PrincetonUniversity
Communications Office
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
Tel 609 258 3601, Fax 609 258 1301
Feedback
Princeton in the News
March 22, 2000
Previous page Next page Clippings archive Current news index
HIGHLIGHTS• Like mother, like daughter
• As gas prices soar, fusion scientists see opportunity
OTHER HEADLINES• SCHOOL SCENE TV show does 'Close-Up' on advanced … classes
• Community of Faith: One-man play brings words of Mark to light
• GREY AREAS IN CARBON STORAGE
• Cal Living: Group fosters serious, scientific look at paranormal events
• EDUCATION IN YOUR TOWN
• IRON HORSES: Going unleaded
• OUR READERS' VIEW
• ST. LOUIS NATIVE GETS DOWN TO ESSENTIAL LEWIS AND CLARK
• ALTRUISM AT A PRICE? MAINE ISLANDERS STRUGGLE WITH CORPORATE LARGESSE
• Demythologizing college admissions
• LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES Physicists from Lucent's Bell Labs devise organic electronics and high-speed communications circuits; Win scientific awards
• Chemist mixed sports, studies Academic All-American Hall to honor Nobel winner
• Ridge again veep prospect, this time for Bush
• INDEX OR MANAGED FUNDS? YOUR BEST BET IS TO PUT YOUR MONEY IN BOTH
• WESLEYAN'S IMAGE, AGAIN, LAID BARE; A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE EXPOSES 'NAKED DORM'
• Poverty of Numbers
• Establishment economic gurus rule Bush, Gore inner circles; Dancing around centrist maypole
• READING THE BRAIN; NEW IMAGING TECHNIQUE LETS DOCTORS SEE INSIDE, BUT SOME QUESTION HOW IT IS USED;
• Investing Expert Bogle to McGraw; Brief Article
• Attentive ears rewarded by Chamber Music Society; Imbrie's Piano Quartet provides complicated beauty
• OPEC pumps up oil prices, draining wallets
• Surfing alone: Princeton opens its ears to Napster's electronic tunes
• The Singer Publicity Machine
• NO-HMO DOCS LAVISH CARE ON PATIENTS - FOR A PRICE
• Million Dollar: maths question
• Schroeder's political humor leaves National Archives crowd in stitches
• A fighter for Arlington; Transportation tops a long legacy of public service for Dottie Lynn, who is leaving the City Council in May.
• RALPH NADER: HOMETOWN HERO OR HEEL; IN WINSTED, LITTLE LOVE IS LOST ON A CONSUMER WATCHDOG
• THEATER;Balancing Art, Education and Audiences
• It was, too, about slavery
• CONRAD PROMOTES POETRY, MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH
• Stakes rise in genetic-gambling casino
• GENE PANIC SPARKS SLUMP
• SOUTHERN EXPOSURE;WRITERS TALK IT UP AT VANDY CONFERENCE
• Trading flaws
• ETHICIST INCITES OUTRAGE, QUESTIONS SANCTITY OF LIFE
• HISTORIANS HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY IN FILM
• American Cancer Society Names Selig to Federal Relations Post
• Young Lawyers Hit the Campaign Trail
• Speaker urges study abroad for life-changing experience
• Covering the Climate: Beware of False Conflict
OBITUARIES• Retired Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll Partner M. Carton Dittman Dies at Age 85
• PEOPLES, JOE WEBB
• John Harlin Grimes Sr.
• Millard Farrar West Jr., 90, retired financier
• Crash at Mixing Bowl Kills Five; Two Cars in HOV Lanes Hit Out-of-Control Truck on I-95
• SCOTT KLURFELD, 47, LAWYER, FORMER PLAINVIEW RESIDENT
• Michael Ivan Austrian, 58; State Department Spokesman
• ROBERT J. WOLF, 84, HELPED POOR FAMILIES FIND HOMES
HIGHLIGHTS
New Scientist
Copyright 2000 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
March 18, 2000HEADLINE: Like mother, like daughter
BYLINE: Harold T. Shapiro (Harold T. Shapiro is chairman of the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission and president of Princeton University)HIGHLIGHT: Harold Shapiro enjoys a guided tour of Dolly and her creators
"The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control" by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge, Farrar Straus & Giroux.
DESPITE its grandiose and somewhat misleading title, this is a thoughtful and engaging account of a wonderful chapter in modern biology: the experiments that resulted in the birth of Dolly, the sheep cloned from her mother's cells.
Dolly has been the subject of a great deal of ink pressed to an even greater quantity of paper. This narrative should, nevertheless, command our attention because it was Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell who designed and carried out the experiments at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh that eventually demonstrated that it was possible to clone a mammal from the differentiated cells of an adult animal. Their account is all the more fascinating because it describes how wide a range of scientific techniques were brought together in a highly creative fashion at a time when few biologists were exploring this avenue.
"The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control" is broad in its scope and generous in its nature. The authors aim to provide their non-specialist readers with an adequate dose of biology to enable them to make sense of the breakthroughs increasingly being featured in the media. They go into considerable detail over their own experiments, and acknowledge their debt to the work of others with a helpful picture of the relevant aspects of the history of cell biology and embryology.
Their story demonstrates, once again, not only how science is done (including its many frustrating moments), but also how dependent scientific progress is on science policy, the structure of scientific institutions, and cooperation and communication among scientists. It also highlights the increasing importance of private funding of biological research, and its likely impact on both the traditional structure and mores of the scientific world and the rate of scientific progress.
The actual writing of the book was the work of the respected science writer Colin Tudge. He has, however, chosen to adopt the first person for Wilmut and Campbell as he tells their separate tales. Occasionally, we see events from Tudge's his own perspective, too. Despite this apparently ungainly structure, you will come away with a clear account not only of the scientific developments that resulted in the birth of Dolly, but also a fair picture of the distinct roles played by Wilmut and Campbell, as well as the institutional constraints and opportunities. …
The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 2000 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: As gas prices soar, fusion scientists see opportunity
SOURCE: Newhouse Service
BYLINE: KITTA MACPHERSON
DATELINE: PLAINSBORO, N.J.PLAINSBORO, N.J. - At the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory here, scientists enlivened by the recent surge in fuel prices are making strides in a decades-long quest to bottle the fusion genie that powers the sun and stars.
Where others see a looming energy crisis, they detect a silver lining, and the timing is critical. The future of the renowned lab - and of fusion energy research - might be on the line.
The drive to develop an alternative energy source that doesn't create byproducts linked to global climate change, and is drawn from cheap, available sources like seawater, is centered on a new, scaled-down machine.
Though skeptics have questioned whether fusion energy will ever be a practical power source, the Princeton scientists are determined to prove they can build one that is also efficient.
"The question for the country is this: Do you want to fix the roof while the sun is shining or do you want to wait?" said Robert Goldston, director of the lab.
After years of budget cuts and layoffs, the lab, managed by Princeton University for the federal Department of Energy, has received a 10 percent increase in its annual budget, bringing it to $63 million and funding a staff of 450. A similar budget increase for next year, recommended by the Clinton administration, is moving through Congress.
The lab's new centerpiece fusion reactor, known as the National Spherical Torus Experiment and called simply the "the machine" by its experimenters, has already produced landmark experimental results nine months ahead of schedule. …
NOTE: This story first appeared in The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.
OTHER HEADLINES
Asbury Park Press (Neptune, NJ.)
Copyright 2000 Asbury Park Press, Inc.
March 23, 2000, ThursdayHEADLINE: SCHOOL SCENE TV show does 'Close-Up' on advanced … classes
BY: LAURA KOLNOSKI/Correspondent
BY keeping abreast of the cutting edges of technology in both art and science, two programs at Howell High School have been chosen by the New Jersey Education Association to be featured in its television program, "Classroom Close-up New Jersey."In April, everyone can view, on UPN Channel 9 and Comcast cable, courses students never could have envisioned just a few years ago.
"It's unusual that two programs at one school would be chosen," said Louise Jasko, a biology teacher at Howell High. Her advanced-placement biology course, through which both Princeton University and Georgian Court College offer expertise and high-tech equipment for student studies of biotechnology, is one of the two selected for the NJEA video.
The students' studies of DNA and genetic engineering began about four years ago, when Jasko took classes at Georgian Court on the subject and marveled at the equipment available to students there. Later, she went to Princeton and participated in two related programs funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to get the latest advances in the field.
Princeton packages its course materials and allows other schools to borrow them. Then Princeton obtained equipment that could be transported, and Jasko jumped at the chance.
"This didn't exist when I went to college," Jasko said. "Now, we have a triumvirate of Princeton's materials, Georgian Court's labs and equipment, and the students here who get to take advantage of both. The colleges are reaching out to the high schools, so students can get these courses without having to be in a magnet school." …
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 2000 The Atlanta Constitution
March 23, 2000, ThursdayHEADLINE: Community of Faith: One-man play brings words of Mark to light
BYLINE: Candice Hannigan, For the Journal-Constitution"Afraid!" a three-act play of the Gospel of Mark, will be presented at 7 p.m. Wednesday at St. Catherine's Episcopal Church, 681 Holt Road, Marietta.
Starring Frank Runyeon, this one-man play is a literal translation of the words spoken by the evangelist Mark in ancient Rome almost 2000 years ago, and is part of a Lenten series on this Gospel at St. Catherine's.
Runyeon is best known for his work on television in "General Hospital," " Santa Barbara," "As the World Turns," "Falcon Crest," "Another World" and "L. A. Law." He has a degree in religion from Princeton University and a master's degree from the General Theological Seminary in New York.
"Every Christian has wondered what it would have been like to be there, in Galilee, and meet Jesus," Runyeon said. " 'Afraid!' is an effort to help those in the audience have that encounter by telling the story just as Mark did in the present tense, here and now, from beginning to end in everyday language. Staged with simple lighting, the character, settings and lights constantly shift, the Gospel engages imaginations, surprises with humor and is a suspense-filled drama." …
The Canberra Times
Copyright 2000 The Federal Capital Press of Australia
March 23, 2000, Thursday EditionHEADLINE: GREY AREAS IN CARBON STORAGE
BYLINE: SIMON GROSEIF THE findings of a new computer modelling study by American scientists are substantiated, current estimates of carbon storage in vegetation may greatly overstate real levels.
Such immense variation between modern estimates of carbon sequestration reveals the relative crudeness of scientific knowledge in this area.
Scientists are investigating carbon storage mechanisms carbon sinks to explain why atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are lower than expected as emissions rise. This is one key to assessing human impact on the earth's climate.
Atmospheric CO2 facilitates and stimulates plant photosynthesis whereby carbon is stored in plant tissue. Natural events such as forest fires, volcanic eruptions, drought, and other climatic variations such as El Nino episodes can also cause major variations in levels of terrestrial carbon storage.
But a study reported in the latest issue of Science finds that land use has greater influence than atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or the vagaries of climate on how much carbon is stored by ecosystems across the continental United States.
Lead author David Schimel is a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and head of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.
Schimel and his team examined the effects of both CO2 fertilisation and climate events on US carbon storage. .
For 1980-1993, three computer models used in the study agree within 25 per cent that US carbon sequestration resulting from CO2 fertiliszation and climate effects amounts to 100 million tonnes a year - about a third of annual amount of stored carbon estimated by Schimel from inventory data.
Uptake of the other 200 million tonnes, the authors conclude, is due to regrowth on abandoned agricultural land or where forests were harvested before 1980.
However, last year a group of Princeton University researchers estimated net carbon uptake in the US at 1-2 billion tonnes a year, 10 to 20 times Schimel's estimate.
The Princeton results were taken to indicate that carbon absorption is greater in the northern hemisphere than south of the equator and to suggest that the US plays a disproportionately large role in carbon storage. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: Cal Living: Group fosters serious, scientific look at paranormal events
BYLINE: By GARY WARTH, North (San Diego) County Times
DATELINE: OCEANSIDE, Calif.A San Diego County-based group is raising the one question everybody wonders at some time: What happens after we die?
The International Foundation for Survival Research may never answer that question, but its 100 members are intent are taking a scientific look at the mystery.
The group resurrected itself recently after being near-dead for more than a decade, said president Elizabeth McAdams.
The group originally formed in Los Angeles in 1982, the year McAdams co-wrote "The Case for Life After Death" with author Raymond Bayless.
"He said 99 percent of what you hear about as being paranormal is either fraud or illusion," McAdams said about Bayless. "But that other 1 percent is real."
McAdams said the organization will take a two-pronged approach - education and research - to focus on that 1 percent. Educational efforts will range from large-scale conferences to local meetings with guest speakers who will discuss their investigations into ghostly experiences. She hopes chapters will flourish in Southern California and eventually, throughout the world. …
In the early 1980s, a Dallas real estate developer interested in the field gave $50,000 for the group to distribute as two $25,000 grants. …
Another grant went to Dr. Robert Jahn, a professor of aerospace science and dean emeritus of Princeton University's graduate school of engineering, where he created a random-event generator for a psychokinesis study.
The generator creates the electronic equivalent of a coin toss in that the results should be random and evenly distributed over time. Jahn's experiment, however, showed that results were skewed when two people with a strong emotional attachment were involved. …
Asbury Park Press (Neptune, NJ.)
Copyright 2000 Asbury Park Press, Inc.
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: EDUCATION IN YOUR TOWN
Holmdel students flock to top colleges
BY: ROYA RAFEI/MIDDLETOWN BUREAU HOLMDEL - So far this year, Holmdel High School seniors have been accepted to Harvard, Princeton and Brown universities.That's not unusual for the high school, which sends a large number of its graduates to the nation's top colleges every year. Nearly 85 percent of the senior class moves on to four-year colleges each year, and an average of about 8 percent of those attend Ivy League schools, according to district officials.
Students here are consistently among the top scorers in college entrance exams and state proficiency tests. There are so many high-achievers at the school that class rank was eliminated in the early 1990s because district officials felt it would hurt admission to prestigious colleges. The A students are the role models, and there's peer pressure to perform well at school.
In recent years, Holmdel has produced at least one senior with a 1,600 - a perfect score - on the SAT test, used by colleges as part of their admission requirements. This year, that student is Meena Ramachandran, who has been accepted to Brown and MIT and is awaiting word from Stanford. …
BusinessWorld
Copyright 2000 BusinessWorld Publishing Corporation
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: IRON HORSES: Going unleaded
BYLINE: Marvin A. TortShell started the trend with its Shell Velocity product. And then Petron followed suit and offered Petron XCS with Valve Master. Only recently, Caltex also joined the fray and pushed Caltex Vortex (Gold or Silver). New fuel products for the new millennium? Not necessarily. More like new products to meet the requirements of a relatively new law - the Clean Air Act of 1999.
In case you don't know, that law provides for, among others, the phaseout of leaded gasoline. That's right, leaded gasoline - that same fuel that many of us have been using for years. That is, before the advent of the unleaded gasoline. Velocity, XCS with Valve Master and Vortex are all unleaded fuels, new products that would help Shell, Petron and Caltex deal with the leaded gasoline phaseout. The phaseout, by the way, is expected to result in cleaner vehicle emissions and, eventually, cleaner air.
To further expound on the advantages of such unleaded fuels, I would like to share with you excerpts from a paper entitled The Elimination of Lead from Gasoline by Valerie M. Thomas of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The paper was published in the Annual Review of the Energy and the Environment, volume 20, pages 301 to 324. The paper was published in 1995, but its lessons remain relevant, particularly to the Philippines now that it is also moving toward the unleaded regime.
In her paper, Ms. Thomas noted that lead additives - that which the Clean Air Act intends to eliminate - have harmful as well as beneficial effects on automobiles. For one, lead additives include halogenated compounds added as lead scavengers to prevent the excess buildup of lead compounds within the engine. On the other hand, these halogens also form corrosive compounds, which degrade exhaust valves, spark plugs, mufflers, and exhaust pipes. …
The Columbian (Vancouver, WA.)
Copyright 2000 The Columbian Publishing Co.
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: OUR READERS' VIEW
BYLINE: compiled by Columbian editorial staffExperts can be wrong
I am continually amused by the lack of expertise shown by people who are supposed to be experts in their fields. Two especially striking examples may be found in the March 13 article, "Women, economy give Gore support."
A professor at the University of Washington, identified only as "Olson," is credited with a most astonishing revelation: that George W. Bush "was forced to move to the right in the primaries," but that Al Gore "was not forced to move to the left." This is quite surprising in view of recent statements by national Democratic leaders expressing concern about Gore's massive health care proposals, embracing of Al Sharpton and other moves to the left.
The same article featured pollster Tim Hibbits declaring that "on balance, it's a reasonable assumption" that women are anti-life. Did he miss last year's Princeton University survey that found a majority of women (53 percent) supporting a ban on abortions in nearly all cases? …
Jay Sulzmann, Jr.
Vancouver
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Copyright 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: ST. LOUIS NATIVE GETS DOWN TO ESSENTIAL LEWIS AND CLARK
BYLINE: Adam Goodman; Of The Post-DispatchSeveral years back, Landon Y. Jones heard historian Stephen Ambrose was working on a biography of Meriwether Lewis.
Jones, a native St. Louisan who had climbed the ranks at Time Inc. to become editor of Money and then People magazines, was gathering material for his own book on Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their expedition across the Louisiana Territory in 1804-1806.
"No problem," he thought.
But Ambrose's little biography, "Undaunted Courage," (Simon & Schuster), first published in 1996, turned into a big hit and a best seller.
Jones put his Lewis and Clark project to rest.
Now Jones has a second chance.
In "The Essential Lewis and Clark," released Feb. 18, Jones seeks to distill the most exciting and personal entries from the painstakingly detailed journals written by Lewis and Clark during their adventure.
The result is not quite the narrative Jones had originally envisioned, but it took all the red-penciling, human-interest and drama-loving instincts he had developed at People to whittle down Lewis and Clark's 900,000 words into an easy-to-handle 203-page book. …
After attending St. Louis Country Day School, Jones went to Princeton University. After graduating in 1966, he started as a writer for Time. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
March 21, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: ALTRUISM AT A PRICE? MAINE ISLANDERS STRUGGLE WITH CORPORATE LARGESSE
BYLINE: By Ellen Barry, GLOBE STAFF
MONHEGAN ISLAND, Maine - There's ingratitude, and then there's Bill Payne.While some people might be satisfied to question the motive of a corporate donation from the comfort of their homes, the first assessor of Monhegan Plantation has been taking a ferry 10 miles to the mainland, strapping on a sandwich board, and picketing the credit card company MBNA Corp. for giving money to the island's two-room library. Payne's stand against MBNA's grant has prompted head shaking among his neighbors on Monhegan Island, who say they are happy to have the money, and at MBNA, whose rapid growth as an employer in midcoast Maine has been accompanied by a shower of gifts to local schools and libraries.
What, they ask, could be so sinister about rebuilding the bookshelves in the mysteries section so that "The Case of Lucy Bending" could stand upright?
From a wood-heated house on a pristine island that has staved off mainland influence for years, Payne acknowledged that he may be tilting at windmills, and even that his support on the island is small. But his criticism comes as MBNA's power and largesse are becoming part of the region's fabric - delighting many with new jobs, and discomforting others who are wary of the outsiders' influence. Some see a replay of Mainers' ambivalence about the mills that sustained, and then bankrupted, a long line of company towns. …
Payne is the son of an airline executive, the product of an Arizona high school and Princeton University's philosophy department, but, like a wave of young people in those years, he was drawn to the simpler life Monhegan offered. At one point, disgusted by his background, he cast his diploma into the sea. …
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society
March 21, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Demythologizing college admissions
BYLINE: Richard G. DiFeliciantonio
DATELINE: COLLEGEVILLE, PA.The college admissions season is now in full swing, and with it comes the onset of pervasive, destructive myths about America's colleges and universities. This is particularly acute among the families of the best high school students, those who have Ivy League aspirations.
The admissions season is also the time when those of us reviewing applications and conducting family and student interviews start to hear certain myths born of insecurity.
Myth No. 1: If you don't get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, your life is ruined.
This misperception assumes that the world is inordinately affected by what less than a tenth of 1 percent of the college-going population does (attend Ivy League colleges).
It's like saying that without Armani and Prada we'd all have absolutely nothing to wear.
But, in fact, American higher education is the envy of the world because of its diversity, its pluralism, and its bountiful opportunities for any deserving student.
While the Ivies are certainly excellent institutions, a recent study cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that many of those top 10 percent achievers who do not attend Ivy League schools may actually end up earning slightly more. …
M2 PRESSWIRE
Copyright 2000 M2 Communications Ltd.
March 21, 2000HEADLINE: LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES Physicists from Lucent's Bell Labs devise organic electronics and high-speed communications circuits; Win scientific awards
DATELINE: MINNEAPOLISPhysicists at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU), have designed novel organic semiconductors and built innovative electronic circuits that could have far-reaching consequences for the communications industry.
They will present the results of this visionary research at the annual meeting of American Physical Society (APS), the largest worldwide gathering of physicists every year, taking place here this week.
Bell Labs physicists will give invited talks on subjects as diverse as organic transistors, silicon micromachines, frustrated magnets, high-temperature superconductors, and high-speed indium phosphide communications circuits. The breadth and scope of the talks will be a tribute to the immense scientific contributions made by Bell Labs, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. …
"Bell Labs has a unique place in the history of twentieth century physics," said Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University. "Not only has it been the source of the physics-based devices on which the modern information economy is run, it has also contributed substantially to fundamental physics. The Labs is the perfect illustration of the fact that technology and fundamental science are mutually reinforcing and supportive of each other, as opposed to the 'linear' model that technology follows from science but not vice versa." …
USA TODAY
Copyright 2000 Gannett Company, Inc.
March 21, 2000, TuesdayHEADLINE: Chemist mixed sports, studies Academic All-American Hall to honor Nobel winner
BYLINE: Willie T. Smith IIISherwood Rowland always has had higher pursuits, from leaping over competitors on the basketball court during the eight years he was in college sports to setting his sights on the world's ozone layer.
The chemist, one of the world's top environmental experts, won the Nobel Prize for research that discovered chlorofluorocarbon gases weaken the ozone layer.
His achievements in science and sports have led to an honorary induction into the GTE Academic All-American Hall of Fame….
Rowland was a professor at Princeton University and the University of Kansas before he joined the staff at California-Irvine as the founding chairman of its chemistry department, one of his proudest accomplishments.
"In 1960 the University of California had the reputation as one of the greatest public institutions in the world," Rowland says. "To play a part in forming a new campus was an exciting idea, one that doesn't come along too often." …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
March 20, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: Ridge again veep prospect, this time for Bush
DATELINE: HARRISBURG, Pa.After Gov. Tom Ridge led George W. Bush on an early morning run along the Susquehanna River, the Texas governor was asked about his Pennsylvania counterpart's fit as a "running mate."
Bush refused to take the bait, joking that Ridge was simply his "jogging mate."
The governors' playfulness last summer was among the first signs of election season "veepstakes" speculation, with Ridge a strong Republican vice presidential prospect, just as he was in 1996.
In addition to his friendship with Bush - and with his father, former President Bush - Ridge offers some potential pluses for the White House ticket, but also a few drawbacks.
Most attractive would be Ridge's popular leadership in Pennsylvania, likely to be a major swing state in November, where he is serving his second and final term as governor.
"Ridge would make good political sense," said Larry Bartels, a political science professor at Princeton University, who views Pennsylvania as a fall battleground. …
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Copyright 2000 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 20, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: INDEX OR MANAGED FUNDS? YOUR BEST BET IS TO PUT YOUR MONEY IN BOTH
BYLINE: CHET CURRIER COLUMNISTThe pressure of a fast-moving stock market these last few months has spotlighted a weakness of index mutual funds.
They're prisoners of their indexes and can't do anything to adapt to changing market conditions. If an index is imperfect - as all indexes are - in its way of measuring everything that happens in the markets, then the index fund bears the same imperfections.
For instance, when small to mid-size telecommunications and biotechnology stocks are the darlings of an otherwise slumping market, any fund based on an index that doesn't emphasize this specialized area gets left behind.
Exhibit A: Standard & Poor's 500 Index funds, which were going great guns until about the middle of 1999. Now, in the past year, the biggest S&P index fund, the Vanguard Index 500, has gained 8.2 percent, while the average of all funds has climbed 22 percent, according to Bloomberg Analytics.
As of last week, Vanguard Index 500, down 5.6 percent for the year, ranked in the bottom 15 percent of all funds, as measured by Bloomberg data.
This is by no means a death knell for index investing. The index approach, which aims merely to parallel the course of a market measure rather than to pick winning investments, enjoys some important advantages. By cutting out most costs of research and trading, index funds give themselves an excellent shot at outperforming the average managed fund during any extended period. …
The argument for indexing, based on the so-called efficient market hypothesis, has won fame and fortune for quite a few people, among them Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel and mutual fund manager John Bogle. "The U.S. capital markets are extremely efficient," Malkiel said. "Stock prices reflect all that is known at any point in time."
There were no index mutual funds when Malkiel published the book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" in 1973. Today, by his estimate, more than 25 cents of every dollar in U.S. corporate pension funds is indexed. …
NOTE: This report from Bloomberg News Service appeared in several newspapers, including Newsday and the Orange County Register.
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 2000 The Hartford Courant Company
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: WESLEYAN'S IMAGE, AGAIN, LAID BARE; A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE EXPOSES 'NAKED DORM'
BYLINE: WILLIAM WEIR; Courant Staff Writer
DATELINE: MIDDLETOWN --National attention has once again visited the campus of Wesleyan University.
This time, it's with a front-page article in the Saturday New York Times on the so-called "Naked Dorm," a group of four housing units also known as West College, or Westco.
The article, which tells the story of an unofficial "clothing optional" policy among the dormitory's 175 or so residents, comes on the heels of national publicity given to a Wesleyan course called "Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes."
"We're developing a reputation as having an affinity for nudity," said Molly Below, a Wesleyan junior who lives off campus. Below said she never knew about the policy. …
Some students, such as Jessica Arndt, say they're concerned that Wesleyan's reputation is being shaped by forces outside the university. And it detracts from what she considers the university's "real issues" -- campus safety and the fight for better working conditions for the school's janitors.
It's especially disheartening for (Justin) Harmon, who officially takes over as the university's communications director in May. He was filling in Sunday. The job he's leaving, as spokesman for Princeton University, had him constantly talking to reporters about an unsanctioned streaking event at the university called the "nude olympics."
Glad to be finally shedding that burden, he picked up the Times Saturday, only to read about the "Naked Dorm."
"I looked at it and said 'Oh, my goodness, I've brought it with me,' " he said.
India Today
Copyright 2000 Living Media India Ltd.
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: Poverty of Numbers
BYLINE: Jairam Ramesh
HIGHLIGHT: The debate on poverty numbers is stoked again but there are no definite trendsAn article titled "Has Poverty declined since economic reforms" published recently in the Economic and Political Weekly is causing a flutter since it shows that rural poverty may have increased since 1991. The article is authored by Gaurav Datt, a World Bank economist. Critics of reforms are gloating, while the defenders of the faith have become sullen. Both are wrong.
Datt uses statistical data from the government's National Sample Survey (NSE) Organisation. During the pre-reform period of July 1989-June 1991, 35.37 per cent of the rural population and during the post-reform period of July 1995-December 1997 36.47 per cent of the rural population were estimated to be living below the poverty line. Urban poverty ratios, however, fell from 33.08 per cent to 29.02 per cent over the same period. Datt hedges his case by saying "there is no evidence to suggest that this has been due to an inegalitarian growth process".
All poverty estimates after 1993-94 are based on a "thin" sample of 20,000 households. This "thin" sample is considered unreliable for drawing any definitive conclusions. …
Meanwhile, a detailed analysis of prices and poverty in India till 1993-94 has just been completed by Angus Deaton and Alessandro Tarozzi of Princeton University, US. Officially, rural poverty fell from 39.18 per cent in 1987-88 to 37.21 per cent in 1993-94. Deaton and Tarozzi estimate that the ratio in 1993-94 may well have been 32.94 per cent, showing that rural poverty may have declined at a faster rate than is officially put out. Officially, the estimate is that urban poverty has increased from 22.56 per cent in 1987-88 to 32.62 per cent in 1993-94. The duo calculate that urban poverty may have instead fallen to anywhere between 18.11 per cent and 21.36 per cent. The state-level estimates are also different. For example, Andhra's rural poverty was officially just 16 per cent in 1993-94, the second lowest in the country after Punjab but the Princeton dons show that it may be more than double that figure. …
Investment News
Copyright 2000 Crain Communications Inc.
March 20, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: Establishment economic gurus rule Bush, Gore inner circles; Dancing around centrist maypole
BYLINE: Sara HansardNo matter who wins the presidential election, ex-Federal Reserve bankers will be calling the shots on economic policy, an InvestmentNews analysis shows.
In both camps, old school ties and establishment connections seem to count as much as philosophy when it comes to cracking the inner circle.
On the right, former Federal Reserve Governor Lawrence Lindsey heads Republican George W. Bush's economic kitchen cabinet, which is heavily influenced by Stanford University academics and supply-siders from the American Enterprise Institute. …
On the left, Democratic Vice President Al Gore's inner circle, led by former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, includes a handful of administration officials and a smattering of scholars from the Ivy League and the liberal Brookings Institution. …
His counterpart, Mr. Blinder, is part of a similar establishment clique.
He is on leave from Princeton University during his tenure as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, a liberal counterpart to the enterprise institute. …
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 2000 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
March 20, 2000 Monday, FINAL / ALLHEADLINE: READING THE BRAIN; NEW IMAGING TECHNIQUE LETS DOCTORS SEE INSIDE, BUT SOME QUESTION HOW IT IS USED;
BYLINE: By SANDRA BLAKESLEE; NEW YORK TIMESTwo hundred years ago, the German anatomist Franz Joseph Gall dazzled the public with his science of phrenology, the practice of divining personality and intellect from the shape of the bumps on a person's head. Each localized bump, he said, represented a different characteristic, such as secretiveness, acquisitiveness or cautiousness.
Later practitioners of phrenology even found locations for pampering children, gluttony and Republican politics.
Now the public is being dazzled once again by a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or FMRI, which is finding precise brain locations related to all sorts of human traits and activities. Among them are hyperactivity centers in children, cells that specialize in the naming of fruits and even a spot in the brain that lights up when a man is sexually aroused.
Instead of having their bumps "read" during a Victorian parlor game, people lie down and put their heads inside a powerful magnet device that detects certain molecules in blood flowing through the brain.
For example, Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, and his colleagues have used the imaging to discover a function for the anterior cingulate that may explain its widespread activation in imaging experiments. Many believe that this part of the brain is responsible for controlled attention or that it responds to errors, Cohen said.
But experiments that could have been done only with FMRI suggest that its real role is to register conflict. This, in turn, leads a person to pay more attention to what is happening. The distinction is subtle but important, Cohen said. …
Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Cahners Publishing Company
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: Investing Expert Bogle to McGraw; Brief Article
BYLINE: Baker, John F.John Bogle, who founded and used to head the Vanguard Group, a celebrated mutual fund company, is one of the great names in investing, and he is planning to do a book, John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years for publisher and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Krames at McGraw-Hill. The book will be the first in a new series, Great Ideas of Finance, which the publisher will bring out once a year.
Krames, whose association with Bogle goes back to previous publications, negotiated the deal, for world rights, without intervention of an agent and plans to bring the book out in September. It will trace the development of Bogle's ideas on the stock market and investing dating all the way back to his Princeton University thesis nearly 50 years ago.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Copyright 2000 Star Tribune
March 20, 2000, MondayHEADLINE: Attentive ears rewarded by Chamber Music Society; Imbrie's Piano Quartet provides complicated beauty
BYLINE: Jim Phillips; Staff WriterThe distinguished American composer Andrew Imbrie and two other honored guests of the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota _ pianist Gilbert Kalish and cellist Fred Sherry _ and several Society musicians held the rapt attention of several middle-schoolers in the front row. One or two were even on the edges of their seats for a time.
That sight at Sunday afternoon's concert, given at the Ted Mann Concert Hall at the University of Minnesota, was marvelous, because the music, a Piano Quartet by Imbrie commissioned by the Society, requires attentive listening.
Imbrie, who will be 79 in April, studied at Princeton University and taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley. He is of the generation of classical music composers referred to as the "post-World War II" group, known for creating music variously described as atonal, dissonant, difficult to either play or listen to (at best, a bewildering challenge; at worst, fingernails on the chalkboard), and so on.
Concert hall audiences largely shunned this music, while its defenders praised mathematical structure, perhaps the definitive use of timbre, or the use of random noises played into a tape loop to demonstrate a circular sense of time. …
University Wire
Copyright 2000 The Daily Princetonian via U-Wire
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: OPEC pumps up oil prices, draining wallets
BYLINE: By Bill Beaver, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.Students returning from Spring Break may need to empty their wallets to refill their gas tanks because the price of a gallon of gasoline has risen locally in the past few months from $1.25 to more than $1.70.
The price of oil has been rising steadily for the past six months and is expected to continue to climb this summer. The higher fuel costs are the result of a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries late last year to reduce production and increase oil prices. OPEC's move has increased the price of a barrel of crude oil from $10 to more than $30 during the last year.
Like many other institutions, Princeton University is already being affected by the increase in fuel costs, according to Director of Engineering Thomas Nyquist.
COGENERATION PLANT
The largest of the University's oil outlays are in the form of gasoline and oil for the cogeneration plant, which provides the University with supplemental electricity to lessen the drain on the community's resources.
"The University's cogeneration plant is a gas facility," Nyquist said. "We primarily use natural gas, but we can use [oil products] as well. When there is a period of heavy usage, like a cold winter, the large commercial customers are asked to cut back on use. In response, we begin burning fuel to compensate." …
University Wire
Copyright 2000 The Daily Princetonian via U-Wire
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: Surfing alone: Princeton opens its ears to Napster's electronic tunes
BYLINE: By Jennifer Chang, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.While hundreds of colleges and universities across the country have decided to ban student use of Napster -- a music search engine that has received national media attention in recent months -- Princeton University has taken a more liberal approach in dealing with the issue.
According to a list published on the Website of the Students Against University Censorship -- a group that says it will "fight and lobby against the universities' decisions on banning Internet resources" -- 196 schools have blocked Napster from their networks.
Princeton University, however, has decided not to restrict use of the service. According to CIT spokeswoman Rita Saltz, "to interfere with information technology goes against what the University stands for."
The Napster software connects thousands of users in locations around the world, according to the Napster Website. The application makes it possible for users to locate and download a wide array of music in MP3 format from one convenient, easy-to-use interface. It also facilitates the process of sharing music collections with other online users.
"Some institutions appear to assume that the use of Napster is illegal. Princeton is not making that assumption," Saltz said. "We are in the business of knowledge and creating new information. We encourage students to use tools at their own disposal in legal and appropriate ways." …
The Weekly Standard
Copyright 2000 The Weekly Standard
March 20, 2000HEADLINE: The Singer Publicity Machine
An article in the March 10 Chronicle of Higher Education takes THE WEEKLY STANDARD to task for our Nov. 1 editorial that suggested Princeton University professor Peter Singer was suffering from "megalomania" for holding "a vision of himself in which the gigantic figure of Peter Singer sits across from the pope at the chessboard of humankind, locked in a grim battle for the future of all us little folk."
You remember Singer, of course. He's the Australian animal-rights activist who proclaims that a baby is of less value than a pig and who advocates a 28-day trial period before accepting newborns into the human race. He holds a chair at Princeton's curiously named "Center for Human Values," from which he pronounces that utilitarian ethical theory gives you the necessity to legalize euthanasia -- which gives you, in turn, the requirement to practice infanticide, which gives you the moral correctness of vegetarianism, which gives you, well, an ideal world of hungry utilitarians who'd kill their elderly mothers and baby daughters at the drop of a hat.
But it turns out, the Chronicle assures its readers in a glowing sketch of Singer, that everybody has the man wrong. All that "the world's most reviled philosopher" really wants is "more happiness for everyone." He has his opponents, of course, but they're just "conservatives" -- killjoys who want more unhappiness for everyone. Some of them belong to "a group of disabled-rights activists called Not Dead Yet," and some to "a group called the Roman Catholic Church." And anyway, all Singer is doing is applying in a rigorous way Jeremy Bentham's unexceptionable principle of utilitarianism: "Each to count for one and none for more than one" -- except if you happen to be one of the ones who don't count: the weak, the lame, the young, the old, and so on. …
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Copyright 2000 The Commercial Appeal
March 19, 2000, SUNDAYHEADLINE: NO-HMO DOCS LAVISH CARE ON PATIENTS - FOR A PRICE
BYLINE: Gina Kolata The New York Times News ServiceNOTE: This story appeared in The New York Times March 17.
Two years ago, William Daniel's doctor adopted a new policy. No longer would Dr. Herbert Rubin of Beverly Hills, Calif., accept payments from health maintenance organizations.
No longer would he be on insurance companies' preferred provider lists. No longer would he even accept Medicare. From then on, if you wanted to see Rubin, you paid cash.
"That was frightening to me," said Daniel, a 72-year-old retired insurance salesman who lives in Hollywood. Reluctantly, he changed doctors. But, he said, his new doctor's waiting room was always crowded, and the doctor seemed pressed for time.
Now Daniel has returned to Rubin, one of a growing number of doctors who have severed their ties to HMOs and insurance companies. In return for cash payments, the doctors often offer a lavish level of service - uncrowded waiting rooms, long, uninterrupted office visits, and an office staff that knows the patients.
"You always get what you pay for," Rubin said.
Nearly seven years after President Clinton's failed effort to remake health care in America, the health care market is remaking itself. For those with insurance or the money to pay for health care, a two-tiered system is evolving. One tier is made up of doctors who have cut their prices at the insistence of health insurers and who make up for the reduced prices by increasing their volume, seeing more patients per hour. The other tier is made up of those like Rubin who offer time and attention, but at a price. …
But, said Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University, doctors with fee-for-service practices might find themselves under a new sort of competitive pressure.
People who can afford such doctors also tend to be comfortable using computers and the Internet, he said. "They will create Web sites that will rank these doctors on quality," Reinhardt said. "That will be the obvious next step. They will put these doctors into statistical fishbowls where everything about these doctors will be on the Web.
"I think the physicians will find it is not quite the world of the late 1950s and the 1960s," Reinhardt said. "It will be utterly brutal." …
THE STATESMAN (INDIA)
Copyright 2000 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
March 19, 2000HEADLINE: Million Dollar: maths question
It is not the easiest way to win a million dollars but it must be one of the coolest. Crack a notoriously difficult mathematical enigma within two years and the money's yours. This is the challenge from Faber, which is hoping to garner appropriate publicity for its latest fictional offering, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, by the Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis. There are estimated to be about 20 people in the world who could do it and a victory, Faber hopes, will help it to cash in on one of the hippest happenings in publishing since Bridget Jones. …
Ian Stewart, a mathematics professor at Warwick University and Britain's best-known popular writer on mathematics, disagrees. "I think some mathematicians will be dazzled by a million dollars," he says. It just might tilt the balance." While Stewart is pessimistic that the prize will be claimed, he notes that the pure mathematics of number theory is populated by solitary geniuses who can sometimes stun the Establishment. "It could well be a loner who gets this," he says.
'A lot of students have been inspired by reading books such as Fermat's Last Theorem. We are moving into a golden age'
The reason that nobody wants to say never is Fermat's Last Theorem, which stood for 350 years before crumbling in the face of a determined effort by Andrew Wiles, a shy, gifted Briton who now resides at Princeton University (sadly, he was too old to qualify for a Fields medal). So, perhaps Goldbach will give up its secrets too. More importantly, the story of Wiles's seven-year quest to provide the proof for the theorem, originally scribbled in the margins of a page, captivated the book-buying public. Simon Singh's sensitive account became a bestseller, continuing a trend started by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Dava Sobel's Longitude.
Since then, publishers have been chasing permutations of the same dead-cert formula - take one man, preferably an eccentric genius, add an obscure problem, a sprinkling of science or maths, and watch the money roll in. Even mathematicians considered lost in the mists of time have been resurrected for the cause - biographies of Paul Erd"s (The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman) and (Princeotn's) John Nash (A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar) are early, readable examples. …
The Denver Post
Copyright 2000 The Denver Post Corporation
March 19, 2000 SundayHEADLINE: Schroeder's political humor leaves National Archives crowd in stitches
BYLINE: By Bill McAllister, Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief, BELTWAY NOTEBOOK,WASHINGTON - 'Have you considered a career as a standup comic?'
It was the first question thrown at former Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-Colo., after she had finished a lecture Thursday at the National Archives. The former lawmaker from Denver literally had left the audience of 100 rolling in the aisles as she recounted her 24 years in the House of Representatives.
'This is good entertainment! What a brain!' chuckled one man as he left the lecture hall. Never at a loss for words in her 24 years on Capitol Hill, Schroeder showed that she could throw out one-liners about Congress as rapidly as Jay Leno or David Letterman. …
Her first six months out of office were spent at Princeton University, where she was stunned to find graduate students in government 'so bright I couldn't tell you' who balked at her suggestion of seeking public office. They all told her government was a mess, she said.
'It's a mess, I say? What isn't?' Why not be part of 'the cleanup team?' Schroeder asked them. That was her motivation in Congress, she said. …
THE FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Copyright 2000 Star-Telegram Newspaper, Inc.
March 19, 2000HEADLINE: A fighter for Arlington; Transportation tops a long legacy of public service for Dottie Lynn, who is leaving the City Council in May.
BYLINE: John Austin; Star-Telegram Staff WriterARLINGTON - Dottie Lynn seemed an unlikely insurgent when she moved to Arlington with her husband and baby boy in 1952.
A petite coal miner's daughter from West Virginia, she just wanted a nice place to rear a family, and Arlington, then a town of about 7,000, seemed a likely spot.
But the little town had a big problem. Like the rest of the South, Arlington was segregated.
The goal-oriented young mother and future city councilwoman soon began to display the same zeal in supporting early civil rights efforts that she would later apply to local government, tutoring at the segregated Booker T. Washington school and fighting to open public parks to African-Americans.
Lynn's convictions extended to her family life.
"She would not let any of the four kids drink out of the whitewater fountains" in local stores, said her oldest child, Michael Lynn, 49. "We went to the colored restrooms."
But such convictions came with a price, a lesson Lynn learned when she ran for a school board seat in 1960.
"They called her a communist and a nigger-lover," Michael Lynn said. "It was vicious. She was bruised by that." …
Her father, Charles Paige, came to America from Serbia at 15, worked in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and eventually made his way to the West Virginia coal mines.
"He had to bribe his boss with whiskey to get two shifts in a coal mine to feed his family," which included four children, Michael Lynn said. "It's a myth in the Lynn family that if you stop working, you'll end up back in West Virginia." …
Paige eventually moved his family to Charleston, W.Va., and opened a corner grocery.
It was during those days that a slight high school majorette met Robert Lynn and began to learn judo.
"Bob had talked me into taking judo," she said. "My father didn't like that very much."
She graduated from high school in 1944 and enrolled at West Virginia University as a premed major. But soon she left school to marry Lynn, and the couple moved to New Jersey, where he was a Navy V-12 engineering student at Princeton University.
Dortheda - her husband bestowed the nickname most people now know her by - went to work in the typing pool.
Lynn says she wasn't much of a typist, but with luminaries such as Albert Einstein roaming the campus - in her mind's eye, Lynn still sees him strolling the campus with shoes but no socks - it was an intriguing environment for a young West Virginian.
"My mom ended up in the typing pool for Einstein," Michael Lynn said. "In fact, she went in and tried to get Einstein to do her taxes, but he didn't know how." …
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 2000 The Hartford Courant Company
March 19, 2000 SundayHEADLINE: RALPH NADER: HOMETOWN HERO OR HEEL; IN WINSTED, LITTLE LOVE IS LOST ON A CONSUMER WATCHDOG
BYLINE: RINKER BUCK; Courant Staff WriterDATELINE: WINSTED --
In his 35 years as America's pre-eminent consumer advocate and corporate scourge, Ralph Nader has carefully cultivated his image as a righteous, civic- minded patriot, frequently emphasizing his boyhood roots in this depressed mill town in the comely Litchfield Hills of northwest Connecticut.
Nader, 65, who last month announced he was running for the Green Party nomination for president, grew up in Winsted during its manufacturing heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. His passion for reform, he has often said, can be traced to his unusual upbringing and the community democracy he embraced in Winsted as a boy. But Nader's affection for his hometown is not as readily reciprocated by townspeople.
Nader's father, Nathra, was a Lebanese immigrant who prospered as the owner of the Highland Arms restaurant just across the Mad River from the mills and who sternly schooled his children during dinnertime seminars about justice and civic responsibility. Young Ralph, eschewing dates and organized sports, devoted his free time to long, studious afternoons at the Beardsley and Memorial Library, devouring the latest editions of the Congressional Record.
After an education at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and practicing law in Hartford for a couple of years, Nader became a household name with his 1965 expose on the Chevrolet Corvair, "Unsafe at Any Speed." Since then, Nader has frequently returned to his hometown to dabble in favorite causes such as education and health care reform, generally with combative results.
Nader's quixotic, love-hate relationship with Winsted has elicited strong passions in town. While some residents applaud Nader's willingness to take on issues no one else is willing to confront, many others charge that Nader's efforts have been opportunistic, hypocritical and even downright rude toward his former neighbors and friends. …
The New York Times
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: THEATER;Balancing Art, Education and Audiences
BYLINE: By JOSH SCHONWALD
DATELINE: NEW BRUNSWICKAFTER spending months researching, after laboring over revisions, R. N. Sandberg, completed a draft for his play "In Between," which he felt was a powerful and compelling piece of work. For many playwrights, that is the goal -- creating powerful art. But for Mr. Sandberg, that was only part of it.
Mr. Sandberg is not only an artist -- he is an art educator.
"If my play doesn't reach the students, it doesn't matter if it's great," said Mr. Sandberg, a theater professor at Princeton University. "The play is for the students." That means it must also be for the teachers, the parents, the principals and the school board administrators.
At the heart of the challenge for artist-educators is the need to delicately balance the interests of two very different -- sometimes irreconcilable -- audiences. Consider this artistic dilemma faced by Mr. Sandberg in writing "In Between," which explores the causes of school violence. Teachers insisted on having a positive teacher character in the play. But Mr. Sandberg knew that the presence of an adult would detract from the students' interest in the play. "Kids turn off the scene when the scene includes an adult and a kid," Mr. Sandberg said. …
The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright 2000 The News and Observer
March 19, 2000 SundayHEADLINE: It was, too, about slavery
BYLINE: Barry Shlachter, Knight Ridder NewspapersATHENS, Texas -- It's not only South Carolina. The Confederate battle flag remains a potent symbol, angering some, pleasing others.
Lost in the current debate is research into what Southern soldiers actually thought they were fighting for.
"Our understanding of the relationship between slavery and the Civil War changed before the war, during the war and every decade since the war," said Ed Ayers, a University of Virginia historian. "The trick is to realize that slavery was absolutely fundamental to the war."
Once the South went to war, a powerful wave of Confederate patriotism swept the region, and many whites marched off to war to defend their home and hearth, many scholars say. Although few Confederates discussed slavery in their letters and diaries, significantly, none wrote in favor of abolition. …
A 1997 book, "For Cause & Comrades" by Pulitzer Prize winner James M. McPherson of Princeton University, is based on 25,000 letters and 249 diaries of Civil War soldiers from both sides.
Only 20 percent of 429 Rebels mentioned slavery, while more than twice as many Yankees did.
Although slavery and emancipation were contentious issues in the North, the South just didn't have a need to rehash the arguments, McPherson said.
Confederate enlisted men and officers, he found, "took slavery for granted as one of the Southern 'rights' and institutions for which they fought and did not feel compelled to discuss it." …
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Copyright 2000 P.G. Publishing Co.
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: CONRAD PROMOTES POETRY, MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH
BYLINE: BARBARA VANCHERI POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITERConrad promotes poetry, museum, Pittsburgh
When David Conrad agreed to participate in a fund-raiser for the International Poetry Forum, he figured the selections would be the usual "greatest hits."
Director Samuel Hazo, however, surprised him.
And delighted him.
"He picked the most obscure, kind of strange, interesting collection of poems," says Conrad. He's talking on his cell phone while engaging in that most improbable of Los Angeles activities: Walking.
The 32-year-old actor, an Edgewood native who could be returning to television with a Fox series called "L.A. Confidential," is among the notables participating in Friday's "Turn-of-the-Century Impromptu" at Carnegie Music Hall. He attended Poetry Forum events as a child and was intrigued by Hazo's profession. "When you're a kid, you don't know too many poets."
This week's program will reunite Conrad with onetime co-star Brooke Shields. They appeared in an independent movie called "The Weekend," which was released in Europe but not in this country. Conrad, aware that Shields studied French literature at Princeton University, invited her to participate.
"Why don't you come down and do it? People will be like, whoa, she's reading French." …
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Copyright 2000 New Mexican, Inc.
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: Stakes rise in genetic-gambling casino
BYLINE: LEE SILVERWhen President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain stated lasts week that all scientific data on the human genome "should be made freely available to scientists everywhere," they entered a long-simmering fight in the furious competition to unlock the human genetic code.
The problem is, the Clinton-Blair admonition won't further the public interest and may give one group of researchers an unfair advantage over the other.
On one side is a group of publicly supported Americans working in cooperation with British researchers financed by the nonprofit Wellcome Trust. This consortium, operating on the high-minded principle that nobody should own the human genome, releases its findings each day for scientists around the world to use freely.
On the other side are a handful of American biotech companies that are also mining the genome but are not revealing what they have found (at least for now). The most prominent of these ventures is Celera, which is decoding the genome at a faster pace than the public consortium. Its president, J. Craig Venter, is unapologetic about his motives: He wants to exploit the genome for profit.
Thus it is easy to see Venter in the role of Darth Vader while the government-supported scientists are Luke Skywalker, with only the interests of the public at heart.
But things are not as simple as they seem. This is less a fight about ethics than it is about profits and control. …
Celera, like its rivals Human Genome Sciences and Incyte, is taking a huge financial gamble in gathering genome information and wants to profit from any advantage it might gain. Venter intends to make public all the raw data collected by his company as soon as the project is completed. To make money, he hopes to sell the powerful software and supercomputing services that will make this raw data understandable and useful for making drugs and therapies. …
Lee Silver is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. This opinion piece first appeared in The New York Times.
Sunday Business
Copyright 2000 Sunday Business Group
March 19, 2000HEADLINE: GENE PANIC SPARKS SLUMP
BYLINE: Larry Black; in New YorkIf the US and British governments had wanted to pull the rug from under the superheated market for technology shares, they could hardly have done a better job than they did last week.
An innocuous joint statement by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair about genetic patents last Tuesday sent the sector into a three-day tailspin that cut the value of many biotech ventures by a quarter and sent the broader Nasdaq market into correction just days after its main index topped 5000 for the first time.
The announcement said the two governments believed that data from the huge project under way to decode the DNA molecule the very blueprint of human life should be made freely available to scientists everywhere", although it went on to acknowledge the validity of genetic patents.
But it did not come out that way in part, officials concede, because of populist spinning by government press spokesmen, notably at the White House, that played to public unease over giving companies exclusive rights to human biology.
At the height of the panic, before the US markets opened on Tuesday, rumours circulated that the leading gene-mapping companies stripped of their ability to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in their research were considering bankruptcy filings. Despite immediate denials by company executives, analysts and even government officials, investors were unconvinced.
The confusion, industry officials say, was over the distinction between genome research the publicly funded cataloguing of the 3bn-letter chemical sequence of DNA and the for-profit race to isolate genes and their functions within that mass of information.
But the market's confusion also highlights the frightening ignorance among investors who have pumped tens of billions of dollars this year into the industry. Their anxiety is all the more troubling given the starring role biotech shares which had been up almost 45% on the year have played in the rapid run-up in the overall technology market. …
Probably more important, notes one institutional investor, the sell-off comes just a month after a controversial decision by the US Patent Office to grant Human Genome Sciences commercial rights to a gene, CCR5, that other researchers later identified as the key to the fight against Aids.
The award has heightened tensions within the industry over medical patents. The debate is not over whether life should be patented, but when it can fairly be patented," says Lee Silver, professor of microbiology at Princeton University. …
The Tennessean
Copyright 2000 The Tennessean
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE;WRITERS TALK IT UP AT VANDY CONFERENCE
BYLINE: KEVIN NANCE STAFF WRITERWould the Fugitives, a prominent group of Southern poets at Vanderbilt University in 1915-1928, recognize the writers arriving at Vanderbilt next month?
Perhaps not. The Fugitives including Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate were white, male and mostly of patrician backgrounds.
But "A Millennial Gathering of the Writers of the New South," a conference featuring 46 top Southern writers on April 6-8 apparently the largest such gathering ever will be an eloquent demonstration of the changing face of the South, its literature and its increasingly diverse group of writers. …
Somewhat pointedly, the keynote speakers at the Millennial Gathering will be an African-American (poet Yusef Komunyakaa, a Louisana native and Princeton University professor who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry) and a woman (Lee Smith, a West Virginia native and author of several popular literary novels including Fair and Tender Ladies and Oral History). …
New Scientist
Copyright 2000 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
March 18, 2000HEADLINE: Trading flaws
BYLINE: Joanna MarchantHIGHLIGHT: You can't rely on randomness to give a fair measure
ANCIENT traders and modern mathematicians may have been getting their sums wrong. It seems you can't get a consistent measure of goods by randomly pouring spheres such as oranges or grains into a vessel, say American researchers. Their findings have sparked off a debate about the meaning of randomness.
Since biblical times, barter economies have relied on the assumption that the same amounts of produce will always fill a container of known volume. Mathematicians also believed that if you pour spheres randomly and shake them around enough, they settle down into a maximum density, a state called random close packing. But while exhaustive experiments with peas and ball bearings gave a maximum density for randomly packed spheres of around 64 per cent, nobody has been able to predict this value theoretically.
Now Salvadore Torquato, a materials scientist from Princeton University, says this whole concept is misplaced. "We showed in a computer simulation that you can go beyond the 64 per cent limit," he says.
Using a computer model, Torquato and his colleagues simulated 500 spheres in a cube, and squeezed the sides inwards at different rates to mimic the effects of shaking until the spheres jammed together. Pushing in the walls at different speeds yielded structures with densities ranging from 64 per cent to 74 per cent. "Both density and order vary continuously," says Torquato.
The scientists argue that the concept of random close packing is meaningless because a "random" state and an "ordered" state are simply regions on a continuous scale, with no sharp distinction between them. Princeton chemist Roberto Car supports his colleagues. "They proved that a concept that has been around for a long time is not defined and incorrect." …
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 2000 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
March 18, 2000 SaturdayHEADLINE: ETHICIST INCITES OUTRAGE, QUESTIONS SANCTITY OF LIFE
BYLINE: By KATHI WOLFE; RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.Ethicists aren't rock stars or politicians. Outside academia, they rarely arouse much passion. This isn't the case with Peter Singer, the 53-year-old DeCamp professor of bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Singer, best known as an animal rights advocate, questions the conventional wisdom, especially in religious communities, that human life is sacred.
His views outrage religious leaders. Demonstrators in wheelchairs protested his appointment to Princeton, where he began teaching last fall. Editorial writers have said he's Nazi-like.
Yet Singer is a natural hero to followers of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group, and many ethicists, even those who disagree with him, say he is a moral man.
Singer reaches a popular audience through the books he has written on such topics as "Animal Liberation" and "Rethinking Life and Death."
The most contentious of his views, however, center on euthanasia. He believes euthanasia should be an option for terminally ill people and supports it, in some instances, for severely disabled infants.
The Judeo-Christian belief in the "sanctity of human life," he says, is a "medieval" concept. He questions whether life is necessarily of value just because it's human in an age when technology can keep people alive after they've irrevocably lost consciousness. To him, an animal life could be just as valuable as that of a human being. …
The Toronto Star
Copyright 2000 The Toronto Star
March 18, 2000, SaturdayHEADLINE: HISTORIANS HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY IN FILM
BYLINE: Judy StoffmanWhen Natalie Zemon Davis goes to a movie that's set in the past, she always sits through the credits to see if the film used any historical consultants.
Recently she noticed that her friend Penny Corfield ''a fine historian of the upper classes and the professions in 19th-century England," gets a thank you at the end of Topsy Turvy, which likely means the director called up and asked her some specific questions about, say, the contracts of Victorian actors.
What Davis likes to see but rarely does is ''genuine co-operation between historians and filmmakers, where the filmmaker takes seriously the evidence of the past and the historian takes seriously the distinctive techniques of the filmmaker - the visual needs and time limits of film.
''Thinking that historians are only useful for little details is a mistake," she says. ''History is about a lot more than that, about ideas, processes, visions of the world."
A celebrated Toronto-based historian of the pre-modern world, Davis will deliver the sixth annual Barbara Frum Lecture on Tuesday at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto. She will speak about how the movies have depicted and sometimes distorted history, with specific reference to slave resistance stories, from Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) to Jonathan Demme's Beloved (1998). …
After teaching history at the University of Toronto in the '60s, Davis left for the University of California at Berkeley. She then spent 18 years as a professor at Princeton University, during which time she and her husband saw each other on weekends and holidays. She moved back into their cosy Victorian home in downtown Toronto full-time after her retirement from Princeton in 1996 to be close to her son Aaron, a musician with the Holly Cole Trio, and her Canadian grandchildren. She also has two daughters, Simone in New York and Hannah, living in Paris.
At 70-ish, she is slim, chic and lively. Married 51 years, she and Chandler still hold hands at the movies.
Films have been a leitmotif in her life. ''At Princeton, I taught a course called History And Film, one on early modern France, on women, on Jewish history, and I used film in all my classes. It's a wonderful medium for recreating the past." …
U.S. Newswire
Copyright 2000 U.S. Newswire, Inc.
March 17, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: American Cancer Society Names Selig to Federal Relations Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, March 17The American Cancer Society, the nation's leading voluntary health organization, today announced that Wendy Selig has been named managing director of federal government relations.
Selig, a veteran Capitol Hill staffer, will manage and oversee the society's federal advocacy efforts beginning May 1.
"We are pleased to welcome Wendy to the American Cancer Society advocacy team," said Daniel E. Smith, vice president for federal and state government relations. "Her skills and experience in cutting through the complexities of the legislative process will help us advance the important mission of the Society. Wendy's expertise will help us carry a strong and sustained message about the need for national leadership in beating this devastating disease and we look forward to working with her to help more people prevent, detect and fight cancer." …
A native of Princeton, N.J., Selig and her husband live in Annandale, Va., with their daughter. Selig holds an undergraduate degree in politics from Princeton University and a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University. …
New York Law Journal
Copyright 2000 New York Law Publishing Company
March 17, 2000, FridayHEADLINE: Young Lawyers Hit the Campaign Trail
BYLINE: By Vanessa Blum, American Lawyer Media
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, D.C.The six o'clock news is up, and the commentator is blasting your candidate. Phones are ringing off the hook. People are shouting, whizzing through the room. A dozen reporters are waiting for answers to their questions. And you have not slept in two days.
It is no wonder people call up battle metaphors to describe life on the presidential campaign trail. The road to the White House is the most brutal contest of American politics - an 18-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week exhilarating, exhausting adventure.
For the past nine months, two young Washington lawyers who left the security and six-figure salaries of law firm jobs worked on opposite sides of the bitter Republican fight between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain.
The two men have similar profiles. Both are 29 years old. Both are recent graduates of Harvard Law School. And both are feverishly devoted to their candidates.
But last week their paths diverged.
Ted Cruz, who last summer walked away from a position at D.C.'s small but prestigious Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, is domestic policy adviser to the Bush campaign. But for Craig Turk, who left D.C.'s Wiley, Rein & Fielding to be chief inside counsel to the McCain campaign, it is time to come home. …
Mr. Cruz is the youngest child of a Cuban revolutionary who came to the University of Texas to study math in 1957 with "the suit on his back, a slide rule in his pocket, and $100 sewn into his underwear." His parents met in the oil business and ran a small prospecting company in Houston. Mr. Cruz developed an interest in the law, politics, and public speaking at an early age.
While studying public policy at Princeton University, Mr. Cruz earned two national debate championships and was elected chairman of the university council. At Harvard, he edited three separate legal journals.
After graduating from Harvard in 1995, Mr. Cruz started building his resume among the conservative legal elite. …
University Wire
Copyright 2000 Independent Florida Alligator via U-Wire
March 17, 2000HEADLINE: Speaker urges study abroad for life-changing experience
BYLINE: By Teresa Wood, Independent Florida Alligator
SOURCE: U. Florida
DATELINE: Gainesville, Fla.Poised behind a desk in the University of Florida Reitz Union, William Bader, assistant secretary of state, urged a group of more than 30 students not to move quickly from college to the workforce.
Bader said he wants students to spend time in a foreign country learning about another culture and themselves.
Bader spent a year in Germany at the University of Munich as a Fulbright Scholar, which provides an opportunity for students to study in other countries.
"Your whole life changes when you have that incredible, intense experience," Bader said.
As assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, Bader handles the Fulbright program, English teaching programs and international exchanges.
He said he believes young people today think "frequency is as important as intensity" rather than really savoring and understanding an experience. …
Bader taught Bill Bradley as a professor at Princeton University. He also first knew President Bill Clinton when Clinton was a messenger for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"He pushed the mail cart around and delivered our mail," Bader said in an interview before his presentation. …
Columbia Journalism Review
Copyright 2000 Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
March, 2000 / / April, 2000HEADLINE: Covering the Climate: Beware of False Conflict
HIGHLIGHT: Expert Witness features top thinkers in other professions commenting on journalistic coverage of their world. In this issue, John Wallace is interviewed about global warming by Frank Houston, a Brooklyn writer who specializes in science.
You have written that where global warming is concerned, the media, "in their well intended efforts to air opposing points of view . . . tend to accentuate differences of opinion," and that this enables propagandists to create a false impression of conflict. Can you explain what you mean by this?
* Seeking out and presenting contrasting opinions is just as important in scientific reporting as in other spheres. However, it's often not so much a matter of offering a balanced presentation of opposing points of view as illuminating a variety of scientific perspectives which may be distinct from one another without necessarily being contradictory. Many science reporters take this part of their job seriously and are very good at it. Problems arise when writers fail to distinguish between subtle differences in opinion and diametrically opposing views; when they include or place undue weight on the views of individuals who are not qualified to offer informed scientific opinions; and when they fail to make a clear distinction between scientific opinion and political opinion.
There are a lot of lobbyists and others with strong points of view who don't always deal with the nuances that responsible scientists do. Reporters inexperienced in dealing with the subject area are particularly prone to these problems because they don't know who to call upon for impartial scientific advice, and they're often unaware of the broader scientific and political context of the story they are writing. The fact that they're writing under pressure of tight deadlines doesn't help. …
. My favorite example involves an incident that took place during the 1996 annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Atlanta on a day when a major winter storm was making headlne news. As rain poured down upon Atlanta in advance of the approaching Arctic blast, a young woman reporter from the local NBC station appeared on the scene and asked the executive director of the society, Richard Hallgren, if he would be willing to find her two meteorologists who would stage a debate for the evening network news. Her news director wanted one to argue that this storm was a consequence of global warming and the other to take the position that it had nothing to do with global warming. Hallgren warned her that no reputable meteorologist would argue that global warming orchestrates weather events, but offered to find two experts who would have interesting things to say on the subject. He asked George Philander of Princeton University and me to meet with her to see if we could work something out. After our fifteen-minute audition failed to produce the desired level of acrimony, Philander and I were dismissed, and the reporter expressed the network's disappointment to Hallgren for not delivering what it wanted, and left. She appeared a few hours later on the evening news, standing outside the conference hotel, huddled under an umbrella for protection from the drenching rain. She reported that she had just been inside the hotel interviewing the meteorologists as to whether they thought the featured storm was a consequence of global warming, and some thought it was and some thought it wasn't. There's no stopping a determined news editor! …
OBITUARIES
The Legal Intelligencer
Copyright 2000 American Lawyer Media
March 23, 2000 ThursdayHEADLINE: Retired Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll Partner M. Carton Dittman Dies at Age 85
M. Carton Dittmann Jr., a retired partner of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, on March 19 at Bryn Mawr Hospital. He was 85.He was a graduate of Germantown High School (1931), Princeton University (1935) and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania (1938). While at Princeton, he was in the Army ROTC and served in the Army Field Artillery in Europe from 1941 to 1945. His service included landing at Omaha Beach in July 1944, serving in the campaign across France, Austria and Germany. He was discharged in August 1945, having received the Bronze Star. …
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 2000 The Hartford Courant Company
March 23, 2000 Thursday, STATEWIDEHEADLINE: PEOPLES, JOE WEBB
Joe Webb Peoples, 92, a longtime resident of Middletown, then of Middle Haddam and most recently of Chester, died on Tuesday (March 21, 2000). After obtaining a B.A. and M.S degrees from Vanderbilt University, Mr. Peoples went on to graduate school at Northwestern University and took a Ph.D. in Geology from Princeton University in 1932. In 1935, Mr. Peoples joined the faculty of Wesleyan University as Chair of the Geology Department, a position in which he continued until his retirement in 1973. …
The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
Copyright 2000 The Durham Herald Co.
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES John Harlin Grimes Sr.
GRIMES
BAHAMA -- John Harlin Grimes Sr., M.D., Bahama, N.C., died peacefully on Sunday, March 19, 2000 at his home. He was born in Lexington, Kentucky on April 11, 1940, the son of Dr. Allen E. Grimes Sr., and Sara Newman Grimes.
Dr. Grimes graduated from Princeton University in 1961 and Northwestern Medical School in 1965. He came to Duke University in 1967 for a urological residency and remained on the medical staff until 1977, when he entered private practice at Durham County General Hospital. …
The Washington Times
Copyright 2000 News World Communications, Inc.
March 22, 2000, WednesdayHEADLINE: Millard Farrar West Jr., 90, retired financier
Millard Farrar West Jr., 90, a financier and civic leader, died March 18 of Parkinson's disease at his Chevy Chase home.
During World War II, Mr. West served in the Army Air Corps and received the Legion of Merit for work on the Corps' demobilization plan. He retired in 1945 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
A native Washingtonian, he graduated from Western High School 1927 and then from Princeton University in 1932. He graduated from National University Law School in 1935.
Mr. West entered the securities business in 1933 at Ferris and Co. He joined the investment firm of Auchincloss Parker & Redpath and was made partner in 1950 and member of the Executive Committee. Through mergers, Auchincloss Parker & Redpath became Thomson McKinnon Securities and later Prudential Securities Inc., and he served in those firms as investment vice president. He also served on the board of the Investment Bankers Association. He worked in the securities business until his retirement in 1995. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
March 19, 2000, SundayHEADLINE: Crash at Mixing Bowl Kills Five; Two Cars in HOV Lanes Hit Out-of-Control Truck on I-95
BYLINE: Michael D. Shear; William Branigin , Washington Post Staff WritersFive people were killed at the Springfield interchange yesterday morning when the two cars they were riding in slammed into an out-of-control dump truck that had careened across Interstate 95 and vaulted into the air before landing in the car-pool lanes, Virginia State Police said.
The high-speed impact ripped the black Saab and gray Toyota Camry apart and toppled the truck, crushing the cars' occupants. In addition to the five adults who died at the scene, two 14-year-old boys riding in the Saab were critically injured, police said.
Killed in the 1995 Saab were Scott P. Klurfeld, 52, and his wife, Janis, 41, of McLean, who were on their way to a soccer game with their son and his friend, police said. The driver of the 1988 Camry was identified only as a 29-year-old man from Arlington, and one of the two passengers was Jacqueline Ernst, 60, of Herndon. All three people in the Camry died, police said.
State police described the horrific scene as the most deadly accident on a Northern Virginia highway in more than a decade. Debris, including personal belongings from the cars, was strewed across seven lanes of I-95 just south of the Capital Beltway--an infamous stretch of highway known as the Mixing Bowl. Police shut down the busy thoroughfare as rescuers worked to cut the bodies from the mangled wreckage. …
The Klurfelds, three of whom were were in the Saab, had moved from Arlington about two years ago to Mclean, where they lived in a two-story saltbox-style home with a stone front.
Scott Klurfeld grew up on Long Island and was a partner at Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman LLP, a K Street law firm in the District, where he specialized in energy law, according to a neighbor. He graduated from Princeton University in 1974 and from Harvard Law School in 1977.
His son, Zachary, is an eighth-grader at the Landon School, a private school in Bethesda. Stuart Newberger, who lives two doors from the Klurfeld home, said Zachary had a bar mitzvah last year and is a good athlete, like his father, who played lacrosse at Princeton. …
Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc.
March 20, 2000, Monday ALL EDITIONSHEADLINE: OBITUARIES / SCOTT KLURFELD, 47, LAWYER, FORMER PLAINVIEW RESIDENT
BYLINE: By Halimah Abdullah. STAFF WRITEROn most sun-splashed weekends, former Long Island resident Scott Klurfeld and his wife, Janis, would load their son and his friends into their 1995 black Saab and be off to sporting events.
On Saturday, the Klurfelds again followed their familiar routine.
But as the couple cruised along Interstate 95 in Springfield, Va., on their way to a soccer match, their car crashed into a dump truck that had spun out of control and skidded across the road. Both Klurfeld, 47, and his wife, 41, were killed instantly.
Their son, Zachary, 14, was hospitalized in stable condition, family members said. One of Zachary's friends, who was in the Saab, was also injured.
"They worked very hard on getting the kids to practices," said Klurfeld's cousin Jim Klurfeld, editorial page editor of Newsday. "They were two completely devoted parents."
Scott Klurfeld was born in Bayside, the younger of two sons. His father worked as an aeronautical engineer and his mother was an elementary school teacher. A few years later, the family moved to Plainview, where Klurfeld excelled in sports. He especially loved lacrosse and played for his Plainview Kennedy High School team, his cousin said. He was the school's valedictorian, graduating in 1970.
He majored in economics at Princeton University, graduating in 1974, and went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1977. …
The Washington Post
Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
March 18, 2000HEADLINE: Michael Ivan Austrian, 58; State Department Spokesman
Michael Ivan Austrian, 58, former State Department spokesman for the Middle East who had also served as political counselor in Ankara, Turkey, and in other posts, died of lung cancer March 15 at Georgetown University Hospital. He lived in Washington.
Mr. Austrian was the State Department's representative to the U.S. military team that enforced the cease-fire in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. In 1988, during his second posting to Turkey, he was one of the first to verify Iraq's use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.
He was a native of New York and a graduate of Lehigh University and the National War College. He did graduate work in Middle Eastern politics at Princeton University and Australian National University. …
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 2000 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
March 17, 2000 FridayHEADLINE: ROBERT J. WOLF, 84, HELPED POOR FAMILIES FIND HOMES
BYLINE: By ALANA BARANICK; PLAIN DEALER REPORTER
DATELINE: AVON LAKERobert J. Wolf, 84, founder of the Cleveland Housing Network and one of the original leaders of the Famicos Foundation, died of complications of a stroke Sunday at the Normandy Manor in Rocky River.
Mr. Wolf, who had lived most of his life in Bay Village, was dedicated to helping low-income families in Cleveland become homeowners. He united several nonprofit neighborhood housing groups to form the citywide Cleveland Housing Network in 1981. …
In 1942, he earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from Case Institute of Technology. He taught at Princeton University before serving in the Navy as a lieutenant commander during World War II. …
top