הוועדה המיוחדת לענייני מחקר ופיתוח מדעי וטכנולוגי, כנסת 15, פרוטוקול מספר 19, 1999-11-30 11:00

ענת מאור: אני רוצה לברך בברכת ברוכים הבאים, בחום רב, את המשלחת של חברי הפרלמנט והסנאט של מדינת צפון קרוליינה.

ענת מאור: אנחנו רואים בביקורכם ביקור עבודה חשוב מכל הבחינות.

ענת מאור: קודם כל, היחסים הטובים וההדוקים בין מדינת ישראל לבין ארצות-הברית במאבק למען דמוקרטיה, למען חופש, למען זכויות אדם, למען חיזוקה של מדינת ישראל כמדינה עצמאית, תרומתכם לקידום השלום.

ענת מאור: כל אלה לכבוד לנו, לחברי הכנסת, מעבר למחלוקות הפוליטית שקיימות אצלנו.

ענת מאור: אנחנו רואים בקידום המדע וטיפוחו, ובשיתוף הפעולה בכל נושא ההשכלה, הידע, המדע, התשתיות ומהפכת המדע בה ידועה ארצות-הברית כדבר מאוד פורה ומפרה את שני הצדדים.

הברכה הישראלית: אני חברת הכנסת ענת מאור, אני יושבת-ראש הוועדה, אני חברת סיעת מרצ.

הברכה הישראלית: ברקע שלי הייתי מנהלת בית-ספר, מחנכת כל השנים ומרצה באוניברסיטת בן-גוריון שבנגב.

הברכה הישראלית: נמצאים אתנו עוד מספר חברי כנסת וכל אחד יציג את עצמו ואז נשמח לשמוע עם מי אנחנו יושבים וניגש לדיון.

ויקטור בריילובסקי: Since then I was a professor at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Computer Science and my field is artificial intelligence and computer science.

ויקטור בריילובסקי: This year I made a great mistake of my life, I entered the Knesset and now I am working here.

ויקטור בריילובסקי: I am a member of the Knesset in Israel and I am a member of this committee of Science and Technology.

מיכאל איתן: MK Breilovsky told you that he was in prison in Russia, that he spent time in prison in Russia.

מיכאל איתן: I spent some time in a prison in North Carolina, yes I came to visit Jonathan Pollard and I spent a few hours there.

מיכאל איתן: He is imprisoned in the federal prison.

מיכאל איתן: I hope that we will shall broaden our cooperation and of course, I am an admirer of Beth Obertson, I met her a few times, heard about her and I appreciate very much the cooperation between North Carolina and Israel.

מיכאל איתן: I know that there are many difficulties, it is not so easy, we are speaking about a new route, about new disciplines, about innovations and it takes time and patience and you have to invest and invest and the fruits will come.

מיכאל איתן: I am sure about it, but it takes time.

מיכאל איתן: So, I hope that this meeting is another meeting in a series of meetings and that the cooperation will benefit both sides, I am sure about it and I look forward to strengthening this cooperation.

אליעזר כהן: אני רוצה להבליט במיוחד את העובדה שבראשי שתי המשלחות עומדות נשים ואני מעריך את זה במיוחד ואני אוהב את זה במיוחד.

ענת מאור: אני שמחה להעביר לג'יין פטרסון, ראש המשלחת שלכם, את רשות הדיבור, לומר דברי ברכה ולהציג לכם את חברי המשלחת.

ג'יין פטרסון: I would just like to briefly tell you who else is here today in the session if I can go around the table.

ג'יין פטרסון: We have Herb; Herb is our retired advisor for everything as I call this, retired executive in business in the United States in executive research.

ג'יין פטרסון: Herb has been very much involved with us in many of our efforts in the North Carolina Israel partnership, but Deutsch is Chairman of the Western Jewish Federation in North Carolina and also a member of the American Israeli Jewish Chamber of Commerce Board.

ג'יין פטרסון: Hope Williams is the President of the independent colleges and universities in North Carolina, such as the Duke University.

ג'יין פטרסון: She represents them in our State and manages the association for them.

ג'יין פטרסון: Barbara Levin, to my right, has been the head of our connect and see effort working with me in North Caroline in the Governor’s office.

ג'יין פטרסון: Senator David Weinstein is from the southEastern part of North Carolina.

ג'יין פטרסון: You may have heard that we have had a flood of water in North Carolina, similar to Noah’s flood where we have had water as high as 28 feet higher than the highest watermark in 500 years in certain parts of our State.

ג'יין פטרסון: David Weinstein is also representing the legislature in its negotiations of how to assist tobacco farmers who no longer can grow tobacco as well as they used to in the industry, buy out basically that has taken place in our country.

ג'יין פטרסון: His wife Caron is with him.

ג'יין פטרסון: Ron is one of the young older software companies in North Carolina, Global Software, which has been around probably 30 years.

ג'יין פטרסון: Harry Liemie is the Director of the Center for Flight Technology at the University of North Carolina, at Charlotte University.

ג'יין פטרסון: Charlotte, as you know is the second largest center in the United States now.

ג'יין פטרסון: It is now second in the US as a financial center.

ג'יין פטרסון: We have also Cathy Levinson who is our Executive Director in North Carolina, the counterpart to Dr.

ג'יין פטרסון: Hammi Tomieri here in Israel.

ג'יין פטרסון: I think I have covered everyone who is with us this morning, correct.

ג'יין פטרסון: I am sorry, the two members of our science and technology committee chairs, Senator Ercrives in the Senate and Joe Tolson from the House.

ג'יין פטרסון: We thought this morning that we would like you to let them talk with you about their activities in the Technology Committee in the House of the Senate and then I will be willing to talk to you about the NNGI Internet 2 and our vision 20/30 project that we are working on.

JOE TOLSON: We have got a long way to go, we have got a lot of challenges, but this is one of the things that Senator Terize and I have spent a lot of time talking about, to make sure that what we do, we do it in a manner that allows us to reach out to all levels of our people throughout the State.

JOE TOLSON: A majority of our State is ruled, so we have got a lot of work to accomplish this task.

JOE TOLSON: But this is one of the goals that we have with the work of our two committees in the House and the Senate to work from there.

JOE TOLSON: Now, one of our problems is attracting the industries into our rural areas, and so one of the things we are working on is to make sure we add the connectivity to the Internet, the infrastructure necessary to make sure that our citizens in the rural area have these opportunities.

JOE TOLSON: We see that with the growth of E-commerce and so far as a critical issue for us.

ERIC REIDS: My part of the State is very well connected.

ERIC REIDS: Indeed, we are one of the most connected communities in the nation.

ERIC REIDS: But our stay as a whole ranks in the bottom of all the states.

ERIC REIDS: So, you can imagine living in the area that I live in where everybody is talking about economic commerce.

JOE TOLSON: So, we are in the process now of trying to develop those processes, trying to get them online and we hope that by next May that we will be having some of these services ready to start being used by our citizens.

ERIC REID: You know, the government is lagging behind the private world and we want to catch up so that we are not, the float on that money was enough to irritate me.

ERIC REID: But there is no reason at all why I should not have been able to transact the complete thing over the Internet.

JANE PATTERSON: You need to understand though that the public libraries, the librarians have been very much opposed to that.

JANE PATTERSON: The librarians are very concerned about first amendment rights and issues like that.

JANE PATTERSON: But in our state, so far the public libraries have been required to use some kind of screening activities and some of the public libraries, the screening activities go from very young up to age 21 and beyond that, there are some computers that are accessible just to adults in the public libraries.

JANE PATTERSON: Recently, in some of the larger cities and actually in the rural areas, you can go to the public library and get a pen number, a personal identification number and you can sign on from home to the public library and get access to the digital library.

JANE PATTERSON: We hope to be able to have that all across the State in all the rural communities and the public schools as well.

JANE PATTERSON: I know I can go where I live and get a pen number and sign on as a citizen to that digital library and get access to these journals etc.

JANE PATTERSON: I would like to tell you briefly though about Internet 2, because I knew you had a question about that.

JANE PATTERSON: North Carolina is in the leadership in the whole of the United States in Internet 2.

JANE PATTERSON: We have the first giga pop in the country and that was four years ago and we now have the information highway in our State.

JANE PATTERSON: There is a backbone OC3, OC12 network.

JANE PATTERSON: It connects more than 18,000 wide area networks and about 172 interactive video sites.

JANE PATTERSON: Next up the line is a network that is a 2.4 giga byte network that is funded by Cisco, Ericson, IVM, also Nautal and the universities in the research triangle area are also members of that.

JANE PATTERSON: It is a production network.

JANE PATTERSON: I mean they actually are working on this network.

JANE PATTERSON: So, while we have some problems in the rural areas, at a university level we are well above the rest of the country, indeed most of the world in our very sophisticated networking capabilities.

JANE PATTERSON: The big issue for the universities is how can they take that Internet access to the dorm room and that is expensive.

JANE PATTERSON: How can they make it available in the dorm rooms?

JANE PATTERSON: So, as I have said, we are rich in many of our universities.

JANE PATTERSON: The universities don’t say that, our universities say that they are poor, but they are rich compared to what

JANE PATTERSON: In our State, in most States in the past, the copyright laws allow the university faculty member who developed a textbook; they own their copyright.

JANE PATTERSON: But for example, at Carnegie Mellon now, if you develop an Internet base class, Carnegie Mellon owns that copyright.

JANE PATTERSON: So there are some big issues that have to do with faculty members as it relates to the development of courses in ownership now.

HOPE WILLIAMS: A number of faculty will put their syllabus on the Internet, expect papers to be delivered over the computer.

HOPE WILLIAMS: A big issue for our colleges, especially for our smallest institutions is how to provide a computer for every student.

HOPE WILLIAMS: We have all had computer labs, but students are coming into colleges and universities now with very high expectations what colleges should have available in technology.

HOPE WILLIAMS: Not only the most up to date hardware and software, but essentially what we call a port for every pillow.

HOPE WILLIAMS: They don’t want to go to a computer laboratory, they want to be able to be in their room and be able to do it on their own.

HOPE WILLIAMS: But their concern is that no student can operate in the way they should as a college graduate without that knowledge and they don’t want the students who are financially needy to suffer.

HOPE WILLIAMS: So they provide it for everybody.

HOPE WILLIAMS: But it becomes a financial issue for the students who are financially needy.

HOPE WILLIAMS: Also, the thing that Jane mentioned, in terms of licensure is a big issue.

HOPE WILLIAMS: We can bring in now and provide courses over the Internet, certainly bring in courses over the Internet, but how you manage that in terms of licensure, to be sure that the quality of education meets certain standards.

HARRY LIEMIE: I am a member of our university’s committee on intellectual property and we are having an exceedingly interesting discussion about who owns the material that is developed?

HARRY LIEMIE: That discussion is still far from complete.

JANE PATTERSON: One other interesting fact about what Hope mentioned about Wake Forest University, which is the name of the university.

JANE PATTERSON: When they finish with their laptops they give them to the public schools, so the public schools each year, every two years and Forsythe County are getting laptops that the students have had when they turn over their laptops, which is the name of the university.

JANE PATTERSON: When they finish with their laptops they give them to the public schools, so the public schools each year, every two years and Forsythe County are getting laptops that the students have had when they turn over their laptops.

JOE TOLSON: I know that the officials at our local community colleges are eager to do so if the use justifies the expenditures of having personnel there to maintain, keep the equipment operational and so forth and so on.

ERIC REID: We are studying representative Tolson and I am studying what that would mean for the State as far as what would it take investment wise to do that?

JOEL TOLSON: We just in the past session approved the expansion of the services that the rural co-ops can offer.

JOEL TOLSON: So we are hoping that this is one thing they will look at as a way to expand their services to the rural areas.

JOEL TOLSON: That is why we received such a high vote in both the House and the Senate to prove this measure, because so many of our representatives and Senators are representatives of the rural area that they saw a need for these co-ops to be able to expand their services.

JANE PATTERSON: I just wanted to add one thing to what they are saying about the use of subsidies.

JANE PATTERSON: You can subsidize and get the service out there, but there has to be also, there was in the United States as well for telephone service a subsidy to poor families and that is called Lifeline and Linkup.

JANE PATTERSON: In the United States, if you meet certain requirements, such as you are eligible for food stamps, or you are eligible for services for welfare.

JANE PATTERSON: If you meet that requirement, you can in fact get a telephone, you get installation with a two years to pay for the installation interest free and you only have to pay $5.63 a month for telephone service.

__________: My question comes, I see us addressing the issue of rural areas and poverty and bringing this access to people who cannot necessarily afford what is happening in the hi-tech centers.

__________: My question then with that is, it seems to me what has happened technologically is that the streaming audio on video technology that is available today currently allows people anywhere technologically to see audio and visual lectures on educational programs from any university in the world anywhere, wherever they are.

__________: So, isn’t it possible that the answer is how to afford, provide high level education and communication to whether it is a Bedouin or a rural Carolinean maybe through the streaming technology that is beginning to break down the issue of walls of university and how far one is physically from the university.

__________: We may have to rethink where students are, as compared to where they are studying.

__________: That is the question I have addressed on these issues.

EMANUEL: If the Ministry of Science is issued proposals on Internet 2 research and Hamutal Me’iri from the Upper Galilee is giving us an excellent proposal and we are willing to support her, you know why?

EMANUEL: Because there is still a monopoly, which is called Bezek, which blocked the network, no any external user, apart from the academia is allowed to enter the network.

EMANUEL: You the MPs won’t support us in order to block, in order to influence the industry, the R

JANE PATTERSON: But what the US is doing, you could do with Bedouins, the US has now offered to communities in our country, a way to have community centers that would be open to folks who could go to that community center in a rural area, get on the Internet, even places to work a tele community working place they can work from close to there, and that has just been released this year by our Federal government.

JANE PATTERSON: It is a new project.

JANE PATTERSON: So you might want to take a look at that.

JANE PATTERSON: They are not giving a lot of money out, but it is not a huge sum of money that it takes to see some of this.

ERIC REID: Basically, my viewpoint is that we want to try to have economies throughout North Carolina that are vibrant, and our farmers, through technology over the years have been able to increase their yields without having to hire more people.

ERIC REID: So you have less people working in agriculture, where those people they are living in rural North Carolina are going to go if they don’t have a job in agriculture, they are going to move to my part of the State.

__________: As you heard, we are still in negotiation of how to connect the rest of the country to this backbone, since this is a national initiative and not just an academic one, and we are very concerned about the situation as it is now.

__________: The emotion of the point that Emanuel put here is part of this concern, because we are a year already within this project and we would like very much the industry and the R

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: The other point is, since the advanced technology allows kids to study together within the Us and Israel and the Europeans, South America, wherever, all over the world, there is no problem now regarding the technology to create joint projects where kids all over the world work together.

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: I mean there are problems, it is not a new issue altogether.

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: There are some initiatives in this direction.

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: I think we can carry it out and have a big problem, a very nice project where the kids in North Carolina or in the States in general, North Carolina can also communicate with other States in the US, Israel and other countries and also within Israel.

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: We can talk about the Arab students, the Jewish students, the Druze, you talked before I came about the Bedouins, working together, studying together without being connected to the wall of the classrooms.

HAMUTAL ME’IRI: Thank you.

RAFI HORIDOR: As to the Internet, there is a lot of activity; ADSL technology will be introduced by the beginning of next year.

RAFI HORIDOR: There will also be a public ATM network, which will enable high broad bent communication, business to business, etc.

RAFI HORIDOR: There is a large development in the content industry, the domain names are doubling every year and there is a new industry, which is around it.

ענת מאור: עם זאת היום אצלנו ההשקעה במחקר היא 2,6 מהתמ"ג.

ענת מאור: אנחנו נאבקים לחזור לשלושה אחוז ואף להגיע לשלושה וחצי אחוז כמו במדינות מתקדמות.

ענת מאור: אנחנו רוצים כועדה לשקוד על שיתוף פעולה הדוק יותר בין האקדמיה, שם מתבצע מחקר לשמו שהוא הכרחי, לבין המחקר התעשייתי ולבין המחקר הלאומי שהוא מחקר יזום.

ענת מאור: אנחנו רוצים לעבור יותר ויותר ממחקר צבאי.

ענת מאור: היינו מדינה עם חמישים שנות מלחמה וכרגע פנינו לשלום, וזה אני אומרת בשם כל המפלגות ואין כאן מחלוקות פוליטיות, כי הוויכוח הוא על איך אבל כולם רוצים להגיע לשלום.

ענת מאור: זה מחייב שינוי חברתי ושינוי במחקר.

ענת מאור: הרבה מאוד מההישגים היו בתחום התעשייה הצבאית ועכשיו נעביר אותם יותר ויותר לתעשייה רפואית ולמחקר חברתי.

ענת מאור: אלה יעדים שאנחנו עובדים עליהם ואני בטוחה שהפגישה הזאת תרמה גם לכם.

ענת מאור: נשמח מאוד להמשך שיתוף פעולה.

ענת מאור: תרשו לי להעניק שי צנוע בשם הכנסת ליושבת-ראש המשלחת שלכם ולעשות זאת בכל הלב.