THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, March 13, 2001 RARE LOOK AT MAGNIFICENT WORLD OF CALLIGRAPHY More than 3,000 years ago in China, priests seeking knowledge at the behest of curious emperors used what were known as oracular bones, consulting them with the grave confidence students today have in dictionaries. In time, to give the process greater force, both questions and answers were carved by means of pictographic representations onto the bones themselves. ... From these semimagical beginnings came calligraphy. ... Now at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, "The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy From the John B. Elliott Collection" is a rare opportunity to survey calligraphy's long, rich and varied history in its birthplace. With choice examples from the fourth to the 20th centuries, "The Embodied Image" reveals why the Elliott Collection at Princeton University is considered the finest overall in the United States. Curated by Cary Y. Liu of Princeton and Robert E. Harrist of Columbia University, the exhibit opened at Princeton and traveled to New York's Metropolitan Museum before coming here. ...
The New York Times, March 13, 2001 Astronomers See Threat To Research In Budget Plan Astronomers are worried that an initiative buried deep in the Bush administration's budget proposal for 2002 could threaten their ability to do the kind of basic scientific research that has led them to discovery after discovery over the past decade. The budget proposal directs that a high-level panel be formed to assess the advantages of radically changing the financing and management of astronomy that relies on ground-based instruments, like optical telescopes and arrays of radio dishes. Rather than leaving those research programs under the umbrella of the National Science Foundation, a federal agency largely dedicated to basic science, the panel would consider the advantages of moving them to NASA. Many astronomers regard NASA as a mission-oriented agency that emphasizes hardware development over the quality of its scientific research, and they fear that their brand of curiosity-driven research, with few immediate practical applications, could be lost in the shuffle there. "N.S.F. astronomy has had many extraordinary successes," said Dr. Joseph H. Taylor, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at Princeton University. "I don't know why it would be a good idea to rip all that apart and put it into another agency that's not very well organized for supporting that kind of enterprise," Dr. Taylor said. ...
The New York Times, March 13, 2001 Minnesota Health Plans to Standardize Treatments Five health plans that cover almost every resident of Minnesota will announce today that they are supporting standard treatment and prevention procedures for 50 common ailments like lower back pain, high blood pressure, diabetes and bladder infections. This is the first time all the major health plans in a state have collaborated to endorse a set of standard guidelines or protocols. Their support represents a major step toward the adoption of national "best practice" medical standards based on recognized scientific evidence. The protocols, which will be continuously adjusted by panels of doctors as new medicines and procedures appear, are available on the Internet (www.icsi.org) to consumers nationwide. The standards do not dictate how doctors must treat patients, but both patients and doctors will be aware of what the recommended treatments are. ... ...most of the cost of health care arises from a small fraction of the diseases, said Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton University. "If you had protocols for 200 of the most frequent problems, you would probably cover 90 percent of the cost," he said. ...
The Seattle Times, March 13, 2001 Author, meet your gargoyle... On Monday, just before 3, she got a visit from herself: Joyce Carol Oates dressed in a purple plaid coat met Joyce Carol Oates cast in concrete. The author met her gargoyle, which overlooks the grounds of the Redmond Regional Library. "Well," the author said, peering up from under the brim of her hat. "It does look like me." Not exactly. The rooftop gargoyle's hair is pulled back, her eyes set eternally downward, as she leans upon a book set upon a spout. The author's hair is down, dark and kinky and runs down her shoulders like rain. Her large eyes are constantly moving, taking in everything to feed what she calls her "fascination with the human personality." To imagine them frozen is impossible. But the gargoyle's face is definitely Oates'--serene, small and delicate, a Victorian visage for the modern world. ... The gargoyle is one of four made by Seattle sculptor David Jacobson. Oates is in good company: Saul Bellow looms large. Nearby is Toni Morrison, a colleague of hers at Princeton University, where Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Raymond Carver is around the corner. For all her skill with words, though (she won the National Book Award for her novel, "Them"), Oates couldn't find any to describe how it feels to be cast in concrete. "I'm speechless," Oates said. ...
The American Prospect, March 12, 2001 Electoral Dysfunction: Will the Media Fail Again? As the nation begins to consider electoral reforms designed to prevent another Florida fiasco, a special challenge is in store for journalists. A story line is already developing that new technology will solve the kind of vote-counting problems that marred the presidential election. And when it comes to new technology, look out: The very words seem to bring out the gullibility of even the best reporters. ... ...the Times published an argument by Princeton University researcher Edward Tenner on "The Perils of High-Tech Voting." Tenner made the case that paperless electronic systems "multiply possibilities for tampering." It's true that financial institutions have ways of auditing touch-screen ATM transactions, Tenner noted, but no one has figured out how to create similarly verifiable records for electronic voting that would protect the secrecy of the ballot. ...
The New York Times, March 12, 2001 Visiting Chinese to Urge Bush Not to Sell Arms to Taiwan Deputy Premier Qian Qichen, the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit Washington in two years, is expected to urge President Bush next week not to sell more advanced weapons to Taiwan. Mr. Qian, a former foreign minister, continues to play a key role in Taiwan policy and will be visiting just weeks before Mr. Bush must decide which weapons the United States will sell Taiwan this year. ... Perry Link, a China scholar at Princeton University, said: "Qian is a skilled diplomat and smooth talker and wants, I think, to smooth things out with the new Bush people, try to get them as far as possible back to where the Chinese government had the Clinton people, both in general -- viewing China as a partner more than an adversary -- and on the particular issue of arms sales to Taiwan." ...
USA TODAY, March 12, 2001 Merit should trump money at top schools Princeton University, from where I graduated in 1980, has 6,350 students and an endowment worth $ 8 billion. That comes to roughly $ 1.26 million in endowment money for each student. ...The university is eliminating its student loan program and replacing all private and government lending with aid packages that grant students tuition money outright. Now, three out of four Princeton students rely on some form of financial aid. During four undergraduate years, the average borrower at Princeton accumulates about $ 16,000 in debt, $ 1,000 more than the average for student borrowers nationwide. Under the new system, however, no Princeton student need graduate with loans hanging over his or her head. ... There is already one good sign that universities that vote for merit above all will be rewarded. Princeton reports that since the university's announcement it has had a rush of calls from donors who are willing to give more for financial aid. If the money keeps pouring in, and Princeton's endowment doubles, the return on investment could easily make the university tuition-free.
Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2001 A GENETIC GLIMPSE: ORDERING DESIGNER CHILDREN LIKE PAIRS OF SHOES Princeton University microbiologist Lee Silver can see a day a few centuries from now when there are two species of humans--the standard-issue "Naturals" and the "Gene-enriched," an elite class whose parents bought for them designer genes and whose parents before them did the same, and so on for generations. ... We may already be on the path to changing the very nature of nature. Last June, with much fanfare, scientists with the taxpayer-supported Human Genome Project, working with the private Celera Genomics of Rockville, Md., announced that they had completed a working draft of a genetic blueprint for a human being. ... Although the implications for longevity, health insurance and discrimination of this achievement have grabbed media attention, the ramifications for the environment--good and bad--haven't. ...
Saint Paul Pioneer Press, March 11, 2001 Saint Paul, Minn.-Based Weapons Maker Takes Flak over Depleted Uranium The shell, with its super-dense metal core, pierces the strongest armor at long distances, quickly turning a tank into a smoldering ruin. It's inexpensive, too. The metal that makes the Silver Bullet so dense -- depleted uranium, or DU -- is low-level radioactive waste from the process of making nuclear bombs and fuel rods. The weapon has proved to be such a hit that Alliant, the leading U.S. ammunition maker, is designing a more lethal and accurate version, courtesy of a government contract that should eventually total $ 130 million. If all goes well, the new DU weapon will be battlefield-ready within a couple years, and Hopkins-based Alliant will have claimed victory in a critical product line: tank ammo. There's just one potential problem: Depleted uranium shells are becoming one of the most politically controversial battlefield weapons since the land mine. ... Fetter and Princeton University physicist and public affairs professor Frank von Hippel have studied DU and concluded that soldiers who inhaled large amounts of depleted uranium particles might face significant risks of kidney damage. But only soldiers with DU shrapnel in their bodies face a statistically significant radiation risk, they concluded. Beyond that, radiation risks are so low as to be statistically undetectable, they say. ...
The Denver Post, March 11, 2001 The 'magic' of school reform starts with the parents Paul Vance, the District of Columbia's new school superintendent, doesn't believe in magic. I almost wish he did. School reformers who do - whether the 'magic' is phonics, principal power, direct instruction or drill - tend to work single-mindedly to get the magic in place. Surprisingly often, it works - at least for a time. ... Vance says he has followed and been impressed by brain-development studies that suggest academic development - language development in particular - ought to begin as early as age 3. His 2002 budget embraces that idea as a good place to start. He'd like to start with smaller class sizes. In a report out just this week, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, who tracked the performance of 11,600 children randomly assigned to classes of various sizes, tells us that size does matter. Moreover, Krueger found, the smaller classes (between 13 and 17 pupils) showed significant closing of the black-white performance gap. The gap remained small even when the children were subsequently returned to larger classes. ...
Business Wire, March, 11 2001 Princeton University's Andrew Chi Chih Yao Wins the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) 2000 A. M. Turing Award Award Has Been Called The "Nobel Prize Of Computing" Award presented at 2001 ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose The Association for Computing Machinery today presented Andrew Chi-Chih Yao with the 2000 A.M. Turing Award, at the Annual ACM Awards Banquet. The A.M. Turing award has been called the "Nobel Prize" of Computing. Each year, the banquet celebrates the achievements and contributions of computer science and information technology luminaries. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. was the winner of the award in 1999, for landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering. ... Prior to his current position at Princeton as William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Dr. Yao taught at MIT, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a consultant at IBM, DEC Systems Research Center, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. ...
Chattanooga Times / Chattanooga Free Press, March 11, 2001 Documents shed new light on CIA's view of collapsing Soviet Union WASHINGTON -- Just three days after Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow became Pope John Paul II in 1978, the Central Intelligence Agency predicted that the installation of the first Polish pontiff would lead to political instability within Poland and the erosion of the Soviet Union's ability to control its Eastern European empire, according to newly declassified CIA documents. ... That report was among 19,000 pages of previously secret CIA documents declassified and released Friday in conjunction with a conference at Princeton University on the history of the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union. The 850 reports cover a broad range of military, political and economic topics from the early years of the Cold War to the Soviet Union's demise in December 1991. ...
Chattanooga Times / Chattanooga Free Press, March 11, 2001 College grads due reality check on expectations The Class of 2001 is in for a reality check if it expects six-figure starting salaries, signing bonuses and stock options in a slowing economy, experts say. ... The upshot: Students who planned to ride the New Economy rocket are exploring other options now that economic reality has brought expectations back to earth. Princeton University recently broke new ground when it announced it will replace student loans with scholarships so graduates needn't skew their career choices to pay off thousands of dollars of debt incurred for a college education. But long before that decision, Princeton career-services chief Beverly Hamilton-Chandler says, "We made sure our students know they have job options besides going into lucrative fields like investment banking and consulting. Those choices answer the short-term question of what you're going to do after college, but they may not answer what you're going to do with your life." ...
Nucleonics Week, March 8, 2001 RUSSIA TELLS U.S. OFFICIALS IT WILL NOT EXPORT LASERS TO IRAN After months of ambivalence, Russian officials have told the U.S. that laser equipment will not be sent to Iran and that the equipment has been sent from a customs storage site back to the D.V. Efremov Institute of St. Petersburg, several sources confirmed. The decision averts, for the moment, a major rupture in the U.S.-Russian nonproliferation relationship. The experts -- Harvard University's Matthew Bunn, John Holdren, and John Reppert, Princeton University's Frank von Hippel, and former DOE officials Rose Gottemoeller and Kenneth Luongo -- called Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran ''unwise and dangerous.'' But they said that linking important programs that enhance the security of the U.S. with Russia's behavior toward Iran would be ''a grave error'' and would ''undermine the very goal of slowing Iran's nuclear weapons program, by increasing the chance that Iran and other proliferating states could acquire weapons material stolen from facilities in Russia. |
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