There is a huge divide in this nation between digital immigrants and digital natives, it is said by many, one way or another. Maybe Candidate Obama can heal it.

The issue is that digital immigrants, who started using the Web, PCs, mobile phones etc. as adults, still have most of the power in the nation, while natives, who started using IT as toddlers, are the sweet spot and major influencers of the current market.

Some immigrants are madly trying to keep up with and communicate with the natives. Others are resistant.

Aedhmar Hynes, CEO of Text 100 International, a leading PR agency specializing in the tech industry, issued a gentle scolding last night to a gathering of communications types (journalists and PR/marketing folks) at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., whom she addressed as “immigrants.” She was probably right.

“Who would *want* to spend time in a virtual world?” one attendee decried during the Q&A session, after asking for a definition of Second Life, a fairly popular 3-D online virtual world.

Hynes’ talk was aimed at publicity folks, but the non-flacks in the audience listened closely too for trends and tidbits.

Digital immigrants grew up trusting institutions, trusting the media, she said (as an Irish immigrant to the United States in 1997, perhaps she missed the Watergate incident). Meanwhile, for digital natives, trust is eroding in institutions (even newspapers) while trust is growing in their peer group, she said.

So for natives, digital technologies such as mobile phones, online social networking and blogs, empower them to have a voice, to make choices and to get their information from peers.

The influence of online media on consumers is 70 percent and the rest goes to mainstream media — newspapers, TV and radio, Hynes said, but publicity tends to focus all its resources on the latter.

Her company encourages clients to get into the mix. Comment on blogs, use RSS to monitor what is said about you online. For the more adventurous, her agency would probably hold corporate PR’s hand while they create or participate in a machinima, a CGI animation rendered in real-time. (She showed a machinima her agency created to promote itself.)

Trends in digital communication, she said, include consumerization, which means consumers control the message (witness send-offs of the Dove evolution video as part of its campaign for real beauty video) and that’s a good thing; virtualization, which means we hang out and chat in virtual domains (Cisco’s virtual meetings); and visualization, which means we like to see who we’re on the phone with or see more on our phone (iPhones, Skype, quik.com videos like the one Scobleizer snagged and streamed of Michael Dell).

The new media audience wants participation, authenticity, connectedness, conversation, community and openness in real-time, she said.

For now, “it’s fair to say that the adoption rate [of digital PR platforms by corporations] is slow. Companies that are dealing with it fast are strongly in the consumer domain already,” Hynes said.

The “no. 1 headache is the concept of losing control [of the message] and the fear that that is creating,” she said. But that control was always an illusion, she said.

Since Hynes mentioned Twitter and it’s one of my guilty pleasures to send text messages about “what I’m doing now!” I posted to Twitter that Hynes had just mentioned it at the SIT talk.

I soon thereafter received this email notification: “Text 100 is now following you on Twitter.” I walked right into that one.

China and the International Olympics Committee are making extreme efforts of course to ensure a successful 29th Olympiad this summer in Beijing.

The efforts go beyond building stadiums and setting the stage for a mega-event watched worldwide.

For the past several days, the efforts have involved securing the Olympic torch against protestors.

Previously, efforts involved announcing a plan to eliminate traffic and shut down industry in Beijing to improve air pollution for athletes during competition.

Today, the latest word from Beijing is preparations by Chinese meteorologists to pre-drain the rain from clouds predicted to drench the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics there on Aug. 8.

Dozens of staffers will work to fire rockets and cannons containing silver iodide at approaching clouds to make them rain, pre-empting a 47 percent chance of precipitation during the ceremony. The chemical concentrates moisture to create rain. China claims to have succeeded in a similar effort to force rain to clear a wicked dust storm in 2004.

If the Chinese weather manipulation succeeds in August, it will surprise the U.S. National Research Council, which issued a report in 2003 stating that there was no convincing proof that so-called cloud seeding works.

But the Fresno-based Weather Modification Association has said the NRC’s report was faulty and held their standard for evidence too high.

As for human rights in China, things have gotten worse as a result of the impending Olympics, according to the Christian Science Monitor, which offered a good overview yesterday of the current human rights situation in the PRC.

It’s easy to get lost when you hear about the accelerated melting of ice at Antarctica. Who has been to Antarctica or even stared at it a long time on a globe’s under side? We hardly know what the continent looks like, let alone its shape or components — for the record, the big pieces are the West Antarctic sheet (with its tail the Antarctic Peninsula) and the humongous East Antarctic sheet. That’s all of Antarctica, right there. The Greenland ice sheet is the other biggie on Earth.
Recently, we learned that the Wilkins ice shelf (a part of the Antarctic Peninsula) is about to break off and the East Antarctic sheet is showing signs of melting, all a result of climate change.

So why is all this melting a problem? And what is the difference between an ice sheet and an ice shelf?

This article in the February issue of Scientific American cleared it all up for me. There are ice shelves, which jut out from Antarctica’s fringe and hang over the water. And then there are more massive sheets, which lie on top of bedrock and are like a huge cap on the continent. The shelves are buttressed by the sheets, but warming air temps are melting the shelves, thereby weakening the buttressing, so the shelves are calving off and the sheets are more likely to melt and even break away eventually. Warming air also is melting the sheets and broadening big lakes and rivers above and below the sheets, which acts like a lubricant and causes sheets to move around more swiftly and to weaken.

When the shelves and sheets weaken and break off into the ocean, sea level rises a lot. How much?

Here is what Robin Bell of Columbia University’s Earth Institute writes in SciAm:

“A third of the world’s population lives within about 300 feet above sea level, and most of the planet’s largest cities are situated near the ocean. For every 150 cubic miles of ice that are transferred from land to the sea, the global sea level rises by about a 16th of an inch. That may not sound like a lot, but consider the volume of ice now locked up in the planet’s three greatest ice sheets. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to disappear, sea level would rise almost 19 feet; the ice in the Greenland ice sheet could add 24 feet to that; and the East Antarctic ice sheet could add yet another 170 feet to the level of the world’s oceans: more than 213 feet in all. (For comparison, the Statue of Liberty, from the top of the base to the top of the torch, is about 150 feet tall.)

A list of biologists long enough to choke a horse has completed a new tree of life for animals, resolving the evolutionary relationships among all the major groups and suggesting some weird things about the origins of animals with well-developed tissues.

This was the surprise tissue finding — comb jellyfish (jellies with well-developed tissues) diverged from other animals even before the lowly sponge, which has no tissue to speak of.

Either comb jellies evolved their complexity independently from other animals or sponges became greatly simplified through the course of evolution, said study co-author Casey Dunn of Brown University.

If corroborated, “this would significantly change the way we think about the earliest multicellular animals,”  Dunn said. The results are detailed in the March 6 issue of the journal Nature.

These gigantic trees of life (this one is said to be the most comprehensive animal tree of life to date) require massive computer power to run algorithms and resolve huge matrices of data into the simplest and best explanation for evolutionary relationships. The animal tree demanded the power of more than 120 processors housed in computer clusters in labs around the globe.

The new tree also shows that millipedes and centipedes are more closely related to spiders than to insects. The pedes-spiders relationship shows it counts when you have a leg up on things.

A lot of grown-ups are packing up today as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting shuts down in Boston, but earlier in the six-day conference, the halls also were populated by a hordes of science-minded 4th graders.

Or they might have been 3rd graders, but anyhow, they were definitely about 9 years old and smarter than a lot of folks on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

The local school kids were here as part of the AAAS’s Public Science Day, and the session I visited was focused on educating some 300 students about spiders.

“Ew,” came the muffled reply from some of the pizza-chomping, juicebox-swilling children as AAAS’s Media Programs Director Bob Hirshon tried to introduce the topic of spiders above the lunchtime din.

But he quickly launched a Spider Trivia contest, and the kids’ competitive curiosity surged.  Test yourself on some of the questions most of the kids aced (they had multiple choice options to choose from, not shown here):

How many named spider species are currently known to scientists? (40,000)

What is the largest known spider species? (the male Goliath bird-eating spider)

Can spiders live underwater? (yes, consider the water spider of central and northern Europe.)

Can spiders live in the Arctic? (true, 70 spider species live in Greenland alone.)

How long do female tarantulas live? (25 or more years)

Is all spider venom harmful to humans (no. Most spider venom is harmless to humans.)

And finally, what was the name of the giant spider in Lord of the Rings? (Shelob)

Nobel laureate and virologist David Baltimore gave his Presidential Address last night as he officially opened the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement in Boston.

He mainly talked about why he chose the theme for this year’s meeting, “A Global Perspective on Science and Technology,” reviewing the need for solutions to poverty, improved access to clean water, economic development and clean energy for all the world’s people.

He joined the call for a debate by the presidential candidates on science and technology, during which they should have to discuss positions on such topics as alternative energy, stem cells and the fact that “abstinence is not the only way to protect people from HIV.”

He discussed the disappointments and challenges faced so far by scientists working to come up with an AIDS vaccine.

He mentioned his travels to developing countries that are working to advance economic development by investing in better training in science and technology in academia. “Demand excellence” was no. 1 on his list of “Baltimore’s Rules of Academic Development,” which ended with “academic freedom is crucial” (otherwise governments dictate the direction of science). He also urges new institutions to stay small and focused, and to grow slowly.

More excerpts from his comments, many of them quite pointed and political, can be found here.

He ended his comments on a personal note, saying that he has lived a “life of denial” since 2001, denying responsibility for the actions of his country. He then asked if he had “the right of denial,” noting such incidents as the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib.

Finally, he said he remained optimistic that our nation would begin to deal with global warming and that the “tide of religious-based anti-intellectualism is beginning to turn.”

There was plenty of applause, but no standing ovation.

Baltimore then introduced Paul Kagame, president of the Republic of Rwanda and the nation’s first democratically elected leader, who spoke about efforts to advance science and technology in his country as a central part of the plan to recover from the 1994 genocide. The United States is the nation’s role model, President Kagame said.

“Advancing science in the developing world is vital for creating an engaged, healthier and peaceful world,” he said. “Africa is no exception … and must improve science and technology to enhance our prospects for improving life.”

Kagame got a standing ovation.

For those of you still scratching your science-curious heads about whom to vote for in the presidential primaries, Physics Today has come to the rescue. You might not be a regular reader of the flagship publication of The American Institute of Physics or know that “it’s the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world, informing readers about science and its place in the world with authoritative features, full news coverage and analysis, and fresh perspectives on technological advances and ground-breaking research.”

In any case, check out their handy “click on the mugshot” overview on the candidates’ positions on science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. Someone went to a lot of trouble to assemble all this information.

And if you’re looking for a broader-issue, quicker answer, you might try out the 14-question “Select a Candidate 2008 quiz“ put out by WQAD-TV (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline — Illinois, of course). You might be shocked by the candidate that the software assigns as your best match. I was. It wasn’t Kucinich and it wasn’t Giuliani. That’s all I’m saying.

Angry,  hostile, Type A behavior, depressed … do you know anyone who *doesn’t* fit one of the psychological profiles linked to heart disease?

The latest out of USC — chronic anxiety.

Mike Gravel was very chatty. John Edwards’ rep provided thoughtful replies. Bill Richardson’s rep emailed three words: yes, yes, no.

Those were the only meaningful responses to LiveScience’s modest attempt to survey the presidential candidates’ opinions on three hot-button science policy topics of the day — federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, federal action on global warming and the teaching of creationism in public schools.

We’re not known for our political reporting, and we suspect the smash-up of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary with the New Year has erased the ability of many campaign offices to answer some media requests. And there are the candidates’ Web sites:

Joe Biden has an entire page of information on national policy action he’d take on global warming.

Chris Dodd has an energy plan that acknowledges climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

Duncan Hunter’s opposition to embryonic stem cell research is noted here and Mike Huckabee’s is here.

John McCain’s more nuanced position on stem cells can be read here and his approach to limiting carbon emissions is here.

Barack Obama sees climate change as one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.

Fred Thompson talks about reducing carbon emissions here.

And while Hillary Clinton’s campaign never got back to us, she had put out a detailed science-friendly policy agenda a few months ago.

Still, the scarcity of direct replies to our survey was telling … of something. (For details on candidates’ positions on space exploration, see our Space.com story.)

Also, did Dennis Kucinich and Duncan Hunter go through a scrambler? The former’s slogan is “Strength Through Peace.” The latter’s is “Peace Through Strength.”

Anyhow, Edwards said he supports stem cell research and federal funding for it, and respects scientists and the scientific method, “so I believe that policy should be science driven and that science shouldn’t be politics driven.”

The American people should halt global warming and achieve energy independence, Edwards said. He supports carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emission caps starting in 2010 to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and by at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

As for creationism and evolution, Edwards thinks local school boards should decide what is taught in their schools, but said “I personally agree with the theory of evolution and believe it should be taught in our schools.”

Richardson said “yes” for stem cell funding, “yes” for federal action to slow down global warming and “no” to the teaching of creationism in public schools as part of the science curriculum.

Gravel supports federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. He also supports a carbon tax and would invite other nations to do the same so all nations could pool the resources to create a global institute to get the world off carbon fuels in a decade.

As for creationism in the schools, Gravel says: “Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial … My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.”