction," billed as a discussion of current ideas on the processes that have shaped all living systems.
Rosenzweig will participate in a session on population trends and
urban challenges. His talk is entitled: "Do Immigrants Screened for
Skills Do Better than Family-Reunification Immigrants."
A single American language?
Ringe will present the results of a statistical analysis of similarities between a selection of nine Native American languages. His work contradicts some popular scholarship that ties the origins of more than 1,000 languages to three language families.
According to Ringe, "demonstrations" of remote relationships among these languages are based on sheer chance or poor scholarship. In fact, Ringe noted, the languages of the Americas appear to fall into at least 40-50 language families. Statistics show that many similarities can be explained by chance and do not indicate that words from different languages have a common origin. Ringe argues that a "greater-than-chance" relationship must be shown before languages can be said to be related.
Such historical probing of languages has important implications for anthropologists seeking to understand the migration to the Americas. For example, evidence of a single, albeit distant, language origin would support theories that a single migration of humans became the common ancestor for the many different Native American populations.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world's largest multidisciplinary federation of scientific organizations in the world. Founded by Thomas Edison in 1880, the association publishes Science, a weekly peer-reviewed journal. Among the association's goals is to increase public understanding and appreciation of science. The organization sponsors a variety of national and local programs to improve science endeavors here and around the world.