OPINION - - - ------- Page 4 Thursday, February 2, 1984 The Michigan Doily Reaching the young who fail to. vote 'a' By Barry Checko way and A my Gibans Recent assaults on education, human services, and social programs have worsened conditions for poor people, minorities, women, and students. But the poor and others do not always par- ticipate in decisions which affect their lives, or even see themselvesas a con- stituency that could respond in order to alter the situation. They are among the least likely to register and vote in elec- tions. Close to 50 percent of the eligible voters in this country are not registered - the majority of them poor, minorities, and women - and student turnout lags behind even these groups. Human service workers and citizens can reach the traditional non-voter in various social agencies and com- munities. If just a fraction of available workers and citizens helped register and remind the disenfranchised to vote, the results could be significant. The concept of agency-based registration is legal; it is professionally sound, endor- sed by major national organizations representing hundreds of agencies, thousands of human service workers, and millions of clients. STUDENTS ALSO can and should par- ticipate. This year commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the Mississip- pi Freedom Summer, when thousands of students travelled the South and registered persons long denied access to the ballot box. The drive was an un- precedented success netting large numbers of new voters. Today's students should recognize the role their predecessors played in opening up the electoral process. They again can help register those excluded from elections, and then join them in strong support of increased funding for education, social programs, civil rights enforcement, and reduced military expenditures. The 18 to 24 year-old age group com- prises almost 20 percent of the electorate. Yet in a state which shows consistent impact upon the outcome of presiden- tial elections, only 170,000 of Michigan's 18 to 24 year-olds showed up at the polls in ticipation and get people registered to 1980. vote. Voting constitutes the most basic SEVERAL GROUPS are initiating voter form of citizen participation within our participation projects. For example, 'The 18 to 24 year-old age group comprises almost 20 percent of the electorate. Yet in a state which shows consistent impact upon the outcome of presidential elections, only 170,000 of Michigan's 18-24 year old showed up at the polls in 1980.' unemployment offices, surplus food centers, housing projects, health clinics and neighborhood groups. PIRGIM has embarked on a major voter registration campaign targeting Michigan students. Joining in a national effort to register one million new voters, PIRGIM volunteers have set a goal to register 25,000 students to vote, 5,000 from the U-M campus alone. The National Student Voter Registration Conference to be held in Boston Feb. 10-12 will serve as the of- ficial launching for the national cam- paign. The largest display of unity among student leaders in more than a decade, the conference has been sup- ported by over 880 student government presidents and newspaper editors representing colleges and universities from all 50 states. Already, almost a busload of Michigan students has made plans to attend. On the local front, a conference in the Frieze Building this Saturday will focus on these same issues. Open to all, the Michigan Workshop on Voter- Registration and Political Par- ticipation is designed to stimulate regional commitment to new strategies for political change. The Workshop will provide oppor tunities for participants to share ideas, learn from one another, sand build placed on methods which have proven effective. Sessions will include strategies t establish voter participation in agenr. cies and communities, identify deputization and registration - procedures, educate and turn out voters, build coalitions, coordinate campaigns, and organize for political, change. Barry Checkoway teaches com-. munity organization and social planning in the School of Social. Work. Amy Gibans is campus- coordinator of PIRGIM. democratic society. However, the needs of an entire voting block will be overlooked if its members are not registered voters. Such a technical handicap challenges those of us already engaged as active citizens to plan and employ strategies which will minimize apathy, encourage political par- the University's School of Social Work voter participation project aims to in- volve individuals in nonpartisan voter participation in agencies and com- munities. Students are establishing services in agencies as part of field placements and registering low income and minority people in waiting rooms of Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan LaBan I A Te Vol. XCIV-No. 102 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board EnVironmental discipline U NDER RONALD Reagan's administration, the Environmen- tal Protection Agency has been as ef- fective at enforcing laws and regulations as the Coast Guard is at lining drug smuggling in the Florida Keo. But there's a new sheriff in town, William Ruckelshaus, and thankfully he's got some tough talk about loose policies. Ruckelshaus, who replaced Ann Burford last winter as Ad- ministrator of the EPA, has recently charged the agency's enforcement staff with inaction and a "lack of serious commitment" to the enfor- cement of laws and regulations. These harsh words come at a time when the EPA needs to be disciplined.. For the past year the agency has been plagued with questions concer- ning its effectiveness and proper management. Twenty top-level of- ficials, Burford among them, resigned last winter amid investigations of inadequate enforcement and improper management. Recent internal and external evaluations of this agency have raised doubts about how it determines and en- forces its policies. As a result of con- troversy surrounding a suspected can- cer-causing pesticide, it was revealed that in 1981 a formal proposal was made to the Reagan Administration to ban the use of the pesticide on foods. The proposal, however, was ignored after the EPA held a series of closed door meetings with representatives of the citrus industry. This type of meeting is improper, if not illegal, because the law requires that regulatory decisions be made in public. More distressing is an internal review of the agency's programs to deal with asbestos in public schools. The report brings to light 'startling inadequacies in the EPA's efforts to solve the problem, and points to a lack of concern on the part of Reagan's ad- ministration. It is estimated that 3.6 million children are exposed to asbestos.in our:public schools and yet only 499 schools out of the ,32 targeted as dangerous are taking any corrective measures.' This lack of ac- tion is largely the fault of the EPA. The agency has failed to set down rigid standards to which schools must con- ply, and where it has, it has been inef- fective in enforcing those standards. Compounding the problem is a lack of financial support for schools that have difficulty financing a cleanup. As it stands, only schools in wealthy areas can afford the large cost to the tax- payer. The problem has been brought to light, and yet Reagan's proposed budget for 1985 doesn't provide funding for an asbestos cleanup program. It is a necessary and big step for- ward for Ruckelshaus to be criticizing the agency's loose enforcement of en- vironmental policy, but a better step would be for him to coax monetary and political support for these much- needed programs from Ronald Reagan. Without strong leadership from Ruckelshaus and strong support from the oval office, the agency cannot be expected to function effectively. After all, you can't blame deputies for slacking off when the sheriff sleeps on the job. Ruckelshaus said that he was sur- prised that he didn't find "a bunch of tigers in the tank" determined to crack down on violators of anti-pollution laws. Considering the quality of leadership that preceded him, he should not have been surprised. Hop- efully Ruckelshaus will roar loud enough to awaken those sleeping tigers. o00 DEFICIT ~rv MT A f" " - i '.. , ., 1 . I 4,COME ON!ALLYOU INT 15 SOMEONE TO LKE CcRE OFYOLU.RKID! : 3 E. e, 1.A r i How human do we want com- puters to be? Computer scientists are finding this problem too complicated to solve by themselves. So they are asking philosophers, an- thropologists, linguists and cognitive scientists to help. THE EDUCATIONAL in- stitutions in the forefront of com- puter research - Stanford, Brown, MIT,, Carnegie-Mellon and several smaller schools - have begun to develop research centers designed to work on the problem of improving relations between machines and people, the "computer-human inter- face." Human language is vastly dif- ferent from the languages used to direct computers. For example, the word "good" has no real fixed meaning. A "good man" can mean something radically dif- ferent if one is talking of organized crime orstheology. MOREOVER, some words depend on understanding the situation of the speaker. Inter- preting the word "here" always depends on knowing the physical location of both speaker and hearer. Human and computer languages do share one thing. They are used to exchange in- formation by people ormachines situated in the world. It is this "situated" quality which makes understanding human language so tricky, ac- cording to John Barwise, professor of philosophy at Stan- ford University and director of its new Center for the Study of Language and Information. BARWISE and his co-workers insist that the truth of any statement is related to the con- t £tnr"iV ati 1 " in hif'h it i Improving rdations between man and computer By William Beeman their market. This involved defeating "computer phobia," a very real obstacle to many. Computers which could explain their functions to new users would help alleviate that fear. THE MILITARY, too, is in- terested - exploring ways to make it possible for enlisted men to address computers without using any specialized language. Ideally, one would like to ask the computer, "How much money do I have to borrow so I Can do a good job on this project?" Such a question would be a snap for an experienced banker, but the computer must have 'how much," "enough," and "good" defined with extreme care in terms of the project under consideration. In fact, this kind of conver- sation may never be possible. According to John Seeley Brown of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, designer of some of the world's largest computer systems, "The real problem is that computers don't have a world view." COMPUTERS share neither our culture nor our society. For one thing, a computer cannot RI V'M t COUNTY make intuitive leaps or under- stand the consequences 9f action it has not been informed of in ad- vance. Nor can a computer execute totally new designs, sin- ce it can only "know" what is already known by those who program it. Thus it is unlikely that the com- puter of the future ever could plan a party, design a game, write a successful campaign speech or formulate a joke. At least one prominent resear- cher disagrees entirely with at- tempts to make computers more human. Terry Winograd of Stan- ford'sComputer Science depar- .tment espouses what he admits is a "non-central" view that "get- ting computers to be more like people is not the way to go." WINOGRAD sees computers as well-designed tools, which, in the right hands, become "tran- sparent." Winograd feels we would be better off knowing exclusively what the computer can do. "There is really no hope that we will develop a system as open- ended and flexible as a person," he explains. "It's better for us to seek to make very explicit, well- designed tools and train our- selves to use them." Whichever we create - simple tools or semi-humans - com-, puters cannot succeed unless they are well-integrated with the groups that hope to use them. Humanists and social scientists are playing a role here, too. ANTHROPOLOGIST Eleanor Wynn, a marketing specialist forv, Bell Northern Research Inc., ex- plains that institutions which consider using computers on a large scale often fail to under- stand what their people actually do. Instead, they have some ideal" view - and try to apply the com- puters to that idealized office, rather than the real one. ' At Brown University, which is moving toward total com- puterization, the faculty has taken these warnings seriously; and established an elected com- mitteepto oversee the effect of k widespread use of computers. "We are concerned about the quality of campus academic- life," says John Ladd, a philosophy professor. As significant number -of faculty members feels that com- puterization implies belief in one kind of scholarship. Thus, enthusiasts who hope to make a more human computer must face -the possibility that even if the machine could be as personable and compatible as one's best friend, it still may be out of place if it is not ap--- propriately positioned in the very human structure of the work- place. Beeman teaches un- thropology at Brown Univer- sity. He wrote this article for the Pacific News Service. i r i by rkes~ Rs..ath~d ..: