National Association of Secretaries of State

Study Recommends Best Practices for Encouraging Youth to Vote
The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the Youth Vote Coalition have released a study of programs underway in each state to encourage civic participation among young people. The New Millennium Best Practices Survey provides an overview of outreach efforts and identifies innovative models showing the greatest promise.

Over the last 25 years, eligible voters in the 18-24 age category have failed to make their voices heard in higher and higher numbers. According to NASS, one in every four voters is under 30—a voting bloc sizable enough to sway elections—yet only about one-third of young voters participated in the contested 2000 presidential election.

NASS, established the New Millennium Young Voters Project in 1998 to search for better ways of persuading young people to become active citizens. Results from the new survey, will be shared with secretaries of state nationwide.

NASS, a professional, nonpartisan organization of public officials, leads the debate on improving voter registration processes and promoting election reform policies at the state and national levels. The Youth Vote Coalition, which has received support from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Open Society Institute, is a nonpartisan coalition of diverse organizations sharing a common goal to increase political and civic participation among young people. For more information, go to www.nass.org and www.youthvote.org.

StoryCorps

StoryCorps Captures Oral Histories of Americans
A nationwide initiative called StoryCorps is collecting personal histories of ordinary Americans in recorded interviews conducted by family members or friends. The interviews, coordinated by StoryCorps facilitators, are conducted in StoryBooths, small sound studios located in public spaces across the country. Interviews may also be recorded at home with the use of a StoryKit, which provides instructions for interviewing and technical details about recording the dialogue.

StoryCorps participants receive a professionally engineered compact disk of the interview which, with permission, will be added to the growing StoryCorps archive. Selected interviews may be broadcast nationally over National Public Radio and included in a compact disc series called Best of StoryCorps.

The StoryCorps project was inspired by the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program that, among other projects, employed out-of-work writers to interview Americans and document their histories. Now housed at the Library of Congress, this collection of personal stories, in text and sound, stands as one of the nation’s most important social documentaries. StoryCorps’ goal is to continue this tradition, enriching future generations through a personal look at the past.

The first StoryBooths will be located in New York City and within a few years, expand across the country. Local StoryBooths will be promoted over regional public radio stations, which will also broadcast selected interviews from the area. In addition, plans are underway for a fleet of mobile StoryBooths that will travel to remote locations.

Funding has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation. For more information go to http://StoryCorps.net.

American Physical Society (APS)

Effectiveness of Boost-Phase Missile Defense in Doubt
The American Physical Society (APS), a professional society of physicists, has released results from a study of boost-phase defense technology, part of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System. The study concludes that boost-phase defense would not be effective against attacks on America by long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which are capable of carrying nuclear, biological and chemical payloads.

Boost-phase defense is part of a layered system for intercepting enemy missiles at
different trajectory points during flight. “Boost-phase” refers to an early segment of the launch, when engines continue to burn as the missile gains velocity. To retaliate, heat-seeking rockets or lasers would intercept the missile at this stage, disabling it before the midcourse and re-entry flight phases were reached. But as this study showed, the window for launching interceptors, often less than 30 seconds, was inadequate.

The study focused specifically on defense against missiles launched from North Korea and Iran, countries that may become capable of firing long-range rockets at the United States. Geopolitical boundaries for both areas preclude locating interceptors close enough to the enemy missiles to be generally effective.

The only scenario in which boost-phase intercept could potentially be feasible is if enemy missiles are launched from ships near the U.S. coast. In that case, interceptors based within 40 kilometers of the enemy ships might be able to make an intercept.

Analyzing performance times of both liquid and solid-propellant enemy missiles produced varying results, as did a comparison of land, sea and air-based missiles. However, the best possible defense technologies of the next decade still would not provide sufficient response time for interception.

Space-based interception technology, even allowing for technological developments in the next 15 years, will face the same time constraints, and scientists calculate it will require a minimum of 1,000 interceptor rockets to effectively defend against one ICBM. Such a vast arsenal would require a sizable increase in defense funding for weapons production and a significant, and costly, acceleration of the U.S. space program to enable deployment.

APS has received funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Packard and MacArthur foundations. For more information, go to www.aps.org.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation

New Prizes for Excellence in International Education
The Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Asia Society have inaugurated The Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education, a unique initiative that will recognize successful strategies for increasing and enhancing knowledge about other countries, languages and cultures.

The annual awards recognize innovation and achievement in international studies by schools, states, colleges and media/technology groups. Announcement of the first five $25,000 prizes will be made in Washington, D.C. in November 2003. A nationally disseminated “best practices” guide will document innovations recognized through the prize program.

Impetus for the new awards comes in part from Asia Society’s National Coalition on Asia and International Studies in the Schools, a group that analyzes data from around the world to track the widening knowledge gap between American and foreign students. For instance, a comparison of scores on a world geography test administered worldwide found Swedish, German and Italian students scored highest (nearly 80 percent). By contrast, Americans, along with their Canadian and Mexican neighbors, answered fewer than half the questions correctly. These and similar statistics have academic, corporate and governmental sectors concerned that America’s youth will be ill-equipped as adults to assess and decide on issues critical to the world’s only superpower.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation is a global philanthropy with a mission that focuses on promoting the lifelong productivity and excellence of young people worldwide. The Asia Society,
a nonprofit educational organization, is dedicated to fostering understanding between Americans and people from Asia and the Pacific.

Additional information, including guidelines for the competition, are available at www.InternationalEd.org.

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Scientists Push for Public Access to Scientific Research
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians, has embarked on a public campaign to make scientific and medical literature freely available worldwide.

Traditionally, research data are disseminated through for-profit professional journals, which often have prohibitive subscription costs that limit access to a narrow segment of amply funded institutions. Scientific organizations unable to afford them—including many state colleges and universities, nonprofit and foreign research facilities—inevitably lag behind elite institutions, restricted by lack of access to cutting-edge research.

PloS’ plan is to make these publications available through a global network of online libraries of science. One way to make this possible would be to include publishing costs in research budgets, which PloS estimates would amount to less than one percent of the project total. However, PloS’ commitment to publishing overrides the ability of authors and institutions to cover the costs, and it has pledged that decisions on whether to publish will never hinge on this.

More than 30,000 scientists around the world, including 13 Nobel Prize winners, are supporting PLoS. Other reinforcement comes from a new House bill, the Public Access to Science Act (PASA), that would exclude copyright protection on nonclassified research substantially funded by the
federal government.

Introducing the PASA bill, Congressman Martin Olav Sabo (D-MN) noted, “Our government spends $45 billion a year to support scientific and medical research for the public benefit. We must remember that government funded research belongs to, and should be readily available to, every person in the United States.”

PLoS was formed in 2000 through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. It’s online journal, PloS Biology, launches its first issue in October 2003. A second journal, PLoS Medicine, is expected to come out in mid-2004. For more information, go to www.PLoS.org.

New America Foundation (NAF)

Unlicensed Airwaves Offer Promise of Fast, Cheap Internet Access
The New America Foundation (NAF) has published a paper on the development of Wireless
Fidelity (Wi-Fi), a fast and cheaper alternative to dial-up and broadband connections available to most Internet users. The paper, Breaking the Chains: Unlicensed Spectrum as a Last-Mile Broadband Solution, was co-authored by James H. Johnston and J.H. Snider and released through NAF’s Spectrum Policy Program.

Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum (airwaves) to bring broadband access to organizations such as universities, hospitals, hotels and airports. Wi-Fi also offers a remedy for remote locations inaccessible by cable and to low-income areas where the cost of broadband is unaffordable.

While Wi-Fi continues to rely on wires or cables for its backbone infrastructure, its innovative use of unlicensed spectrum offers a solution for the “last-mile” hurdle, the final lap a signal travels before reaching a user’s computer. Most last-mile broadband service travels over wires owned and controlled by telephone and cable monopolies. This last-mile wire domination affects consumers in two ways: it slows down broadband Internet communication and raises the costs to consumers who must pay to use the wires.

Although the spectrum is publicly owned and unassigned airwaves are accessible by anyone, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocates and regulates the amount that is available. Right now, the supply of unlicensed spectrum at low frequencies—optimum requirements for wireless access—is inadequate for Wi-Fi development and expansion. Thus, although Wi-Fi’s future looks promising, it cannot proliferate without FCC commitments to increase the amount of necessary spectrum and to revise FCC policy in order to ease the way for Wi-Fi development.

The New America Foundation, a nonpartisan, public policy institute, brings new voices and ideas into public debate. To download a copy of the paper, as well as J.H. Snider’s Citizen’s
Guide to the Airwaves, go to www.NewAmerica.net.

Investing in Democracy

Campaign Finance Reform Movement Gaining Momentum
A toolkit called Investing in Democracy: A Citizen & Candidate Guide to Voter Owned Elections is now available for community coalitions working toward campaign finance reform on state and local levels. Included is a user guide, Creating Public Financing of Elections in Your Community, prepared by the Center for Governmental Studies. The guide provides an overview of public financing in America, including organizational and action strategies, as well as contact information for over 160 state and local campaign finance reform organizations.

The toolkit also includes two short videos, each documenting campaigns using public funds. The Road to Clean Elections, narrated by Bill Moyers and produced for Public Campaign, follows candidates in elections held in Maine and Arizona. Running: The Campaign for the New York City Council, produced by Firelight Media, goes behind the scenes with City Council candidates running in New York City’s first election regulated by enhanced public financing guidelines. Running aired on Thirteen/WNET, New York’s City’s public television station, and received the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media and a CINE Golden Eagle.

Investing in Democracy was launched at a meeting of campaign finance funders in Phoenix that featured Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, who ran for office under new Arizona funding guidelines.

Support for this project came from the Solidago Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. For information on the project, or to order a toolkit, go to www.publicampaign.org.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation

Harvard School of Public Health

Americans Favor Medicare Prescription Plan
A recent nationwide poll finds most Americans (52 percent) favoring a Medicare prescription plan similar to what most workers have, even if it costs taxpayers more and means foregoing future tax cuts.

Thirty-eight percent of the population initially opposed a more generous drug plan; however, 65 percent of this same group changed their opinion in favor of a generous drug plan when asked if they would remain opposed if it meant seniors would be unable to afford prescribed medicine.

While the study found general agreement across the board about many Medicare issues, responses were bifurcated when analyzed by age groups. For instance, 80 percent of Americans 65 and older are favorable toward Medicare while only 44 percent of younger Americans have positive feelings about it. Asked what they would prefer if they could choose a health plan upon retirement, 63 percent of seniors selected the current government Medicare program while 56 percent of the 18-64 age group would choose a private health plan.

Yet older and younger Americans feel similarly about suggestions for reforming Medicare. Majorities of seniors (68 percent) and those under 65 (56 percent) object to privatizing Medicare. Both groups (65 percent and 63 percent, respectively) also agree that any changes to Medicare should build on successes of the current program.

Queried about political support, Americans in all age groups continue to think Democrats do a better job on health policy than Republicans (28 percent vs. 14 percent). However when the same question was asked in 1999, Democrats scored much higher (43 percent vs. 17
percent), an indication that Democrats have lost ground on this issue.

The survey was a collaborative effort by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent philanthropy that provides information and analysis about health issues to policymakers and the general public, and the Harvard School of Public Health, an institution dedicated to improving public health. For more information about this study, go to www.kff.org.

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