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Princeton in the News
April 12, 2000
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HIGHLIGHTS
The New York Times
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
April 11, 2000, Tuesday, Late Edition - FinalHEADLINE: Author's First Book Wins Pulitzer for Fiction; 3 Journalism Prizes to Washington Post
BYLINE: By FELICITY BARRINGERJhumpa Lahiri, 33, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction yesterday for her first book, a collection of stories evoking the isolation and disconnection of South Asian immigrants in America.
Ms. Lahiri, who won for "Interpreter of Maladies" (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin), was the second immigrant to win a national fiction award in five months. In November, Ha Jin, a Pulitzer finalist from China, won a National Book Award for his novel "Waiting." …
POETRY
C. K. WILLIAMS
"Repair"Mr. Williams, a New Jersey native, lives part of the year in Paris and teaches at Princeton University. Known for his long, Whitmanesque sentences and his documentary style, he can be ruthless, even cruel, in his pitiless contemplation of the world around him. The subjects of his early work were politics, the Vietnam War, the horrors of the nuclear age. But in recent years, his poems have become more personal and introspective. In the poem "Archetypes," Mr. Williams writes about a sleeping woman who stirs in her dreams and rises up, like an animal, to her hands and knees.
Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings; it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature, then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees, and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face, until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away, forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.
NOTE: Other news stories on the Pulitzer Prizes appear below.
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society
April 12, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: US must help save elephants
BYLINE: Andrew Dobson and Renee Kuriyan
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.With little notice, the international ivory trade has quietly reopened, reawakening a threat to the world's remaining elephant populations.
But the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Nairobi this week should reinstate the ban on ivory trade. And this would require US support to join some African countries in rejecting a narrow approach to conservation.
Between 1979 and 1989, poaching for ivory halved Africa's elephant population from 1.3 million to 609,000. Responding to predicted imminent elephant extinction, the 1989 CITES conference agreed to ban the ivory trade. Elephant poaching almost ceased. Unfortunately, the poverty of the region led some African leaders to seek easy money through the trade. Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's blunt formulation of the notion that "in order for a species to stay, it must pay its way" set the tone for the 1997 CITES conference, which reopened the trade in ivory.
The reopening of trade is leading to a renewed ecological crisis. In particular, animals with slow population rates like elephants are susceptible to over-exploitation. This has been evident since 1997 when the CITES secretariat allowed a one-time sale of 50 tons of ivory by Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia to Japan, where consumers demand ivory for ornaments.
As was expected, this caused elephant poaching to increase in Africa and India. …
*Andrew P. Dobson is professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. Renee Kuriyan is a master's degree candidate in public affairs at Princeton.
OTHER HEADLINES
FORBES
Copyright 2000 Forbes, Inc.
April 17, 2000HEADLINE: Rocket Man
BYLINE: Doug DonovanHIGHLIGHT: A Dallas banker thinks he has a shot at building a successful satellite-launching company.
IN THE MIDDLE OF A WINDSWEPT Texas prairie on a recent morning, Andrew Beal's dream -- and his money -- is about to go up in flames. And he couldn't be happier. This is his chance to prove he hasn't completely lost his mind by spending more than $200 million of his own money to deliver satellites into orbit.
Standing a few fields over from grazing cows, at an old naval testing facility, Beal waits anxiously with some 500 people -- friends, family, employees and space industry officials -- to watch the testing of a huge and innovative rocket engine. …
It's just the second stage of a three-stage engine that will eventually power Beal's rockets. …
Beal is trying to pull off another anatomical feat: coming up with a "simpler" proof of Fermat's last theorem. The 17th-century French mathematician's hypothesis went unproven until a Princeton University professor took a whack at it three years ago. Beal hasn't produced a proof, but he has come up with his own oddball conjecture, (see sidebar). He's offering a $75,000 prize, to be given out by the American Mathematical Society, to anyone who can prove it. This could be tougher than launching a profitable rocket firm. …
BusinessWorld
Copyright 2000 BusinessWorld Publishing Corporation
April 13, 2000, ThursdayHEADLINE: Calling a Spade ... Prescribing the wrong medicine
BYLINE: Solita Collas-MonsodThe other day, I watched as Horst Koehler (or Kohler, depending on who's spelling it), the newly elected IMF managing director, was being interviewed live over CNN in its regular Q and A program hosted by Riz Khan.
He frankly didn't sound very knowledgeable about the institution, but then again it could be because he was nervous, or because he wasn't too articulate in English, or even because he deliberately chose not to answer the interviewer's questions directly. After all, as head of the European Development Bank, his position before Germany maneuvered him to be in the IMF post, he would have been in constant contact with the IMF, and thus fairly familiar with its policies. …
I was definitely not impressed by his logic in defending the IMF's actions during the Asian Crisis (I'm not even sure why he wanted to defend them). The IMF, he said, must have been doing something right because the countries in crisis are now out of the woods - or words to that effect.
Joseph Stiglitz makes mincemeat out of that argument. He will be remembered as the chief economist and vice-president of the World Bank (now resigned - people say that US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asked for his head) who blew the whistle on the kind of economic medicine the IMF was dispensing to the countries during the Asian crisis. …
Stiglitz has more to say about this: "Quite frankly, a student who turned in on the IMF's answer to the test question 'What should be the fiscal stance of Thailand, facing an economic downturn?' would have gotten an F." Why is this? Partly because, he says IMF staff frequently consists of third-rank students from first-rate universities.
"Trust me," he says, "I've taught at Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, Yale University and Princeton University, and the IMF almost never succeeded in recruiting any of the best students." …
USA TODAY
Copyright 2000 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 13, 2000, ThursdayHEADLINE: Disease led O'Neill on long journey into night Booze not to blame, autopsy analysis says
BYLINE: Rita RubinEugene O'Neill, whose deteriorating health forced him to stop writing plays a decade before his death in 1953, succumbed from complications of a rare, degenerative brain disorder, not alcoholism or Parkinson's disease as is widely believed, says a report out today.
When O'Neill died of pneumonia at age 65, his wife, Carlotta, asked that an autopsy be performed "because I wanted to know what in the name of God was the matter with this man I had nursed so long," says the report in The New England Journal of Medicine. …
For the last 12 years of his life, Price writes, O'Neill suffered from cortical cerebellar atrophy (CCA) of unknown origin. While O'Neill's thinking ability remained intact, the part of his brain that controlled muscle tone, speech, posture and the ability to swallow or write with a pen or pencil had withered. He was virtually bedridden the last few months of his life. …
Africa News
2000 Africa News Service, Inc.
April 12, 2000HEADLINE: Eritrea; President Isaias Winds Up Visit to US
BYLINE: Embassy of Eritrea (Washington, DC)Washington - President Isaias Afwerki confirmed that Eritrea will submit its detailed views on the implementation of the OAU peace package in the coming few days.
This is in accordance with the OAU decision to open the Technical Arrangements, originally presented to both sides as a "take it or leave it" document last August, for amendment by both sides. Eritrea expects the OAU to subsequently call for proximity talks in which Eritrea will participate, the president underlined.
Eritrea's offer of the use of the port of Assab to enable delivery of humanitarian assistance to famine victims in Ethiopia was reiterated by President Isaias. Ethiopia discontinued use of the ports and began bombing them following their initiation of the border conflict.
President Isaias was in Washington DC, New York City and Princeton NJ on a private visit from 5-11 April. He came to the country at the invitation of Princeton University and the Council on Foreign Relations. …
Business Wire
Copyright 2000 Business Wire, Inc.
April 12, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: Hungry Minds.com's Bold New Ad Campaign Challenges Traditional Learning; Unique Ads Urge Universities To View Students As Customers
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2000
With the launch of its new Web site, Hungry Minds.com (tm), the online learning marketplace, today announced a new advertising campaign that seeks to initiate dialogue about the benefits of for-profit learning versus traditional education. The campaign, which begins today, highlights Hungry Minds.com's innovative, customer-focused approach to learning by challenging traditional educators and institutions to treat their students like valued customers. The company also officially unveiled its newly redesigned Web site today. (See separate release, "Hungry Minds.Com Pioneers Customer-Focused Education By Launching New Web Site," April 12, 2000.)
"Critics have said that for-profit learning companies like Hungry Minds.com will negatively affect the quality of education," said Stuart Skorman, founder and CEO of Hungry Minds.com. "We disagree. We think that companies like ours will bring broader choice to the customer and therefore improve the quality of education. In fact, we are so confident in the quality of our learning experiences, that we offer a money-back guarantee on every course on our site -- something virtually unheard of in education." …
In addition to national print advertisements in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Hungry Minds.com ads will appear in over 20 top college newspapers, directly appealing to college and university professors. Because seasoned academics are ideal candidates to be Subject Experts, Hungry Minds.com is also leveraging its ad campaign to raise awareness and specifically reach this target audience for recruiting. …
Hungry Minds.com advertisements can be located over the next three weeks in the following colleges and universities nationwide: … Princeton University
The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright 2000 The News and Observer
April 12, 2000 WednesdayHEADLINE: On Campus - University People
Duke UniversityJanet Smith Dickerson, vice president of student affairs at Duke since 1991, will become vice president for campus life at Princeton University starting July 1. Dickerson took an active role in creating a safer campus environment through her work on alcohol policy and education and on wellness and mental health, according to Duke President Nan Keohane. One of Dickerson's other priorities was securing space for the women's center. At Princeton, Dickerson will oversee the office of the dean of undergraduate students, the department of athletics, University Health Services and the office of the dean of religious life and the chapel. …
PR Newswire
Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
April 12, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: Schools to Leave Direct Lending for Sallie Mae; Company Establishes New and Expanded Relationships With Colleges and Universities
DATELINE: RESTON, Va., April 12"Sallie Mae is now seeing the benefits of offering the most comprehensive product set in the industry."
Sallie Mae (NYSE: SLM) today announced that it has established significant new and expanded relationships with colleges and universities nationwide.
Schools leaving the Federal Direct Student Loan Program (FDSLP) for the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) include: Austin College, Sherman, Texas; Emerson College, Boston, Mass.; Manchester College, North Manchester, Ind.; The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, N.J.; St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y.; and University of Dallas, Irving, Texas.
Counting these schools, 41 colleges and universities have left Direct Lending for Sallie Mae loan programs. For Sallie Mae, this represents more than $250 million in new student loan volume for the 2000-2001 academic year.
Thirty of the 41 former Direct Lending schools will use Sallie Mae's Internet-based loan delivery system, Laureate(R). With Laureate, these schools will now be able to offer their students complete online education loan application, approval and funding.
"Sallie Mae is now seeing the benefits of offering the most comprehensive product set in the industry," said Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, executive vice president, Sallie Mae. "With Laureate, our customized private loan programs and our College Answer(R) Service, we provide solutions that meet the needs of all types of higher education institutions -- traditional or multi-campus schools."
The company also has received recent commitments from many FFELP schools to use Laureate for the 2000-2001 academic season, including: Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, N.J.; Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pa.; Keystone College, La Plume, Pa.; Musicians Institute, Hollywood, Calif.; Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.; The University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Wash.; and Villanova University School of Law, Villanova, Pa. …
PR Newswire
Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
April 12, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: IPnetwork.com Acquires Licensoft, Inc.; Web-Based Intellectual Property Technology to Track IP Licenses And Revenues
DATELINE: NEW YORK, April 12
IPnetwork.com, the premier intellectual property (IP) marketplace on the Internet, announced today the acquisition of Licensoft, Inc., a leading developer of IP licensing management software. IPnetwork.com CEO Christine Hearst Schwarzman stated that Licensoft's technology, which will be renamed IPLicenseTracker(TM), reinforces IPnetwork.com's position as the most comprehensive site for IP transactions and services on the Internet by adding intellectual property license tracking capabilities to the company's online IP licensing, sales, database searching and valuation services.
"For the first time, licensors and licensees will now have a comprehensive rights management and tracking tool combined with an Internet marketplace," said Ms. Schwarzman. "IPLicenseTracker(TM) provides a uniquely efficient way to track contracts, terms, revenues and performance measures. It also provides a new means to manage the product approval process. IPLicenseTracker(TM) will lower costs and speed the time to market for licensed products."
Under the terms of the agreement, IPnetwork.com will acquire the complete assets of Licensoft, including its current client base, which includes Priceline.com, Walker Digital, Honeywell Intellectual Properties, The Girl Scouts of America and such notable academic institutions as Princeton University, University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University and Indiana University.
"Before Licensoft," said Robin Frink of Princeton University, "managing trademark licenses was done using a slow, cumbersome and inefficient process. Licensoft provided us with a user-friendly system that gave us everything we needed to streamline our licensing operations and maximize licensing revenue -- all automated at desktop." …
U.S. Newswire
Copyright 2000 U.S. Newswire, Inc.
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: President Clinton Honors Outstanding Young Scientists
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 11President Clinton today named 60 young researchers as recipients of the fourth annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. The researchers will receive their awards tomorrow in a White House ceremony.
These awards, established by President Clinton in February 1996, embody the high priority the Administration places on producing outstanding scientists and engineers ready to contribute to all sectors of the economy. Eight Federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious young scientists and engineers who will broadly advance the science and technology that will be of the greatest benefit to fulfilling the agencies' missions. …
Department of Defense
Dr. Gennady Shvets, Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Web site dedicated to job-searching 20-somethings set to unveil
BYLINE: By CATHERINE IVEY, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: BOSTONShortly before Jennifer Floren's younger sister graduated from Princeton University, she called Jennifer in a panic about where to find a job.
"She said, 'I've gotta talk to all your friends!'," Floren recalled. "She was trying to figure out what was out there. Basically she wanted my Rolodex."
Floren, 28, is launching a Web site today that she thinks might have saved her sister some anxiety. The site, located at www.experience.com, focuses exclusively on the job needs of 18- to 29-year-olds. …
Floren's site, based in Boston, builds on a database created from the merger of two career software companies, Ivy Recruiting, and Crimson Solutions, to form experience inc. Floren started Ivy Recruiting not long after helping her sister, Melissa, find a job with a financial services company in Denver. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Pulitzer Prize winners in brief
BYLINE: By The Associated PressThe 2000 Pulitzer Prizes for Arts:
POETRY
Charles Kenneth Williams, "Repair"Charles Kenneth Williams received the poetry Pulitzer for a collection titled "Repair," meditations on hurt and healing that touch on topics including the Holocaust and American race relations.
The 63-year-old Williams, who was born in Newark, N.J., teaches creative writing, poetry and dramatic adaptation and translation at Princeton University.
The poet, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959, will shortly publish a memoir called "Misgivings," about his family and growing up in Newark.
Williams' "Flesh and Blood" (1987) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and "The Vigil" (1996) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. …
QUOTE: "They were very happy." - Poetry prize winner Charles Kenneth Williams in his class at Princeton University, where students applauded him. "I'm a little speechless. It feels nice."
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 2000 The Atlanta Constitution
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Playwright Margulies among Pulitzer winners
BYLINE: Staff reports and news services
DATELINE: New YorkPlaywright Donald Margulies, twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the drama award Monday for his off-Broadway play ''Dinner With Friends.'' Three other past finalists were also winners: historian David M. Kennedy, biographer Stacy Schiff and poet C.K. Williams, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University. …
Business Wire
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Former Christie's Asian Art Specialist Joins Circline Team
DATELINE: NEW YORK, April 11, 2000www.circline.com, Circline, the first online dealer-driven marketplace for art and antiques, announced the appointment of Michael Hughes as Circline's new Director of Asian Art.
Appointing Hughes underscores Circline's commitment to expanding its inventory of Asian art. Circline already boasts partnerships with some of the world's leading Asian art dealers, including Ralph Chait, Nicholas Grindley, Sam Fogg, Sydney Moss, Ltd., Linda Wrigglesworth, Martyn Gregory, MD Flacks and John Eskenazi, Ltd. …
While at Christie's, Hughes was responsible for such important sales as The Nanking Shipwreck; The Piccus Collection of Annamese Ceramics; Classical Chinese Furniture from the Renaissance Museum; Treasures of the Tang; The Mack Collection and The Rachelle R. Holden Collection. He has been published in Apollo, Arts of Asia, Oriental Art, Elle Decor, The Antique Collector and Antique Collecting, among others, and is currently writing a book on the Princeton University Museum's Chinese Snuff Bottle Collection. …
The Gazette (Montreal)
Copyright 2000 Southam Inc.
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Unknown riches on McGill's shelf: Rare volume of etchings by Piranesi sat, its value ignored, for 80 years
BYLINE: JOEL YANOFSKYFor most of the last century, a treasure remained hidden in plain sight in the stacks of McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections library.
The recently rediscovered volume, Opere Varie, published in 1760 or 1761, is the work of the influential artist, archeologist and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi and is one of only three copies of the second edition, according to Myra Nan Rosenfeld.
''The other two copies are at Princeton University and the British Museum. And McGill's copy of the Opere Varie is the only one to have the first version of Carceri, one of Piranesi's most famous works,'' said Rosenfeld, who is scholar-in-residence at McGill. …
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 2000 Times Mirror Company
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: TIMES WRITER WINS PULITZER; POST WINS 3
BYLINE: DAVID SHAW, TIMES STAFF WRITERJ.R. Moehringer, a Times national correspondent based in Atlanta, won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing Monday for his evocative portrait of an isolated river community in Alabama where descendants of slaves live on the land of their ancestors. …
Drama, Fiction, Music Also Honored
The Pulitzers are awarded annually by Columbia University in New York and include 14 prizes in journalism and seven in the arts. This year's arts winners: …
* C.K. Williams, in poetry, for "Repair" (W.W. Norton & Co.). Williams teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
The Morning Call (Allentown)
Copyright 2000 The Morning Call, Inc.
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: VALLEYDAWGS HAVE THE EIGHTH PICK IN TODAY'S USBL DRAFT
BYLINE: The Morning Call and wire reportsThe Pennsylvania ValleyDawgs are considering using the eighth pick in today's United States Basketball League draft to select Penn State's Jarrett Stephens, Temple's Quincy Wadley or Villanova's Malik Allen, team officials said Monday. …
Track and field
Moravian College's Heidi Wolfsberger won the 1500 meter run at Princeton University's third annual Sam Howell Memorial Invitational Meet clocking a time of 4:38.2.
Her time is an automatic qualifier for the NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships to be staged near Chicago next month.
Wolfsberger held off Princeton's Holly Huffman once on the backstretch and again in the final 100 meters to win the race by just over a second. …
National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: TALK OF THE NATION
April 11, 2000HEADLINE: THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS PROCESS AND WHAT IT TAKES TO GET INTO COLLEGE TODAY
ANCHORS: JUAN WILLIAMSJUAN WILLIAMS, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams. This time of year is key for high school seniors. Adolescent joy or dejection will come in the form of a letter. If the letter is fat, it will hold information about dorms, campus life, financial aid and a course catalog. If the letter is thin, it will betray the rejection note held inside. This hour on TALK OF THE NATION, we're going to talk about getting into college, the test prep courses, the SATs, the ACTs, the grades, the campus visits, the interviews and the infamous dreaded college essay. …
WILLIAMS: Well, when you say it's a painful process, now I know at your school, which has, I think, the highest number of National Merit Scholars in the country, there must be intense competition to get into the very best schools.
Ms. BLOOMQUIST: You're absolutely right, Juan. That is exactly what happens. Our students tend to cluster around 10 or 12 of the most selective schools, and we had, oh, a hundred students apply to Princeton and 96 to Harvard. That's almost quarter of the class. So that is guaranteed to have some disappointment attached to it, as capable as our students are and as many are in the nation. …
The New York Times
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Halo Reveals Remains of Milky Way's Galactic Snacks
BYLINE: By JAMES GLANZAstronomers have long suspected a dark secret about Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way. They have even seen other galaxies engaging in the macabre behavior at the core of this secret. But without irrefutable proof, astronomers refused to admit that it might be commonplace closer to home. Now, they have that proof.
The Milky Way is a cannibal. It consumes other galaxies and makes their stars its own.
The evidence comes from some of the first data to emerge from the multi-institutional collaboration called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an $80 million project that will eventually observe and categorize hundreds of millions of celestial objects over a quarter of the entire sky. Faint stars that the Sloan collected in two patches of the sky have revealed, in effect, the partly digested remains of two small galaxies that the Milky Way's gravity grabbed, perhaps a billion or two billion years ago. …
The data were assembled from observations of two patches of sky, one in the northern galactic plane and one in the south, made by the Sloan Survey's automated telescope at Apache Point, N.M., said Dr. Brian Yanny, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a Sloan collaborator.
The telescopic images included a few million stars all told. But within that sample, the images revealed elongated clumps of hot objects called A stars. The northern clump contained about 2,000 A stars and the southern clump about 1,000. The northern clump also turned out to be traced by another kind of star, the blinking variable stars called RR Lyraes, said Dr. Zeljko Ivezic, an astrophysicist who is a Sloan collaborator at Princeton University.
Both types of star have a special property: Their intrinsic brightness is approximately known, so their distance from Earth can be estimated from their apparent brightness on the sky. That knowledge allowed the Sloan astronomers to reconstruct the three-dimensional shapes of the clumps.
"They're very diffuse and elongated," Dr. Yanny said, or roughly cigar shaped, 15,000 light-years wide and 60,000 light-years long. They no longer look like little galaxies, he said, because "they've been disrupted by the gravitational potential" of the Milky Way -- partly digested, in less clinical language.
Such faint groupings of stars can be seen only using a vast survey like the Sloan, Dr. Ivezic said. He added that the precise way in which the former galaxies were being torn to pieces could reveal the distribution of a mysterious, nonluminous type of matter called dark matter in the halo. "That will constrain very strongly how the halo is built," Dr. Ivezic said. …
The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 2000 The Providence Journal Company
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Stuff - Smarts beat schooling
If you think going to an elite college is crucial to your financial success, think again.
Researchers from Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation reviewed the earnings of people who were accepted at top colleges in 1976 - most of them Ivy League schools - but chose instead to go to less selective colleges.
Twenty years later, those graduates had a slightly higher average salary than a group of their peers who went to the selective colleges. The difference was $77,700 a year vs. $76,800 a year.
The study involved 14,239 graduates and 30 colleges. The average freshman SAT score was 1,200 at the selective schools, and 1,000 at the less selective ones.
The study, released this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, reached this conclusion: If you're smart enough to get into an Ivy League school, you'll probably do well no matter where you wind up going to college.
The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright 2000 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
APRIL 11, 2000, TUESDAYMONEYBAG
BYLINE: Arthur M. LouisQ: In your column a while back you compared mutual funds and trusts that track the stock market indexes, and suggested that trusts offer certain advantages over funds. I'm having trouble finding more information about these trusts. My discount broker can't or won't help me, and a book I bought by a Princeton University professor mentions only index funds, not trusts. Can you offer any further information?
A: Most of the index-tracking trusts are traded on the American Stock Exchange. Take a look at their Web site, at www.amex.com. Click on the prompt for "Index Shares," then follow other prompts that will help you learn more about a broad assortment of trusts, including those that follow the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard & Poor's 500 index, the Nasdaq 100 index and various sub-indexes, such as the S&P Utilities and S&P Energy.
I like trusts better than funds because they offer greater flexibility. They trade as stocks, so you can move in and out during the day and sell them short -- something you can't do with funds.
Also, they charge small management fees -- generally less than 0.2 percent of the trust assets annually. Some -- though not all -- index funds charge upward of 1 percent annually.
When I wrote the earlier column touting index trusts, one reader disputed my analysis, pointing out that you must pay brokerage commissions to buy and sell trust shares. While I should have pointed that out myself, I don't think it is much of a drawback in an era when several online discount brokers charge only $5 to $10 per trade. A large management fee probably will hurt you a lot more.
Scripps Howard News Service
Copyright 2000 Scripps Howard, Inc.
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Texas-Aetna deal could set national standard for patient care
BYLINE: MARY DEIBELSettlement of the Texas lawsuit charging Aetna, the nation's No. 1 health insurer, with bribing doctors to hold down costs could set a nationwide standard for how managed-care companies deal with patients and the physicians who treat them.
"If this agreement brings about quick review, independent review of managed-care decisions, it could bring about 90 percent of what's needed by way of reform," said health-care expert Henry Aaron of Washington's Brookings Institution.
Analysts said the settlement could be the model for reforms in other states and the federal government. Congress and President Clinton are currently wrestling over a patients' bill of rights. …
In the end, "patient rights and lawsuit settlements come down to the terms of the contract: HMOs don't practice medicine, they practice payment, and what's needed is an appeals system that works," said Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt.
"Whenever a third party is paying, medical treatment is never 100 percent right or wrong, black or white, because 25 percent of medicine falls into a gray zone. But there are better ways to make sure the insurance coverage that's been agreed to gets delivered in ways that take account of the urgency of treatment needed."
University Wire
Copyright 2000 Daily Skiff via U-Wire
April 11, 2000SECTION: COLUMN
HEADLINE: Women's accomplishments, rights should be remembered
BYLINE: By David Becker, Daily Skiff
SOURCE: Texas Christian U.
DATELINE: Fort Worth, TexasIs female chauvinism dead? Recently feminists throughout the United States met in Baltimore, Md., to talk about the rights and fights of women. The militant outcry of the feminist movement may have subsided in recent years as women have made some great strides in being recognized for their abilities.
There are so many women to admire. Some preach in our churches, some teach in our classrooms and some reach new heights in medicine, philosophy, business and science. Many women are mothers who create wonderful homes and raise great kids. There are so many remarkable ladies who exemplify what anthropologist Ashley Montagu said is the "natural superiority of women." …
Good teachers are the backbone of this nation. On this campus there is a legacy of wonderful educators. On the wall of the Mary Couts Burnett Library is a gallery of honored college educators, including Betsy Colquitt, Toni Craven and most recently, Linda Hughes.
I admire a young high school teacher, Emily Moore. Moore graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an incredible resume of accomplishments and honors. After successfully completing her student teaching, a job interviewer told Moore: "You have such a good degree. Why waste it on teaching?" The interviewer was suggesting that Moore could receive much more money and prestige with her Ivy League degree. Moore replied, "Who would you rather have teaching your children?" Students should have the best, the brightest and the most enthusiastic people teaching in our schools. Education is not a dead-end career. It is consequential to the future of the world. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Post Wins Pulitzer for Public Service; Kosovo Photo Coverage, Style's Allen Also Honored
BYLINE: Peter Slevin , Washington Post Staff WriterLed by Katherine Boo, who mapped the misery and neglect of hundreds of mentally retarded District residents, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize board's gold medal for public service yesterday. It was the second consecutive year that the newspaper has been awarded the prestigious medal for coverage of the city's troubles. …
The Pulitzer board at Columbia University also awarded seven prizes in arts and letters. Playwright Donald Margulies, author of the off-Broadway play "Dinner With Friends," won the drama award. David M. Kennedy won the history prize for his study of the Depression. C.K. Williams, a Princeton University writing professor, won for poetry. [Details on arts and literature awards appear in the Style section.] …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
April 10, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: Princeton University lecturer wins Pulitzer
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.Newark-born poet and lecturer Charles Kenneth Williams received the poetry Pulitzer for a collection titled "Repair," meditations on hurt and healing that touch on topics including the Holocaust and American race relations.
Williams, 63, was teaching a class at Princeton University when he learned he had won.
His class applauded him.
"They were very happy," he said. "I'm a little speechless. It feels nice."
He teaches creative writing, poetry and dramatic adaptation and translation at Princeton. The poet lives half of the year in Princeton and the other half in Paris. …
Business Week
Copyright 2000 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
April 10, 2000HEADLINE: THE POWER OF SMART PRICING
BYLINE: By Peter Coy in New York
HIGHLIGHT: Companies are fine-tuning their price strategies-and it's paying offHow did Ford Motor Co. manage to earn $7.2 billion last year, more than any auto maker in history? The hot economy helped. But Ford couldn't have done it without a new pricing strategy that helped upgrade the mix of vehicles it sells. From 1995 to 1999, Ford's U.S. market share fell, from 25.7% to 23.8%. Ordinarily, that's cause for alarm. But behind those numbers was a 420,000-unit decrease in sales of low-margin vehicles, such as Escorts and Aspires, and a 600,000-unit increase in sales of high-margin vehicles, such as Crown Victorias and Explorers. Ford cut prices on its most profitable vehicles enough to spur demand but not so much that they ceased to have attractive margins. ''This is probably the biggest driver of Ford's profitability,'' says Lloyd E. Hansen, Ford's controller for North America and global marketing. …
Varying the price constantly works best in situations where there's no bond between the buyer and the seller. In the stock market, for instance, you don't know and don't care who sold the shares you're buying. But in many transactions, relationships do matter. Asking About Prices, a 1998 book by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder and others, concluded from interviews with 200 companies that a big reason for ''sticky'' prices is that sellers fear antagonizing customers with frequent price changes. ….
The Herald (Glasgow)
Copyright 2000 Scottish Media Newspapers Limited
April 10, 2000HEADLINE: Canada knocks back the real McKoy
BYLINE: Paul GainsGOGA Vukmirovic remembers the bombs exploding on the streets of Sarajevo and her parents' wish to get her and her sisters out of the war-torn city.
Eventually, she was sent to Venezuela to stay with family members for 18 months, but that was not without incident either.
"Right as we went to Venezuela, they had a coup," says Vukmirovic. "You saw all these people who are shocked that there are airplanes flying over their homes and we were like, 'Oh, been there, done that'."
Today, Vukmirovic is captain of the Princeton University women's water polo team, which has a legitimate chance for the national championship. Last week the team won the Eastern Collegiate Athletics Conference.
Vukmirovic is an inspiration to her teammates and to the coaching staff, who marvel at the dangerous path she has followed to get to Princeton.
"When you're not given a choice, you deal with things much better because you can't second guess yourself," she opines. "You can roll up and die and be depressed and sit in your room all day, or you can figure out a way to go and deal with it."
The Palm Beach Post
Copyright 2000 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.
April 10, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: NEWSMAKERS
BankingJ. Christopher Lynch has been promoted to president of 401kExchange.com Inc., Lake Worth. He served as executive vice president and chief operating officer for the company and is a graduate of Princeton University. …
The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 2000 The Richmond Times Dispatch
April 10, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: THE GIVE & TAKE OF TECHNOLOGY; NEW DEVELOPMENTS BRING UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
BYLINE: McGregor McCance; Times-Dispatch Staff Writer; Call McGregor McCance at (804) 649-6348 or e-mail him at; mmccance£timesdispatch.com
Virtually fogotten today, the typewriter was a sure-fire technological wonder during the 1880s and 1890s.
Here was a new machine that could automate the writing process and eliminate some of the drudgery of clerical work.
But there would be another side to Christopher Sholes' invention. The typewriter - just like its advanced, modern relative, the computer - affected the business world and society in unexpected ways.
"It had a whole bunch of unintended consequences," said John K. Brown, a University of Virginia Professor who teaches the history of technology.
"One was that initial recipients of typewritten letters took offense at them, thinking that the standard for communication was lovely, copperplate handwriting." The influence would prove more dramatic, though.
"The major unintended consequence was that it brought women into the world of white-collar, managerial work, an area that had been exclusively male until this innovation," Brown said.
History is littered with examples of technology's unintended consequences, Brown said, from pre-typewriter days to the Internet age. Design and creative services businesses provide a glimpse into how technology is influencing the modern workplace. * * *
Edward Tenner, a visiting researcher at Princeton University, agrees.
"On the positive side, there are people who learn new ways of thinking that go along with the new technology. They can create [products] that might not have been possible or practical 30 years ago," said Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences."
Tenner's book explores unintended consequences beyond the corporate world, but he said influences are similar in any setting.
"Everybody needs to know one of the interesting consequences of technology in business - for better or worse - is that once a method is widely adopted there is great pressure, even on people who are able to work well with their traditional tools, to switch."
Moving to integrate the next new technology and the next after that creates a "ratcheting effect." Returning to earlier days may be impossible, he said, but the new tools and techniques shouldn't eclipse the underlying basics.
"The important thing is to see that no machine really relieves us of the burden of really knowing our business, or creativity and intuition," Tenner said. "The problem of computers is not in the computers themselves, but in the people who abuse them and expect them to do what they inherently can't do."
The Sporting News
Copyright 2000 The Sporting News Publishing Company
April 10, 2000HEADLINE: The book on ... Jeff Halpern
Capitals C, 5-11/198, 1st year
Jeff Halpern is the only player born in Maryland to play in the NHL and the only graduate of the Washington Little Capitals to make it to the big leagues.
But there were many tough decisions along the way for an American boy, who, at the age of 10, chose hockey over soccer in the park-ing lot of the old Capital Centre in Landover, Md.
The choice of hockey eventually led Halpern to Tier 2 Canadian junior hockey and a scholarship from Princeton. …
TELEGRAM & GAZETTE
Copyright 2000 Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Inc.
April 10, 2000 MondayHEADLINE: Fitchburg gets musical preview
BYLINE: Matthew Bruun; TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFFDATELINE: FITCHBURG
- Listeners got a sneak preview yesterday of Raging River, Rolling Stone,'' an original composition that celebrates the city of Fitchburg at the dawn of the millennium.
Barbara A. White, a professor at Princeton University, said she has been working on the piece for almost a year. The eight-minute overture, which includes a three-minute march, will debut in its entirety July 4.
A packed crowd at the Fitchburg Historical Society applauded enthusiastically after hearing a small section of the completed work performed by nine members of the Thayer Symphony Orchestra.
The excerpt played yesterday was adapted from a Finnish melody Ms. White uncovered during months of research into the city's musical heritage. …
University Wire
Copyright 2000 Daily Bruin via U-Wire
April 10, 2000HEADLINE: Scholars discuss legacy of Armenian Genocide at UCLA
BYLINE: By Todd Belie, Daily Bruin
SOURCE: U. California-Los Angeles
DATELINE: Los AngelesSpeaking to a capacity crowd in Dickson Auditorium at UCLA, Professor Richard Hovannisian began Saturday's conference on the Armenian Genocide by asking the audience to stand for a moment of silence.
Among those standing were scholars and authors who came from around the nation to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Armenian Studies program at UCLA, and to take part in a day-long conference titled, "The Armenian Genocide and Historical Memory: Challenge of the 21st Century."
The event centered on the 85th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide where an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire.
The Turkish government, however, refutes these claims and denies a genocide ever occurred. …
Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton University, spoke of the impact that attempts at international war crimes trials had on the world, discussing the failed attempts to provide justice to Armenians who had suffered or were killed.
While political and social factors prevented many from facing justice, Bass noted the Armenian incident was a landmark in that crimes against humanity were discussed well before the Second World War.
"Thirty years before Nuremberg, you had charges of crimes against humanity," Bass said. "Yet this extraordinary effort turned out to yield nothing, as good intentions were not backed up with power."
Bass also discussed the problems that could arise if international justice fails or is not taken seriously by all parties involved. …
University Wire
Copyright 2000 Michigan Daily via U-Wire
April 10, 2000HEADLINE: Police dept. says arrests more likely at U. Michigan's 'Naked Mile'
BYLINE: By David Enders, Michigan Daily
DATELINE: Ann Arbor, Mich.University of Michigan students running nude through the streets in this year's Naked Mile may be donning handcuffs, according to the Ann Arbor Police Department.
Although law enforcement officials at the annual event have made arrests for public drunkenness, their main concern has been providing safety for the runners. But last week the AAPD said they will be more likely to arrest streaking students than ever before.
"There's a tremendous increased potential for arrests over previous years," AAPD Deputy Chief Larry Jerue said. "We've tried all other avenues absent of arrest." …
The Naked Mile is one of the last events in what has become an increasingly rare tradition at colleges and universities across the country. Princeton University, for instance, canceled its 25-year-old Nude Olympics last year due to safety concerns. …
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 2000 U.S. News & World Report
April 10, 2000NEWS YOU CAN USE; BEST GRADUATE SCHOOLS; ENGINEERING; EXCLUSIVE RANKINGS
HEADLINE: Schools of EngineeringSCHOOLS OF ENGINEERING
THE TOP SCHOOLSA - Rank
B - School
C - Overall score
D - Reputation rank by academics
E - Reputation rank by recruiters
F - '99 average quantitative GRE score
G - '99 average analytic GRE score
H - '99 acceptance rate (pct.)
I - '99 Ph.D. students/faculty
J - '99 faculty membership in National Academy of Engineering
K - '99 engineering sch. research expenditures (in millions)
L - '99 research expend./per faculty member (in thousands)
M - Ph.D.'s granted in 1988-99A B C D E F G H I J K L M
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
100.0 1 1 760 698 30.3 3.2 12.2 $ 177.0 $ 528.4 2082. Stanford University (CA)
90.0 1 6 762 686 46.0 5.1 17.1 $ 87.5 $ 480.6 1913. University of California-Berkeley
87.0 1 4 756 688 26.0 4.8 20.8 $ 89.1 $ 412.5 1804. Georgia Institute of Technology
85.0 7 2 744 672 24.5 3.0 3.6 $ 148.5 $ 358.8 1734. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
85.0 6 4 763 694 34.7 3.3 3.9 $ 130.6 $ 585.9 1696. California Institute of Technology
81.0 1 7 773 783 11.7 4.3 16.7 $ 47.3 $ 556.6 586. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
81.0 5 8 760 697 23.0 2.8 3.1 $ 134.6 $ 358.0 1858. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
76.0 8 12 755 697 18.4 3.1 7.8 $ 88.5 $ 508.6 999. Cornell University (NY)
75.0 8 9 764 708 28.3 3.5 7.2 $ 78.3 $ 575.7 809. Purdue University-West Lafayette (IN)
75.0 10 3 749 668 32.8 2.5 2.8 $ 93.3 $ 434.0 1649. University of Texas-Austin
75.0 10 11 750 657 36.0 2.5 11.6 $ 90.2 $ 477.0 162
16. Princeton University (NJ)
63.0 10 16 763 727 25.5 3.4 11.2 $ 40.5 $ 378.5 44SPECIALTIES
Graduate programs ranked best by engineering school deansAEROSPACE/AERONAUTICAL/ASTRONAUTICAL
1. Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. California Inst. of Technology
4. Univ. of Michigan-Ann Arbor
5. Georgia Inst. of Technology
6. Purdue U.-West Lafayette (IN)
7. Princeton University (NJ)
8. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
9. University of Texas-Austin
10. Cornell University (NY)
10. Penn State University-University ParkCHEMICAL
1. Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.
2. Univ. of California-Berkeley
3. U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities
4. California Inst. of Technology
5. Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison
6. Stanford University (CA)
7. University of Texas-Austin
8. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
9. University of Delaware
10. Princeton University (NJ)COMPUTER
1. Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. Univ. of California-Berkeley
4. Carnegie Mellon Univ. (PA)
5. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
6. Univ. of Michigan-Ann Arbor
7. University of Texas-Austin
8. Cornell University (NY)
9. University of Washington
10. Princeton University (NJ)
The Washington Times
Copyright 2000 News World Communications, Inc.
April 10, 2000, Monday, Final EditionHEADLINE: Some schools try to control their price tags
BYLINE: David R. Francis; CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITORBennington College in Vermont for years was famous - or infamous - as the most expensive private school in the nation.
No longer.
"We committed in 1994 to make the cost of a Bennington education 10 percent less than competitive schools in four years," President Elizabeth Coleman says, "and we did." …
For students of the 1970s, the return on their educational investment in the most expensive schools was a startling 16 percent to 18 percent, but that return may have declined with the sharp rise in college costs since then.
At the same time, the study suggests that being talented enough to get into an elite school is more important than actually attending one. It reinforces the idea that talented students who apply themselves can succeed no matter what school they attend.
(The report was compiled by Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and Stacy Berg Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City.) …
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 2000 The Atlanta Constitution
April 9, 2000, Sunday, Home EditionHEADLINE: WINDOW ON THE UNIVERSE: COSMIC FIREWORKS;
Now you see them, now you don't --- mysterious flashes of light in the universe's far reaches that astronomers say are the most violent celestial explosions since the big bang.;
ScienceWatch
BYLINE: Jeff Nesmith, Staff
DATELINE: WashingtonFor roughly 30 years, astronomers have known that mysterious flashes of radiation are lighting up the distant universe about 100 times a day, each with the energy of all the stars of a million galaxies.
During that time, more than 170 explanations of what is going on have been suggested. Nearly all of them have been proved wrong. But Stan Woosley is cautious but confident that his latest explanation --- his sixth --- will prove true.
"I've been wrong before," said the University of California, Santa Cruz, astrophysicist, "so I like to keep a certain amount of skepticism, even about my own models."
In about three years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to launch a "low-budget" $163 million satellite called "Swift" to make the observations that could finally determine whether Woosley's newest theory is correct. Understanding the origin of the mysterious bursts not only would solve one of the enduring mysteries of modern astronomy, but would bring to light new details about conditions in the universe during a dark and ancient time about which scientists now know very little. …
Woosley said he has "loved things that go kaboom" since childhood, when he used a toy chemistry set and a small tank of propane to blow up a backyard shed. His gamma ray bursts, however, are confined to the innards of a computer, which he used to make complicated calculations describing the explosion of a star 30 times or more the size of the sun. After the explosion, the jets of matter race through space at 99.995 percent of the speed of light.
When these jets collide with wispy-thin clouds of gas that surround the exploded star, the gamma ray burst is created, Woosley thinks. Because they are moving at a speed that is at the very edge of scientific imagination, the particles within the jet collide with the gas clouds and with each other with such awful force that a beam of gamma rays, visible light and X-rays is propelled into space in the direction of the jet. Only when the Earth lies in the path of the beam would it be seen. The fact that the bursts are seen about once a day implies that another 99 or so are happening but point away from this planet, Woosley said. …
The collision of two neutron stars would amount to the biggest atom smasher imaginable. Both stars would be converted to raw energy in a fraction of a second. But Bohdan Paczynski, a Princeton University astrophysicist who proposed the merging neutron star model, says he has become skeptical about all of the explanations, including his own. "There is a long chain of if-if-if and hypotheses and so on," he said, "but observational evidence is limited. I am very cynical about the models. I used to do this myself and it is difficult to be very positive or very negative about any specific model."
What's needed, he said, is more observation. …
NOTE: This story was carried by the Cox News Service and also appeared in The Palm Beach Post.
The Boston Globe
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: COLLEGE ADMISSIONS RACE TIGHTENS SCHOOLS TURN AWAY TOP-TIER STUDENTS
BYLINE: By David Abel, Globe Correspondent, and Doreen Iudica Vigue, Globe StaffA crush of high school graduates, a flush economy, and changes in the admissions process have made 2000 the most competitive year ever for top students trying to gain entry to the college of their choice, a survey of area universities indicates.
With many Ivy League colleges reporting record numbers of applications, students from abroad and around the country increasingly applying to colleges on the Internet, and more money available for scholarships, the nation's top universities are having to reject some of the best and brightest applicants. Harvard, for example, accepted its lowest percentage of applying students this year. With a record 18,691 applications for 2,035 slots, the university turned down about 1,000 valedictorians, as well as hundreds of students with perfect Scholastic Assessment Test scores. Just since 1998, the percentage of applicants accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fallen from 23 percent to 15 percent. And even Boston University, which has cut recruiting to reduce the size of incoming freshman classes, continues to get record numbers of applications.
Admissions officials at schools including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, Tufts, Williams, Stanford, and Amherst also report being swamped with applications. …
Over the past few years, changing demographics have been the most obvious explanation for the increased competition at top-tier colleges. An "echo baby boom," as some call it, is creating increasingly larger numbers of 18-year-olds, and more of them are applying to colleges every year.
Of the approximately 2.8 million students who graduated from high schools in the spring of 1997, a record 67 percent attended college in the fall of 1998, according to federal figures. …
The booming economy has also played a role in attracting more applications to top schools that otherwise may have been off-limits.
The surging stock market, for example, has helped raise endowments at Harvard to nearly $15 billion, $7 billion at Yale, $5 billion at Princeton, and $4.5 billion at Stanford. The more money the universities have, the more they can give in scholarships. …
The Independent (London)
Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: HARD LINE OF THE FLORIDA EXILES HAS WEAKENED THE ANTI-CASTRO CAMP
BYLINE: Andrew Marshall In MiamiTHE SAGA of Elian Gonzalez, the little boy caught in the middle of a row between Washington and Havana, seems to demonstrate again the strength of America's right-wing Cuban-American lobby. "They have shown enough clout to get the US government to do very difficult things," said Max Castro of the University of Miami.
But many experts in the US also see the battle as evidence both of a strategic miscalculation and of weaknesses.
"They have positioned themselves badly in terms of public opinion," added Mr Castro.
Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (FIU), said: "This is going to be a very costly exercise in the long term." …
The failure of the Elian case may weaken the hold of the hardliners and make it easier for a future administration to take on the anti-Castro lobby, some believe. They see a decline in commitment to "La Causa" among the younger generation.
But Miguel Centeno of Princeton University, a member of a moderate Cuban American group, is pessimistic. "They have shored up their percentage. They have given a symbol to Miami, to Tallahassee (the state capital) and to Washington that they need to be taken seriously," he said. He uses a comparison with Northern Ireland. "I don't see a Trimble. I see a lot of Paisleys," he added. "It's a perpetual motion machine of political hatred."
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 2000 Times Mirror Company
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: '80S CORPORATE RAIDER HASN'T LOST HIS TASTE FOR TAKEOVERS;
FINANCE: CARL ICAHN, WORTH AN ESTIMATED $4.2 BILLION, IS STIRRING THINGS UP AGAIN WITH AN OFFER TO BUY NABISCO GROUP.
BYLINE: JAMES F. PELTZ, TIMES STAFF WRITERCarl Icahn is a corporate raider who's spent the last 20 years being a company's worst nightmare or a stockholder's best friend, depending on your view. But this much is true either way: Icahn's in it for the love of the game.
Icahn got very rich and nearly became a household name in the 1980s as a raider of the first order, making headlines with other financiers such as T. Boone Pickens Jr. as they waged hostile takeovers--or threatened to--of dozens of giant companies and made work a living hell for countless executives.
Yet long after most of Icahn's peers have faded from the financial scene, and long after Icahn has made more money than most could spend in several lifetimes, Icahn is still roiling the corporate waters at age 64. …
Icahn graduated from Princeton University with a philosophy degree in 1957. He tried New York University medical school, but quit after three years. Legend has it he went to Wall Street with $4,000 in poker winnings, but, in any case, he opened the securities brokerage Icahn & Co. in 1968. …
The New York Times
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: DANCE;
From a Woman's Recollections as an Israeli Outsider
BYLINE: By MINDY ALOFF; Mindy Aloff is the dance critic for The New Republic.THE dances of the Israeli-born choreographer Ze'eva Cohen focus on women, contemporary, ancient and mythical. Some of the women are feisty, some are noble. All, ultimately, are tragic: they dance as an act of resistance against straitened circumstance or passing time, as if they were singing private songs in a desert.
Five of the 40 works Ms. Cohen has choreographed since 1968, collected under the title "Female Mythologies," will be performed at Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church from Thursday through Sunday in a program dedicated to Ms. Cohen's mentor, Anna Sokolow, who died on March 29. None of the dancers are old enough to have seen Ms. Cohen's own impassioned performances, the true models for their roles, with Sokolow's company during the 1960's.
"Dancing for Anna was a total emotional and intellectual commitment," Ms. Cohen said. "She helped liberate me from being an academic dancer to being a full-blooded, expressive dancer." …
Growing up in Tel Aviv in the 1950's, Ms. Cohen studied with the Austrian-born modern dancer Gertrude Kraus, who emphasized improvisation and musical response, and with Rena Gluck, who taught the Martha Graham technique. …
Sokolow soon arranged for, and subsidized, Ms. Cohen's travel to New York, where she completed the dance program at Juilliard in three years and danced with Sokolow's New York-based company over a period of eight years. (Her astonishing performance in "Rooms" is preserved in Jac Venza's 1966 film, "Anna Sokolow's 'Rooms.' ") In 1969, Princeton University -- newly coeducational -- hired Ms. Cohen to teach dance; she immediately founded an entire dance program, running it while she also performed as a soloist and, for a time, directed her own group. She maintained a family life, too, marrying and having a daughter, Keren. …
The New York Times
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: APRIL 2-8;
The Incredible Is Testable, But in Another Dimension
BYLINE: By GEORGE JOHNSONSuperstring theorists have a problem: You can't test a theory that posits that all matter consists of "notes" produced by tiny strings vibrating in nine-dimensional space. We aware of only three dimensions because the rest are curled up into extremely tiny balls, a hundred million trillion times smaller than a proton.
But Lisa Randall of Princeton University, Raman Sundrum of Stanford University and Joseph Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have proposed that at least one of the extra dimensions is actually a four-dimensional megaverse inside which the universe floats like a bubble. They believe energy might occasionally leak into the fourth dimension -- and that idea might be testable.
When two particles are slammed together in an accelerator, the amount of energy going into the reaction should equal the amount coming out.
If it doesn't, energy could be leaking into the fourth dimension. Scientists are searching records of past accelerator experiments for signs of this.
"Maybe a discovery of extra dimensions is already sitting on a tape in some data bank," Dr. Lykken said. GEORGE JOHNSON
News & Record
Copyright 2000 News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
April 9, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: Faculty notes
Keith Cushman, professor of English at UNCG, gave two lectures at the University of Trieste at the end of February.
One of his lectures was on D.H. Lawrence's poetry, and the other focused on the theater of August Wilson.
On March 17, Cushman was the banquet speaker at the annual conference of the Philological Association of the Carolinas. His topic was ''Forty Years with DHL.''
A specialist in British and American fiction, Cushman was quoted extensively throughout Samantha Gillison's article, ''Too Close for Comfort: Why Is Raymond Carver's Masterpiece, 'Cathedral,' So Much Like a Little-Known D.H. Lawrence Story?'' This article was the lead story in salon.com for Jan. 18. …
He earned his doctorate at Princeton University.
Omaha World-Herald
Copyright 2000 The Omaha World-Herald Company
April 9, 2000HEADLINE: Conference Addresses Bison Decline
BYLINE: Julie Anderson
SOURCE: World-Herald Staff WriterPeople often see history as a concrete set of facts locked in place in the past like a collection of artifacts in a museum display case. Not so historians. In fact, it's amazing sometimes how they can take facts out of those display cases and put them into new ones, offering whole new ways of looking at past events. That's exactly what's been happening with the decline of bison in North America. A number of scholars have been writing new books - controversial ones - laying out theories that the buffalo weren't all killed off by white hide hunters and a military bent on putting down Indians. The hide hunters played a significant role, they say. But a number of other factors were involved in the bison's decline, including drought, competition from cattle and wild horses, and even Indians who had acquired horses and guns and had gotten involved in hunting bison to market meat and hides. Two of those historians and authors spoke last week at a conference sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The conference, "Bison: The Past, Present and Future of the Great Plains," drew about 500 scholars, bison producers, tribal officials and college and high school students by Friday, the second day of the three-day conference. Andrew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, said environmental and human factors were inextricably linked in the bison's fate. Isenberg is the author of "The Destruction of Bison: An Environmental History, 1750 to 1920," published recently by Cambridge University Press.
Isenberg said his book deals with the question of how the Great Plains went from 30 million bison around 1800 to fewer than 1,000 bison by 1900. White hunters killed buffalo by the millions in the 1870s and 1880s, Isenberg said in a telephone interview from Princeton. But there were other factors - a 10- to 15-year drought in the central Plains beginning in 1840, the spread of horses from herds brought by Spaniards, and the introduction of cattle. Before trade in buffalo robes began, tribes in the Plains were killing 450,000 to 500,000 bison a year for subsistence and trade with other tribes, Isenberg said. By 1830 to 1850, about 100,000 robes - many shipped back East for cold-weather coverings and leather - were being traded a year. That increased the kill to about 600,000 a year. "I argue that the 450,000 was right on the edge of sustainability, and beyond that it was not sustainable," he said. …
Sacramento Bee
Copyright 2000 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
April 9, 2000HEADLINE: THE SECULAR CANONIZATION OF CESAR CHAVEZ: BACK TO RELIGIOUS ROOTS
BYLINE: James RichardsonCreating a Cesar Chavez state holiday is not just an issue about state employees getting time off from work or the cost to taxpayers or the convoluted politics of the state Capitol or scoring points with Latino voters. Rather, if Chavez's birthday is made a holiday, as state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) is proposing, it will be in line with a practice as old as Western civilization itself: adding to the calendar of saints.
Indeed, the root of the word holiday is holy day, and where once only bishops and popes could mandate feast days, now legislatures and governors hold that power. …
Although our culture continues to spin away from those roots, our need for saints is still very much with us. Princeton University historian Peter Brown, in his masterly book, "The Cult of the Saints," observes that "plainly, some solid and seemingly unmovable cultural furniture has piled up somewhere in the capacious lumber room, the back of our mind."
How can we explain the staying power of holy days in a secular era when organized religion has ceased to hold the prominence and power it once held over our collective life? Honoring particular people as saints, religious or secular, seems to fulfill a deeper need among the living than simply memorializing the dead. That deep need, as Brown points out, is mediation between life and death. It is no accident that all of our saints are dead. …
The Washington Times
Copyright 2000 News World Communications, Inc.
April 09, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: Physics and the baffling role of quantum theory
BYLINE: Jeffrey MarshThe 20th century may have been the century of the common man, but it was not the century of common sense. That is certainly true among physicists, whose astonishing success in accurately describing the behavior of nature on a microscopic scale and learning how to manipulate it has come from a dogged willingness to accept the results of abstruse mathematical calculations, no matter how absurd their results seem. That is the lesson of "The Odd Quantum," a layman's introduction to quantum mechanics by Sam Treiman, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton.
The book, which evolved from a one-semester seminar delivered to a class of what Mr. Treiman describes as "eager, open and numerate" freshmen, goes beyond the anecdotal, descriptive accounts of quantum theory found in many popular books by including some authentic mathematics, but does not provide the full bag of mathematical tools that must be mastered before one can really understand the subject. It is written in an exceptionally clear way, but the reader must keep his wits about him, and needs sufficient mathematical sophistication not to be frightened by the frequent appearance of equations.
The book is probably most suitable for someone who wants a quick overview of the subject, either because he wants to go on to study it in greater depth or because he has studied it before a long time ago and wants to refresh his memory. …
Chicago Daily Herald
Copyright 2000 Paddock Publications, Inc.
April 8, 2000, SaturdayHEADLINE: Former soap star to perform in Winfield
BYLINE: Laura Zahn Pohl Daily Herald CorrespondentFormer television daytime soap star Frank Runyeon will bring to life the Gospel of Mark in a dramatic one-man performance.
This production, which is sponsored by St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Winfield, will take place at 7 p.m. April 16 at the church, 0S233 Church Road.
"Afraid! The Gospel of Mark" puts the Bible in today's terms and includes plenty of audience participation, said Mary Spatz of Winfield, one of the co-organizers of the event. …
He's also a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in religion. In addition, Runyeon studied at Yale's Divinity School and received a master's degree in theology from the General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1994. …
The Indian Ocean Newsletter
Copyright 2000 Indigo Publications
April 8, 2000HEADLINE: ISSAYAS AFEWORKI (Eritrea/United States)
Following the closure of the Africa-Europe summit meeting in Cairo this week, the Eritrean head of state is expected to make a short visit to the United States. He is expected to address the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Press Club in Washington, and Princeton University in Boston (Mass).
The Union Leader (Manchester NH)
Copyright 2000 Union Leader Corp.
April 08, 2000 SaturdayHEADLINE: B.C.'s Mottau Hobey Baker award winner
BYLINE: IAN M. CLARK Union Leader SportsPROVIDENCE -- As he stands poised to make a dream come true, Boston College's Mike Mottau was allowed to live another one.
The Boston College senior defenseman was named the Hobey Baker Award winner yesterday at the Rhode Island Convention Center, beating out a field of nine other finalists that included teammates Jeff Farkas and Brian Gionta and University of New Hampshire junior goalie Ty Conklin. …
Awarded annually since 1981 when Minnesota's Neal Broten took home the first trophy, the Hobey Baker Award is named in honor of former Princeton University football and hockey captain Hobart "Hobey" Baker. The legendary player got his start at the St. Paul School in Concord. …
The Vancouver Sun
Copyright 2000 Pacific Press Ltd.
April 8, 2000, SaturdayHEADLINE: Ivy League university no guarantee to wealth
DATELINE: WASHINGTONWASHINGTON -- Those who think going to an elite college is crucial to their financial success should think again, a study says.
Researchers from Princeton University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation reviewed the earnings of people who were accepted at top colleges in 1976 -- most of them Ivy League schools -- but chose instead to go to less selective colleges.
Twenty years later, those graduates had a slightly higher average salary than a group of their peers who went to the selective colleges. The difference was $77,700 US ($114,242 Cdn) a year vs. $76,800 ($112,919 Cdn) a year.
The Princeton study involved 14,239 graduates and 30 colleges. The average freshman SAT score was 1,200 at the selective schools, and 1,000 at the less selective ones.
The study, released this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, reached this conclusion: If you're smart enough to get into an Ivy League school, you'll probably do well no matter where you wind up going to college. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: Business news in brief from around New Jersey
PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) - Thirteen teams of Princeton University students will pitch business plans to venture capitalists on Saturday in a competition for $10,000 in prize money.
The Business Plan Contest is sponsored by the university's Entrepreneurship Club and will be judged by 10 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Despite volatility in dot-com stocks this week, the university said most students are expected to present plans for technology-based companies.
THE BALTIMORE SUN
Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: Interim chief named UM law school dean
SOURCE: BY A SUN STAFF WRITERKaren Rothenberg, who has been on the faculty of the University of Maryland law school for 17 years, has been named dean of the school.
Rothenberg, who holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of Virginia, was named interim dean last year when Donald E. Gifford resigned.
She is the first woman to head the Baltimore school in its 184-year history.
A resident of Bethesda, Rothenberg is a scholar in health care law and bioethics. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: BROWN PROBED ON SPORTS RECRUITING ALLEGATIONS FOCUS ON FINANCIAL AID
BYLINE: By David Abel, Globe CorrespondentAt least five sports teams at Brown University are being investigated for allegedly violating Ivy League recruiting regulations, university and Ivy league officials confirmed yesterday.
Brown officials are expected to file a report as early as today detailing the results of its own investigation, university officials said. The allegations of improper recruiting of athletes for the incoming 2000 class prompted Brown in early February to launch a review of its policy of awarding "supplemental financial awards" to attractive athletic prospects, said Laura Freid, a Brown spokeswoman. …
Mirroring the moves of other Ivy League schools, Brown in February 1999 amended its financial aid policies to allow students to use non-university or supplemental scholarships to defray tuition costs.
Before that, students, including star athletes, had to rely on grants, loans, and other forms of aid provided by the university. Grants gained from other sources (such as neighborhood Rotary Clubs or companies) would offset the amount of aid the university gave.
The change, however, has opened up the university to charges of luring athletes with financial aid packages unavailable to other students.
"It's not the specific sports that are really the issue," said Carolyn Campbell-McGovern, senior associate director of the Ivy League athletic conference office based in Princeton, N.J. "It's the way the athletes were recruited." …
Copley News Service
Copyright 2000 Copley News Service
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: TO BE EQUAL
California's new educational policy: Racial tokenism
BYLINE: Hugh B. PriceThe latest data from the University of California system has made the harm caused by Proposition 209, the 1997 state referendum banning affirmative action in admissions, more and more evident.
That supposedly colorblind approach is creating a racially stratified university system. The figures gathered by university officials show that the number of African-American, Hispanic-American and American Indian students who'll enter the nine universities of the sprawling system this fall will be greater than it was three years ago by a mere 100: 7,336 compared to 7,236 in 1997.
Some have declared this proof of the benevolence of Prop 209.
But the real news lies in where most of those students of color will now be heading.
Significantly fewer than in the past will be going to the top-tier state universities: the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego and the University of California at Santa Barbara. …
(Ward) Connerly and his ideological friends, who say they oppose affirmative action for people of color because it's unfair, are only telling half the truth.
The half that is the truth is that they oppose affirmative action for people of color.
But not because it's unfair.
They oppose it because affirmative action enables people of color to benefit from the same latitude colleges and universities have always used to admit those whose talent and ability weren't accurately measured by the standardized tests. In the decades before the 1960s, that preferential treatment was reserved almost exclusively for white males. …
That's why they kept silent when it came to light during the recent jousting for the Republican and presidential nominations that both Gov. George W. Bush and former Sen. Bill Bradley were admitted to Yale and Princeton universities, respectively, in the early 1960s despite board scores 100 to 200 points below the norm for their class. …
Hugh B. Price is president of the National Urban League.
The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 2000 The Providence Journal Company
April 7, 2000, Friday, All EDITIONSSECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: COMMENTARY - For spring, try simplifying
BYLINE: M.J. ANDERSENTHE SIMPLICITY PEOPLE have not given up. A new magazine devoted to simplifying your life, called Real Simple, has just come out. A couple of Web sites have joined in too. One, called O2Simplify, offers a lot of lists on how to make things simpler. For instance: if you have several credit cards, cancel all but one. (Warning: this canceling business takes time. It is not simple.) …
The other day, I received a catalog of Shaker items. You could order the simple boxes and chairs the Shakers designed. But one page gave me quite a turn. It showed a Shaker-style computer work station, while proclaiming, across the top, " 'tis a gift to be simple."
'Tis a gift to be ironic too. I doubt I have ever seen a worse collision of form and function, except possibly in the library at Princeton University, where Gothic architecture meets its Waterloo. …
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 2000 Bergen Record Corp.
April 7, 2000, FRIDAYHEADLINE: FOCUS ON WOMEN;DANCING AROUND HISTORY
BYLINE: ROBERT HICKS, Special to The RecordDANCE PREVIEW
ZE'EVA COHEN: "Female Mythologies,"an evening of five of Cohen's dances. Part of Danspace Project's "City/Dans"series. 8:30 p.m. Thursday through April 16. St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St., Manhattan. $12. (212) 674-8194.
Ze'eva Cohen, who founded the dance program at Princeton Universityand who is a professor of dance there, recently spent time looking back at her historically based dances.
"What I realized in retrospect is that I'm focusing on stories told about women,"she says."If they're not found stories in mythology or in the Old Testament, then I am making up stories for women." …
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 2000 The San Diego Union-Tribune
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: Another modest step on partial-birth abortion
BYLINE: Teresa R. Wagner; Wagner is an attorney and a policy analyst for the Family Research Council, and has authored amicus briefs in support of the state of Nebraska in the Stenberg case at the Supreme Court and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Congress' desire to protect partially born children from abortion remains steadfast. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted again with a veto-proof majority (287-14) to support the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The Senate version was approved 63-34 last October. Now the president must decide if the bill will become law.
But just as all roads lead to Rome, all abortion laws lead to litigation. While the federal effort persists, several state partial-birth abortion laws already have worked their way through the courts. …
Also, this method destroys the child in a visible and explicit way, making the act indistinguishable, for many, from infant homicide. Countless legislators are on record making precisely this point. In the aftermath of the Grossberg/Petersen case (where two college students threw their newborn into a dumpster) and the Melissa Drexler scandal (a girl delivered her baby in the bathroom at her senior prom and dropped him in the garbage), Americans are realizing how disposable infant human life has become in our culture.
Indeed, both a 1998 New England Journal of Medicine study and FBI statistics confirm that infant homicide has risen dramatically. Meanwhile, prestigious Princeton University recently hired Bioethics Professor Peter Singer, who argues that infanticide is morally acceptable and should be practiced. …
The Times (London)
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
April 7, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: Drawn to the girl behind Marilyn
BYLINE: Joanna ColesJoyce Carol Oates is an American phenomenon, a writing Roneo, whose inventory of novels stretches further than the queue for the tollbooth at the New Jersey turnpike. Yet when I mention the word prolific - in awe, not as criticism - she seems defensive, testy even.
"I don't write any more than a lot of other people," Oates says quickly. "It's just something that accrues to me. Look at Stephen King or Charles Dickens. And John Updike, he does all that literary criticism, too, thousands of pages! Other people write as much, I've just got labelled."
Perhaps. But King writes to his own special, if repetitive, formula and one suspects that Updike's best work - brilliant though it can be - is now a decade behind him.
The point about Oates is that she has no formula. Every book is different and her writing style changes faster than Hillary Clinton changes her hair.
Now 61, she was 31 when her early novel, Them, dealing with corruption and race, won her a National Book Award and it became clear that America had a new writer on the block. She was quickly inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters (which rejected Tom Wolfe more than once); several of her books have been turned into films; she has produced dozens of volumes of poetry, plays and short stories; and has written several thrillers under the alias Rosamond Smith.
Blonde: A Novel, her latest offering, is a 790-page doorstop on the interior life of Marilyn Monroe. Her 29th novel, it shows Oates, whom the critic Harold Bloom once described as "our true proletarian novelist", on peak form. Who else would describe the playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn's one-time husband, as having "eyes like frayed socks"? Who else, among contemporary American writers, would think to describe John F. Kennedy's penis as "a slug"? Or Monroe herself - after her 12 abortions - as having breasts that "ached with a ghostly milk"? …
OBITUARIES
The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 2000 The Providence Journal Company
April 11, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Barrington
THE REV. ROBERT T. FERRICK, 73, a Jesuit priest, died Sunday at Campion Health Center in Weston, Mass.
Born in Providence, he was the son of the late Timothy and Helena (Cassidy) Ferrick.
Father Ferrick served as chaplain at St. Patrick s Manor in Framingham, Mass., from 1993 until 1998, when he moved to the health center. He had taught in several schools, including Brown University and Boston College, and had been a visiting fellow at Princeton University in the department of religion. …
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