HYENAS AND HUMANS IN ICE AGE SIBERIAby Christy G Turner II

ENCOURAGING INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK IN A UNIVERSITYby Harvey A Smith

DANISH TEACHER ATTITUDES TOWARDS MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ANDINTEGRATION INTO DANISH SOCIETY

by Donald K Sharpes and Lotte R Schou

Department of ListsARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

by Nicholas V Findler

Christy G Turner II was awarded a 2006 research grant from the Emeritus Col-lege to pay for book production costs and was invited to contribute this articleon the subject of his research. Now, a year later, the project to which the Collegehas lent support is nearing completing. Several hundred photographs have beenprinted with explanatory text. What remains is to prepare a map of Siberia show-ing aeological and paleontological sites that were explored during eight years offield work, to take account of some recent articles in Russian, and a final edit-ing. Professor Turner is widely published in the field of dental anthropology. Heis best known as co-author (with GR Scott) of Anthropology Of Modern HumanTeeth (1977) and the book Man Corn (1999), and is honored with a world-widereputation for research on the peopleing of the Pacific Basin and the NewWorld.

Harvey A Smith also appears in the fiction section.

Donald K Sharpes is Professor in the Emeritus College at Arizona State Univer-sity and a former research associate at Stanford University. He has been a direc-tor in the U.S. Dept. of Education and taught at various times at Maryland,Maine, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Utah State, Weber State, and Zayed Universityin Dubai. He did postdoctoral studies at the University of Sussex, was a VisitingScholar at Oxford University in 1998–1999, and has had Senior Fulbrightawards to Malaysia and Cyprus. He has authored 17 books and over 235 profes-sional articles in the social and behavioral sciences, humanities, and teachereducation. Don has also been a newspaperman: foreign correspondent for TheSalt Lake Tribune and for several major western newspapers. Presently he isserving as the elected President of the International Studies Group of theAmerican Educational Research Association and is engaged in research projectsin Denmark, Belarus, and Azerbaijan.

Nicholas V Findler is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering

Hyenas and Humans in Ice Age Siberia

Christy G. Turner IIRegents’ Professor Emeritus

School of Human Evolution and Social ChangeArizona State University

Envision being on a Bering Sea island where hundreds of screechingsea birds are soaring high above and diving out of the mist into thesea around you. You stand on the edge of a high wet tundra-coveredashy cliff overlooking a coast line where near shore, seals, sea lions,sea otters, and whales can occasionally be seen feeding in theseremarkably rich northern waters. This scene is duplicated in themultitude of bays, inter-island passes, and offshore wave-pounded seastacks throughout the north Pacific’s Aleutian Islands, the coast ofSiberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Kurile Islands — all part ofthe North Pacific Rim of Fire. The scene is the backdrop for my storythat begins in the summer of 1962 when I was the doctoral graduatestudent field supervisor for a University of Wisconsin-NSFarchaeological-ecological expedition to the Aleutian islands. Thiswild treeless volcanic archipelago stretches 1,000 stormy miles fromthe Alaska mainland to a cluster of small islands far from the easterncoast of Kamchatka. The island chain divides the cold Bering Seafrom the warmer north Pacific Ocean — a situation that generatesdense chilling fog much of the year. In fact, the U.S. Coast Pilotwarns that these are some of the most dangerous waters in the world.The 1962 expedition was part of a long-term scientific effort tounderstand the colonization of the New World, an effort that extendsback into the mid-1800s when the American naturalist William HealyDall carried out the first stratigraphic and explicitly evolutionaryarchaeological excavations in the New World. My trip that summerwas the first of many that would take me to Alaska over the next 45years. Why go there? Well, I was intrigued with the issue of how theNew World was colonized by humans, and since all human evolutiontook place in the Old World, Native American beliefsnotwithstanding, the initial route from the Old to the New World hadto have been from Siberia to Alaska as every line of evidenceindicates.

Part of our 1962 excavation was trenching a huge refuse mound thathad been continuously settled upon by Aleuts for 4,000 years. Aleutsare close relatives of the better known Eskimos. There may have been15,000 Aleuts when discovered by a Czar-ordered Russianexploratory expedition in 1739, led by Commander Vitus Bering. Atthe time of European contact, the Aleuts constituted one the largestnon-agricultural populations in the New World. From the grassysummit of this 50 foot high accumulation of refuse one looks uponthe often stormy, icy cold, and fog-shrouded Bering Sea. Today, thissea has 300 feet of water atop the sea floor that was a land bridgeconnecting Siberia and Alaska at the end of the last Ice Age. It wasacross this Bering land bridge that the ancestors of most NativeAmericans drifted into the New World 13,500 years ago — some mayhave boated along the southern ice-fringed coast of the land bridge,but only as far as the Alaska Peninsula because of massive glaciersgrinding their way into the Pacific Ocean from their mountainousorigins in the Alaska Range. These tiny pioneering bands of huntersand their families reached Alaska unknowingly because the animaland plant life of the Alaska mainland was much the same in Siberiaand on the land bridge — a vast cold dry grass and sagebrush plaincalled Beringia or Arctic Steppe.

This northern Ice Age community is also called “Mammoth Steppe”in reference to the largest species in the Ice Age community. Many ofthe plant and animal species of this community were distributed fromthe unglaciated regions of eastern Europe, across all of Russia,Mongolia, and northeastern China to the base of the mile-thickcontinental ice sheet that lay heavily across all of Canada andsouthern Alaska. In addition to the mammoth, there were large herdsof horse, bison, various deer, sheep, gazelle, and more solitary beastslike the wooly rhinoceros, cave lion, cave bear, and south of theArctic Circle, packs of hyenas and other less cold-tolerant species.

That summer I dreamed of one day conducting anthropologicalresearch in Siberia in order to further understanding of how the NewWorld was first colonized. Despite the Cold War between the U.S.and the Soviet Union, I eventually reached Siberia in 1979. I was

prepared to carry out bioarchaeological research on the basis of twomethodologies I had learned and had advanced: (1) Due to the greatexpense involved in shipping archaeological artifacts and non-culturalsamples from the Aleutians to Wisconsin and in later years to ASU, Ihad to reduce the volume of our archaeological recovery. Rather thansending every single bone or marine shell that we dug up, I decided tosave only bone, stone, and shell refuse that had some sign of Aleutmodification or utilization plus all bird and mammal skulls. In thisway I became experienced in identifying cut marks and other form ofdamage or modification. (2) I and my ASU students developed aprotocol for systematically observing human dental morphology in ahighly standardized manner. Using this protocol, I had studiedthousands of prehistoric Native American teeth, which made mefamiliar with their dental characteristics. To a large degree, dentalmorphology is inherited. Between-group dental comparisons providea non-destructive way to easily and inexpensively estimate theirdegree of relatedness. With this data base I could search throughSiberian archaeological collections looking for a match that wouldhelp identify the more precise homeland of ancestral NativeAmericans.

I made six additional research trips to the Aleutian islands, but alsocarried out summer-long bioarchaeological studies in museums andarchaeological sites in North and South America, western Europe,Japan, Australia, Oceania, and Southeast Asia from 1962 to thepresent day. Much of this huge data base was eventually publishedwith one of my ASU PhD graduate students (Scott and Turner 1997).

It was during one of these museum studies that I became veryinterested in human taphonomy. The term taphonomy was coined in1940 by a Soviet paleontologist named I. A. Yefremov. He intendedthe term to mean the study of depositional and post-depositionalprocesses that affect the condition and location of animal and plantmatter after death. In one sense, taphonomy is a kind of detectivework on the remains of prehistoric life. I had long been interested inwhat could be learned from studying prehistoric human bones andteeth. The interest grew sharply when I came across a human skeletalassemblage containing parts of at least 30 people that had been

severely cut and broken into many small pieces, some pieces of whichwere also burned. My previous experience in 1958-1961 as a memberof the Museum of Northern Arizona’s Glen Canyon archaeologicalproject on the Colorado and San Juan rivers told me that thebutchered, broken, and burned human skeletal remains werestrikingly like the processed remains of prehistoric game animals thatwe recovered from caves and rock shelters in the canyons of what isnow Lake Powell. After a year of studying the remains, andconducting a year-long taphonomy and forensic literature review ofall the possible ways that human remains could become damaged inthis fashion, I and one of my ASU graduate students concluded thatthe humans might possibly have been cannibalized. Since thatoriginal study, my late wife, Jacqueline, and I worked off-and-on for30 years on several other similar cases in the Southwest and Mexico.These studies culminated in our 1999 book, Man Corn. Needless tosay, the book so strongly challenged the conventional wisdom aboutthe prehistoric Anasazi being gentle peaceful that we were cursed byIndians, archaeologists, other scholars, New Age types, and thepolitically correct Santa Fe crowd. Since the publication of our book,there have been further discoveries of butchered and cooked humanassemblages in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, and wehave been vindicated.

During that long but intermittent study, we were aware that carnivoreswere also involved in damaging some of the human bones, but wewere never exactly certain about who or what caused each and everydamage mark. We needed prehistoric skeletal assemblages that wereproduced solely by carnivores in order to develop a carnivore damagesignature. We could not identify any such collection in North orSouth America.

The opportunity to study assemblages of carnivore food refuse cameabout as part of the Native American origin studies I began in 1979 inthe former USSR. During a 1984 mid-winter research trip toNovosibirsk, Siberia, my daughter, Korri Dee, and I met by chance avertebrate paleontologist named Nicolai D. Ovodov. He showed ussome of the excavated bones and teeth of ancient horses, mammoths,sheep, bison, rhinoceros, and various other species that had lived

12,000 to 40,000 years ago in Siberia. Most striking of these was theuniform and patterned way that large carnivores damaged bones.

Fig. 1. The uniformly damaged saiga antelope crania seen first in1987 that stimulated this taphonomic study in Siberia. (All photos bythe author).

Repeated and similar damage is normally a criterion for identifyinghuman activity. However, this bone damage was caused by wolves,cave bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas. The latter were especiallyinteresting, one reason being that their remains were always foundbroken, chewed upon, and covered with tooth marks indicating thatcave hyenas were cannibalistic. One hyena den located in the forestedlimestone Altai Mountains near Mongolia was especially rich inbones that hyenas had carried into the cave over a period of some40,000 years. Called Razboinich’ya (which in Russian means“refugee” cave in reference to three young men who hid in the cavefor more than a year in order to avoid being drafted into the Sovietarmy during World War II) , this deep, dry, near-freezing hyena denhad been excavated over several summers by Ovodov and hisassociates. After an unsuccessful attempt to reach the cave in 1987because of stormy mountain weather, we were successful twelveyears later. When far back in the pitch black cave I experienced astrange sensation. I thought I heard the throaty coughing of somelarge animal. We had been studying hyena bone damage since thebeginning of the summer, so these terrifying creatures were much onmy mind. As it turned out, the sound came from heavy-smokerOvodov coughing in a side branch of the main cave.

The large amount of very well preserved faunal remains that Ovodovrecovered from Razboinich’ya gave us the baseline we needed fordeveloping a carnivore bone damage signature. Ours turned out to besimilar to others developed earlier, especially in southern Africa by C.K. Brain (1981). Ever since reaching Razboinich’ya, in addition tomy dental anthropological studies on the colonization of the NewWorld, in the back of my mind swirl vivid images of Ice AgeSiberian people and their relationship to large carnivores, especiallythe huge and powerful socially-organized night-hunting hyenas whosemassive jaws and teeth had easily cracked open even heavy anddense rhinoceros leg bones.

During the dozen or so research trips I made to the USSR, laternamed the Russian Federation, I came to realize that there was ataphonomic problem of immense proportion lurking in thePleistocene prehistory of Siberia and the New World. Simply put, it is

this: Despite the archaeological excavation of many Ice Age open andcave sites both in ancient forest and steppe environments, and despitethe excellent preservation of game animal bone refuse in many ofthese sites, almost no Ice Age human remains have been found — atmost a quart or two of teeth and small bone fragments (Broken up, acomplete adult human skeleton probably would fill 10-15 quart-sizedcontainers.) Why? Explanations that come to mind include: First, thePleistocene dead were buried, abandoned, or cremated away from allthe habitation sites that the Russian archaeologists had excavated.The few bits of human bone and teeth found in the habitation sitessuggest extra-mural burial was not always practiced, if it waspracticed at all. Second, there might have been widespread humancannibalism. This was the conclusion reluctantly reached in the late1990s by one of Russia’s best known anthropologists, the lateAcademician Valery Pavlovich Alexeev. Thanks to the experiencegained in the Man Corn research, I have recognized a few scraps ofhuman bone that could be tentatively suggested as having beencannibalized (Turner, Ovodov, and Pavlova 2003).

Fig. 2. Siberian human skeletal remains whose perimortem damagethat might have been caused by cannibalism.

I am doubtful about this possibility as having been a major cause ofthe missing bone. Third, carnivorous scavengers might have dug upand consumed the humans buried in the habitation sites. There is

more direct and circumstantial evidence for this possibility than anyother explanation. So, as the reader may suspect, two very differentproblems are beginning to converge: The colonization of the NewWorld, and the bone damage signatures of large Siberian carnivores.

Since 1998 vertebrate paleontologist Ovodov, translator OlgaPavlova, others, and I (bioarchaeologist) have been studying theanimal bones excavated from 30 Ice Age archaeological andpaleontological sites in Siberia. We have gone through at least onemillion pieces of late Pleistocene bone curated in various Siberianinstitutions. We have visited archaeological and paleontological sitesnear or within the river basins of the Ob, Yenisei, and Angara . Ourstudies have also taken us to Ice Age sites and collections excavatedeast of Lake Baikal and post-Pleistocene collections excavated nearthe Sea of Japan. Much of our study and visitations have been in theAltai Mountains, near the Russian-Mongolian border. We have beensupported for this taphonomic research by the National GeographicSociety, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,my Regents’ Professor account, and the Siberian Branch of theRussian Academy of Sciences. We are indebted to a number ofresearchers for their help, most notably Academician Anatoly P.Derevianko, Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology,Novosibirsk. What have we learned and what are our plans for thisinformation?

As for plan, we are in the final stages of analysis and writing a book-length monograph tentatively titled Animal Teeth and Human Tools:A Taphonomic Odyssey in Ice Age Siberia. A generous grant from theEmeritus College will enable the book to be copiously illustrated withphotographs and line drawings of our findings and travel. Our majorfindings and working hypotheses are these:

1. The bone damage signatures of Siberian humans and carnivorescan each be readily distinguished by a suite of taphonomic features(Turner et al. 2001a, 2001b). For example, in a bone assemblage,human damage characteristically includes stone tool cut marks,breakage of limb bones in the mid-shaft portion,

Fig. 3. Humans damage long bones to get at marrow by smashing themid-shaft portion and leaving the ends intact. These bones are IceAge reindeer tibiae.

smashing striations, and wide hammer-stone notches on fractures,among other features including rare pieces of accidentally burnedbone. Carnivores, on the other hand leave tooth striations andpuncture marks.

Fig. 4. Carnivore chewing marks that resemble poorly preserved stonetool cut marks. We refer to these as pseudo-cuts. They can resemblestone tool cut marks so closely, that by themselves, they would likelybe misidentified.

Fig.5. Two small pits caused by carnivore teeth. Pitting is not presentin human damaged bone.

They chew at bone ends, creating rounded and polished hollowedends,

Fig. 6. End-hollowing. Damage to long bones by carnivores occurs atthe ends of the bones as the animals chew away in their effort to get atthe marrow. This, and several other damage features define thecarnivore bone damage signature.

but rarely do they damage the mid-shaft region. They leave smallnotches on fractures. Using carnivore assemblages such asRazboinich’ya, we can be certain that hyenas ransacked human caverefuse in search of bone fragments from which they not only couldextract marrow grease by cracking open bones, but also bone protein.They obtained the latter by swallowing many bone fragments, whichtheir digestive system was capable of dissolving. Fragments that passthrough the entire length of their intestinal tract are highly eroded andso highly polished that they have a slippery feel. We refer to thesepartly digested bone fragments as stomach bones. They are verycommon in paleontological sites where hyenas had dens, and arepresent in the Ice Age archaeological sites, but not in post-glacialanimal dens or human encampments because at the end of the IceAge, Siberian hyenas became extinct along with mammoth,rhinoceros, and many other mega-fauna.

2. Ice Age cave hyenas were distributed longitudinally all over Siberiaand latitudinally as far as 55north (about the latitude of the U.S.-Canadian border). Actual hyena skeletal remains and their damagesignature occur in many Siberian Ice Age archaeological andpaleontological sites below 55. Siberian people and hyenas werepatently aware of one another. Ice Age human skeletal remains arerarely found despite the excellent preservation of non-human animalremains.

3. At the end of the Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, hyenas wentextinct along with northern mega-fauna such as mammoth,rhinoceros, bison, and many other species. The Arctic Steppe wasreplaced by forests in most of Siberia, and treeless tundra in the farnorth. From this time on, buried human remains are commonlydiscovered in Siberian habitation sites.

4. The inverse relationship between hyenas and human remains leadsus to the hypothesis that the number of Siberian humans may havebeen held down by hyena and other carnivore predation, as well as bycold climate and patchy food resources in the steppe and forest-steppeeco-systems. Just as there are hyena attacks on children and elderlyadults today in Africa and India, so must have been their predatory

behavior during the Ice Age. Toddlers wandering away from campwould have made easy pickings for a packing of prowling Siberianhyenas. Opportunistic predation would have been an added measureof human population control that would have slowed down thenatural expansion northward of a growing population. There is verylittle evidence of human presence north of the Arctic Circle until thevery end of the Ice Age.

5. Humans reached Alaska about 13,500 years ago, a time shortlyafter a domesticated dog skull was left in the Razboinich’ya hyenacave. The stratum in which Ovodov found the dog skull dates about14,000 years ago. Northeast Asian wolves were seemingly the firstwild animals that humankind domesticated. The resulting dog mayrepresent the “invention” that enabled humans to expand into Alaskaby guarding human encampments from marauding packs of hyenas orwolves, or solitary bears and lions. The dogs could have also servedas aids in transporting the considerable camping gear needed to livein the high Arctic (tents, tent poles, bedding, emergency food,clothing, tools, weapons, etc. — the multitude of material cultureitems used and needed by Eskimos is well known). Because of thepreponderance of hyena remains in Ice Age Siberian archaeologicalsites in contrast with the lesser number of cave lion, cave bear, andwolf remains, we feel that hyenas played a significant role in thedelayed settlement of Alaska. There were anatomically modernhumans in Siberia at least 20,000 years ago, and more archaic formseven earlier. In addition to opportunistic predation, hyenas may haveentered camps and dragged away the weak or those in deep in sleep.They could also have scavenged the carcasses of large animals thathuman hunters had killed, thus denying the humans the entirety oftheir hunt. Numerous scenarios can be produced by analogy withhyena activity in their modern range that includes Africa, India, andthe Near and Middle East. Such scenarios are allowed by thetaphonomic demonstration of hyena abundance in Ice Age Siberia. Itis curious that hyenas have lived for millions of years in the OldWorld, and still do in the above mentioned regions. However, innorthern Eurasia they seem to have met their match with the comingof anatomically modern humans, their dogs, and technologicalinventions unknown to the earlier archaic humans. A very marked

cold snap at about 15,000 years ago, called the Late GlacialMaximum, may also have played a role in their extinction. As theexact story unfolds about the cave hyena extinction, one inferenceseems solid: Humans did not disperse into the New World until thesepowerful social Siberian predators went extinct.

6. One curious finding that came out of our taphonomic study is thevery low frequency of burned bone. The few fragments that areburned suggest that they fell into campfires accidently. No piecessuggest the roasting of meat. Some other form of cooking and grease-rendering must have been practiced such as light boiling in skin bagsfilled with water heated by hot stones. Unfortunately, for thisexplanation, very few stones have been found showing thermaldamage. Perhaps most meat was eaten raw, as was done by historicEskimos.

The Emeritus College grant will allow voluminous illustrations ofhow game animals were processed by ancient Siberian humans andhyenas. These heretofore unsuspected stalking hazards arehypothesized as having slowed down human population expansion —expansion that in the northeasterly trek across Beringia brought theancestors of Natives Americans into a hunter’s paradise filled withgame animals totally naive about human behavior. Once past theSiberian hyena barrier, the New World was rapidly filled withhumans who found an abundance of food, no enemies, no contagiousdiseases, and very few social carnivores. We add to this scenario thedog which along with the fine tailoring needle may have been twoimportant inventions that helped late Pleistocene Siberians to reachthe New World.

This story began in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, so perhaps Ishould return there for my ending. There, as in Siberia, thousands ofanimal bones were recovered in our excavations. All were from seamammals, marine fish, marine birds, and marine shellfish. There wereapparently no terrestrial animals in the prehistoric Aleutian Islands.The Aleuts were a maritime people whose roots seem to go back tothe late Pleistocene Siberian Pacific coast and the lower reaches ofthe Amur River, which empties into the ocean north of Japan. These

Amurians must also have encountered hyenas because theirdistinctive bones and teeth have been found in a small latePleistocene near-coastal cave site north of Vladivostok excavated byOvodov in the mid-1960s. Ancestral Aleuts, like ancestral Indians,entered the New World late relative to other parts of the world(Australia, for example, was reached 50,000 years ago). Yes, terriblecold was undoubtedly a factor in the tardy settlement of the NewWorld. But it alone does not explain why even the food-rich marineAleutian Islands were seemingly settled so late also.

ReferencesAnonymous

United States Coast Pilot. 9. Paacific and Arctic Coasts. Alaska,Cape Spencer to Beaufort Sea.Seventh edition. Washington DC:U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

Brain, C. K.The Hunters or the Hunted? An Introduction to African CaveTaphonomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Turner, Christy G. II, and Jacqueline A. TurnerMan Corn. Cannibalism and Violence in the PrehistoricAmerican Southwest. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,1999.

Turner, Christy G. II, Nicolai D. Ovodov, Nicolai V. Martynovich,Olga V. Pavlova, Anatoli P. Derevianko, and Nicolai D. DrosdovPerimortem bone taphonomy of late-Pleistocene human andhyena refuse deposits in Siberia. Current Research in thePleistocene 18:88-90 (2001).

Turner, Christy G. II, Nicolai D. Ovodov, Nicolai V. Martynovich,and Alexander N. Popov.Working definitions for perimortem taphonomy of natural andanthropogenic bone damage in late Pleistocene and HoloceneSiberia and Primorye. Archaeology, Ethnology, and Anthropologyof Eurasia 4(8):21-29 (2001).

Turner, Christy G. II, Nicolai D. Ovodov, and Olga V. PavlovaPerimortem taphonomy and dental affinity assessment of thehuman skeletal remains from Yelenev Cave, Krasnoyarskterritory, Siberia. Archaeology, Ethnology, and Anthropology ofEurasia 1(13):49-57 (2003).

Turner, Christy G. II, Nicolai D. Ovodov, and Olga V. Pavlova.Animal Teeth and Human Tools:A Taphonomic Odyssey ThroughIce Age Siberia. In preparation.

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DANISH TEACHER ATTITUDES TOWARDSMUSLIM IMMIGRANT INTEGRATION

INTO DANISH SOCIETY

Lotte R. Schou, Danish University of EducationDonald K. Sharpes, Arizona State University

Paper Presented at the Annual MeetingAmerican Educational Research Association,

Chicago, April 9-13, 2007

ABSTRACT

This proposal highlights the AERA 2007 theme of foreign educationalresearch by seeking to pinpoint potential causes of inter-group conflictamong the immigrant Muslim and native communities in Denmark bysurveying Danish teacher values. The perceptions Muslim and non-Muslim teachers have about teaching Islamic and national values in Dan-ish society reveal the level and depth for or against national civic andsocial integration. Survey data from teachers, the principal architects forshaping values in a society, yield significant insights into how social andpolitical discourse might be shaped and public policy developed. Den-mark’s localized Muslim immigrant community has leaders who lentsupport to this effort. Based on a summary of interviews, a validated sur-vey instrument available in English and Danish has been designed andadministered via the Internet to all teachers in Denmark in 2007.

Introduction

The new global confrontation is between secular western values and con-servative Muslim religious beliefs. The problem for Europe and Americais to find the right legal and political balance between cultural assimila-tion and national integration of all immigrant religions, but especiallyfirst and second generation Muslims. Unquestionably, the economic, po-litical and social agenda for the next century will be the conflict betweenthe secular developing world and its historical values accentuating indi-vidual rights and freedoms, and the burgeoning Muslim communitiesscattered throughout Europe that value more communal standards andnot individual freedoms. It is problematic whether Muslim communitieswill ever become thoroughly assimilated culturally into European socie-ties in the near future, whether or not governments agree on regulationsfor the wearing of the jihab gown on female Muslin high school studentsor head scarves.

The Dutch government, for example, passed new laws for immi-grants entering the Netherlands in March, 2006 that include having themwatch a video with nudes sunbathing on the beach and homosexuals kiss-ing. These scenes are a part of a DVD in a package of study materialsand a test to discourage applicants who may be offended by the content.The aim was to let naïve or uninformed Muslim workers know that a va-riety of different values are tolerated in western democracies. These strictnew policies were made as a direct cause of the murders of Dutch politi-cian Pim Fortuyn and the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and former Dutchlegislator Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s renunciation of her Muslim faith and thesubsequent death threats against her. She now resides in the UnitedStates.

Unless Europe can at least nationally integrate its relatively small butrestive Muslim immigrant communities as citizens, it will witness a Mus-lim majority in Europe by the end of the century. There are about 16 mil-lion Muslims in 15 countries in the European Union, about four percentof Europe’s total population. However, the fall in birthrates among nativeEuropeans and the explosive growth of Muslim populations (about threetimes as high) represent a crucial demographic imbalance that cannot beignored.

In 1982 there were 35,000 Muslims living in Denmark. By 2003there were 162,000, a nearly five-fold increase in 20 years. This patternof exponential Muslim population increase has been duplicated in Spain,Italy, France, Germany, and Austria during the same time period.

Moreover, nearly one million Muslim immigrants from North Africaand the Middle East arrive in Europe each year placing an already bur-

densome strain on the welfare system in most European nations. Thesearrivals tend to live in already crowded Muslim ghettos that exist on themargins of urban society. Many will not become citizens. This in turnmakes many unemployed young men vulnerable to the lure of radical-ism. Moreover, according to the U.S. Department of State, younger Mus-lims are resisting assimilation into secular European societies much morethan their immigrant grandparents did. The clash between western secu-lar traditions and iconoclastic Muslim religious views will only deepenthroughout Europe in the following decades.

The integration of Muslims into Danish society has not been ade-quately studied and this investigation is an attempt to provide social sci-ence evidence for teacher attitudes. Everyone agrees that formal school-ing is the primary social agent for nurturing social and civic integration.Accordingly, teachers are the linchpins for inculcating all the necessaryvalues for integration. Hence, one question is: What do teachers actuallybelieve about the integration of Muslims into the community and in theschools? This survey provides some answers for Denmark, a country ofabout six million that faces the same absorptive workforce and culturaldilemmas accepting larger number of Muslim members as other Euro-pean countries.

A Clash of Values

The convergence of Islam and national and cultural identity in Europe,exacerbated by external events like a murder, assassination, riot, or evena satirical cartoon, has the potential for disrupting civic order and erodingmovements towards cultural assimilation and national integration.Clearly, fundamentalism in any religion, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, or Mus-lim, can turn a few radicals into fanatics who seek the death of thosewhom they believe are infidels. Revealing the sources of cultural disso-nance between Islamic faith and national identity can have a profoundinfluence on how societies prepare for Muslim immigrant problems inDenmark, the country chosen for this investigation, and throughoutEurope and even America.

A Pew Global Projects poll, surveying over 14,000 in 13 nations andreleased in June, 2006, found that Muslims and Westerners both tend toview the other as violent, intolerant and lacking respect for women. Inselected European countries, respondents were asked whether Muslimswere fanatical. The yes responses were: in Spain 83%, Germany 78%,France 50%, and Great Britain 48%.

This is not a research question for identifying a few surly young menin the mold of the Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard who pessimis-

tically brood on metaphysical issues, but of awakening the Muslin com-munity to radicalized extremists who hijack the attempts of the majoritywho seek to peacefully integrate and conform to the demands of modernlife.

In the United States and Europe where Muslims have the greatestexposure to western values and culture, they are increasingly embracingIslamic values. Western altruistic hopes for full integration of Muslimsinto national western cultures is unlikely to be realized.

This proposal will provide a modicum of evidence for the depth andlevel of the Muslim immigrant population towards integration and awayfrom violence in the native Danish immigrant Muslim population to-wards continued tolerance. This proposal seeks to pinpoint potential ar-eas of disagreement among Danish educators, and to provide evidencefor or against inter-group conflict by examining values in Danish schoolsamong regular and Muslim Danish teachers.

Why Denmark?

Danish society was traumatized in 2006 by the global outrage over thepublication of satirical cartoons about Mohammad in September 2005.The violent attacks on Danish embassies in Syria, Iran, Libya, Pakistanand Indonesia, and to some other Nordic individuals throughout the Is-lamic world and the boycott of Danish commercial goods, shattered thetranquility of Scandinavian insouciance. This is an opportune time toexplore whether this national awakening to the depth of Islamic fervorwill lead to a retrenchment of social interaction between Danes and theirimmigrant Muslim communities, deepen the fear and mistrust betweennatives and the immigrant community, or result in a new show of toler-ance between the native and non-native groups and diminish the potentialfor violence.

The ultimate fear is that terrorist attacks within Denmark will dam-age the collective psyche and jeopardize the high level of tolerance fornew or recent Muslim immigrants, and mistrust of third generation Mus-lim residents. But just as real is the political backlash from Danish right-wing proponents. A right-wing, anti-immigrant, xenophobic politicalparty, the Danish People’s Party led by Pia Kjaersgaard, has alreadyemerged to challenge the widening tolerance toward Muslims amongDanes. Polls have shown that growth in this party from 13.3% in the2005 general election to 17.8 percent in 2006, and there has been a surgein membership applications.

Denmark has passed laws in an effort to speed Muslim immigrant in-tegration into Danish society by limiting the practice of second-

generation Danes returning to the ancestral countries to find husbandsand wives.

The Danish Foreign Ministry sponsored a conference on March 10,2006 of preachers, Arab media representatives from Kuwaiti TV and thepopular Al Jazeera network based in Qatar, and various scholars to en-gage in dialogue. It included 25 young people from Denmark and 25from the Arab world. No imam from Denmark, however, was invited, asImam Ahmad Abu Laban, who was based in Denmark and was inter-viewed in 2006 preparatory for this proposal, had organized trips amongDanish imams to Egypt and Lebanon stirring up outrage in the Arabworld about the Danish cartoons. Participants at this conference openlyexpressed fears about new extremism on both sides. (Imam Abu Labandied in the winter of 2007.)

Radical Islam

Islam means “submission,” a yielding to the Koran and the precepts ofclerical exponents. Any undermining of the claims of Muslim faith andthe authority of religious belief is liable to retribution, not just by a fewhotheads but by huge crowds of Islamic believers flooding the streets ofcities. The global Islamic response to perceived blasphemy, and not justfrom terrorists, has been predictably violent.

The attempts to pillory or destroy traces of forbidden images is simi-lar to the iconoclasm of the 6th through the 8th centuries when Christianemperors in Constantinople initiated the destruction of images, art, andshrines. Islam now attempts to destroy, not just images within its reli-gious purview, but all instances that satirize its sacred beliefs in any reli-gious or non-religious context. Many businesses, media outlets and gov-ernments, under the guise of apologetic sensitivity to religious beliefs,have obediently complied. The response is similar to the iconoclasm ofthe Byzantine era.

Moreover, most Muslims claim that their attitudes towards the so-called infidels are peaceful. But the Koran contains passages that radicalscan claim to give them leave to condone violence. With these phrases asdivine sources of legitimacy, a Muslim who chooses a violent responseor a jihad can find all that is needed to authorize militancy.

When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads.(Sura 47:4)

And fight in the way of God with those who fight with you...And slaythem whenever you come upon them, and expel them from where theyexpelled you.” (Sura 2:190)

When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you findthem. (Sura 9:5)

Lest anyone think these scriptural claims are only token symbols of afaded past, it is instructive to recall the statement of Mohammed Taheri-Azar, a Muslim student at the University of North Carolina, in a letter tothe local ABC TV affiliate on March 3, 2006 where he wrote:

Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack thosewho have waged war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise incase of martyrdom and/or living one’s life in obedience of all of Allah’s com-mandments found throughout the Koran’s 114 chapters…I did not act out ofhatred for Americans but out of love for Allah instead.

Mr. Taheri-Azar ran down students on a sidewalk with his car in 2006.Fortunately, no one was killed though several were injured. This is achilling reminder of how literally some U.S. Muslim believers and otherreligious fundamentalists take scriptural passages for direct action. Thisone incident also shows that violence condoned by the Koran is not lim-ited to jihad websites that specifically shows violence against the non-believers. Similarly, Hamed Bitawi, a newly-elected Hamas legislator inthe Palestinian parliament in Gaza said, when it approved the Islamicgroup’s new cabinet in April, 2006: “The Koran is our constitution, Ji-had is our way, and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.”

It has been reliably reported that only about 13% of Danish Muslimimmigrants active attend Friday mosque ceremonies. This does not al-ways reveal irreligious sentiments, however, as Islamic websites provideabundant sources of literature, news and information from the Arabworld, devotional content, and even radical recruitment for jihad move-ments.

Methodology

The method is to evaluate both native Danish and Muslim teacher beliefsabout integration into Danish nationality. After interviewing an imam,headmasters, professors and teachers in the summer of 2006, researchersdesigned a survey form for Danish teachers of Muslim students for use inthe school year of 2007 via the Internet. The attempt was not to try toidentify a terrorist cell, mentally disturbed church arsonist, or grave

desecraters, but to gather credible evidence about prevailing social valuesthat inform public opinion and which could drive legislative or govern-ment policy initiatives. Such evidence about values and beliefs can re-veal tendencies among immigrant communities towards possible isola-tion and retreat from integration or spot progress towards assimilationinto Danish culture.

A key objective was to learn what values Muslim teachers teachMuslim or other Danish students, and what values Danish teachers whoare not Muslims teach Danish students about Islam. How do schoolsgrapple with differing values in a Danish society now that Denmark hasemerged as a target of global Islamic hostility? The perceptions Muslimand non-Muslim teachers have about teaching Islamic and national val-ues in a Danish society will reveal the depth of antagonism for or againstnational integration. The tension between secular and nationalistic val-ues favoring the individual and strongly-held views about religious iden-tity that may disfavor individual freedoms will yield significant socialinsights into how policy might develop to reduce friction.

The argument for and documentation about national integration ofimmigrant Muslim communities is found in the Danish goals of educa-tion. Here is a typical schooling goal that educators in western societieseasily subscribe to. In fact, it is one of the chief goals of Danish educa-tion:

“The Folkeskole shall familiarize pupils with Danish culture and con-tribute to their understanding of other cultures and of man’s interactionwith nature. The school shall prepare the pupils for active participation,joint responsibility, rights and duties in a society based on freedom anddemocracy. The teaching of the school and its daily life must thereforebuild on intellectual freedom, equality and democracy.”

The key phrases here are 1) “rights and duties in a society based on free-dom and democracy,” and 2) that the school must emphasize “intellec-tual freedom, equality and democracy.” Such phrases encapsulate thehard-won freedoms of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the outcomeof religious, civil and even world wars in the West over the last two hun-dred years. These are not the phrases to which devout Muslims, muchless radical fundamentalists, would automatically yield assent. Whileattempting to preserve their own religious freedom, immigrant Muslimsin Denmark and elsewhere also typically believe that they are entering atraditional society that will only absorb them culturally on its own terms.

The typical environment for assimilation in western societies is theschool system, which is why this project has chosen teachers to glean

attitudes about these social imperatives. Denmark has both public andprivate Muslim schools. Both native Danish and third and second genera-tion Muslim Danes teach in both kinds of school.

A research project conducted by Prof. Annette Ihle of CopenhagenUniversity and released in June, 2006 in the newspaper BerlingskeTidende followed three Muslim schools in Copenhagen through the 2006school year to study whether students learned citizenship values. Shefound that performance at independent Muslim schools did not meet theprovisions of the education Act in several fields. While education inDanish, English, and mathematics match the demands of the Folkeskole,performance falls short in art, gymnastics, and science. Moreover, nei-ther the content nor the authoritarian methods in the subject’s religionand mother tongue meet the education act’s demands. She concludes thatstudents at the selected schools are not learning citizenship values.

Interview Results

Preliminary interviews for this project were conducted in July, 2006 inCopenhagen and Aarhus, two cities in Denmark where large concentra-tions of Muslims live. Interviewees included at least one Imam, twoschool administrators, one teacher, and four professors.

Here are the sample interview questions:

Do Danish Muslims denounce radical Islamic jihad and violence?Can Danish Muslims integrate successfully into a western, secular so-ciety and still preserve their religious identity?Do Danish Muslims understand the secular nature of western societies,which is to preserve religious plurality in the nation?Can Denmark grow to accept and respect Muslim immigrants whilepreserving other religious persuasions?Should Danish schools give any special privileges to Muslim students?Are there age or gender differences in how Muslim immigrants ap-proach living in Danish society?Are there generational differences between first, second, and third gen-eration Muslim immigrants?Should more tolerance for all faiths be taught in schools?What would you suggest should be the best government policy for suc-cessful Muslim integration into Danish society?

Those interviewed included:

Ahmad Abu-Laban (deceased), Imam at the Islamic Community inDenmark

Jens Raahauge, Headmaster of Folkeskole with many Muslim studentsPenille Rasmussen, teacher at Folkskole with Muslim students.Annette Haaber Ihle, Cross-cultural & Regional Studies, Language, Re-

ligion and Society at Copenhagen UniversityTallat Daniel Shakoor, Danish University of Education, researching pa-

rental attitudes in Muslim schoolsJens Lundby, Vice-Principal, Lykke Skolen, a private Muslim school in

AarhusKaren Bjerg Petersen, Danish University of Education, researching Dan-

ish as a second languageOsman Oztoprak, Turkish Professor at the University of Aarhus

Based summary of these interviews, a validated survey instrumentwas designed and administered via the Internet for administration in theschool year 2007 to an anticipated audience of one thousand teacher par-ticipants of Danish and Muslim teachers of Muslim students and resultstabulated. Survey statements were gleaned from interviews questions andresponses and some from the Danish legal education requirements.Teachers responded to positively-worded statements based on their levelof agreement or disagreement with each statement on a 7-point Likert-like form, available in English and Danish.

Sample Survey Statements

DIRECTIONS: Please tick the space that best represents your responsetowards the attitudes and statements (very strongly agree VSA/stronglyagree SA/agree A/ no opinion NO/disagree D/strongly disagree DS/verystrongly disagree) VSD.

Students need to learn about tolerance for all religions and faiths.Teachers in my school teach tolerance for all religions.Students need to learn about major religions.Teachers in my school teach specific religious values.Students need to learn about the major tenets of Islam.Muslim students need to learn how to integrate into Danish society.Teachers in my school teach Muslim students how to integrate into Danish soci-

ety.All students must reject violence.Many Muslim immigrant students look favorably on jihad.

Muslims students reject jihad and violence.Teachers in my school teach students to renounce violence.Students need to learn to treat everyone without prejudice.Some teachers in my school hold prejudicial views about Muslim students.Students need to learn how to treat everyone with equality.All students need to learn the value of individual political Freedoms & rights of

citizenshipAll students learn the value of, & respect for, intellectual freedoms & think,

believe and speak freely.Muslim immigrant students lack basic Danish language skills.Schools should give special preferences to Muslim students in learning their

native language. The majority of Muslim immigrant students have behav-ioral problems.

Denmark should increase its Muslim immigrant community to satisfy the laborshortage.

Danish Muslim students will integrate successfully into Danish society.

Respondents

Here are some facts about the 176 respondents thus far:34% have taught less than 5 years, but31% have taught for 19 years or more.94% have only formal training at the teaching certificate level.Less than 5% have advanced training.Respondents teach equally in all major school subjects in

roughly equal proportions.

Initial Survey ResultsFour conclusions

[1] In general, teachers agree that students need to learntolerance for all religions,to reject violence,to treat everyone without prejudice,and to learn the value of individual rights and freedoms

These are the standard values formal Danish schooling seeks toinculcate, in conformity with Danish educational standards.

[2] But, while expressing these supportive values, respondents are lesslikely

to believe that Muslim students will integrate successfully intoDanish society

to want to increase the Muslim immigrant community to satisfy thelabor shortage.

[3] On the one hand, although Muslim teachers overwhelming (75%)believe that Denmark should increase the Muslim immigrant community,only 27% of Protestant teachers believe likewise. Similarly, while 100%of Muslim teachers believe Danish Muslim students will successful inte-grate into Danish society, only 52% of Protestant teachers believe so.

[4] More disturbing is that over 40% of Protestant teachers believeMuslim students look favorably on jihad, and 30% of Muslim teachersagree. Whatever values teachers seek to inculcate in students, studentacceptance of the violence of the jihad movement among Muslim youthis alarming. This shows that the jihad movement among Muslim youth islikely formed by influences outside the school, commonly believed tocome from jihad websites but not, according to our interview responses,from the mosques or sermons by the imams. Both Muslim and Protestantteachers agree in equal proportions that Muslim students do not rejectjihad or violence. Moreover, 25% of Muslim teachers agree that teachersare not teaching students enough to renounce violence, while less than2% of Protestant teachers think so. One conclusion is that Muslim teach-ers may see teacher instruction for renouncing violence as more impor-tantly than do regular Danish teachers, or that more needs to be doneabout greater instruction in non-violence.

The authors of this survey will continue to seek teachers to take the sur-vey, which is still available on teacher association websites, and will ex-pand its use to vocational and folke school teachers. Additionally, thesurvey is being administered in Belarus, has a large number of Muslimsattempting to enter European Union countries through Belarus. We hopeto report on a comparative analysis between these countries at a latertime

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Encouraging Interdisciplinary Work in a UniversityHarvey A. Smith

The administration of Arizona State, in its efforts to create TheNew American University, has placed great emphasis on promotinginterdisciplinary work. I believe that, as one who has spent a goodportion of my life in such work, an account of some of the difficul-ties I have encountered might be useful. Interdisciplinary work is aback road to a happy and successful career, which can easily beavoided by putting one’s main efforts into more traditional lines ofresearch. Instead, I have followed my own interests and pursuedwhatever appeared to me to be interesting and useful.

I. My History

I earned an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics andworked for the next seven years in operations research and analyti-cal engineering, which are inherently interdisciplinary activities.During this time, I went to graduate school at Penn part-time. Iearned an M.S. in physics and pursued a doctorate to the point ofselecting a dissertation topic in solid-state physics. I was not al-lowed to complete the physics doctorate at Penn while employedelsewhere, so I switched to pure mathematics, earning my A.M.and Ph.D. This took twelve years of part-time graduate work; forthe last five of these I taught mathematics at an engineering school,directed a theoretical engineering project, and served as a consult-ant in engineering and in theoretical criminology. Following thedoctorate, I spent a year as an NSF fellow in pure mathematics.After my postdoctoral year, I worked for a year in a systems analy-sis group attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the next elevenyears, I taught mathematics at Oakland University in Rochester,Michigan, continuing to serve as a consultant to various federalagencies and spending two years on leave at the Executive Officeof the President. I then came to ASU as chair of the mathematicsdepartment and continued to consult for the US Arms Control andDisarmament Agency, the Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

II. Career Effects and Departmental Evaluation of Interdisci-plinary Work

The effect of my diverse experience on my academic career hasbeen mixed; usually it has been an asset in getting an academicjob, but it has not been looked on favorably once I had the job. Thechair at Oakland was happy to sell the president on making me anoffer by telling him about my varied background, but once I wason the faculty he let me know that he didn’t consider such things“real mathematics”. A later chair at Oakland told me that becausemany of my papers were connected with my consulting work thedepartment committee believed I had already been paid for themand would not consider them in recommending merit raises.

When I was being considered for chair at ASU, someone askedthe committee, “What’s his field?” After examining my curriculumvitae, one of the committee members said, “It looks like every-thing!” Although an exaggeration, this was considered a positiveaspect of my application. Later, when I had reverted to being a pro-fessor, the then mathematics chair asked me, “Why are you havingthem send me this stuff?” when he received copies of some of mypapers which were having a major impact on national policy.

Only about one-sixth of my publications were pure mathemat-ics. Fortunately, they were strong enough to sustain a respectablecareer in mathematics. The other papers were by no means weak ornegligible. Most were only “non-mathematical” in that they werenot within the discipline although the work in most of them couldonly have been done by a doctoral-level mathematician. Two pa-pers were invited lead articles in the magazine Science. Another isoften cited as a fundamental contribution to a field of signal proc-essing. A paper published in Management Science influenced gov-ernment policy and was the subject of a doctoral dissertation ineconomics at Padua. Many of my papers were devoted to questionsof strategic policy; others ranged from criminology to energy pol-icy,

My enthusiasm for publishing interdisciplinary work in a formwhere it would have maximum visibility, as opposed to impact onpolicy, was substantially diminished by the low esteem in whichthe work was apparently held within my academic department. Inthe end, I would often be content to contribute anonymously to a

government report, rather than making the effort to put my work ina form suitable for journal publication.

To succeed, an effort to promote interdisciplinary researchmust find a mechanism for overcoming the inherent parochialismof the traditional departmental structure. My work could be charac-terized as “mathematics and …”, where the “and …” was highlyvariable (and sometimes blank.) But neither would I have felt com-fortable in an ad hoc department dedicated to a single interdiscipli-nary area, rather than in a mathematics department. The reaction insuch a department to straying from the prescribed area would be nodifferent than that of the traditional departments. I recall the in-credulous response when the Executive Office of the President wasbilled page charges for a lengthy paper on pure mathematics in theTransactions of the American Mathematical Society while I was afull-time employee engaged in interdisciplinary mathematical stud-ies more directly relevant to government concerns.

III. Team Teaching

From time to time, at several universities including ASU, effortshave been made to give the students an interdisciplinary perspec-tive by merging courses from two departments and having thecourse taught by professors from the two departments working as ateam. The cases I have encountered most often have been attemptsto merge the basic physics course with the calculus. I do not knowof any instances in which this combined course has been a long-term success. (This is different from having a professor from onedepartment teach a course in another, which often is successful.) Agreat deal of effort is typically put into reconciling the differentapproaches to the subject traditionally followed by the two disci-plines. This can be stimulating and fun for the teachers. It is oftenconfusing — and much less fun — for the students. If given achoice, many students who started out enthusiastically in the com-bined course drop out of the program and continue in the separatecourses in succeeding semesters. Students doing this typically toldme that they found the traditional courses easier and less confus-ing. They did not appreciate the advantages of an interdisciplinaryapproach.

IV. Some Hazards of Interdisciplinary Programs

At Oakland University, I served on a committee charged with for-mulating an interdisciplinary doctoral program in the sciences. Itwas to be that university’s first doctoral program. The committeemembers were drawn from mathematics, physics, chemistry, andbiology. The first stumbling block we encountered was a differ-ence in traditions. Doctoral programs in physics and mathematicstend to be course-intensive. Students take a standard curriculum ofbasic courses at the master’s and early doctoral level before theyeven think about a dissertation. We were told that graduate stu-dents in chemistry and biology have most of the needed back-ground from their undergraduate schooling and proceed directly towork with an advisor, taking only the relatively few courses di-rectly related to the dissertation area. The outcomes are also differ-ent. A Ph.D. in mathematics or physics is expected to be able toteach almost any undergraduate or beginning graduate course inthe department. Chemists and biologists were said to specialize,even in their undergraduate teaching. Each group wanted the newinterdisciplinary program to reflect what was typically done in thehome discipline. Each greeted the other’s proposals with, “That’snot a doctoral program!”

We eventually worked this out. The proposal we finally agreedon was essentially to have the student spend the first years takingwhat amounted to a slightly weak master’s degree in all of the fourdisciplines. This would be followed by individual study, workingwith an advisory committee selected according to the student’schoice of what we hoped would be an interdisciplinary dissertationproblem. We agreed that incoming students would need to haveroughly the undergraduate preparation of a physics or engineeringstudent. We did not spell out specifically what that was, assumingeveryone knew.

We brought in several well-known interdisciplinary scientiststo consult. We talked to relevant people at the NSF. All agreed thatthis was a sound approach to a badly needed program and urged uson. The university administration was enthusiastic. Then the effortcollapsed. The essential problem was that the biology professorssuddenly realized that they would not have been qualified for ad-

mission to the program. They hadn’t had the required courses inmathematics and physics which all undergraduate engineers andphysicists — and most mathematicians and chemists— take.

They complained, “How can you expect us to teach in a pro-gram to which we wouldn’t be qualified for admission?” The restof us didn’t see this as a problem.

The biologists were quite furious at this wound to their amourpropre. They felt insulted by the graduate dean’s informal dressand rough speech when he called them together in an emergencyweekend meeting to urge them to cooperate. They decided to for-mulate a separate Ph.D. program in biology and apply for ap-proval. They were, of course, turned down — as the dean hadpromised they would be.

Oakland University’s first doctoral program was a Ph.D. in“reading” in the school of education. The science faculty, ratherspitefully, referred to it as ”the Ph.D. in ABC.”

Editor’s comment: Harvey Smith’s professional memoir is actuallyabout discouraging interdisciplinary work, and he leaves me with asense of futility concerning this notoriously intractable problem.Nor can it be said that this has anything to do with his confininghimself to the sciences; it may be only that in the sciences the pro-grams of study have more fixed names and so it is clearer what thesquabble is about.

At the same time, Harvey refers to his many curiosities withobvious delight and satisfaction. I use the word “curiosities” quitedeliberately, as meaning the force which drives inquiry but also toevoke the old “cabinet of curiosities” — fabulous things broughtback from exotic places, as many of his papers appear to have beento his colleagues.

This can’t be right, nor a disparity rightly tolerated. I inviteanyone in the College with successful experiences (or illuminatingfailures) in interdisciplinary research or teaching to write some-thing for the next issues of Emeritus Voices; letters, anecdotes, ormore extended pieces will be welcome.

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Department of Lists

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCENicholas V. Findler

Prof. Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering

Editor’s comment: On the list as a literary formNicholas Findler sent this in and I can’t resist adding a note on

the venerable literary genre of the list. Rabelais, Borges, Nabokov(among others) have created famous lists, and Nabokov has set outsome of the requirements of the form — chiefly that the relationbetween one item and the next be surprising, even puzzling. It is inthis that the genius of a really good list is to be found.

Findler’s list has a hallucinatory fractal quality. Every item hasanother list within it, unexplained — what is the story of thedoctor, the missionary, and the computer scientist? — an infiniteBorgesian shop of cakes all full of nuts, fruit, mysterious bits…

On artificial intelligenceI started work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia in

1957, without knowing what had been done in AI before (not muchreally…). In the fifty years since, AI has become a diverse area ofresearch activity, intersecting many disciplines from biology andpsychology to engineering. Dozens of books and hundreds ofrefereed journal articles appear every year. Practically everyuniversity offers courses on AI-related subjects at theundergraduate and graduate levels. International and nationalconferences are organized on topics related to AI and its subareas.

The history of AI is not without controversy and opposingviews, as is any endeavor which seems to some to duplicate ourhumanity in a machine or which interprets human activity as theresult of machine-like processes. Witness the current argumentsover cognitive psychology or, from the early years of AI, the threatof a poetry-writing computer. This now seems laughable, andpublications that oppose AI on philosophical or scientific groundno longer appear in the scientific literature.

The basic objective of AI (also called heuristic programming,machine intelligence, or the simulation of cognitive behavior) is to

enable computers to perform such intellectual tasks as decisionmaking, problem solving, perception, understanding humancommunication (in any language, and translate among them), andthe like. Proof of this objective is the blind test suggested by AlanTuring in the 1930s: if an observer who cannot see the actors(computer and human) cannot tell the difference between them, theobjective is satisfied.

The present-day pervasiveness of AI, given how little it isnoticed in everyday life, suggests that in important ways thisobjective has been reached. We find the notion of a refrigeratorwhich calls in its own grocery orders a bit funny — one thinks ofcartoon parrots who order pizzas — but it may surprise people toknow just how much we have come to rely on this sort ofintelligence which we no longer bother to label as artificial. Thefollowing list is drawn from my own past projects in the field ofAI. It is incomplete — I have not worked in several importantsubdomains — but nevertheless suggestive.

Game playing

Vast. The first AI was a computer game. I worked on such a game'Dama' myself. Within just the game of poker, I have researched:

Computer models of gambling and bluffing.Gambling machines.Poker studies: decision making, machine cognition, inductive

discovery processes leading to a heuristic poker program.New objectives for game playing programs.

Problem solving

Cryptanalysis on computers.Machine learning from noisy information.Human decision making under uncertainty and risk.Computer based experiments and a heuristic simulation

program.Human learning versus machine learning.A machine that generates and optimizes its strategy.Computer models of the learning process.Computer simulation of highly organized mental activities.

Computer studies of perception.A computer program that generates and queries kinship

structures.The story of the doctor, the missionary, and the computer

scientist.Computer simulation of a demographical and kinship model.Some new approaches to machine learning.A universal word puzzle solver.On problems of time, retrieval of temporal relations, causality

and co-existence.A computerized self-teaching matchmaker.Some ideas about the solution of cryptarithmetic puzzles.Reasoning by analogy in problem solving.On a sufficient cognitive structure for competitive

robots.Discovery processes in analogical reasoning.Analogical reasoning in problem solving.Analogical reasoning in design processes.Distributed planning and problem solving systems.On a computer-based theory of strategies.Automatic analysis and synthesis of strategies.Distributed knowledge-based systems in manufacturing.An approach to supplementing simulation models with

knowledge-based planning systems.Some techniques of reducing the dangers of combinatorial

explosion in automatic knowledge acquisition.

Decision making

An information processing theory of human decision makingunder uncertainty and risk

Studies on the behavior of an organism in a hostileenvironment

A learning robot systemThe complexity of decision trees, the Quasi-Optimizer, and the

power of heuristic rulesA pruning algorithm for finding all optimal decision graphsA system to analyze and optimize decision making strategies

On the comparison of five heuristic optimization techniques ofa certain class of decision trees

A decision support system for automatic rule discovery inanthropology

Analogical reasoning by intelligent robotsA note on computing the asymptotic form of a limited

sequence of decision treesRepresenting causal knowledgeOn the concept of causality and a causal modelling system for

scientific and engineering domainsA methodology for modeling coordination in intelligent agent

societiesAn empirical approach to a Theory of CoordinationA heuristic information retrieval system based on associative

networks.Machine learning

Computer simulation of a self-preserving and learningorganism

An automatic program writing system that can repair itselfOn a sufficient cognitive structure for competitive robotsSome effective models of computer learningTwo approaches to automatic knowledge acquisitionMachine learning — Why do we need it?Distributed control of collaborating and learning expert

systemsDimensions of learning in a real-time knowledge-based

control systemDesign of an interactive environment to study the behavior of

several robots which can learn, plan their actions, and co-existAspects of computer learningTeaching strategies to an Advice Taker/Inquirer systemOn automating computer model constructionA multi-level learning technique using production systemsAnalogical reasoning by intelligent robotsA pattern search technique for the optimization module of a

morph-fitting package.

Traffic control

The role of strategies in Air Traffic ControlAn examination of distributed planning in the world of air

traffic controlA general-purpose man-machine environment with special

reference to air traffic controlAir traffic control: A challenge for AIA distributed artificial intelligence approach to air traffic

controlA predictive man-machine environment for training and

evaluating air traffic control operatorsAn examination of distributed planning in the world of air

traffic controlSome Ideas about Future Air Traffic Control Systems —

Theoretical and Experimental Investigations in a SimulatedEnvironment

A distributed approach to optimized control of street trafficsignals

Distributed control of street traffic signals by real-time,collaborating and learning expert systems

A knowledge-based approach to urban traffic controlA semi-autonomous decentralized system for controlling street

traffic signalsA note concerning on-line decisions about permitted/protected

left-turn phasesHarmonization for omni-directional progression in urban

traffic controlKnowledge-based approach to urban traffic controlApplication-oriented distributed, real-time systems.

Linguistics, psychology, and the humanities

Some conjectures in Computational LinguisticsOn a heuristic search strategy in long-term memory networksA few steps toward Computer LexicometryMARSHA, the daughter of ELIZA — A simple program for

information retrieval in natural language

An excursion into Social and Cultural Anthropology byArtificial Intelligence — an automated discovery system toidentify rules for inheritance, succession, marriage, injunctionagainst incest and exogamy

Memory-based hypothesis formation: Heuristic learning ofcommonsense causal relations from text

Automatic rule discovery for field work in AnthropologyAlliances and social norms in societies of heterogeneous,

interacting agentsA system for human-like retrieval of legal information and

factsAn explanatory mechanism for déjà vu and related

psychological phenomenaA model-based theory for déjà vu and related psychological

phenomenaThe role of exact and non-exact associative memories in

human and machine information processingStudies on the behavior of an organism in a hostile

environmentAn Artificial Intelligence Technique for Information RetrievalAn Application in Medical Knowledge ProcessingAn automatic knowledge acquisition toolKinship structures revisitedOn an approach to the automatic evaluation of the subjects'

behavior in Roemer's Inkblot TestOn the automatic verification and validation of modelsSHRIF, a general-purpose system for heuristic retrieval of

information and facts, applied to medical knowledge processingSocial structures and the problem of coordination in intelligent

agent societies.

Miscellaneous applied areas

Sufficiency investigations in robotology — An example inApplied Cognitive Science

Pattern recognition and generalized production systems instrategy development

Implications of Artificial Intelligence for InformationRetrieval

Morph-fitting — An effective technique of approximationAn expert subsystem based on generalized production rulesA module to estimate numerical values of hidden variables for

expert systemsA note on the functional estimation of values of hidden

variables — An extended module for expert systemsOn automatic generation of descriptive and normative theoriesA heuristic approach to optimum experimental designA conceptual framework and a heuristic program for the

credit-assignment problemTwo theoretical issues concerning expert systemsA balanced view of Expert SystemsDistributed knowledge-based systems in manufacturing

Distributed planning control for manufacturingPerceiving and planning before acting — an approach to

enhance global network coherenceA model of law enforcement activities of the United States

Coast GuardMulti-agent planning and collaboration in dynamic resource

allocationDistributed goal-oriented dynamic plan revisionMulti-agent collaboration in time-constrained domainsAgent modelling in distributed intelligent systemsModels of and experiments with e-markets for electric utilitiesThe Automatic Generation of Empirically-Based Theories of

Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems.

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