About their problems. They try to find answers for their problems together. For example

TRENDS

How will society change in the next century? Debbie Kent looks at some ~ture trends.
Forecasting the future is a risky business. But that doesn't mean we can't say anything about the next decade. In fact, one trend is almost completely predictable: population growth. The population of the UK, currently just over 57 million, is expected to keep rising to hit 59 million by 2001. Most significant is how the structure of that 59 million will change. The number of 16 to 19-year-olds has been falling since the baby boom generation reached adolescence in the early 1980's, and it will stay low through the 90's and into the next century. On the other hand, the proportion of older people will grow. By 2001 more than 45% of us will be over 50.

Some implications for the next century are clear. Fewer school leavers and a workforce that is growing only slowly will have an impact on the labour market. Employers may have to look elsewhere to fill vacancies - to women with children and older people.

At the other end of the scale, the growth in the number of elderly people means a fresh look at the idea of retirement. For the first time most of us can expect to have 30 years of retirement to look forward to.

Although society will still be made up largely of conventional families, there is a growing trend for fewer stereotypical households: more homes will consist of single adults. Then there will be households split by divorce, mixed households of second marriages, and three generations living under one roof. The average household size is predicted to fall from 2.7 people to 2.4 people by 2001.

Finance is one of the areas that is likely to undergo a fundamental change between now and the year 2001. If full European monetary union takes place, we could routinely be using 'ECU' or some other denomination of Euro-wide currency even for our spending at home.

Will we be using money at all? The answer is almost certainly yes, for low-value transactions and for that small but intractable section of the population that does not have a bank account. But the cheque should be pretty much on the way out by 2001. According to Roger Taylor of Midland Payment Transmission Services, developers of payment card systems:

"Transactions will be primarily plastic-based but people won't carry as many credit cards.

So the walletful of plastic is likely to be replaced by a single multi-function card that will act as cheque book, credit card, cash dispenser and debit card. Haven^’t we got that already? The difference is that the 2001 version will be an

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'intelligent card' with a built-in memory. It will carry as much information about you as a personal organiser - details of bank accounts, credit ratings, insurance, salary - and will be able to pass that information on to anyone you choose to do business with.
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NUCLEAR POWER - A SAFE SOLUTION?
Ever since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, governments have been trying to stress that the atom has a peaceful as well as a warlike side. In early propaganda films, which were made to gain the support of the public round the idea of a nuclear research programme, we were shown pictures of a high speed train travelling around the world. It was said that the train was powered by the equivalent of the energy contained in a glass of water. And it was claimed that this energy, which was won by 'harnessing the power of the atom', would be cheap, efficient, clean, and above all, safe. Besides, men would not have to labour beneath the ground in dirty and dangerous conditions to win the coal which would fuel our industry. The nuclear power stations of the future would not cause a decrease in the world's natural resources since they did not depend on burning fossil fuels like coal or oil. Thus, our resources would last much longer.

It all took a lot longer to happen than predicted. The first disappointrnent, of course, was that a power station could not actually be fuelled with a glass of water. The power stations still had to be fuelled with radioactive and potentially dangerous substances which were won from the ground by accident-prone miners, just like coal. These substances had to be transported to the power stations by train in special containers. Many of the early objections and protest campaigns came from the inhabitants of villages through which such trains passed, as they feared that in the event of a collision the containers of radioactive substances would break and spill radiation on to surrounding houses and countryside. The railway authorities were fairly successful in reducing such fears and showing that the containers they used could never break, not even in a head-on collision.

Concern was almost never directed at the power stations themselves and we were assured that scientists had foreseen everything that could possibly go wrong and taken the necessary precautions. What the nuclear power station designers and engineers had not taken into account, however, was Murphy's Law, which states that if a thing can possibly go wrong, sooner or later it will. At Three Mile Island in the USA, and Windscale in the UK, accidents happened despite all precautions. Radiation spilt into the atmosphere and we heard for the first time of the China Syndrome - the dreadful possibility of a nuclear accident burning through the earth all the way to China.

This seemed to be quite a weak possibility until Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident so far. We saw pictures of a 'melt-down', where the entire core of the reactor becomes molten and uncontrollable, and also heard for the first time of a 'melt-through', where the radioactive mass melts through the earth's crust, and at the very least, contaminates the ground water

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of an entire river basin system, making thousands of square miles uninhabitable for decades and totally destroying the agriculture of an entire region.

The fact that it was not quite as catastrophic as what is described above is due to the incredible and heroic self-sacrifice of the Soviet fire-fighters who tunnelled beneath the molten mass, entering the radioactive zone, to build a shield of concrete beneath the power station and wall it off forever. In the meantime, the plume of radioactivity had risen high above western Europe and, with the rain, dropped, deadeningly, in Sweden. Europe and the world were faced with an ecological disaster which could be much greater than that caused by an accidental firing of a powerful military weapon. Suddenly, the 'peaceful uses of atomic energy' did not seem so peaceful any more.

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HOW TO STOP COMPUTER ABUSE
More and more, the operations of our businesses, governments, and financial institutions are controlled by information that exists only inside computer memories. Anyone clever enough to modify this information for his own purposes can reap substantial rewards. Even worse, a number of people who have done this and been caught at it have managed to get away without punishment. A recent Stanford Research Institute study of computer abuse was based on 160 case histories, which probably are just the tip of the iceberg. After all, we only know about the unsuccessful computer crimes. How many successful ones have gone undetected is anybody's guess.
For the last decade or so, computer programmers have concentrated on making it easy for people to use computer systems₁ Unfortunately, in some situations the systems are all too easy to use; they don't impose nearly enough restrictions to safeguard confidential information or to prevent unauthorized persons from changing the information in a file.
A computer system needs a sure way of identifying the people who are authorized to use it. The identification procedure has to be quick and convenient Besides, it should be so thorough that there is little chance of the computer being fooled by a clever imposter, who dishonestly pretends to be an authorized user. At the same time, the computer must not reject legitimate users. Unfortunately, no identification system currently in use meets all these requirements.
At present, signatures are widely used to identify credit-card holders, but it takes an expert to detect a good forgery. Sometimes even a human expert is deceived, and there is no reason to believe that a computer could do any better. A variation is to have the computer analyse a person's hand movements as he signs his name instead of analysing the signature itself. Advocates of this method claim that different persons' hand movements are sufficiently distinct to identify them. And while a forger might learn to duplicate another person's signature, he probably would not move his hand exactly the way the person whose signature he was forging did.

Photographs are also sometimes used for identification. But, people find it inconvenient to stop by a bank or credit-card company and be photographed. Companies might lose business if they made the pictures an absolute requirement. Also, photographs are less useful these days, when people frequently change their appearance by changing the way they wear their hair. Finally, computer programmes for analyzing photographs are still highly experimental.

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Cash-dispensing systems often use two identification numbers: one is recorded on a magnetic strip on the identification card, and the other is given to the card holder. When the user inserts his card into the cash-dispensing terminal, or the automatic money machine, he keys in the identification number he has been given. The computer checks to see that the number recorded on the card and the one keyed in by the user both refer to the same person. Someone who stole the card would not know what number had to be keyed in order to use it. This method currently is the one most widely used for identifying computer users.

For a long time, fingerprints have provided a method of positive identification. But they suffer from two problems, one technical and one psychological. The technical problem is that there is no simple system for comparing fingerprints electronically. Also, most methods of taking fingerprints are messy. The psychological problem is that fingerprints are strongly associated in the public mind with police procedures. Because most people associate being fingerprinted with being arrested, they almost surely would resist being fingerprinted for routine identification.

Voiceprints may be more promising. With these, the user has only to speak a few words into a microphone for the computer to analyse his voice. There are no psychological problems here. And technically it is easier to take and analyse voiceprints than fingerprints. Also, for remote computer users, the identifying words could be transmitted over the telephone. However, voiceprints still require more research. It has yet to be proved that the computer cannot be fooled by mimics. Also, technical difficulties arise when the voice is subjected to the noise and distortion of a telephone line.

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THE MIND AND THE BODY

A simple truth that should be self-evident is that an individual's personality is expressed through his body as much as through his mind. A person cannot be divided into a mind and a body. Despite this truth, all studies of personality have concentrated on the rnind as the determinant of identity and have neglected the body. The body of a person tells us much about his personality. How one holds himself, the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, and the spontaneity of his gestures tell us not only who he is but also whether he is enjoying life or is miserable and ill at ease.

A person enters therapy because he is not enjoying life. In the forefront or the background of his mind, he is aware that his capacity for pleasure has been diminished or lost. The apparent complaint may be depression, anxiety, a sense of inadequacy, and so on, but these are the symptoms of a deeper disturbance, namely, the inability to enjoy life. In every case it can be shown that this inability stems from the fact that the patient is not fully alive in his body and in his mind. This problem cannot be fully resolved, therefore, by a purely mental approach. It must be tackled on the physical and the psychological levels simultaneously. Only when a person becomes fully alive is his capacity for pleasure fully restored.

The principles and practices of bioenergetic therapy rest on the functional identity of the mind and the body. This means that any real change in a person's thinking and, therefore, in his behaviour and feeling, is conditioned upon a change in the functioning of his body. The two functions that are most important in this regard are breathing and movement. Both of these functions are disturbed in every person who has an emotional problem by chronic muscular tensions that are the physical counterpart of psychological conflicts. Through these muscular tensions, conflicts become structured in the body. When this happens, they cannot be resolved until the tensions are released. To release these muscular tensions, one must feel them as a limitation of self-expression. In other words, the body and the mind must work hand in hand to overcome the problem.
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