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September 1 to 10, 1998 | Feedback
The Associated Press
September 10, 1998, Thursday, PM cycleHEADLINE: Ivy League authors say affirmative action works
BYLINE: By ROBERT GREENE, AP Education WriterDATELINE: WASHINGTON
Racial preferences at top colleges and universities have helped black Americans get ahead, according to a new book by two former presidents of Ivy League institutions.
The experience benefited graduates even though many had lower grades or admissions test scores and did less well academically than white students, according to the study by Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, and William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University.
The book, published by Princeton University Press, is being released in the midst of intellectual and legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education. The University of California system and Texas state universities have already abandoned preferences, and the University of Michigan's policies are being challenged in court. ...
But the authors, advocates of race-based admissions policies, said their analysis of records from 45,000 students of all races proved that such policies worked. The study tracked the performance and attitudes of those students, who entered 28 selective colleges in either 1976 or 1989.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., was among the colleges chosen.
"Rather than having been overwhelmed, they clearly appear to have benefited from having gone to these very select schools," Bowen said in a telephone interview from New York.
The 75 percent graduation rate among blacks at those institutions was higher than that for all black college students - 40 percent. It was also higher than the overall 59 percent rate for white students, but lower than for whites at the more select institutions - 86 percent. ...
The Associated Press
September 10, 1998HEADLINE: Colleges studied for effects of racial preferences
BYLINE: By The Associated PressThe top colleges and universities in a study of racial preferences by Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, and William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University.
Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, Denison University, Duke University, Emory University, Hamilton College, Kenyon College, Miami University (Ohio), Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University;
Rice University, Smith College, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Tufts University, Tulane University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Washington University (St. Louis), Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Williams College and Yale University.
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
September 10, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: National drama moves forward; Congress officially gets into the act with receipt of Starr report
BYLINE: Paul West, SUN NATIONAL STAFFWASHINGTON -- The images were as mundane as they were historic: white-shirted Capitol policemen lifting cardboard cartons out of the independent counsel's Chrysler vans and loading them into their own navy Suburbans.
That brief businesslike scene, carried out at the foot of the Capitol steps yesterday afternoon, marked the formal transfer of Kenneth W. Starr's case against President Clinton to Congress.
With it, America's long-running national psychodrama entered a new and wholly unpredictable phase.
For the first time, the House must deal with documentary evidence of possible presidential crimes, gathered by an independent prosecutor under the authority of the post-Watergate law that created his office. For what would be only the third time in the nation's history, presidential impeachment proceedings are a very real possibility.
At this point, no one can script the outcome. Censure, resignation or impeachment are options. While Congress alone can act on Starr's report, the verdict, as analysts and historians have noted, will ultimately be rendered by the American people. ...
Fred Greenstein, a Princeton University political scientist, described Clinton as "a somewhat seamier version of Nixon" and wondered whether Clinton's fellow Democrats would come to his defense one more time.
"He's sawed off so many limbs that people have gone out on for him," the professor noted. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
September 10, 1998HEADLINE: THE MARKETS: Economic Scene; Twisting Controls on Currency and Capital
BYLINE: By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEINThe International Monetary Fund, having bailed out Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia over the last 15 months, is nearly out of money, and Congress is not yet rushing to its defense. But its job is far from complete.
The financial crisis that it tried to snuff out in Asia has spread to Latin America and beyond. Investors are still dumping pesos and rubles in a grab for dwindling reserves of dollars, driving up the costs of imports for consumers and depriving economies of desperately needed foreign capital.
With the I.M.F. partly sidelined for now, the debate on how to stop the financial carnage rages at two levels -- what beleaguered countries should do for themselves and what the international community should do for them. One important step the industrialized powers could take -- debt relief -- has worked in the past. But otherwise, the outlines of a solution remain murky as economists find that many of the old panaceas do not work. ...
While the symbolism of joint international action might turn investors into optimists, it is easy to exaggerate the likely effect of a joint rate cut. Interest rates in the West are already low, and the United States is loath to drive them much lower because its economy is, at least for now, growing briskly. Besides, rate cuts do not cure serious ills, like Japan's insolvent banks or Russia's corrupt institutions.
But Alan Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, provides a clever political rationale for a joint rate cut. If it were combined with an ironclad commitment by Japan to solve its banking problems -- a necessary step to its recovery and therefore Asia's -- the joint rate cut would rise above symbolism. Still, Mr. Blinder describes the case for joint rate cuts as borderline. ...
The Times
Copyright 1998 Times Newspapers Limited
September 10, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Nobel Prize for God's left foot
BYLINE: Roy PorterA BEAUTIFUL MIND. By Sylvia Nasar. Faber, Pounds 17.99 - ISBN 0 571 17794 8.
Roy Porter on the life of John Nash, schizophrenic and genius
GENIUS and madness mingle where the mind's musings are at their most abstract or ethereal, and so it is no surprise that great musicians and mathematicians feature prominently in that company. Robert Schumann comes to mind and, more recently, among performers, the pianist Glenn Gould. And what better example of the mad mathematician than the American John Nash, in many experts' view the most powerful mathematical mind of our century. ...
Unlike most schizophrenia cases, there was, remarkably, a happy ending. In due course, Nash was able to find for himself the ultimate supportive environment: Princeton University campus, where he gained a name for himself as The Phantom and could be as eccentric as he pleased without it showing too much. And gradually he recovered - finally he was well enough to go off and receive his Nobel Prize in 1994.
A Beautiful Mind is a compelling book about a phenomenal figure. Sylvia Nasar manages to illuminate both the man and his maths, and she tells Nash's poignant story without sentimentality. Like many books these days, it suffers, however, from being too long, padded out with sentences of the "the DC3 shook as it droned past the desert and mountains toward the opaque Pacific" kind. Unaccountably, the Prologue provides a precis of the whole. Skip that, but pore over the rest of this eye-opening study of (as William Wordsworth described Sir Isaac Newton) "a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone".
USA TODAY
Copyright 1998 Gannett Company, Inc.
September 10, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Black grads achieve more College bestows enduring benefits
BYLINE: Mary Beth MarkleinBlack college students may get lower grades and graduate at lower rates than white students, but their achievements after graduation mirror, and in some cases surpass, those of white students, says a major study included in a book released Wednesday.
The book, by two former Ivy League college presidents, argues in favor of the continued use of race-sensitive policies in college admissions, which some critics say is unfair.
But the authors, relying on empirical data that span 20 years, conclude that such policies have contributed significantly to the growth of the black middle class and to improved race relations by helping all students learn to work and live successfully in a multicultural environment.
"It is the contributions that individuals make throughout their lives and the broader impact of higher education on the society that are finally most relevant," William Bowen and Derek Bok write in The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press, $24.95). Bowen and Bok are past presidents of Princeton University and Harvard University, respectively. ...
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
September 10, 1998, Thursday, Final EditionHEADLINE: Collapse of the Syrian option
BYLINE: Amos PerlmutterThe Israel-Arab peace process is in stalemate. The real obstacle to peace - the inflexibility of Syria's President Hafez Assad, not that of Israel's prime ministers - has been forgotten.
Walter Lippmann long ago wrote that interest in conflict is short-term. It all depends upon what is under the spotlight today. This is especially true about the Middle East. The focus of the analysts and Middle East experts is on the stalled Israel-Palestine negotiations, putting the blame for the most part on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Unfortunately, analysts and former high administration Middle Eastern diplomats have short memories.
From the perspective of the last five years, the real culprit in the Middle East stalemate is none other than Syria's dictator, Mr. Assad. To understand why this is so we have no better analyst than Professor Itamar Rabinovich, soon to become president of Tel Aviv University, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin's chief negotiator with the Syrians. In his book just published by Princeton, "The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations," what emerges is a scoop and revelation in the form of an academic book.
To understand the chicaneries of Mr. Assad, there is no better reference than this splendid page-turner. To quote the dean of Middle Eastern studies, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, "An extraordinarily valuable book, both as an illuminating study of a major issue of our time, and as a model of how a historian can write the history of events in which he himself was involved." One can derive most significant news from this brilliant exercise in diplomatic history. ...
The Columbus Dispatch
Copyright 1998 The Columbus Dispatch
September 9, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: DEATHS & FUNERALS
BROWN Memorial services were held in Waukesha, Wis. Tuesday, August 11, 1998 for Richard C. Brown who died Monday, August 3, 1998 in Dayton, Oh. He was born July 20, 1935 in Waukesha, Wis. After completing high school, Richard attended and graduated from Princeton University. He then attended and graduated from Harvard Law School. Prior to moving to Dayton where he taught law at Dayton University, he taught law at Capital University Law School. He is survived by his mother, Margaret Fraser Brown and sister, Roberta (Robert) Duckett both of Waukesha, Wis. Local announcement by EGAN-RYAN FUNERAL HOME, 403 E. Broad St.
The Courier-Journal
Copyright 1998 The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY.)
September 9, 1998, Wednesday MET:METROHEADLINE: Dillman Rash dies; was friend of the arts
BYLINE: DAVID GOETZ, The Courier-JournalMaj. Gen. Dillman A. Rash, a retired Army Reserve officer, civic leader and long-time friend of the arts in Louisville, died Monday at Jefferson Place Nursing Home. He was 91.
Once called the classic ''citizen soldier,'' Rash, a former partner in the Hilliard Lyons investment firm, complemented a 34-year military career with decades of service on dozens of private and public boards and committees.
''It's a great loss,'' said Donald Kohler, chairman emeritus of Hilliard Lyons Trust Co. ''He was a fine investor and an awfully good friend to many of us.'' ...
A 1930 graduate of the Princeton University and its ROTC program, he served in England and France in logistics staff positions. He received the Bronze Star and the French Medaille de Reconnaisance, leaving active duty as a colonel in 1946.
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
September 9, 1998, Wednesday, Late Edition - FinalHEADLINE: Study Strongly Supports Affirmative Action in Admissions to Elite Colleges
BYLINE: By ETHAN BRONNERA major new study of the records and experiences of tens of thousands of students over 20 years at the nation's elite colleges concludes that their affirmative action policies created the backbone of the black middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration.
The study, which challenges much of the conservative thinking about affirmative action, is to be released today by Princeton University Press in a book titled "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions." It was written by two former Ivy League presidents, William G. Bowen of Princeton University, an economist, and Derek Bok of Harvard University, a political scientist.
Examining grades, test scores, choice of major, graduation rates, careers and attitudes of 45,000 students at 28 of the most selective universities, the authors say that although they are both advocates of race-conscious admissions policies, they wanted to test the assumptions underlying such policies.
Having completed the work, they say it should put to rest major objections to such policies, especially the notion that both whites and blacks are ultimately cheated by them.
With its rich database and carefully calibrated tone, the study will most likely lead the charge in a liberal counteroffensive to recast the debate over affirmative action, which in the last two years has been rolled back in California and Texas and is under serious challenge in Michigan and Washington. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
September 9, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: A View on the Meaning of 'Merit' From 'The Shape of the River'
Following are excerpts from the study "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions," by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, to be released today by Princeton University Press:
One reason why we care so much about who gets admitted "on the merits" is because, as this study confirms, admission to the kinds of selective schools included in the College and Beyond universe pays off handsomely for individuals of all races, from all backgrounds. But it is not individuals alone who gain. Substantial additional benefits accrue to society at large through the leadership and civic participation of the graduates and through the broad contributions that the schools themselves make to the goals of a democratic society. These societal benefits are a major justification for the favored tax treatment that colleges and universities enjoy and for the subsidies provided by public and private donors. . . ...
Unfortunately, however, to say that considerations of merit should drive the admissions process is to pose questions, not answer them. There are no magical ways of automatically identifying those who merit admission on the basis of intrinsic qualities that distinguish them from all others. Test scores and grades are useful measures of the ability to do good work, but they are no more than that. They are far from infallible indicators of other qualities some might regard as intrinsic, such as a deep love of learning or a capacity for high academic achievement. . . .
Selecting a class has much broader purposes than simply rewarding students who are thought to have worked especially hard. The job of the admissions staff is not, in any case, to decide who has earned a "right" to a place in the class, since we do not think that admission to a selective university is a right possessed by anyone. . . .
Race almost always affects an individual's life experiences and perspectives, and thus the person's capacity to contribute to the kinds of learning through diversity that occurs on campuses. This form of learning will be even more important going forward than it has been in the past. . . .
The Prague Post
Copyright 1998 Prague Post s.r.o.
September 9, 1998HEADLINE: The man without a station
BYLINE: Alan LevyWilliam Jefferson Clinton is not the only president of the United States in trouble nowadays. So is Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who died in 1924 believing that he had made the world "safe for democracy" and that Prague's main railroad station had been named for him.It took 1939's German occupiers until 1942 to rename Wilsonovo nadrazi the Hauptbahnhof (Hlavni nadrazi). They also tore down a monument to the U.S. president in the park outside. ...
The Czechoslovak state - a union that lasted 74 years - was born of two founding fathers, both progressive university professors: Tomas Masaryk (1850/1937), a Slovak coachman's and Moravian housemaid's son who took the maiden name of his American bride, Charlotte Garrigue ... and Woodrow Wilson, six years Masaryk's junior, who, in barely two turbulent years (1910-12), had resigned under fire as president of Princeton University (after waging a losing battle to eliminate elite eating clubs) and won election first as governor of New Jersey and then as president of the United States. ...
Newsbytes
Copyright 1998 Post-Newsweek Business Information Inc.
September 8, 1998HEADLINE: Microsoft Vs. Justice Witnesses Position For Battle
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.By Robert MacMillan, Newsbytes.
Not playing fast and loose with its involvement in the upcoming antitrust suit versus the US government, Microsoft Corp. [NASDAQ:MSFT] is bringing to bat several of its most powerful executives, as well as heavy-hitting expert witnesses.
The company late Friday revealed names of the 12 witnesses who will bolster Microsoft's defense against charges that it tried to use the Windows operating system to monopolize the Internet browser market. ...
Following a hearing last week in US District Court before presiding Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the Justice Department accused Microsoft of withholding key evidence to its case. Microsoft said the government was trying unfairly to expand its case beyond the original browser market domination issue. Microsoft's witness list was accompanied by a statement that the witnesses would show Microsoft's innocence in that matter. ...
The Justice Department and team of state attorneys general also released their list of witnesses: James Barksdale, president and chairman of Netscape; David Colburn, senior VP of business affairs at America Online Inc. (According to the Associated Press, Colburn is the executive who agreed to distribute the Internet Explorer to AOL's 13-million strong subscriber base); Steven D. McGeady, VP of content group at Intel Corp.; John Soyring, IBM Corp.; William Harris, president and chairman of Intuit Corp., a designer of personal finance software; Scott Vesey of the Boeing Co. (According to the AP, Vesey works Boeing's computer division in Bellevue, Wash); Franklin Fisher, MIT economics professor. (An illustrious economics professor, Fisher also worked with IBM in its fight against the Justice Department. His colleague at IBM was David Boies, who now is arguing the federal government's case against Microsoft); Frederick R. Warren-Bolton, former chief economist during the Reagan administration; David J. Farber, telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Edward Felten, assistant computer professor at Princeton University; Glenn Weadock, president of Independent Software Inc.; David Sibley, economics professor at the University of Texas. (According to the AP, Sibley specializes in public utilities, which would support the Justice Department's claim that Microsoft's Windows operating system practically is a public utility because of its dominance of 90 percent of the desktop computer world).
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
September 8, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: The Conference Board Reports Leading Economic Indicators Now Available to College Students
DATELINE: NEW YORK, Sept. 8The Conference Board's Business Cycle Indicators database -- which includes the Leading Economic Indicators that are among the most widely-watched barometers of future economic trends -- is now available to students using two prominent undergraduate economic textbooks.
The Conference Board and Addison Wesley Longman, leading publisher of economic books, will offer this one-of-a-kind database through two widely-used economic textbooks: Abel and Bernanke's Macroeconomics, Fourth Edition, and Gordon's Macroeconomics, Seventh Edition. ...
"The Conference Board's Business Cycle data is a great, compact source of macroeconomic data," says Ben Bernanke, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author (with Andrew Abel of the University of Pennsylvania) of Macroeconomics. "It gives students easy access to timely, real-world numbers which increase economic literacy and help make classroom discussions come alive."
Business Week
Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
September 7, 1998HEADLINE: FILL 'ER UP WITH WOOD CHIPS, PLEASE
BYLINE: By Catherine Arnst; EDITED BY OTIS PORTIN A FEW YEARS, YOU MAY BE PUTTING A CORNCOB IN YOUR TANK -- in liquid form. Stephen F. Paul, a Princeton University physicist, has developed a way to make gasoline substitutes from corn, paper, wood chips, and other biomass waste products -- and slash noxious emissions to boot.
Some 70% of the fuels' liquid content comes from waste materials. The rest is typically ethanol. Paul told the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in Boston on Aug. 23 that his P-series fuels (named for Princeton) produce 40% to 50% fewer hydrocarbons -- a key component of smog -- 20% less carbon monoxide, and 4% less carbon dioxide than gasoline. Yet they generate 92% of the power of gasoline.
These fuels won't be cheap, though. Paul figures they'll cost about $1.50 a gallon at the pump. Still, he thinks the technology could serve as a ''high-volume insurance policy'' in the event of another oil crisis. ...
Business Week
Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
September 7, 1998COMMENTARY
HEADLINE: A HUMAN REASON NOT TO RAISE RATESBYLINE: By Aaron Bernstein; Bernstein covers labor from Washington.
When central bankers from around the world gather at the Federal Reserve Board confab in Jackson Hole, Wyo., starting on Aug. 27, Russia's collapsing economy is likely to be the hottest topic at the dinner tables. But that won't stop talk about the subject closest to these bankers' hearts: monetary policy. Key to that debate are today's low jobless stats and the fat wage gains they have provided. Indeed, at the July Fed meeting, hawks called again for a rate boost to cool off the steady ascent of real wages.
In this context, the official subject of the three-day meeting, income inequality, offers a timely opportunity for Fed bankers to review their approach to monetary policy. In recent decades, the Fed has focused on controlling inflation, paying far less attention to its other legally mandated job -- curbing unemployment. Liberals often slammed the central bank for this neglect. But even they didn't blame the Fed for 25 years of a widening gap between rich and poor -- through recessions and boom times alike.
Now, some liberal economists are arguing that Fed monetary policy may have indeed aggravated the disparity after all. The reason: signs that the gap between rich and poor is finally narrowing, just as the Fed has stopped itself -- uncharacteristically -- from pushing interest rates up as the jobless rate lingered below 5% for the first time since the 1960s. ...
Just a few years ago, the hawks argued that if unemployment fell below the so-called natural rate of 5%, the Fed would lose its ability to avert an inflation spiral. As this hasn't happened, the fear of a trigger point ''is more or less gone at the Fed,'' says Alan S. Blinder, a former Fed vice-chairman and Princeton University economist.
The Irish Times
Copyright 1998 The Irish Times
September 7, 1998HEADLINE: Biomass waste makes the least noxious motor fuel
A motor fuel made from corn, paper, wood chips and other biomass waste produces fewer noxious emissions when burned than conventional fuels according to tests carried out by its developer, Dr Stephen Paul of Princeton University. The 'P-series' fuel produces 40 to 50 per cent fewer unburned hydrocarbons than petrol and 20 per cent less carbon monoxide. It also has 40 per cent less ozone-forming potential and is two to three times less toxic than petrol according to Dr Paul.
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
September 7, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Witness Lists Suggest Moves By Microsoft And the U.S.
BYLINE: By STEVE LOHRWith the filing of witness lists on Friday night, the Government and the Microsoft Corporation offered the first glimpse of their courtroom strategies in the historic antitrust trial scheduled to begin later this month.
The Government will portray Microsoft as an information-age monopolist with anticompetitive practices that are wide-ranging and that began long before anyone heard of the Internet. Microsoft plans to mount its defense by putting eight top executives on the stand, but with one conspicuous absence -- William H. Gates, the Microsoft chairman, who is not on the witness list.
The 12-person witness list for the Justice Department and 20 states suing Microsoft suggests a broadening of the evidence it intends to marshal to make its case. Its industry witnesses include executives from the Intel Corporation, the International Business Machines Corporation and the Boeing Company, all of whom are expected to offer evidence of what the plaintiffs say are Microsoft tactics that unfairly curb competition. None were mentioned in the complaint filed in May by the Government and states. ...
In addition to industry witnesses, both sides will call economic and technical experts. On the Government side, the technology experts include David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and an Internet pioneer; Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, and Glenn Weadock, president of Independent Software Inc. Its economic experts include Franklin Fisher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who was a witness for I.B.M. in its antitrust confrontation with the Government; David Sibley, a University of Texas economist, and Frederick Warren-Bolton, a former chief economist of the Justice Department's antitrust division.
The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News
Copyright 1998 Stuart News Company (Stuart,FL)
September 7, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: PHYSICISTS MAKING MATTER OF LIGHT
BYLINE: Fred Brown Scripps Howard News Service
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - We crave the pure and the genuine in life, but everybody loves to be dazzled. Which brings up Occam's Razor and a Stanford University laboratory experiment that has accomplished an amazing feat: transforming light into matter.
Occam's Razor goes back to 14th century England, where logician and Franciscan friar William of Occam said, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
That means when two theories produce the same predictions, the simpler one is better. Getting matter from light deals with antimatter, and that means you have to fiddle with the Razor and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Since 1934, it has been known that the math and physics were right to produce matter from energy. All you had to do was collide two super beams of radiation. The reverse is well understood: energy from matter. The nuclear bomb is about the clearest example of that event. But in 1934, it wasn't feasible to attempt because a great deal of energy was needed - energy in the billions of volts range.
Fast-forward to 1997. Bugg and Steve Berridge, a UT research engineer, worked on a mini-Manhattan project with three other prestigious institutions. Berridge developed the details to capture fast-moving electrons in a container. That's sort of like catching a jet-propelled butterfly with a net that has holes in it.
Joining Bugg were physicists and doctoral candidates from Stanford University in California, Princeton University and Rochester University. They created a green-glass laser that would make Star Wars aficionados drool. Using Department of Energy money, the physicists set up at Stanford's Linear Accelerator, a 2-mile long pipe that fires a stream of electrons at a clip just shy of the speed of light. ...
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998 U.S. News & World ReportSeptember 7, 1998
HEADLINE: Paying for college
BYLINE: By Fred VogelsteinHIGHLIGHT: How high can tuition go? Administrators are finally acknowledging that the hikes must be controlled
It's hard to blame Americans for being vexed about the long, continuing increase in college costs. Over the past two decades, costs have risen roughly twice as fast as inflation. It now costs $31,100 a year to attend Harvard, almost twice as much as a decade ago and more than four times as much as 20 years ago. The cost of attending college has gone up so much, in fact, that American higher education has an image problem: Many parents and students now believe colleges and universities are gouging them. ...
Higher education seems to be getting the message, though. Schools are finally talking about and taking action on tuition reform. Ivy League schools and other high-priced institutions have been boasting that their 1998-1999 tuitions increased by the smallest percentage in 30 years. For Yale, the hike is only 2.9 percent; for Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, it's roughly 3.8 percent. The University of California system has frozen tuition this year, as have 14 other state university systems. And through a combination of merit scholarships and changed eligibility requirements, a number of high-priced schools have recently made it easier for many applicants to get financial aid. (story, Page 70). ...
Colleges have done such a lamentable job of educating their customers about school finances that most parents and students don't realize that even students who pay full price receive a subsidy. Tuition makes up only a fraction of an education's total cost. At public universities, tuition and other fees like room and board represent roughly 25 percent of the total, at private universities they represent 45 percent, and at private colleges they represent about 70 percent. Private institutions with big endowments, like Princeton, which has the largest endowment per student in the country, can subsidize tuition heavily. As a result, the $30,500 it costs to go to Princeton every year represents only 28 percent of the university's annual cost to educate that student. ...
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998 U.S. News & World Report
September 7, 1998HEADLINE: More merit money for the middle class
BYLINE: By Thomas TochHIGHLIGHT: There's a revolution going on in financial aid
In the early 1990s, St. Lawrence University, a respected liberal arts school in the rural reaches of northern New York, had a problem. It was losing many strong applicants to schools in more exciting ZIP codes. So administrators at the 1,900-student school stopped giving financial aid only to students who really needed it and began offering scholarships to top students regardless of family resources. Today, a third of the student body, which has an average family income of $70,000, receives "merit" scholarships of up to $10,000 toward the $28,545 sticker price. And the percentage of St. Lawrence students coming from the top 10 percent of their high school class has risen from a fifth to nearly a third. Says Kathryn Mullaney, the university's vice president for finance: "We've discounted our price to a level that the market will bear."
Financial aid has long been an engine of the American meritocracy, allowing the nation's best students to attend college whether or not they could afford to pay. Higher education itself has never been a perfect meritocracy, of course: Schools have routinely used their student aid coffers to ensure that their orchestras have oboe players and their football teams have quarterbacks, and wealthy but mediocre students have long gained entrance to selective schools. But financial aid has generally been reserved to help needy students. ...
The fact is that the relentlessly rising price of higher education has simply outpaced the middle class's ability to meet it. A year's tuition plus room and board has risen to an average of just under $8,000 at four-year public institutions and to about $20,000 at private schools. Princeton's basic fees have climbed to $30,500; the median American household's income is $35,500.
Even elite schools that don't give merit aid are taking steps to halt a decline in applications from outstanding middle- and upper-middle-class students, many of whom have enrolled instead in public universities' honors programs. Princeton earlier this year announced that it would no longer consider home equity in its aid calculations for most families with incomes below $90,000 and that it would not count a portion of home equity for families with incomes as high as $150,000. Rivals Yale, MIT, and Stanford quickly announced similar steps. Next spring, the College Scholarship Service, which calculates student need for 450 top colleges and universities, is likely to make changes improving eligibility for families earning between $40,000 and $90,000.
Deciding factor. The new Princeton policy landed Joe Kochan, a National Merit Scholar from a suburban Syracuse, N.Y., family with an income of slightly under $100,000. The University of Oklahoma, a school that he hadn't even applied to, offered the aspiring chemical engineer more than $57,000 in merit aid over four years, and Lehigh, the University of Rochester, and George Washington University offered him big merit awards. But when Princeton knocked $85,000 of home equity off his financial aid sheet, Kochan's need-based scholarship of $1,200 rose to $3,000. Combined with $6,300 in federal student loans and work-study grants, that was enough to bring his family's obligation to within a couple of thousand dollars of what the other schools had said it would be-a gap he was willing to live with because of Princeton's prestige. ...
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998 U.S. News & World Report
September 7, 1998HEADLINE: Schools offering the best value
Where will you get the most for your money? U.S. News measures value by relating a school's quality ranking with the net cost to a student who receives the average level of financial aid. The higher the quality and the lower the cost, the better the value. Only the top half of national institutions in the rankings and the top quarter of regional schools are considered, since U.S. News believes the best values are found among colleges that are above average academically.
A Rank
B School name (State)
C Percent receiving grants based on need (percentage)
D Average cost after receiving grants based on need
E Average discount (percentage)A B C D E
National Universities
1 Stanford University (CA) 41 $ 11,104 65
2 California Institute of Technology 61 $ 14,172 51
3 University of Rochester (NY) 60 $ 14,151 52
4 Rice University (TX) 32 $ 12,188 43
5 Brandeis University (MA) 48 $ 13,563 57
6 University of Chicago 53 $ 16,269 49
7 Cornell University (NY) 47 $ 16,014 48
8 Illinois Institute of Technology 66 $ 12,253 49
8 Northwestern University (IL) 46 $ 15,856 44
10 Princeton University (NJ) 41 $ 16,907 47
10 University of Virginia 21 $ 12,661 40
12 Tulane University (LA) 45 $ 14,276 51
13 Clarkson University (NY) 83 $ 13,259 51
13 Columbia University (NY) 40 $ 16,651 49
13 Massachusetts Inst. of Technology 49 $ 17,982 44
13 Washington University-St. Louis (MO) 51 $ 17,163 43
17 U. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 17 $ 12,194 31
18 Carnegie Mellon University (PA) 56 $ 17,567 39
18 University of Notre Dame (IN) 36 $ 16,104 41
18 University of Pennsylvania 40 $ 17,990 44
18 Worcester Polytechnic Inst. (MA) 71 $ 16,395 39
Asbury Park Press
Copyright 1998 Asbury Park Press, Inc.
September 6, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: ObituariesWILLIAM JOSEPH MATHEWS, 63, of MIDDLETOWN, died Friday at home. He held sales positions at WGHQ, Kingston, N.Y., WNEW-FM and WPLJ in New York. He also worked for Penton Publishing, New York. He was a 1956 graduate of Newark Academy and Princeton University. He was a member of the Princeton Club, New York, and the Sea Bright Lawn and Tennis Club. ...
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1998 The Atlanta Constitution
September 6, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONSHEADLINE: Jonesboro High offers pointers on higher SATs; Average score rises 45 points over previous year, to 1020, just above the national average.
BYLINE: Doug Cumming
Jonesboro High sits in the statistical middle of Georgia in its size and makeup. With a 1,623-student enrollment that is about 28 percent African-American and about 21 percent poor, it reflects Georgia's overall teenage population.
Most of its achievement statistics also hover just above and just below the state median. The school, in the country-turned-suburbs of Clayton County, is a little better than average in its Advanced Placement enrollment, and in the percentage of graduates who do not require remedial courses when they enter state colleges. Its dropout and absentee rates are a little below average.
But Jonesboro High is far ahead of most schools in efforts to boost SAT scores --- and the lessons it has learned could be useful to other schools coming under intense pressure to do something about Georgia's second-from-the-bottom SAT average. ...
When the SAT was introduced in 1926, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It was essentially an intelligence test for college admission, using testing theories that some historians have contended were established to reduce the number of ethnic and racial groups in colleges. Over the decades, selective colleges used the SAT as a national yardstick to know whether a student with A's from one high school equaled a student with A's from another.
But in today's highly competitive environment, a high SAT score is no guarantee of getting into highly selective colleges like Duke University, Dartmouth College and Princeton University. Such schools don't care much whether your combined SAT score is 1400 or 1600, as long as you score above 650 in each section, according to Joyce Slayton Mitchell, director of college advising at Nightingale-Bamford School in New York.
"It may sound scary at first for students to learn that Princeton University turns down 76 percent of its applicants who scored between 750 and a perfect 800 on the SAT --- and that it offered admission to only 495 of 1,534 class valedictorians," she wrote in Education Week. "But on second thought, that could be seen as an encouraging . . . sign that a student doesn't need a perfect score and perfect grades to get in.
"When parents begin to realize this, they understand that their child can concentrate on learning and on pursuing the interests and activities that are unique to her --- rather than spending two years of Saturdays at an SAT-prep course." ...
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
September 6, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Researchers say the truth is out there; Portsmouth panel to discuss UFOs
BYLINE: By Ralph Jimenez, Globe StaffDATELINE: CRANEY HILL
Trees crowd the old roads that snake over this broad lobed hill that spills into corners of Henniker, Deering and Weare. The woods are cut up with walls and pocked with cellar holes left behind long ago by people who moved on in search of land with more soil than stones. Pat's Peak Ski Area runs down the hill's northeastern face.
The hill, or rather the goings on around and over it, were national news nearly two decades ago. That was after Billy Gould and his girlfriend saw the flying saucer. The UFO wasn't actually saucer-shaped, said Gould, who still lives in town. It looked more like a long capsule of cold medicine - a capsule that glowed and hummed. Gould's radar detector went off when the craft hovered over his truck. The object then moved off silently at terrific speed. ...
A few years later on the other side of the hill, a father and his young daughter reported walking down a back road by flashlight when they were chased by a glowing capsule-shaped object that had no trouble navigating between trees after them as they fled through the woods. ...
Recently, the Society for Scientific Exploration published the report of an august panel of scientists from universities that included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University. The scientists, the first independent panel to be convened for such a purpose in a generation, had spent four days hearing and analyzing the reports of eight serious UFO investigators. ...
The Buffalo News
Copyright 1998 The Buffalo News
September 6, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: NEW COMPUTER MODEL HELPED PREDICT BONNIE'S INTENSITY AS IT; APPROACHED THE U.S.
BYLINE: MAYA BELL; Orlando Sentinel
DATELINE: MIAMI
As Hurricane Bonnie bore down on North Carolina, Max Mayfield, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, congratulated a fellow forecaster for accurately predicting the storm's power.
"It wasn't me; it was him," Lixion Avila replied, pointing to Mark DeMaria.
"Wasn't me" DeMaria demurred. "It was ships."
DeMaria, the chief of the hurricane center's technical support bureau, wasn't referring to maritime assistance. He was crediting SHIPS, the newest computer model in the hurricane center's growing arsenal of forecast tools.
The Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme is a simple computer program that considers basic factors such as ocean temperature, wind shear, past trends and the general environment to predict how intense a tropical storm will become.
The SHIPS model is still light years away from the complex models forecasters rely on to predict hurricane paths. But like the models before it, SHIPS is bound to improve with time. ...
The most complex model used specifically for hurricane forecasting was developed at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. Called GFDL for short, the model usually provides hurricane forecasters their most reliable guidance, even more so today thanks to new reconnaissance missions flown in the upper atmosphere.
Until the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began flying a Gulfstream IV jet into hurricanes at 40,000 feet last year, data was limited to that collected at 25,000 feet by lower-flying aircraft. The gaps filled in by the jet have, after nine missions, reduced forecast track errors by 25 percent, DeMaria said.
Hurricane forecasters receive the GFDL and other model forecasts four times a day and collectively plot them on a map. Sometimes, as is the case with Hurricane Danielle, the lines from each model converge in a tight cluster, suggesting widespread agreement in the forecast. ...
Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 1998 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
September 6, 1998HEADLINE: Nuclear fusion is fizzling
BYLINE: BY ROBERT MATTHEWSPhysicists, normally gung-ho about their achievements, joke sardonically that "nuclear fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be."
It appears that for Congress, the joke is getting stale.
Later this month, Congress is expected to pull the plug on U.S. involvement in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a $10 billion project to trigger for energy use the nuclear reactions that have powered the sun for billions of years.
It is a move that effectively kills off the best hope yet of harnessing this awesome source of energy. In theory, a single pound of fusion "fuel," found in seawater, can produce the energy of burning 4,000 tons of oil. Its supporters add that fusion power creates no greenhouse gases and produces relatively little radioactive waste.
The trouble is that on Earth, hydrogenlike atoms must be heated to temperatures of around 100 million Celsius, allowed to fuse together, and then controlled long enough to extract the resulting torrent of energy in the form of fast-moving particles.
It is a challenge that some of the world's top physicists have wrestled with for half a century, as yet without producing enough net power to light a Christmas tree bulb. And now their bill payers in national governments are getting impatient. ...
Conceived in the mid-1980s, the ITER project has its origins in a 45-year-old idea for creating and controlling fusion, known as the tokamak. A kind of magnetic "bottle," the tokamak heats fusion fuel in a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber which is surrounded by magnetic fields. These stop the fuel from touching the sides of the chamber and -- in theory at least -- allow it to reach temperatures at which useful amounts of power can escape.
For more than 20 years, scientists have been using tokamaks such as Princeton University's reactor in Plainsboro, N.J., and Europe's Jet machine to probe the physics of fusion, steadily pushing up the temperature and energy release. Their current goal is simply to achieve "break-even," when the energy used to heat up the fuel matches the amount produced by the fusion reactions. ...
CNN
SHOW: CNN SUNDAY MORNING
September 6, 1998; SundayHEADLINE: Latest Medical News has Consequences for Men and Women
BYLINE: Miles O'Brien, Elizabeth Cohen
ELIZABETH COHEN: Also this week, the FDA has given approval to the first emergency contraception product. It's called Preven. Emergency contraception is also known as the morning-after pill.
It must be taken with three days of unprotected sex in order to prevent pregnancy. Emergency contraception appears to work by preventing ovulation, preventing fertilization or by keeping the fertilized egg from embedding in the uterus.
People often erroneously confuse emergency contraception with the so-called French abortion pill or RU486. But they're different drugs. RU486 ends the pregnancy after it's begun.
If emergency contraception is widely used, researchers say it could cut unintended pregnancies and the abortion rate in half.
DR. JAMES TRUSSELL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: We decided about six years ago that making emergency contraception widely available was the most important step we could take in the United States to reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy. ...
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1998 The Dallas Morning News
September 6, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Oil transport debate sails on rocky straits; Turkey standing firm on safety issue amid worldwide rush to gain Gaspian Sea's riches
SOURCE: Washington Bureau of the Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Richard Whittle
ISTANBUL, Turkey - Cruising up the Bosporus toward the Black Sea aboard a Turkish friend's yacht, Heath Lowry spots the blue-hulled Greek tanker Crudegulf gliding around the bend.The sight reminds Mr. Lowry of a day in 1974. The Princeton University historian and his son were at the shore of the narrow Bosporus, which bisects overcrowded Istanbul, when people started waving wildly and shouting. Then cursing. Then running.
"We looked around, and here came this huge tanker, headed straight for the shore," Mr. Lowry laughs, steadying himself as the Crudegulf's wake slaps the yacht around."It was a Panamanian-flag tanker, and it just literally ran aground. It was three days before they could unload enough of the cargo to tow it off."
Just days after the Crudegulf jarred Mr. Lowry's memory, she, too, fell victim to the strait's fickle currents. Loaded with 140,000 tons of oil she had picked up in Russia and was taking to Italy, the Greek tanker ran aground Aug. 24 at the southern end of the Bosporus.
No oil spilled, and no one was hurt. But such all-too-common accidents - 170 in the past 10 years - are why Turkish officials insist that the developing oil riches of the Caspian Sea will have to reach world markets by routes other than the Bosporus. ...
THE FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Copyright 1998 Star-Telegram Newspaper, Inc.
September 6, 1998, Sunday FINAL AM EDITIONEDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Tracing a family tree's roots of crime
BYLINE: STACY SCHNELLENBACH BOGLE
My Heart Laid Bare
By Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction
Dutton, $24.95The name Joyce Carol Oates conjures an image of a slight face behind owlish glasses and an encyclopedic list of novels, short story collections, essays and poetry. Oates, now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, has been weaving her cerebral brand of fiction for more than 30 years.
My Heart Laid Bare, Oates' 28th and most recent novel, has been called a departure from her previous works; yet close examination reveals familiar themes in a 19th-century setting.
Abraham Licht is a confidence artist from whose loins springs a veritable family tree of crime. Licht's predilection for chicanery is no accident, having descended from a similarly inclined Sarah Licht, who escaped the hangman in England for a criminal life in America.
Her death in the swamps of Muirkirk sets the tone for the supernatural forces that keep an icy finger on the affairs of Abraham and his offspring.
Like others for whom criminal life is a family institution, Abraham raises his brood by the rules of "the game. " A sort of them-vs.-us mentality allows sons Harwood and Thurston, daughter Millicent, and the adopted Elisha to segue quite naturally into a world where right and wrong swap places for the convenience of the family business. ...
Oates has been criticized for dwelling on pain as well as some of the more unpleasant aspects of human behavior; but this 531-page volume is testament to what she has called "the human soul caught in the stampede of time. " ...
The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 1998 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
September 06, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Stanford blasts yearly U.S. News college list; School creates its own web site alternative
BYLINE: MICHELLE LEVANDER
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, Calif.SAN JOSE, Calif. - Stanford University officials have once again blasted U.S. News & World Report's college guide, launching a rival set of statistics on its Web site just before the magazine hits newsstands Monday.
The university, which moved up one rank to No. 4 in the new U.S. News guide, calls its numbers a more reliable alternative. But U.S. News officials question how a university's self-selected data can be as useful or objective.
Stanford University officials said if their Web page is a success, they may refuse to provide data to the U.S. News guide next year. If they follow through on that threat, they would be the first national university to rebuff the guide bought by 76,000 readers last year.
The Stanford Web site, which cost $30,000 to produce, starts by criticizing commercial college guides that "purport to 'rank' colleges" as "inherently misleading and inaccurate."
"Stanford believes the following information, presented without arbitrary formulas, provides a better foundation for prospective students and their families to begin comparing and contrasting schools," its Web page states.
Stanford spokesman Terry Shepard said, "I don't think we are kidding ourselves. We won't put U.S. News out of business." But he said he hopes it will encourage other schools to follow suit.
Celeste James, spokeswoman for the U.S. News college guide, said Stanford's site is flawed. ...
For instance, Stanford ranks a mediocre No. 18 out of 50 national universities in the U.S. News guide when it comes to alumni giving - far behind such well-endowed rivals as Harvard and Princeton universities. U.S. News includes the category because it believes it is the most valuable measure of alumni satisfaction.
Stanford declines to provide a similar figure on its Web site. The school has no way to accurately calculate such a rate because it doesn't know how many of its alumni are alive, Shepard said. ...
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
September 06, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: LESSONS NOT LEARNED
In the recent revival of interest concerning the Canwell Committee, you are to be commended for finally bringing both sides of the story of this controversy in Susan Gilmore's article ("The Cold War and Albert Canwell," Aug. 2).
Whether we like it or not, politicians sometimes do what the public demands. The threat of communism was a biting issue at the time, and Canwell comforted some people by his investigations while ruining a few at the same time. Although Canwell's actions present an unfortunate scar on this state's history, it was refreshing that Gilmore presented both sides of the story and did not simply present Canwell's alleged victims as martyrs in a sea of anti-Red hysteria, which seems to be the common tone among intellectuals examining this era today.
Such analysis always makes me chuckle sardonically as I contemplate how little these scholars have learned from their endeavors. It seems very ironic that they can condemn the past witch-hunting excesses of "guilt by association" professed by the Canwell committee and remain remarkably silent concerning similar activity today.
Recently Marvin "Monty" Gray was denied a chance to become a federal judge on the U.S. District Court of Western Washington by the Clinton administration because he made a statement in support of segregation when he was a student at Princeton University more than 30 years ago, despite impeccable judicial credentials. If Justice Hugo Black were a candidate for the bench today, could he successfully accede to the Supreme Court? I cringe to think that his past affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan would have denied this country the advantages of having one of the greatest civil libertarians of our time interpreting law for the benefit of all Americans. I wonder to what degree "Canwellesque" politicians under the watchful eye of so-called "civil-rights" groups would have hounded him into a ruined career. ...
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
September 06, 1998, SundayEDITORIAL
HEADLINE: A JOURNALIST DEFENDS HIS CREDIBILITYBYLINE: NAT HENTOFF; SPECIAL TO THE SEATTLE TIMES
-- For the state voter pamphlet, supporters of Initiative 200 want to use a disputed quote attributed to Dean Roland Hjorth of the University of Washington Law School. The quote has Hjorth saying a white applicant would have been admitted if she had been black. The dean says he made no such statement.
Last Wednesday's lead editorial in The Seattle Times had the headline: "I-200's bogus quote."
I am identified as the reporter who wrote that alleged "bogus quote." It was published in my columns in The Washington Post and the Village Voice.
The use of that term regarding a journalist is clearly intended to discredit him; and as all journalists know, all that each of us has going for him or her is credibility.
What I wrote concerned an exchange between me and Dean Roland Hjorth at a luncheon at the University of Washington Law School. I had been invited to speak because I write regularly on constitutional law and was told that the dean and members of the faculty believed my writings have integrity. ...
I then asked the dean whether Katuria Smith, when she applied, had been required to state her race. He said that was not mandated.
In that case, seeing her grade and LSAT scores, which are very high, and the fact that she grew up in poverty and took menial jobs for years to pay for her schooling - and considering the possibility that she was black, Katuria being a difficult name to categorize - would she have been admitted?
The dean nodded affirmatively and at the same time said softly "yes." I was sitting right beside him. ...
NOTE: Nat Hentoff is the current Ferris Professor of Journalism in the Council of the Humanities.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Copyright 1998 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
September 6, 1998, SundayEDITORIAL
HEADLINE: REMEDY FOR THE MORNING AFTERBIRTH CONTROL
Accidents happen. Without wanting to, without thinking about it and sometimes without taking precautions, a woman discovers she's pregnant. Now what?
This scenario happens frequently, more frequently than we may imagine. One out of every two women between the ages of 15 and 44 has had at least one unintended pregnancy, according to James Trussell of Princeton University. Mr. Trussell is a former director of Princeton's Office of Population Research. He estimates that half of all pregnancies in the United States - roughly 3 million a year - are unintended.
For 20 years, there has been a safe, reliable alternative to abortion or pregnancy. Common in Europe, it is still surprisingly unknown in the United States. It is the so-called "morning-after" pill, a regimen of birth-control pills that can be used with nearly 75 percent effectiveness as emergency contraception. ...
PREVEN, though, brings emergency contraception into the open. It's long overdue. Most of the delay has been politics. The anti-abortion lobby has intimidated pharmaceutical companies from developing and marketing new forms of birth control, and the litigious history of the Dalkon shield has probably also served as a deterrent. Political leaders are reticent to press the Food and Drug Administration to approve potentially controversial forms of birth control. Despite the success of emergency contraception abroad, only last year did the Food and Drug Administration rule "morning-after" pills safe and effective and specify which pills and dosages are best. ...
The Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
September 6, 1998, SundayOBITUARIES
James W. Hundley Jr., 81, retired Koppers executive
James Winslow Hundley Jr., a Ruxton resident and longtime Koppers Co. executive, died of heart failure Tuesday at his summer home in Watch Hill, R.I. He was 81.
A Baltimore native, Mr. Hundley graduated from Princeton University in 1940 and served in the Navy during World War II. He worked at Koppers, a metalworkcompany, for 25 years as an engineering executive. An avid outdoorsman, Mr. Hundley enjoyed waterfowl hunting on the Eastern Shore and deep-sea fishing in Florida and Rhode Island. ...
Sunday Telegraph
Copyright 1998 The Telegraph Group Limited
September 6, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Schizophrenia by numbers Simon Singh on how a brilliant mathematician fought his madness
BYLINE: BY SIMON SINGH
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar Faber, pounds 17.99, 459 pp
IN THE late 1940s, at the age of just 21, John Nash revolutionised our understanding of game theory, an area of research which seeks to explain how individuals, corporations or nations compete against each other. Half a century later he was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Economics, which resulted in a controversy so great that it almost tore apart the committee responsible for the award. However, it was not the significance of his breakthrough which was under debate, but rather his mental state. For three decades, Nash had suffered from severe paranoid schizophrenia, which had cost him his job, his family, and his freedom. When Nash arrived at Princeton University in 1948 he began collaborating with game theorists - mathematicians who try to define ideal strategies for games, such as chess and backgammon. Rather than studying highly logical games, however, Nash became interested in poker and bridge, games which are complicated by bluffing, and also other games, such as Prisoner's Dilemma, in which co-operation can lead to benefits for both players. The following year he outlined a radical new approach to problems in game theory, which potentially had applications for the complex games played by economists. However, outside the mathematical community his ideas were largely ignored, and this lack of recognition may have contributed to his tragic mental breakdown. From the beginning of 1959 Nash gradually made the transition between genius and madness. ...
The Toronto Sun
Copyright 1998 Sun Media Corporation
September 6, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: MONTREAL SHOW PURE SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS
BYLINE: JANET DAVIS, TORONTO SUNAs I walked across the velvety green lawn, it began propositioning me in a deep, sexy, bedroom voice: "Touch me. Caressez-moi. Dominate me. Dominez-moi. Run your fingers through my blades ..."
Startled, I looked around. The closest people on the huge lawn outside the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal were two guys playing soccer 100 yards away. Again, the lawn spoke, sounding uncomfortably like a bilingual 1-900 number instead of a rustling half-acre of turfgrass. "Inhale my aroma. Moisten my shoots. Roll on me. Walk all over me."
Then I noticed strange, raised areas where the grass had been allowed to grow long in what seemed like meandering, random patterns. Hmm ... Not only a lecherous lawn, but a drunken gardener too? Merde.
But on entering the award-winning building that is Phyllis Bronfman Lambert's monument to architecture to view the exhibit, The American Lawn: Surface Of Everyday Life, the joke was revealed.
The voice? A series of underground speakers programmed to play non-stop turf talk. And the long grass? A work of art titled Growing Concern featuring the number 325,293,680: An estimate, based on textbook standards, of the number of blades of grass growing in this public space. That gives you a clue to the flavor of this elegant exhibition, the last in a series called The American Century, launched by Lambert and the CCA in June 1995 to "cast a fresh eye on critical aspects of modern America's architectural culture." ...
Designed by New York architects Diller + Scofidio and curated by architects and historians from Princeton University, the exhibition is on until Nov. 7. It's brilliant and worth a jaunt to Montreal, especially paired with a visit to the city's world-class botanical garden. ...
The Virginian-Pilot
Copyright 1998 Landmark Communications, Inc. (Norfolk, VA)
September 6, 1998, Sunday, FINAL EDITIONHEADLINE: EUGENIA M.G. GRAY; NEW PRACTICE IS A GOOD FIT
BYLINE: BY SCOTT MCCASKEY, CORRESPONDENTDr. Eugenia M.G. Gray grew up the town of Cullowhee in the mountains of western North Carolina. Even as a child she was always good with her hands and had a natural acumen for the sciences. The valedictorian of Cullowhee High School, Gray went on to get her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Princeton, her medical degree from Duke Medical School and did her residency work at University of Virginia hospital. Today she is an otolaryngologist - head and neck surgeon - and a partner at Ear Nose and Throat Associates of Tidewater in Suffolk. ...
Q&A
If you won the lottery, what would you do/buy? I would give to the Orthodox Church, to deafness research and to Princeton University educational scholarships. ...
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
September 6, 1998, Sunday, Final EditionHEADLINE: Shedding new light into one of history's dark corners
BYLINE: William Chester JordanIt has become fashionable in scholarly circles in recent years to lament certain silences of the past. The marginal groups of Western European civilization in the Middle Ages - prostitutes, homosexuals, lepers - almost never speak in their own voices in chronicles or official documents.
Even when they appear to speak, we are cautioned that the scribes who recorded their words and the legal system that required them to bear witness to their acts or observations profoundly distorted the authentic expressions of their feelings. They did not speak in Latin, but words attributed to them are given in Latin. They probably did not routinely use the jargon of the law, but it is often attributed to them. They are nearly lost to history - or so it goes.
Not every scholar shares this gloominess, and considerable effort in recent years has gone into the task of recovering the history of marginal groups. The same can be said for the peasantry, not quite marginal, since it constituted the vast majority of the population, but presenting an equally difficult task of historical recovery. Thomas Bisson's "Tormented Voices" is a major contribution to that task. ...
Catalonia, the author's chosen area of research, has one of the richest documentary traditions in Europe, and in the last half-century scholars have begun to exploit with care and missionary zeal the cache of records that have survived. Focusing on a group of complaints from several Catalonian villages in the middle and late 12th century, Mr. Bisson tries to dispel layer after layer of distortion in these records in order to recover the "tormented voices" of named and unnamed peasants who were at their wits' end in resisting lordly power. ...
William Chester Jordan is professor of history and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.
The Associated Press
September 5, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Thomas Edison college piloting hybrid Web technology for students
BYLINE: LINDA A. JOHNSON, AP Business WriterDATELINE: TRENTON, N.J.
The "World Wide Wait" is about to get quite a bit shorter for students of Thomas Edison State College taking courses over the Internet.
Using a new technology called Web-iV developed by a Princeton multimedia software company, students taking a business course called Ethics for Managers will be able to interact with the instructor and other students through the college's Web site while getting video and other data-intensive portions of the course stored on a CD-ROM.
That will allow students to view full-motion, full-screen, high-quality videos - depicting ethical dilemmas and other scenarios they must evaluate and discuss - rather than enduring the long download times, "fuzzy, jerky video" and tiny pictures that now frustrate Web users. ...
Starting in January, the hybrid technology will be used by students taking the ethics course. Thomas Edison, a "college without walls" that offers degrees to adult students through independent study, correspondence and other non-traditional methods, will be the first college in the nation to use system. It plans to eventually offer the technology in other courses, Paist said. ...
The company also uses its hybrid system for clients such as health insurers training staff on following confusing Medicare reimbursement rules, salespeople making presentations that integrate the Internet with video and graphics stored on their CD-ROM or laptop, businesses with information kiosks at trade shows and shopping malls, and colleges such as Princeton University offering online, non-credit courses to alumni. ...
The Gazette
(Montreal)
Copyright 1998 Southam Inc.
September 5, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Life gets lost in the details
BYLINE: DEBBIE PARKES; THE GAZETTEA Beautiful Mind
By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 459 pp, $35John Forbes Nash Jr. may not be a household name - unless the household is one of mathematicians - but in 1994 the name did cause a small stir in Stockholm. The committee charged with selecting the winner or winners of that year's Nobel Prize in economics proposed that Nash, then 66, and two others share the prize for their contributions to game theory.
Nash was nominated for the prize for his definition of strategic game equilibrium, the subject of his PhD thesis, written when he was 21.
"Nash equilibrium" is the point when none of a game's players can improve their situation by picking a different strategy. This simple concept later proved to have a huge impact on economics and social sciences.
Nash's nomination for the prize did stick in the end, but not without some heavy campaigning by one prize-committee holdout who disliked the idea of bestowing such a high honour on a man who had spent the previous several decades mentally ill. ...
Nash, an eccentric Princeton University graduate and undisputed genius, was 30 and on the verge of being made a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he suffered his first full-blown paranoid-schizophrenic breakdown, pushed over the edge, it would appear, by a failed bid to solve one of the most complicated problems in pure mathematics. ...
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd.
September 5, 1998HEADLINE: Fuel with flare
BYLINE: Jeff HechtHIGHLIGHT: Designer fuels, Florida's Everglades and low-alcohol beers with a real kick all came under the spotlight at the American Chemical Society's meeting in Boston. Jeff Hecht reports
VOLATILE liquids burnt as waste at gas fields and coal mines could become a component of clean "designer fuels".
Fossil-fuel deposits often contain liquid short-chain hydrocarbons, including butane and other alkanes. But these hydrocarbons have a low octane rating, making them less useful as fuel, and also evaporate very easily. So they are usually flared off, rather than being collected and put to use.
Stephen Paul of Princeton University in New Jersey, whose previous research has centred on nuclear fusion, realised that these waste hydrocarbons might still be useful as vehicle fuels if mixed with ethanol - which has a higher octane rating and evaporates less easily.
Unfortunately, the two substances don't mix well. But Paul has solved that problem by adding a third component to the mixture: methyltetrahydrofuran (MTHF), an ether highly soluble in both ethanol and the short-chain hydrocarbons. ...
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd.
September 5, 1998HEADLINE: The price of genius
BYLINE: Keith Devlin (Keith Devlin is a mathematician living in California. He wrote "Life by the Numbers" (Wiley, 1998))"A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasar, Simon & Schuster, dollar 25, ISBN 0684819066
IN 1994, John Nash won the Nobel Prize for Economics for a dissertation that was 44 years old.
Which was nothing short of a miracle given the roller coaster life he had led between 1950 and 1994. This brilliant mathematician oscillated between moments of great genius and long periods of terrible mental illness, sometimes so severe that he was confined in a mental institution.
So what was so significant about those 27 pages written at Princeton University when Nash was just 21 years of age ? Nothing less than a breakthrough in game theory, the field pioneered in the 1920s by one of the fathers of the modern computer, John von Neumann, in an attempt to use mathematics to analyse human conflicts and predict their likely outcomes. ...
I found Nasar's book a "must read", with something for everyone. The first third provides a good overview of the rise of American mathematics during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, particularly the role played by Princeton. Spurred on by the Cold War and the space race, these were the golden years of modern American mathematics, when funds flowed freely and American mathematicians - or, rather, mathematicians who went to live there - began to lay the foundation of their present international dominance. Nash is just one of several characters we encounter. To her credit, Nasar, an economics correspondent for "The New York Times", does not underestimate her readership by leaving the mathematics out, though of necessity she does little more than state some of the deep problems Nash and others tackled. ...
AP Online
Copyright 1998 Associated Press
September 04, 1998; FridayHEADLINE: Obituaries in the News
Walter L. MorganBRYN MAWR, Pa. (AP)
Walter L. Morgan, father of an early mutual fund that prospered through tough times to spawn the Vanguard family of funds, died Wednesday of pneumonia. He was 100.
Morgan started his fund with $100,000 on July 1, 1929, just prior to the stock market crash and the Great Depression. The Wellington Fund, as it was later known, has paid dividends every quarter since 1930 and is now worth more than $25 billion.
In 1951, Morgan hired John Bogle, a fellow Princeton University alumnus, who later founded Vanguard, the nation's second-largest family of funds with about $400 billion in assets.
Morgan was the last surviving member of the Princeton class of 1920.
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
September 4, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: Grand Jury Summons Man for Aiding Suicide; Hemlock Society Will Defend Actions of New Jersey Leader
DATELINE: ELIZABETH, N.J., Sept. 4
A Maplewood man being investigated for alleged violation of New Jersey's assisted suicide law says if he is indicted by a grand jury he will use his case to test the constitutionality of the 30-year old statute.
Winthrop Drake Thies, president of Hemlock Society of New Jersey, was detained by Union County authorities August 13 at the home of an unidentified Westfield woman, a terminally ill cancer patient who had planned "self deliverance" with drugs she had obtained privately.
Self deliverance is the term Hemlock and right-to-die advocates use when a terminally ill patient chooses to relieve pain and hasten death by ingesting barbiturates or other lethal drugs. ...
Thies, a former tax attorney, is a graduate of Princeton University, Harvard Law School and the New York University Graduate School of Law. He founded Hemlock Society of New Jersey and has served as president since 1995.
Press Journal
Copyright 1998 Scripps Howard Newspapers (Vero Beach, FL)
September 4, 1998, FridayObituaries
Arthur JacobsenArthur Jacobsen, 76, of Vero Beach, died Sept. 2, 1998, in Vero Beach after a prolonged illness.
He was born Sept. 21, 1921, in Staten Island, N.Y., and moved to Vero Beach in 1989 from Morristown, N.J.
Mr. Jacobsen was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University. He was a former president of the Princeton Alumni Association, Nantucket Island, Mass. He was a member of the Nantucket Yacht Club, Nantucket, and Riomar Bay Yacht Club, Vero Beach Country Club, Princeton Club and St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, all of Vero Beach. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc (New York, NY)
September 4, 1998
HEADLINE: FATHER-FREE WORLD IS DEFINITELY NOT A BRAVE ONEBYLINE: Donna Britt. Donna Britt is a syndicated columnist based at The Washington Post.
EVERYWHERE you look, there they aren't. They aren't in the lives of Jodie Foster, Sandra Bernhard, Madonna, Erykah Badu or a host of other celebrity single moms.
Not one was around recently when two Spice Girls, "Posh" and "Scary," announced their pregnancies. The complex picture that emerged after two blue-eyed Virginia toddlers were revealed to have been switched at birth - a portrait complete with grandparents, a teary mother and assorted lawyers - lacked even one.
I'm talking about fathers - specifically dads who are married to the mothers of the infants they helped create. At least both pregnant Spice Girls are engaged. But in our brave new world of marriage-free child-raising, little was made of the fact that neither mom in the baby-switching case had wed her daughter's father. And that wherever the toddlers end up, they won't have a daddy. But hey - it was just another no-daddy news story. ...
Or is it the culture that ignores unwed parenthood until it's too late?
Well, we'd better start caring. In a new, 14-year study of 6,000 males, ages 14 to 22, Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University found that boys with absentee fathers are twice as likely to be incarcerated as those from traditional two-parent families - regardless of their race, income and parents education. ...
NOTE: This column also appeared in Newsday and The Montgomery Advertiser.
ABC NEWS
SHOW: ABC WORLD NEWS THIS MORNING
SEPTEMBER 3, 1998In the other news, an FDA panel is recommending two drugs to fight breast cancer. ...
And the FDA gave final approval for the morning-after kits to be made available by prescription. The kits use a combination of birth control pills to prevent pregnancy up to three days after sex. The action is already part of the debate over abortion. Here's ABC's Michele Norris.
MICHELE NORRIS, ABC News: (on camera) There are almost 2.7 million unintended pregnancies in this country every year and almost half end in abortion. This new kit approved by the FDA could dramatically alter those numbers. In the past, doctors were able to advise women how to use standard birth control pills to end unintended pregnancies. But the process was very confusing. The instructions difficult to follow. In this case, women can go to the store, purchase one of these kits, easily following the instructions, and medical experts say this could be quite revolutionary. In fact, a recent study from Princeton University estimates that almost 50 percent of abortions and unintended pregnancies could be avoided if women have easy access to morning-after pills. But not everyone is happy about this, some of the more conservative right to life groups strongly oppose any kind of morning after pill, for religious reasons, for ethical reasons, and also because they say this sends the wrong message, particularly in the era of AIDS. The concern is that women will be much less likely to protect themselves in the future.
Health Line
Copyright 1998 The National Journal Group, Inc.
September 3, 1998HEADLINE: EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION: FDA OKAYS SPECIAL KIT
"More than 20 years after researchers discovered a simple treatment that can be used soon after sex to prevent pregnancy," the Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the first specially designed emergency contraception kit. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the approval "is a breakthrough in the six-year campaign by reproductive health advocates to make the 'morning-after' pill conveniently and widely available." ...
Analysts predict that Gynetics' sales of the product will be "a relatively modest $300 million a year," but researchers from Princeton University's Office of Population Research estimate that "(e)mergency contraception can halve the" 300 million unplanned U.S. pregnancies each year. ....
The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright 1998 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1998, THURSDAYHEADLINE: Emergency Birth-Control Kit to Debut; 75% success rate for morning after' pills
BYLINE: Sabin Russell, Chronicle Staff WriterA small New Jersey firm has won Food and Drug Administration approval to market the nation's first emergency birth control kit, a four-pill combo that can block a pregnancy up to three days after unprotected sex.
Gynetics Inc., a private company founded by a former president of contraceptive maker Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp., won federal approval late Tuesday evening -- 18 months after the FDA virtually begged American drug companies to sell the product. ...
But birth control advocates hailed Preven as an important new product that could greatly reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions. There are about 2.7 million unintended pregnancies annually in the United States. About half are caused by contraceptive failure.
"Nobody plans perfectly," said James Trussell, director of Princeton University's Office of Population Research and author of "Emergency Contraception: The Nation's Best Kept Secret."
"We estimate that there are 27,000 condom breaks in the United States each night," he said. "Very few adults can honestly admit not having one unprotected act of intercourse."
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1998 The San Diego Union-Tribune
September 03, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: After-sex contraceptive gets OK
SOURCE: CHICAGO TRIBUNEBYLINE: Judy Peres
One of the best-kept secrets in America is finally out of the closet.
The Food and Drug Administration yesterday gave the green light to a New Jersey company to advertise and sell emergency contraceptive pills that women can take after unprotected sex to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Kits of the "morning-after" contraceptive pills, trade-named PREVEN, will be available by prescription by the end of September, said Roderick Mackenzie, chairman and founder of Gynetics Inc. of Somerville, N.J.
Although the pills are safe, legal and relatively effective -- and have been available for more than 20 years -- most American women and even some doctors are not aware of their existence.
"One out of every two women aged 15-44 has had at least one unintended pregnancy," said James Trussell, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and former director of its Office of Population Research.
Trussell and others estimate that the pills could avert 1.7 million pregnancies and 800,000 abortions a year in the United States if everyone knew about and used them.
"Fifty percent of all UT pregnancies are unintended -- that's 3 million a year," Trussell said. "In contrast, only 10 percent of women know emergency contraception is available in this country . . . and only 1 percent have ever used it." ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
September 03, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: First 'Morning-After' Kit For Contraception BackedBYLINE: John Schwartz, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the first "morning-after" contraception kit, a set of pills and instructions that will allow women to avoid pregnancy up to 72 hours after unprotected sex.
The FDA action did not require approval of any new drugs, since currently available oral contraceptives have long been used to prevent pregnancy after sex. Instead, yesterday's approval marks the first time that all of the elements for what is known as "emergency contraception" will become available in a simple package labeled specifically for that purpose. ...
As a result, only 1 percent of women had used emergency contraception, said James Trussell, past director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University -- even though, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are nearly 3 million unwanted pregnancies each year. ...
"There clearly is a big need for emergency contraception," Trussell said.
The Princeton center has promoted morning-after contraception for years, establishing a telephone information line and, in 1994, a site on the World Wide Web that gave step-by-step instructions and guided women to local physicians who dispensed the drugs.
"Today marks yet another big step in changing that situation because now we have a dedicated product," Trussell said. ...
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Copyright 1998 The Cincinnati Enquirer
September 2, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: CONGRATS
Teacher at PrincetonCarla Huffman, a teacher at Colerain High School, attended the Woodrow Wilson Leadership Program for Teachers at Princeton University in July, where she studied recent research and teaching approaches in high school biology.
Ms. Huffman was one of 39 teachers selected from across the country to develop curriculum and identify critical needs in science education.
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Copyright 1998 The Cincinnati Enquirer
September 2, 1998, Wednesday
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: GUEST OPINIONFrench fascinated by our Clinton-Lewinsky saga
BYLINE: Katherine ZoepfEvery morning it started again. Clustered around the coffeemaker at the French publishing house where I interned this summer, my Parisian co-workers would rehash the juicier bits of the evening news over their tiny plastic cups of espresso. Post-World Cup Soccer, this usually meant a discussion of President Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and related Oval Office hanky-panky. I've never worked in Washington, and my grasp of current domestic politics is usually shaky, yet as the lone American in the group, I've spent these past three months getting about as much grief and fielding as many questions on the Lewinsky hearings as poor, besieged Mike McCurry himself.
The French love talking about the Monica Lewinsky case. Not only does it combine the country's twin preoccupations, sex and politics, but it's the kind of thing that, viewed at the right sort of comfortable remove, imparts a pleasant feeling of superiority. Sex, power, betrayal - and the chance to cluck self-righteously over the ludicrous behavior of the most powerful government on earth? Who could resist?
The collective American psyche is laid bare, and the French are fascinated. For the American in France, unfortunately, critical distance doesn't come quite so easily. I resented being forced into attempted explanations for a situation I found so completely inexplicable and disappointing. But at the office coffeemaker and the corner newsstand, I found I had no choice. ...
Katherine Zoepf is a former Madeira resident who spent 2 1/2 months in France as an intern. She enters her junior year at Princeton University this fall.
Newsbytes
Copyright 1998 Post-Newsweek Business Information Inc.
September 2, 1998HEADLINE: Oracle Dishing Out WebDB In Front Of Microsoft Launch
DATELINE: SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.By Jacqueline Emigh, Newsbytes.
Outside the building where Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] is launching the latest edition of Visual Basic today, Oracle [NASDAQ:ORCL] execs have been busily doling out Javabeans, while also demoing a forthcoming, as yet unannounced Web page builder called WebDB.
"They're not going to get any Javabeans in Visual Basic," remarked Jeremy Burton, Oracle's VP of tools, in an impromptu interview with Newsbytes conducted from a cellphone from the sidewalk in front of the Santa Clara Convention Center.
"We think developers should be developing for the Web, instead of for Microsoft," the Oracle VP contended.
Developers seeing Oracle's sidewalk demos today have responded, "'This rocks,'" according to Burton.
Burton described Oracle's upcoming WebDB as "the first development environment than runs inside a browser." ...
"Access used to come with Microsoft Office, and line-of-business developers used to make IT (information technology) very mad. They built applications based on Access that were hard to manage," he noted.
In contrast, Web pages created with WebDB will operate directly inside the Oracle database, facilitating easy administration, Newsbytes was told. Princeton University is one highly satisfied early user, according to Burton.
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR MORNING EDITION
SEPTEMBER 2, 1998, WEDNESDAYHEADLINE: DOCTOR UNEMPLOYMENT
BYLINE: Joanne Silberner, Washington DC; Bob Edwards, WashingtoHIGHLIGHT: NPR's Joanne Silberner reports that a Journal of the America Medical Association study shows that one in eight doctors who specialize is unemployed.
BOB EDWARDS, HOST: A report in today's issue of the "Journal of the American Medical Association" says young doctors aren't always getting the jobs they want. And some aren't getting any jobs at all.
NPR's Joanne Silberner reports.
JOANNE SILBERNER, NPR REPORTER: Young physicians never used to worry about finding a dream job. To most, it was a just reward for all the effort: four grueling years of medical school, debts of $100,000 or more, years of advanced on-the-job training at low pay. But new doctors aren't writing their own tickets anymore, according to health researcher Marvin Dunne (ph). He and his colleagues at the American Medical Association surveyed nearly 8,000 young physicians.
MARVIN DUNNE, HEALTH RESEARCHER, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION: You would expect a zero percent unemployment, but it's not zero.
SILBERNER: In fact, the unemployment rate was seven percent among physicians who had just completed their training. That's higher than the nation's overall unemployment rate. Those who found jobs said they didn't necessarily get the job they were seeking. Some even had to abandon the specialties they had trained for. ...
All of this points to a physician surplus, something health experts have been predicting for years. Dunne says one of the forces behind it is the changing medical marketplace. ...
Dunne says the shortage of openings for doctors could have a good effect. It may push more doctors into underserved inner cities and rural areas. Others such as Princeton University economist Uwe Reinhardt says the shrinking physician job pool makes doctors more like everyone else.
UWE REINHARDT, ECONOMIST, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: If you took architects or lawyers or economists, for that matter -- we graduate Ph.D.s -- only a very few get their first job choice. Most of them wind up places that they really didn't want to go, but they end up there.
SILBERNER: And Reinhart says, subjecting doctors to the forces of supply and demand may have another effect.
REINHARDT: When that happens to you, chips fall off shoulders. And that's a good thing. You know, it's not such a hot idea to have people out there who believe they're God's gift to mankind.
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
SEPTEMBER 2, 1998, WEDNESDAYHEADLINE: HURRICANES & GLOBAL WARMING
BYLINE: Robert Siegel, Washington DC; Linda Wertheimer, WashingtoHIGHLIGHT: NPR's Richard Harris reports that hurricanes and tropical storms may do much more than stir up the weather. A study in the journal "Nature" finds they draw enormous quantities of carbon dioxide out of the ocean and put it into the air. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to global warming. But in the long run, severe storms may paradoxically slow climate change.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: Today Florida officials ordered the evacuation of Barrier Islands southwest of Tallahassee as Hurricane Earl approached. But that storm may be doing much more than affecting the weather. A study in tomorrow's issue of "Nature," suggests that hurricanes draw carbon dioxide gas out of the ocean and dump it into the atmosphere. In fact, over the course of a year, tropical storms and hurricanes may but as much carbon dioxide into the air as all the cars, trucks and airplanes in North America.
And as NPR's Richard Harris reports, the storms may have a surprising effect on the climate.
RICHARD HARRIS, NPR REPORTER: Scientists have realized for some time that the oceans play a critical role in climate change. Carbon dioxide gas from smokestacks and tailpipes would be building up in our atmosphere at an even faster rate if the oceans didn't absorb a lot of this climate-warming gas. But this isn't a simple process. Depending on the stretch of sea and the time of year, carbon dioxide may be flowing into or out of ocean waters.
Nicholas Bates and colleagues at the Bermuda Biological Station have been studying the process for years. And in 1995 they got a unique opportunity as Hurricane Felix came within of 50 miles of them.
NICHOLAS BATES, RESEARCHER, BERMUDA BIOLOGICAL STATION: We were fortunate to be measuring the difference between ocean and atmospheric CO-2 before and after hurricane Felix. And we found a very strong impact of the hurricane on the transfer of CO-2 between ocean and atmosphere
HARRIS: Bates says normally in the summer time the oceans around Bermuda release more carbon dioxide than they absorb. But Felix's winds dramatically increased the transfer of gas from water to air. And when Bates and his colleagues extrapolated that one hurricane to all the tropical storms and hurricanes in a typical year, they came up with a huge number. All tolled, they estimate that these storms could release as much as half a billion tons of carbon into the air. That's about as much as is produced by all cars, trucks and planes in North America. ...
Jorge Sarmiento from Princeton University says what happens in the air is only half the picture. Hurricanes also stir ocean waters vigorously, and Sormiento says that stirring could more quickly move carbon dioxide from surface waters into the abyss where it would be stored away far from the atmosphere for centuries.
JORGE SARMIENTO, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: As long as the frequency of hurricanes remains roughly the same, then what they would be doing in terms of the future growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide is slowing it down.
Aerospace America
Copyright 1998 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.;
September, 1998HEADLINE: AIAA TECHNICAL AWARDS
Propellants and Combustion Award:Presented to Irvin Glassman, Robert H. Goddard Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, "As a researcher, author, and editor whose research and educational skills established a school of combustion and propulsion that inspired generations of engineers and academicians."
Information Today
Copyright 1998 Information Today, Inc.
September, 1998HEADLINE: JSTOR to Make Science Available on Web Database.
JSTOR has announced that it has signed an agreement with Science, the weekly peer reviewed journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). With the signing of this agreement, JSTOR will now begin the process of converting the complete archives of Science dating back to 1880 into an electronic format and loading them into a searchable database.
According to the announcement, JSTOR is creating a fully searchable electronic database that will contain the scanned images of the back issues of at least 100 major research journals in a variety of academic disciplines (JSTOR- Phase I). To date, 82 scholarly publications have signed agreements with JSTOR; currently, 51 of these titles are available to the academic community. ...
With the signing of this agreement, JSTOR will begin the process of converting back issues of Science into electronic format. The production team, based at Princeton University, will scan in each page of Science at 600 dpi resolution, converting the text through OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and indexing the entire journal run. When the process is completed, JSTOR users will be able to retrieve a high-resolution, scanned image of each journal page as it was originally designed, printed, and illustrated, and will be able to search Science archives for articles by author, title, abstract fields, keywords, and phrases. ...
Science is the first title to be included in a new General Sciences cluster now being developed by JSTOR. The cluster, which will be composed of journals focusing on broad-based scientific topics, will also include the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (first published in 1915). ...
Natural History
Copyright 1998 American Museum of Natural History
September, 1998HEADLINE: Space: you can't get there from here.
BYLINE: Tyson, Neil de GrasseThe only things standing between us and interstellar space travel are politics and money-and the need to travel at the speed of light.
From listening to space enthusiasts talk about space travel, or from watching blockbuster science fiction movies, you might think that sending people to the stars is inevitable and will happen soon. Reality check: It's not and it won't--the fantasy far outstrips the facts.
A line of reasoning among those who are unwittingly wishful might be, "We invented flight when most people thought it was impossible. A mere sixty-five years later, we went to the Moon. It's high time we journeyed among the stars. The people who say it isn't possible are ignoring history."
My rebuttal is borrowed from a legal disclaimer often used by the investment industry: "Past performance is not an indicator of future returns." Analysis of the problem leads to a crucial question: What does it take to pry money out of a population to pay for major initiatives? A quick survey of the world's famously funded projects reveals three common motivations: praise of person or deity, economics, and war. Expensive investments in praise include the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and opulent cathedrals. Expensive projects launched in the hope of economic return include Columbus's voyage to the New World and Magellan's round-the-world voyage. Expensive projects with military or national defense incentives include the Great Wall of China, which helped keep out the Mongols; the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first atomic bomb; and the Apollo space program.
When it comes to extracting really big money from an electorate, pure science--in this case, exploration for its own sake--doesn't rate. ...
Unless there is a reprise of the geopolitical circumstances that dislodged $200 billion for space travel from taxpayers' wallets in the 1960s, I will remain unconvinced that we will ever send Homo sapiens anywhere beyond Earth's orbit. I quote a Princeton University colleague, J. Richard Gott, a panelist who spoke a few years ago at a Hayden Planetarium symposium that touched upon the health of the manned space program: "In 1969, [space flight pioneer] Wernher yon Braun had a plan to send astronauts to Mars by 1982. It didn't happen. In 1989, President George Bush promised that we would send astronauts to Mars by the year 2019. This is not a good sign. It looks like Mars is getting farther away!" ...
Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, is the Frederick P Rose Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium and a visiting research scientist at Princeton University. His latest book, Just Visiting This Planet, was recently released by Doubleday.
Sky & Telescope
Copyright 1998 Sky Publishing Corporation
September, 1998
HEADLINE: Celestial survey sees first light; Sloan Digital Sky SurveyThe workhorse telescope for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) saw first light May 9th. The 2.5-meter reflecting telescope is perched 2,800 meters high in the Sacramento Mountains at New Mexico's Apache Point Observatory.
Over a five-year period it will image one-quarter of the sky in five colors on clear nights, and on less-than-perfect ones its two spectrographs will measure distances to a million galaxies and 100,000 quasars.
According to cosmologist Neta Bahcall (Princeton University), the survey will encompass a volume of space 30 to 100 times larger than any previous effort. As such, Bahcall says, it will allow astronomers to see the distribution of numerous galaxy superclusters and voids in unprecedented detail.
At a June 8th presentation to the American Astronomical Society, SDSS scientific director Bruce Margon (University of Washington) said that when complete, the survey should effectively replace the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, an essential reference tool since the 1950s. In addition to reaching 40 times farther than the Palomar survey, the Sloan survey's data will be in digital format.
Collaborators at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the U.S. Naval Observatory, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) are busily creating software to deal with the 10 trillion bytes of data - an amount of information comparable to that held by the Library of Congress - that SDSS will produce. After being processed at Fermilab, SDSS scientists say, the data will eventually be available to the public via the Internet. ...
Sky & Telescope
Copyright 1998 Sky Publishing Corporation
September, 1998HEADLINE: Supernova poses gamma-ray-burst puzzle; Supernova 1998bw
Cosmic gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) are the biggest puzzle in modern astronomy, and they are proving stubborn indeed about yielding up their secrets. Satellites detect about one of these high-energy flashes per day; they typically last from less than a second to a few minutes. In the past 18 months the precise locations of a few of them have been pinpointed on the sky by their faint visible and/or radio afterglows. This has enabled astronomers to establish that GRBs are fantastically distant - as much as 10 or 12 billion light-years away near the edge of the observable universe in at least some cases.
One theory has GRBs resulting from two neutron stars spiraling together, or from a neutron star spiraling into a black hole (February issue cover story). But the well-observed burst last December 14th was so powerful that even this mechanism might not be able to supply enough energy (July issue, page 18).
A newer theory has the bursts arising when the core of a very massive, rapidly spinning star collapses to become a 10-solar-mass black hole in a supernova explosion. Ordinary supernova cores collapse to become neutron stars, which have less than about 3 solar masses. If you give the core enough mass, enough spin, and a strong enough magnetic field - all of which seem plausible - you can extract a strong enough burst. If most of the rest of the star has already disappeared into a spinning black hole by way of its poles, a dense, equatorial disk or doughnut of material could do the bursting in plain view. Bohdan Paczynski (Princeton University) has named such events "hypernovae." They would be about 10,000 to 100,000 times rarer than ordinary supernovae, and perhaps 100 times brighter at visible wavelengths. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
September 1, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Mark Zamkov, 46, a State Department Foreign Service officer since 1980, died of leukemia Aug. 31 at his home in Potomac. He was serving in the department's African bureau at the time of his death. ...
Mr. Zamkov, who was born in Poland, came to this country with his family and settled in New Haven, Conn., in 1963. He was a 1974 magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University, and he received a master's degree in political science from Southern Connecticut State College. ...